writing matters.

Boys are struggling more than girls in Canada’s current Education system. A plethora of rambling articles and video blogs are popping up to expose the problem and propose solutions. As usual when it comes to delicate social issues, I’ve found some helpful and some not. Many are offensive, qualifying their overarching essentialist gender claims with statements reminiscent of the tried-and-true schoolyard immunity idol, “No offense, but…” The majority of commentaries on this topic blame our “feminized” Education system. Some even expose a cloak-and-dagger “War on Boys.” To me, that sounds a lot like all those white men out there who are convinced that they (we) are a threatened minority with less and less voice, power, money, and political clout. I hear most of this is as just whiny noise from the system’s rusty gears, which are finally— finally —starting to move the needle on the equality meter somewhere other than the 100% male dominated everything that it’s been stuck on since a...

A few months back I posted an open invitation on the blog to submit short fiction pieces that were inspired in some way by T.S. Eliot's poem, "Preludes." Here are the two pieces that emerged! it’s fucking quiet out, the quiet like crisscrossing sirens and mangy dogs, and it’s like he’s not even there but she shudders and stares at the ground, the white stripe of the rebel bicycle rejecting its load of toxic plastic primer imprinted on salt-crusted suede, shuttered murals, abstract impressions on concrete of oxygen and the musty freshness of a coastal rainshadow and that tucked clock fitting experience and breathlessness into the delicious agony of time and the mural is green with lots of blue like magenta-dense filters and abandoned menthol cigarettes and that bicycle under the rattling tracks floating on air is escaping, a vandal bringing the streets inside, glowing white primer on ancient filthy concrete or at least microscopic infinity compressed into litter-strewn ...

Attention all budding writers and closet modernists! Teilo and I thought it would be neat to each try writing a short story based on T.S. Eliot's "Preludes," and then to touch base afterwards with our respective visions. Then we thought: the more the merrier! It'd be pretty incredible to be able to read through several different takes on Eliot's poem, especially given how differently writers pursue their craft. So let's see what happens! Spread the word and, whenever you have a minute, scribble something down yourself. This experiment/project/exercise is purely about the joy of creating something neat, so there are no word limits (neither high nor low), guidelines, winners or losers. Just the satisfaction of writing and a tentative deadline - April 15th - after which we'll ideally post all the stories here in the blog. Here's a link to "Preludes":  http://www.bartleby.com/198/3.html . When and if you end up writing something for this, j...

This question returns to that posed by Teilo in one of his older posts. Off the top of my head, here are a few possible answers, which obviously overlap in places, followed by short meditations on each of them: - Aesthetic enjoyment - Narcissistic fulfillment - Political/Cultural activism - Community building/Networking Aesthetic enjoyment : Writing for the sake of writing. Producing combinations of words that are beautiful and then sharing those words with others in order to bask in this beauty together. This would include the intention of provoking thought, although perhaps these thoughts would be primarily of an abstract, aesthetic nature. Narcissistic fulfillment See Teilo's post from Oct.18th of last year ( http://bit.ly/kzgnfq ). He noticed that when people go to the website for The Oral Tradition they overwhelmingly spent their time on the submission guidelines page instead of checking out the past and current issues of the magazine. I've noticed this trend wi...

It's been awhile since my last post, but now that it's summer I've been reinvigorated to come back to the magazine and the blog. To shake the dust off, I want to give a brief glimpse into the direction The Writers Block is headed: The next issue is going to be a tribute to and exploration of the relationship between handwriting and poetic composition. Until July 1st, the Block is accepting submissions for a poetry-only manuscript issue of handwritten and/or hand-illustrated poems in digitized, scanned, or photographed formats. I'm interested to see what sort of submissions will come in. I've tried to phrase the call specifically enough to communicate clearly what I'm looking for, while leaving it ambiguous enough to ensure a plurality of submissions. The inspiration for the call came out of my research on e-books, and how emerging literary technologies are changing the way we read and experience older printed and hand-written texts. Both print and digitizati...

In an attempt to begin articulating what effective writing looks like at the present moment, Teilo and I have formulated three basic guidelines. They're meant to start a conversation more than anything, and are not meant to be overly prescriptive. However, we feel that following them as closely as possible will eliminate many of the weaknesses we have observed in the writing submitted to our respective literary magazines. In no particular order, they are: - Subjectivity, as far as it illuminates common experience, can be more effective than objectivity. - Intertextuality can be an addition, but never the crux. - The form of a work of art should never become its content. Please feel free to comment. Both affirmation and disagreement are necessary cogs in the engine of any progression.

The closing sentence of your last post, Teilo, suggests that art doesn’t have to be as careful nowadays as it has been in times past. Is sloppy art the answer to sloppy communication? Is a plurality of art forms the answer to a plurality of communication modes? This type of art exists – in the form of fictional msn conversations, blog novels, etc. – and I think there is value to it, but I don’t understand why the thoughts of the modernists (or whoever) are “worse than meaningless.” I don’t think we’re really “reacting to” the modernists anymore either—although it’s impossible to quantify what “reacting to” even means—but we’re definitely influenced by them. What I had in mind by pointing back to Imagism was to glean some of that movement’s aesthetic principles, in addition to adding principles of our own. In this way perhaps the strongest aspects of that movement can be adapted to fit our needs of expression in the 21 st Century. And the general thrust of my argument is not fixated o...