This idea comes from The Sun, www.thesunmagazine.org  a literary magazine that’s quirky and full of first rate essays, interviews, poems and short fiction.  (Sy Safranksky, the editor, whom I’ve never met but feel I know intimately from his wonderfully angst ridden Notebook column at the end of each issue, started the magazine in 1974 with $50 borrowed from a friend.)

One section of the magazine is called “Readers Write” and each month readers send in short essays on the topic for that month. 

To Do:  Here are the topics and deadlines for future “Readers Write” columns.  Choose one and do a five minute exercise, writing fast, and not thinking.  Don’t stop until the five minutes are up.  If you’re on to something, keep going.  If the first topic doesn’t work for you, try another.  Write 200 – 700 words and send it to: The Sun, 107 North Roberson St. Chapel Hill  NC 27516

(And take a look at the magazine – it’s worth subscribing to.) 

Nothing to Lose (8/1)

Help   (9/1)

Good Friends (10/1

Praying  (11/1)

Too close For Comfort  (12/1)

The Bedroom (1/1)   

 

Quotes

From an interview by Michael Shapiro with Barry Lopez in The Sun, “Against The Current, Barry Lopez On Writing About Nature And The Nature Of Writing”  – July 2006

“Sometimes people ask how I decide, when I sit down at the typewriter with a particular thought or emotion, whether I’m going to write fiction or nonfiction. To me that’s like asking how you decide whether you will paint or dance.  They’re two different things.  The decision is almost unconscious.  It’s a sixth sense about how to get at the truth of existence. Truth in a piece of nonfiction lies with material  that can be verified outside the author’s authority.  You can’t take that route with a short story.  Its truth is an emotional truth: is the pattern of events in this short story true to what I know about what it means to be human?” 

“I have to believe that my imagining a story will somehow help people to imagine a way around difficulty. Stories, in some way, are blueprints for the imagination.”

– Barry Lopez