Deborah Adams's Blog, page 4

When all the words desert my brain, I go in search of someone else’s leavings

Maybe it’s the annual stretch of life-sucking heat and humidity, or maybe I’ve run out of things to write about after writing about things for nearly six decades. Do you ever feel this way? Do you understand why I want to give up this writing nonsense and spend my life eating dump cake and watching Murder, She Wrote?

I was within sight of that scenario when I ran across an erasure poem that I started during a previous bleh funk. A few years ago I used erasure poems to drag myself out of a dry spe...

Cynthia Storrs ~ 3 Questions & a Poem

Question 1What do you consider the three most important elements of a poem?

A poem should communicate SOMETHING, in a way understandable to the average person. I taught high school for nearly 40 years. We studied poetry throughout the year but did a special unit in April. My goal was that each student would find something – some one poem at least – that s/he liked, or at least appreciated. When we started with poetry early in the year, EVERY year, most students would groan and say, “I hate poetry...

10 places to submit your writing in August 2025

1 The Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing

Submission window: July 1, 2025 - September 30, 2025

2 El Premio Ambroggio

“El Premio Ambroggio 2026 es un premio de publicación de 1,000 dólares otorgado a un manuscrito de poesía escrito originalmente en español con traducción al inglés.”

3 Grey Coven Publishing

accepts poetry, flash fiction, short stories, and artwork. “mall press that publishes bi-annual anthologies, poetry & short story chapbooks, full length poetry collections, and full length shor...

They’re Taking Our Stuff, Muffins Are Falling Apart, and Martian Beetles Are Eating Our Brains

I’ll include some links with each monthly recap, and I hope these will be of help to you. Please let me know if that’s really so.

Regarding the title of this post: “Studies have showed that people tend to interact more with negative posts on social media, and negatively-spun stories in larger media which impacts our mental health.” Cassie Mannes Murray from Pine State Publicity

TITLE INSPIRATION: “BrainDead,” a tv series that debuted in 2016 and was cancelled that same year. Probably because it co...

Denton Loving ~ 3 Questions & a Poem

Question 1What do you consider the three most important elements of a poem?

When I teach poetry workshops, I like to draw a Venn diagram where the three sets are 1) intention and clarity, 2) compression, and 3) language, sound, rhythm and imagery.

Intention speaks to what the poet is trying to express while clarity speaks to what the poem needs for the reader to understand it. Sometimes those two things are at odds or, at least, are not coalescing in a way that that the reader is coming to the sam...

b.read.crumbs : You won’t believe me, and the only person who can confirm this is dead.

I remember my first birthday. I was already standing up in my crib when my mother came into the room. She was singing “Happy Birthday,” and she held a Mason jar lid with a burning candle on it. I laughed, because the burning candle was beautiful and because my mother sang a song that was all about me–it even had my name in it. I remember it simply and clearly. I knew it was my first birthday. I knew what that meant.

Not long before her death, I mentioned this to my mother. She didn’t believe me e...

b.read.crumbs: Could you repeat that, please?

Crossposting Julie Herman’s b.read.crumbs entry for July from her brand new Substack Mystery Garden.

The last year has felt like a big bunch of Can’t Even.

A long time ago, a wise person told me that life is a spiral. Often there are structural beams of ease and beams of difficulty — CANs and CAN’T EVENs — going through the layers of the spiral, and as we rise in age, we ascend the spiral, coming again and again to these beams as they intersect our path. The beams are the refrain of life: grief an...

Good Trouble

This poem was accepted by a literary journal two years ago, but never saw the light of day. Like so many literary and arts outlets, the journal closed shop. I’ve just gotten the official word that my poem is released—as luck would have it, in time for the John Lewis National Day of Commemoration and Action.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedInstars(a lannet)Then: I wasn’t a girl who’d pick a fight,or claw and scratch and slap some classmate’s faceover a ...

Georgann Eubanks ~ 3 Questions & a Poem

Question 1What do you consider the three most important elements of a poem?

The element of compression is primary. As Flannery O’Connor said, “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word of the story to say it.” You could substitute the word “poem” for “story” here. I started out wanting to write short fiction, but found myself turning to poetry for many of the stories I’ve needed to tell. You can’t write poetry wearing oven mitts. You’ve got to rea...

Auston Jenkins – Three Questions & a Cover

Question #1: In what genres have you written, and which one of them gives you the most satisfaction?

A: Over the years, I’ve dabbled in a little bit of everything, though I’ve always found my niche in poems and short stories. There’s just something about seeing an unfiltered glimpse into someone else’s life that fascinates me to no end. I especially like how challenging it is to build reader empathy given the tight constraints of flash-fiction. You have one, maybe two sentences, to introduce a me...