Get published with the help of New Pages

Are you a writer looking for a place to publish your fiction and/or poetry? While Poets and Writers and Writer's Market are the two most popular options for locating literary journals and competitions, arguably the best organized and most informative website is New Pages. Hugely supportive of independent and university presses -- as well as independent book stores, record labels and alternative weeklies -- New Pages hosts a variety of free resources for writers on the hunt. Writers can narrow down their search by clicking on a variety of contest lists, either for individual stories/poems or for book-length manuscripts, and they can also peruse an inspiring list of calls for submissions -- the rare and highly desirable situation where presses are begging to receive one's work.

New Pages isn't just for writers, but also for readers in search of quirky reads that the bigger publishers may have passed on. Click on "Book Reviews" for exciting new titles being published by these intrepid smaller presses.

And don't forget to visit one of the writing groups in town, such as the Inland Northwest Writers Guild, for more advice on where and how to publish your writing. Their next meeting is at 6:30 PM on August 18th, in the auditorium of Auntie's Book Store.

Is GenY Studying Less?

Keith O'Brien of The Boston Globe recently asked, "What Happened to Studying?" Based on research about to be published in The Review of Economics and Statistics, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. How much does today's average student study?

Just 14 hours.

Professors, administrators, students and parents are taking a hard look at the research, wondering what could account for so few hours being devoted to studying: "The easy culprits — the allure of the Internet (Facebook!), the advent of new technologies (dude, what’s a card catalog?), and the changing demographics of college campuses — don’t appear to be driving the change, Babcock and Marks found. What might be causing it, they suggest, is the growing power of students and professors’ unwillingness to challenge them."

Essentially the two professors who conducted the research believe that professor/student relationships are based on doing as little as possible. Students complain about hard assignments and give negative course evaluations, so professors trying to keep their jobs make assignments less complicated and receive positive course evaluations.

Another interesting aspect of the research showed that students themselves were concerned about how much they were studying, stating that they "didn't know how" to successfully study.

What do you think?

Is this a reflection of students raised by helicopter parents used to negotiating with or bullying their high school teachers? Has technology simply streamlined aspects of research that used to take hours? Have rising tuition costs forced a greater percentage of students to work while in school, leaving them less hours for study? Should colleges be doing more to ensure their students know how to use the resources provided? Should high schools?

Read the full text here. And let us know your thoughts!

Spokane Author Shann Ray Wins Prestigious Writing Award

We would like to offer congratulations to Spokane resident Shann Ray, winner of the Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for Fiction, a prestigious award sponsored by The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference of Middlebury College. His winning manuscript, American Masculine: Montana Stories, will be published by the independent publisher, Graywolf Press, in 2011.

Shann Ray is the nom de plume of Dr. Shann Ferch, a professor currently employed by Gonzaga University, where he teaches classes on leadership and forgiveness. His short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals such as Northwest Review, StoryQuarterly, McSweeney's and The South Dakota Review. He also is an award-winning poet, a Fulbright scholar, a former collegiate basketball player and a father of three daughters.

Get Lit! Programs recently contacted Shann Ray over email in regards to this blog posting. He generously and eloquently offered the following quote when asked about Spokane and the Northwests' influence on his poetry and prose:

"Spokane's lit scene is the place where I was given the gift of seeing the world with new eyes. The great psychiatrist, and holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl once said: 'what is to give light must endure burning.' Frankl also said the most true expression of our humanity is to give ourselves in the ultimate unselfish act of loving another human being. I agree. Here in Spokane, I feel such gratitude for the deep investment other literary artists have made in me. Poet Jonathan Johnson completely transformed my vision of life with others, beauty, and the crucible involved in prose that is both elegant and filled with torque. Poet Chris Howell's Light's Ladder shattered me, and then made me whole. Jess Walter's discernment regarding plot and the undercurrents that move society, and especially his kindness, have been invaluable. Sherman Alexie's poetry collection, The Summer of Black Widows, his collection of stories, War Dances, and his vitality and generosity as a person have helped keep my hope alive as a writer.

"The Northwest, a span of wildness and fire I think of as running from Washington to British Columbia and from Alberta to my home state of Montana is another form of crucible. Spending time with my dad in the high country, and letting the landscape absorb me has given me an abiding respect for the ravishing mystery that is the created world.

"Awe, violence, loneliness, emptiness, forgiveness, intimacy, fullness and grace are aspects of our relationship to landscape that help form the interior of my poems and stories and the people who inhabit them. Both landscape and people leave me with a breathtaking sense of the many subtle and enduring ways perfect love casts out fear."

For more about Shann Ray and his writing, visit his website

A Scrap of An Idea

ODE TO PAPER

Plain white lined object
Floating through the air in the breeze
Leaving and arriving at different destinations
Movable, portable
Wanting nothing more than
To communicate
To relay words and numbers and symbols
Accepting different languages
Written by different hands
Light-weight
Loose-leaf
Different purposes
Different roles
Without this, little children of all ages
Grown adults with childhood spirit
Could not enjoy the gift of freedom
To make airplanes that
Fly high into the heavens
To make frogs and tigers and birds
That expand our minds
To make footballs that
Cause touchdowns in the middle of class
This dull, reusable, recyclable piece of trash
Is the binding of our society, our culture, our world
Connecting life into a whole

- MARCI PHILIPS
(We found this poem in the College of Central Florida's literary journal IMPRINTS and the Paper Sculpture art is by Jen Stark.)

I love this quote by George Bernard Shaw. "Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love." Writers can create the world as we'd like it and expose life in all of it's complexities. Let's here a big HOLLER for those artists who play with paper...whether it manifests into a sculpture, a piece of writing, or even a prayer for peace.

As Picasso said, "The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web." With that in mind, we invite you to share with us your scraps of ideas: a lonely line, a fuzzy outline of a thought, a few of your favorite words that jump off the page in the dictionary. Who knows, maybe if we free these words and ideas from our mind, they will finally find a home on paper.