Celia Lisset Alvarez's Blog, page 4
April 7, 2012
Couplets Blog Tour: The First Week
Hey everybody--wanted to update you on all the Couplets Blog Tour posts so far. Below are links to all the participating blogs this week.
1 April 2012: what we make waiting for death (Lyn Lifshin at Joanne Merriam).
1 April 2012: National Poetry Month: Guest Post #1, Stella Pierides . . . (at Margaret Dornaus' Haiku-doodle)
1 April 2012: Inquiring Minds and Other Clichés - Neil Aitken (at Christine Klocek-Lim's November Sky Poetry).
1 April 2012: National Poetry Month: Margaret Dornaus (at
April 5, 2012
Couplets Blog Tour: Poetry of the Urban Pastoral
The Couplets Blog Tour has me posting on Anne Higgins's wonderful blog today,
Scattered Showers in a Clear Sky
. Go check out her blog, and see what a city girl like me has to say about "Poetry, Gardening, Birding, and other reflections on life."
April 1, 2012
The 2012 Big Poetry Giveaway
It's that time of year again! It's National Poetry Month, and that means it's time for The Big Poetry Giveaway! This is my second year participating in the event, created and arranged by Kelli Russell Agodon at The Book of Kells. What's the big idea? Poets everywhere are giving poetry books away for free!Yep: FREE!
In this exciting campaign, meant to promote the poetry we love during National Poetry Month, participating poets are giving away a book of their own and one of a poet they ad...
March 30, 2012
The Writing with Celia Blog Tour!
Writing with Celia is going on tour! In honor of National Poetry Month this year, Joanne Merriam of Upper Rubber Boot Books has organized a spectacular multi-blog tour called "Couplets." Two dozen poetry bloggers are participating, guest-posting and cross-posting on each other's blogs. Read the full details here, and follow the event on Facebook, Twitter, and Goodreads.
My first tour post will be Thursday, April 5, when I guest post to poet Anne Higgins's blog, Scattered Showers in a Clear...
My first tour post will be Thursday, April 5, when I guest post to poet Anne Higgins's blog, Scattered Showers in a Clear...
March 8, 2012
Speaking through Red Lips
Taking a break this week from my Workshop Hell series, because one can hardly call oneself a feminist poet and then proceed to do a blog post on International Women's Day about pot poems, which I will get to next week, God willing. So, little joiner that I am, here I am with some red lips and some thoughts on—what else?—women and writing.This year's awareness gimmick is this red lips thing. I must say I'm not entirely sure how it works. I suppose it might substitute the enthusiasm formerly...
March 1, 2012
Workshop Hell & How to Get Out of It: The Third Circle
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Welcome back to hell, boys and girls! This week's horror is: The Sudden Accident! And it's a doozy. A real favorite of the beginner, The Sudden Accident! combines all that is most terrible about a bad story: flat, boring characters, an unpredictably predictable plot, and a complete lack of awareness of melodrama, as is attested by its professional use in soaps and movies of the week. What is the appeal of arbitrarily derailing your protagonist's train into a precipice, pummeling his car...
February 21, 2012
Workshop Hell & How to Get Out of It: The Second Circle
Have gotten some good feedback already from my first post on this subject, how to write yourself out of a bad romance. If you missed that post, you can read it here. Meantime, I proceed below with another popular theme: the divorce or death of parents.
The Divorce or Death of Parents Story
It's no surprise that along with love, the other popular beginner's subject is death. After all, it seems to carry its own drama, and anything ready-made is particularly appealing to the beginner, who...
The Divorce or Death of Parents Story
It's no surprise that along with love, the other popular beginner's subject is death. After all, it seems to carry its own drama, and anything ready-made is particularly appealing to the beginner, who...
February 20, 2012
Workshop Hell & How to Get Out of It
At this point, I've spent nearly half my life in workshop—first as a student, and now as a teacher. By far the most surprising thing I've learned is how repetitive workshops are. Especially when one is stuck teaching at the introductory level, it becomes obvious that human beings—at least those drawn to creative writing workshops—have a lot fewer than seven stories to tell. Though you might expect each workshop to be different, an assumption based on the expected creativity of the different p...
February 7, 2012
Scene vs. Summary
To get the most out of this post, you might want to read Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" here first.
One of the most difficult aspects of writing for beginners to master is the art of balancing scene and summary. At its most basic, the distinction between these is not that complicated. Summary, by definition, encompasses a large amount of information in a condensed form. A scene, on the other hand, is a place or a vista, something we experience in its...
One of the most difficult aspects of writing for beginners to master is the art of balancing scene and summary. At its most basic, the distinction between these is not that complicated. Summary, by definition, encompasses a large amount of information in a condensed form. A scene, on the other hand, is a place or a vista, something we experience in its...
February 5, 2012
Teaching "The Yellow Wallpaper" and Thinking about the Susan G. Komen Controversy
It's been another busy week, and I just finished preparing tomorrow's lecture on Charlotte Perkins Gilman's mostly autobiographical 1892 short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper." It's a story I've taught many times, but now it seems more relevant than ever.
This time, I'm not teaching it as a creative writing model; I'm teaching it as part of a unit on motherhood and depression in my introduction to literature course. The course is populated almost exclusively by nursing majors, whose tight...
