Roy Miller's Blog, page 260
February 28, 2017
10 Japanese Poetic Forms | WritersDigest.com
I’ve been covering poetic forms on this blog for nearly 10 years now. To celebrate, I’ve collected 10 Japanese poetic forms below.
While poetry in general is known for concision of language, there’s little argument that Japanese forms take concision to extremes. Click on each link to learn how.
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Master Poetic Forms!
Learn how to write sestina, shadorma, haiku, monotetra, golden shovel, and more with The Writer’s Digest Guide to Poetic Forms, by Robert Lee Brewer.
This e-book covers more than 40 poetic forms and shares examples to illustrate how each form works. Discover a new universe of poetic possibilities and apply it to your poetry today!
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10 Japanese Poetic Forms
Dodoitsu. 4-liner.
Gogyohka. Variation of the tanka.
Haibun. Prose + haiku.
Haiku. 3-line nature juxtaposition.
Katauta. 3-line question.
Mondo. Question-response-nature poem.
Sedoka. 2-stanza question and response.
Senryu. What many poets write when they think they’re writing haiku.
Somonka. Love letter tankas.
Tanka. 5-liner.
Check these forms out, try them for fun, and let me know which is your favorite in the comments below. Or let me know of Japanese forms I still have yet to cover (like the renga).
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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.
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Is This Mic On?: A Stand-Up Comedian Wrestles With His Country and His Soul
Credit
Tamara Shopsin
A HORSE WALKS INTO A BAR
By David Grossman
Translated by Jessica Cohen
194 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.
A broken man walks on stage and makes jokes for 194 pages. That’s the shortest summary I can think of for David Grossman’s magnificently comic and sucker-punch-tragic excursion into brilliance, his new novel, “A Horse Walks Into a Bar.” Jewish humor is celebrated, and, these days, more necessary than ever. It is humor from the edge of the grave. Humor with a gun stuck in your ribs. Humor that requires nothing more than a match and a can of gasoline. And, of course, the willingness to set yourself on fire. Grossman’s protagonist, the self-styled Dovaleh G, is ready for the flames. He addresses an audience hungry for jokes — though not of the political variety, they’ve had enough of that in Israel — in the basement club of the town of Netanya, which lies between Tel Aviv and Haifa. The first photo of Netanya on Wikipedia shows the intersection of two highways with some Minsk-looking apartment towers attached. As Dovaleh likes to say: “Nice city, Netanya.”
The audience for Dovaleh’s act of self-immolation is a cross-section of Israeli society: soldiers, bikers, gruff Likudniks, sensitive young women and two special guest stars from his childhood, a former judge with anger management issues and a dwarf village medium with a speech impediment. As Dovaleh unleashes the most heartfelt and terrifying stories of his life, the joke-hungry audience rebels. “You wanna clear your head,” one man cries before storming out, “and this guy gives us Yom Kippur.” Comic novelists may understand Dovaleh’s predicament all too well. Have I earned enough laughs to show you I’m this close to blowing my brains out, or do you want me to tell you the one about that horse who walks into a bar? Or, as another disgruntled audience member says: “Can you believe how he’s using us to work out his hang-ups?”
Dovaleh has hang-ups to spare. He’s got the standard 20th-century Eastern European setup for parents, the violent dad whose love spurts out of him like a half-broken water fountain, the anxious, morose mom whose love is clear, but whose mind checked out long ago. At their backs are the concentration camps of Poland; in front of them, Israel’s endless series of conflicts and the occupation. This is material Grossman has explored previously; indeed, some of it mirrors his own biography. But never has he presented it in one sustained performative howl, combining the comic dexterity of a Louis C.K. with a Portnoyish level of detail (especially when it comes to Dovaleh’s childhood: At one point, to stop himself from being beaten up by all and sundry, young Dovaleh took to walking through the neighborhood on his hands).
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His former friend the judge, who witnessed Dovaleh’s childhood humiliations, begins to wonder about the relationship between the comic and his audience. “How, in such a short time, did he manage to turn the audience, even me to some extent, into household members of his soul? And into its hostages?”
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The audience won’t stay hostage for long. Amid his desperate fusillade of jokes and provocations — “Wait, you’re from the settlements? But then who’s left to beat up the Arabs?” — Dovaleh begins to unspool the very long story at the center of the novel. When he was 14, Dovaleh had been sent to a junior Israeli Army camp, a time of further daily harassment and humiliation by his peers. One day he is told by the adult soldiers that he will be taken home to attend a family funeral, but, in a bureaucratic oversight, never told which of his parents has died. The long ride from the country’s south to Jerusalem with an incessantly joke-telling army driver takes young Dovaleh into a world where humor is the sturdiest form of armor although, in the end, it protects him from nothing and no one. Dovaleh’s story becomes too much for the audience to bear. They are here for entertainment, a rare chance to escape the realities of life in a divided, conflicted country, and slowly they begin to leave, even the members of the liberal intelligentsia, even those lucky to be coated in “eau de 1 percent.”
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David Grossman
Credit
Michael Lionstar
As the action builds and the audience thins, Dovaleh, quite literally, beats himself up. He breaks his own glasses, he starts to bleed. “He is uniting with his abuser,” the judge thinks. “Beating himself with another man’s hands.” The last people left are the ones from his childhood. There’s Avishai, the judge who begins to see his own childhood silence at the collective torture of his friend as a form of acquiescence, collaboration. And then there’s Azulai, the medium with the speech impediment, the “odd little woman, a self-appointed warrior battling for the soul of a boy she knew decades ago and of whom almost no trace remains.” When they were kids, Dovaleh protected the tiny Azulai, a magnet for abuse even stronger than the boy who walked on his hands to avoid beatings. Now, the village medium cannot understand Dovaleh’s public self-abasement, the constant lash of anger at himself and others. In a message familiar to anyone comically inclined, she asks: “Why are you like this? You were a good boy!”
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Bukowski’s Hollywood and the theater of the grotesque
“Charles Bukowski, West Coast poet and patron saint of drinking writers, or writing drinkers, author of the screenplay for the movie Barfly, has written a classic in the take-the-money-and-don’t-run category of Hollywood fiction. This is the genre wherein Real Writers who have been seduced into screenwriting (than which nothing is more lowercase) live to tell all shamelessly.
The difference between Mr. Bukowski and other literary avengers is that he is neither a martyr nor a fallen angel. In Hollywood, he surveys the absurdities of the passing scene with the complicitous eye of a cast member in the theater of the grotesque, and has no delusions that he can fall any lower in life than a short drop off a barstool. Of course, the image of himself as a drunk who sleeps till noon and practices craft, not art, is itself a theatrical feint, the hipster’s mask for his softness, the ballet dancer pretending to be a boxer, the writer cunningly demoting himself as someone who hits ‘the typer.’
The basic motif of the novel consists of the endless wrangles and cons that characterize the making of a movie with a tiny budget, a movie that almost nobody wants to make and that almost nobody will pay to see.
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“The lower the stakes, the more frenzied the power struggles … and the more often the word ‘genius’ is thrown around. Chinaski, the drinking-gambling-typing persona that runs through Mr. Bukowski’s writing, refuses to be impressed by hyped-up art house deities such as Wenner Zergog and Jon-Luc Modard. Need I say, this is fiction disguised thinly enough for even non-cinephiles to see through the pseudonyms.
The clipped phrases and deadpan style recall the hard-boiled affectations of literary drunkards such as Hemingway and Hammett. In Chinaski’s presence, Jon-Luc, who has never said more than a sentence at a time, opens up. About him: ‘Jon-Luc was on a roll. I no longer understood what he was saying. I saw lips moving. He was not unpleasant, he was just there. He needed a shave. And. . . .’ A haze of alcohol always descends in time to rescue Chinaski from having to listen too closely to what goes on below the surface of his own or other people’s lives. It is also, one comes to realize, a protection from his own acute vision. Anyone who sees life this clearly needs something to cloud his lens.
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“Bukowski-Chinaski watches the filming of Jack Bledsoe-Mickey Rourke-Chinaski and feels pangs of envy and yearning for his younger self, yet the real hero is this 67-year-old man on the sidelines, whose brain and liver have survived 40 years of strenuous – if intermittent -alcoholism. He talks a tough game, but there’s a wide streak of fellow feeling – for sagging, used-up women, for gamblers, for professionals. For the flotsam and jetsam. His wife, Sarah, is more than a supporting player: she gets her share of good lines and, as the one responsible for getting him off meat and hard liquor (thus adding 10 years to his life), comes off as an unlikely combination of drinking companion, drinking conscience, straight talker, muse and nursemaid.
Where women are concerned – and women, for him, are always a concern – Hollywood shows Mr. Bukowski as a more sympathetic figure than in his earlier, no less fiendishly observant Post Office, a comic horror story about his 12-year stint as a mailman. Beneath the bravura appetite for female flesh that runs through the stories and poems is a fierce struggle: theirs to seize and capture his pure male essence, his to keep it and move on.”
–Molly Haskell, The New York Times, June 11, 1989
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February 27, 2017
A Tour of Rodrigo Corral’s Manhattan Workspace
Slide Show
A Tour of Rodrigo Corral’s Manhattan Workspace
CreditSasha Arutyunova for The New York Times
Age 46
Occupation Graphic designer
Location Lower Manhattan
His Favorite Room Mr. Corral created an office inside a converted apartment in a high rise near the New York Stock Exchange. The space is filled with projects — future, current and past — like his celebrated book covers for “A Million Little Pieces” and “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” There are also homey conveniences like an entrance foyer, a fridge and a daybed.
Walk me through the first 20 minutes of your workday. I come in, turn on the lights and turn on music. You know how boxers have a hype man before the fight starts, talking constantly in their ear? I need hype music. To make me feel like I can seize the day.
What’s a good hype track? Right now, Frank Ocean’s “Nights.”
Ever take a nap on that bed during the workday? Sometimes. Rarely. That’s when I’m burnt. I have friends who have a little twin bed in their studio, and it’s amazing. It’s set in a way that doesn’t suggest that you’re not being productive. It’s part of their tool kit in a way. Like, I rest and then I recharge.
So what’s your key for getting a lot of work done? Wall space is so critical. Natural light. Counter/table space is so critical. So you can really throw things on the wall and not feel, like, “O.K., if I only have five feet of wall space, I only have five feet of idea space.”
What’s on your walls now? There are some things that are exercises in futility, some things I’ve gotten obsessed with and can’t let them go. Like a series where we took rock and rollers from the ′60s and ′70s that have started to look like grandmothers. We started to draw them, and it just expanded. We have, like, 20 grandmas of rock ’n’ roll. We’re trying to get it published.
This space is very white. And for a visual guy, the furniture is — how to put this tactfully? — Ikea-generic. I don’t want to make a statement with an interesting table or chairs. I want it to feel generic so the work within it is the focus. The statement is the work.
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5 Crime Must-Reads to Devour Coming This March
Leah Carroll, Down City
Carroll’s mother, a drug addict and sometime sex worker as well as a gifted photographer, was murdered by two drug dealers with mafia connections when Leah was four years old. Her father, who mainly raised her, was an alcoholic and manic depressive who was dead by the time Leah was 18. In this memoir, told in vignettes, Carroll investigates her family history in police records and interviews with mafia members, using her own memory to create immediacy and public records to ensure the brutal, horrific facts are straight.
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Howard Norman, My Darling Detective
National Book Award nominee Norman writes an homage to noir that’s by turns sexy and cerebral in Detective. Protagonist Jacob Rigolet is at an art auction in Halifax when his mother, the former head librarian at the Halifax Free Library but now an in-patient at the Nova Scotia Rest Hospital, appears out of nowhere and throws black ink at a photograph by Robert Capa called “Death on a Leipzig Balcony.” Jacob’s detective fiancee, Martha, is assigned to investigate the case, which opens up the secret of Jacob’s paternity: his father was not war hero Bernard Rigolet but Robert Emil, a disgraced police officer on the run for murdering two Jewish police officers in 1945. His mother’s outburst is connected to this secret, but Martha and Jacob must resolve the sticky mystery of Jacob’s birth to solve the case.
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Nicolás Obregón, Blue Light Yokohama
This debut from British-Spanish national Obregón is told from the point of view of police Inspector Iwata. When the novel opens Iwata is transferred to a station in Tokyo where his superiors do not want him and the partner he’s assigned, Noriko Sakai, would rather work with anyone else. Worse, they are given a brutal case: the murder of an entire family with no clear motive or killer, and a crime scene with ritualistic details, including a large black sun. Iwata becomes haunted by the case—which becomes connected with other killings, and the killer known as the Black Sun killer—so much so that he can’t sleep, and a song, “Blue Light Yokohama,” keeps running through his troubled mind.
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Amy Engel, The Roanoke Girls
The Roanoke Girls has nothing to do with Virginia but everything to do with missing girls, as the females in the Roanoke family, who live in a tiny town in rural Kansas not worth naming, are rich, beautiful, and generally short-lived. Engel’s book focuses on 15-year-old Lane Roanoke, sent to live with her grandparents and cousin, Allegra, on the family farm after her mother’s suicide. The farmhouse, which is “equal parts horrifying and mesmerizing,” is a perfect setting for a gothic mystery full of small-town secrets, lies, and guilt.
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Julia Dahl, Conviction
“I didn’t do it.” Four words scrawled on a piece of paper by a man serving a life sentence make their way into the hands of reporter Rebekah Roberts and a novel is born. Conviction is the third in Dahl’s series centered around young reporter Roberts but it’s a great leap forward in style, pacing, characterization, and plot. The point of view shifts, as does the time frame from when the murders were committed to the present. Dahl’s confidence in writing about the Hasidim and other Jewish sects in Brooklyn has gotten notably stronger: she describes their lives with authority and compassion, and her Jewish characters are also more complex. Conviction boasts a long list of complex and interesting characters of all walks of life, from the put upon Jewish sects in Crown Heights who feel oppressed by violence and shortchanged by the horrible conditions of their apartments to their African-American neighbors, who don’t understand the dress and the customs of their new neighbors. Dahl has written the novel about the Crown Heights conflict, and in these times when it takes so little to turn a neighborhood conflict into something bigger, it’s worth studying how she thinks it might have been averted.
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Review: In ‘Exit West,’ Mohsin Hamid Mixes Global Trouble With a Bit of Magic
The device of a magical door is reminiscent of C. S. Lewis’s “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” in which four children find a secret passageway, through a wardrobe in a spare room, to the mysterious realm of Narnia. There animals can talk, and good and evil openly battle. In summary, it might sound perversely counterintuitive of Hamid to use a fairy-tale-like device as a way to move his characters from their war-torn homeland to a new life in the West. How, the potential reader might ask, can the treacherous journeys undertaken by refugees — across seas or deserts; at the mercy of the sun, rain, cold, heat, hunger, thirst and unscrupulous smugglers; among other untold random terrors — be condensed into a simple step through a portal?
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Mohsin Hamid
Credit
Jillian Edelstein
Hamid, however, is less interested in the physical hardships faced by refugees in their crossings than in the psychology of exile and the haunting costs of loss and dislocation. Having left their families, their villages or their countries, many of the characters in his earlier novels, like “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” and “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia,” also felt like outsiders — yearning to escape the bounds of family or class or expectation, and yet at the same time homesick for some sense of roots and belonging. And in “Exit West,” Hamid does a harrowing job of conveying what it is like to leave behind family members, and what it means to leave home, which, however dangerous or oppressive it’s become, still represents everything that is familiar and known.
For Saeed, prayer remains a way to connect with his dead mother and his beloved father, who refused to make the journey with him and Nadia. “He prayed fundamentally as a gesture of love for what had gone and would go and could be loved in no other way,” Hamid writes.
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Saeed thinks that prayer was “about being a man, being one of the men, a ritual that connected him to adulthood and to the notion of being a particular sort of man, a gentleman, a gentle man, a man who stood for community and faith and kindness and decency, a man, in other words, like his father.”
The shy, sweet Saeed is changed by the experience of exile. Regret about leaving his father behind, disillusion over being swindled by another migrant, bitterness over his new improvisatory existence — such emotions take their toll. Nadia is the more adaptive, adventurous one, but even her resilience changes the dynamic of their relationship, which begins to labor under the weight of their uncertain existence, their enforced closeness and dependency on each other, the worries of finding food and shelter, or work, every day.
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To open out his novel, Hamid intercuts the story of Nadia and Saeed with short, strobe-lit glimpses of other people’s stories around the world in a fashion that recalls a technique David Mitchell has employed in novels like “Ghostwritten.” It’s a technique that underscores the simultaneity of time and experience in our globalized world, reminding us of both the amazing similarities and vast differences among countries and individuals across an increasingly interconnected planet.
By mixing the real and the surreal, and using old fairy-tale magic, Hamid has created a fictional universe that captures the global perils percolating beneath today’s headlines, while at the same time painting an unnervingly dystopian portrait of what might lie down the road. The world in “Exit West” is, in many respects, an extrapolation of the world we live in now, with wars like the one in Syria turning cities into war zones; with political crises, warp-speed technological changes, and growing tensions between nativists and migrants threatening to upend millions of lives.
Hamid writes that in many places — like the San Francisco Bay area, one stop on Saeed and Nadia’s journey — “the apocalypse appeared to have arrived and yet it was not apocalyptic, which is to say that while the changes were jarring they were not the end, and people found things to do and ways to be and people to be with, and plausible desirable futures began to emerge, unimaginable previously, but not unimaginable now.”
Continue reading the main story
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Lit Hub Daily: February 27, 2017
The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 1956, Ted Hughes and poet Sylvia Plath meet in Cambridge, England.
Nick Ripatrazone on the importance (and rarity) of the public school novel, right now. | Literary Hub
5 must-read crime titles to read this March (which can also be a cruel month). | Literary Hub
Karolina Ramqvist struggles to balance the public persona of the Writer with the writer who actually writes. | Literary Hub
The ambition (and hubris) of transhumanism is all too human. | Literary Hub
Nell Zink on writing for rejection and finally finding “some rigorous realist fiction to love” in Doris Lessing. | n+1
A theater group has dramatized and reinterpreted the 1971 debate between a panel of feminists (Diana Trilling, Germaine Greer, Jill Johnston, and Jacqueline Ceballos) and an angry misogynist (Norman Mailer). | The New Yorker
Unstable in the present, being dragged from the past, resistant to the future: Mohsin Hamid on the appeal and dangers of nostalgia. | The Guardian
On the history of feminist bookstores: What contemporary readers owe them and what they reveal about the movement’s failures. | Los Angeles Review of Books
To capture that as poetry, and to call that your occupation, is to sort of reify your life: An interview with Eileen Myles. | The Rumpus
In a new Walden-themed video game, players regain inspiration by “reading, attending to sounds of life in the distance, enjoying solitude and interacting with visitors, animal and human.” | The New York Times
“At no point had I decided to become a so-called ‘chick-lit’ author (whatever that was), and yet apparently, as a young woman who had started out by drawing on her familiar world, I had inadvertently done so.” Ruth Gilligan on constraints placed on female writers. | Read it Forward
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When good assignments go bad
It was the perfect story with the perfect hook. Sarah (not her real name) was looking through a stack of jeans at The Gap, singing softly to herself. A man, overhearing, leaned in as he passed.
“Don’t quit your day job,” he whispered.
Little did he know, singing WAS her day job. She was a mezzo-soprano with the New York City Opera.
By the time Sarah told me this story, she had, in fact, quit her day job – to become a personal trainer in the small town of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Which is where I met her, in her privately owned gym, going quietly about her new life.
It was a story made for publication, and I knew it. I wrote up the query and sent it to several high-paying markets. Rather quickly, one bought it, and for more money than I’d ever been offered for a freelance piece. I was ecstatic.
I interviewed Sarah for two hours, after which I wrote up the story and submitted it. The editor wrote back and requested that Sarah recommend three simple exercises people could do at home for overall toning.
Which is when the slam-dunk assignment became the assignment I couldn’t even drag onto the court.
For reasons still unclear to me, Sarah did not want to provide three simple exercises. Only she didn’t tell me this up front. Instead she said she would get them to me in a few days, then didn’t. When pressed, she said it would be the following week. It wasn’t. When pressed again, she said she’d try to get something to me when she returned from vacation. Operative word: try.
I was confused. As a business owner with a bottom line, didn’t she want to be profiled in a national magazine? Wouldn’t it possibly bring in more clients? Hadn’t she been excited when I told her I’d gotten the gig to write about her?
The answer to all of those questions was yes. But she never got me those exercises. Faced with the prospect of telling the editor I couldn’t complete the assignment, I decided to solicit the advice of some professional freelancers I knew. And here’s what they said: Be honest. Explain exactly what happened. And offer to profile a different, equally interesting trainer.
The opera star angle was going to be hard to beat, I knew. But I had to try. I called my friend Tamara, a kickboxing instructor in Atlanta. Over the years I had watched her radically transform her emotional life and her body through life coach training and kickboxing. Could I profile her? And if yes, would she swear on the life of her children that she would give me three simple exercises people could do at home for overall toning? Yes and yes.
I contacted the editor, told her the problem with Sarah, and offered Tamara as a replacement. Did the editor cyber-roll her eyes and dismiss me as unprofessional, as I feared she might? (Years earlier, a bad experience with an editor with a rage problem left me feeling anxious about editors in general.) No, she didn’t. She wrote me back immediately, said she was sorry for the trouble I was having, and green-lighted the Tamara story. I almost wept. I wrote the story, sent it, and three weeks later, pulled my lovely large check out of the mailbox, at which time I almost wept again.
This was a story with a happy ending. The editor was shockingly kind, causing my writer’s heart – that ridiculously fragile orb that rides shotgun next to my ridiculously fragile ego – to expand exponentially.
A month later, another assignment fell through. I was to write a piece about Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, Mexico, but I missed my flight due to a highway shutdown and wound up in Key West and Miami instead. I recalled the advice I’d been given, and the kindness of my last editor, and regrouped quickly. Where I went there was no midnight Day of the Dead Celebration in a graveyard, there were no cultural norms to adjust to, no language barriers to overcome, and no currency exchange to struggle with.
But here’s what there was: a dramatic, failed attempt to make the flight, heartbreak when I realized we couldn’t, and consolation tequila shots at the terminal. In Key West and Miami there were bucket cocktails and men in tutus, nitrogen ice cream, and a restaurant where they make you suck out the eyes and gills of the fish you’ve ordered before they will take your plate away. These were some of the details I sent to the editor who was expecting a Mexico story, along with a request to write about this alternative trip for the magazine.
To which she said yes.
Thankfully, I reached out and received good advice: Address the problem head-on and in a timely fashion, and be ready with an alternative plan. Will it always work? Maybe not. But in freelancing, as in life, honesty, professionalism, and resourcefulness are the way to go every time.
—Dana Shavin’s essays have appeared in Oxford American, The Sun, Fourth Genre, and other literary magazines. She is a columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press and the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist.
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HarperCollins Adds Book Recommendation Bots to Facebook Messenger
Looking to deliver more book recommendation features on Facebook, HarperCollins is adding two online bot-powered recommendation engines to Facebook Messenger.
HarperCollins is adding BookGenie and a similar Epic Reads A.I. interface to the Facebook Messenger feature on two of its Facebook pages. Carrie Bloxson, v-p of marketing, said HC is relying on "the power of artificial intelligence" to deliver recommendations for "readers searching for their next great book.”
BookGenie is available on Facebook.com/HarperCollins and the Epic Reads bot (specifically for YA titles) is available at Facebook.com/EpicReads. Both services feature interactive artificial intelligence widgets that can find new HarperCollins titles based on their taste, general mood, and past favorite books.
Both services are activated by clicking on the blue Facebook Messenger button located under the page’s Facebook cover photo. On the BookGenie/HarperCollins page, the messenger will ask the user for information about what books they like and, through an exchange of information with the software, the user will be offered titles.
Epic Reads is an online recommendation site for YA titles that HC launched in 2012; the Epic Reads Facebook bot is accessed the same way as BookGenie. However this bot is designed to be slightly more interactive; it will respond to recommendation requests with an animated video image of a comically cheerful female book lover who asks the user for details about their mood and literary taste before delivering a recommendation.
Margot Wood, Epic Reads senior community manager, said the most popular question her team receives is: "What book should I read next?" Wood said that now, with the bot, "we can scale conversations with our community and engage, share content, and deepen consumers’ connection with our brand.”
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New Literary Agent Alert: Justin Wells of Corvisiero Literary
Reminder: New literary agents (with this spotlight featuring Justin Wells of Corvisiero Literary) are golden opportunities for new writers because each one is a literary agent who is likely building his or her client list.
About Justin: Justin started his journey six years ago when he began his young adult literature blog. If you had asked him then, he would have never imagined just how much his journey over the course of those early years would impact his future. Starting as an intern with the Corvisiero Literary Agency in May of 2016 quickly turned into a position as a Literary Agent Apprentice, under the guidance of Marisa Corvisiero. Being a literary agent is something that Justin has fallen in love with, and is eager to continue for years to come.
Justin is going into his senior year of college, and will be graduating with a B.S. in Mass Communications with a focus in Public Relations. He loves being able to utilize his skills in public relations to assist the agency and his own clients through his work as a literary agent.
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He is seeking: Justin is looking to represent middle grade, young adult, new adult, and adult novels. For middle grade, he is actively seeking fantasy, science fiction, paranormal, adventure, and historical fiction. In young adult, he is seeking fantasy, science fiction, paranormal, adventure, historical fiction, contemporary, and dystopian fiction. For new adult, he is seeking fantasy, contemporary romance, and science fiction. And, lastly, for adult, he is seeking fantasy, science fiction, and historical fiction. He would really like to see submissions for all categories and genres that have diverse main characters.
How to submit: To submit a query to Justin, e-mail query@corvisieroagency.com with the subject line “Query – ATTN: Justin Wells, [insert name of manuscript]”. When submitting your query, please make sure that you are making it as strong as it can be. Please include a one to two page synopsis, and also the first ten pages of your manuscript within the body of your query, at the bottom (no attachments will be accepted.
Please do not e-mail unsolicited queries to his personal work email. Those submissions will not be accepted. Only submit queries to Justin via the email listed here.
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partner book to the agent database, Guide to Literary Agents.
Other writing/publishing articles & links for you:
If you’re an agent looking to update your information or an author interested in contributing to the GLA blog or the next edition of the book, contact Writer’s Digest Books Managing Editor Cris Freese at cris.freese@fwmedia.com.
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