Vonnegut on Writing

Kurt Vonnegut is, I think, one of everyone's favorite writers. In addition to his wonderful fiction, he wrote some really nice essays, a few of which discuss the art of writing. Really, who better to take advice from? For your reading pleasure:

How to Write with Style
and
Eight Rules for Writing a Short Story (from his book Bagombo Snuff Box)

via kottke.org

Writer's Block? A tool for you!

So, you're sitting down at your desk, blank pages in front of you and pen poised to begin writing your submission for Plains Song Review XII. You want to write something amazing, but, alas! You have writer's block! How on earth will you think of something to write before the January deadline?

It's okay! We're here to help! Write or Die is a neat little Internet gadget that forces you to write. From the website:

Write or Die is a web application that encourages writing by punishing the tendency to avoid writing. Start typing in the box. As long as you keep typing, you're fine, but once you stop typing, you have a grace period of a certain number of seconds and then there are consequences.

In my experience, the best way to beat writer's block is just to write something, anything on the page. It doesn't have to be good, it just has to be something to get you going and kickstart your creativity. So this little application could be quite helpful for desperate situations!

PSR to Begin Accepting Graphic Literature Submissions!

Today, we have some very exciting news at PSR! Beginning this issue, we will be reviewing submissions of graphic literature!

It all started when Van Jensen (whose graphic novel was featured on PSR Book Club) asked if we'd ever considered publishing comics in Plains Song Review. Well, we hadn't, but it certainly seemed like an interesting idea! After thinking about it and talking about it for awhile, we decided to give it a try.

I know what you're thinking. Graphic literature? Isn't that just a fancy-pants name for comics? Yes indeed! But comics have gotten pretty literary and high-brow in recent years. For instance, last year in an English class, we read the graphic novel MAUS, a memoir of the Holocaust that won a Pulitzer. Other notable comics include Persepolis and Skyscrapers of the Midwest. Literary magazines are starting to take comics more seriously too. Virginia Quarterly Review regularly publishes them, and McSweeney's devoted an entire issue just to comics!

I really think comics could be a good fit at PSR. They're such a uniquely American art form, which makes sense for a publication like ours. Furthermore, graphic novels are uniquely well-equipped to explore "place," as they are able to both depict place both through words and through images.

Of course, PSR's publishing standards will remain the same as ever. We will only accept submissions that explore the Great Plains, and we will only accept submissions that we feel are high quality. If we don't get any good comic submissions this year, we simply won't publish any comics. That said, I'm hoping that we get some really good stuff to show you when Issue XII comes out.

Graphic Literature Submission Guidelines can be found at http://www.unl.edu/plains/publications/PSR/psr.shtml.

New Photography Exhibit

The Center for Great Plains Studies just opened its new exhibits:

Searching for the Real Nebraska: A Photo Essay on the Great Recession. The exhibit features photographers Bruce Thorson, Patrick Breen, Kyle Bruggeman, and Clay Lomneth, and it runs from November 6th to December 13th. People of the Plains is a series of black and white photographs by John Evasco. These are some gorgeous photographs, so I highly recommend going to see them.

Check them out at CGPS 1155 Q Street, Lincoln, NE 68588-0214. The gallery is free and open to the public. Check the website for hours.

Save The Words!

Oxford English Dictionary has a new campaign to save old, unused words from completely dropping out of our language! Save the Words allows users to sign up to "adopt" words to keep them from being lost. You pick a word from their many options, and commit to use it as often as you can in normal conversation. It sounds kind of silly, but a lot of these words are wonderfully specific and meaningful and absolutely deserve to be reinvigorated!

I've adopted "helctic," which means "acting to drag or draw out." Isn't that a terribly useful word? This is also a good site for poets who are looking for the perfect ancient adjective to add flavor to their lines.

How to Write Badly Well

Want to know how to write a wonderful piece of fiction? Don't take advice from Joel Stickley! Stickley is a writer and the author of the blog How to Write Badly Well. It lists some really cringe-worthy ways one can ruin a piece of writing.

An excerpt, from the post "Present your research in the form of dialogue:"

‘My god,’ said Geoff, ‘so it’s true. We hold in our very hands the original draft of the hitherto unknown third treaty of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia signed by the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III himself.’
‘Yes,’ confirmed Sally. ‘Who would have thought when we set off this morning for this remote Swiss village that we would end the day in possession of the very document which marked the birth of modern European statehood?'
‘Certainly not me!’ laughed Geoff.

via kottke.org

Gregory Euclide's Landscape Art

There's a neat exhibit going on at the David B. Smith Gallery in Denver, CO right now. The artist is Gregory Euclide, and he does art that explores our relationship with the landscape. The press release says:

Euclide explores the difficulty of escaping the cultural lens from which we view nature. Images from traditional landscape paintings, wildlife documentaries and travel guides construct our cultural expectations and define how we view land. Euclide’s work explores the conflicts between these images of idealized, picturesque views and the desire to truly experience nature as it is.

Not near Denver? The website has a photo gallery where you can see the art!

via boingboing.net

Great Plains Halloween

It's Halloween Eve! So we're going to do an extra link-filled post today, to make sure you're prepared for this wonderful holiday in an appropriately Great Plains fashion.

The Journal Star has local Halloween events both for families and for adult-types.

The only Nebraskan horror movie!

Finally: a few Great Plains ghost legends: Faceless Fred, ghosts of Neihardt Hall, and Omaha's Hummel Park.

Happy Haunting!

PSR Halloween Book Club: Guide to the Ghosts of Lincoln

For this installment of PSR Book Club, we have a Halloween book! Alan Boye's A Guide to the Ghosts of Lincoln is a look at some of Lincoln, Nebraska's most thrilling ghost stories. It also happens to be the most-frequently stolen book at Lincoln City Libraries. I highly recommend checking it out (not stealing it!) so you can scare your friends with spine-tingling stories whilst impressing them with your knowledge of local history!

A Haunted History of Lincoln

I am generally not a Holiday Person, but I love Halloween! I especially like ghost stories; they give you such a good sense of a community's history and culture.

Lincolnite Dale Bacon is another ghost story lover. He gives bus tours every year of Lincoln's haunted places. This year, he's come out with a ghost story DVD: A Haunted History of Lincoln: The Capitol City. Check out the Journal Star for an interview with Bacon about ghosts and his DVD. If you want a DVD of your own, email dtb22@windstream.net.

Be sure to check back on Wednesday for some spine-tingling ghost stories from the Great Plains!

Discussion of Aaron Douglas at the Sheldon

Did you know that Aaron Douglas, the painter of the Harlem Renaissance, was from the Great Plains? He grew up in Topeka, Kansas, and went to school at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. You can learn all about him at an upcoming discussion at the Sheldon on Tuesday. From the event description:

Director J. Daniel Veneciano will discuss artist Aaron Douglas, who graduated from the University of Nebraska. This program, part of UNL's Diversity Working Group talk series, will be held in Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium. It is free and the public is invited. Visitors who bring brown bag lunches may eat in the Sheldon boardroom after the talk.

When: October 27th 12:00 PM- 1:00 PM
Where: Sheldon Art Museum, Lincoln, Nebraska

The New Science of Fall Colors

It's looking very autumnal lately around here. All the leaves are turning color and falling. There are some especially cool trees on the UNL campus by Memorial Stadium that are bright scarlet! Pretty (and school-color appropriate)!

One thing I've noticed moving from Colorado to Nebraska is that Fall looks different here. I thought it was just the types of trees that made a difference, but Discovery has a photo gallery and article about the science of fall colors. It's a lot more complex than I thought! If you're interested in knowing why the Great Plains looks like it does in the fall, I'd check it out! (If you're not a science-type, I still recommend looking at the pictures; there are some very nice ones.)

Link

via boingboing.net

The Emptied Prairie

If you've ever driven through the Midwest, you've probably noticed those old abandoned farmhouses and churches along the side of the highway. I always wonder why their former occupants took off and left their homes behind. Luckily, National Geographic is there with answers. They have an article and photo gallery on their website called "The Emptied Prairie" about ghost towns of North Dakota. (Some of the pictures are quite spooky and appropriate for Halloween time.)

Link

Good Novels Don't Have to Be Hard Work

There was an interesting article by author Lev Grossman in the Wall Street Journal recently called "Good Novels Don't Have to Be Hard Work." Basically, Grossman says that compelling plots have in recent years been considered somewhat "low-brow," while high-class literature usually doesn't have suspenseful plotting. Grossman thinks plot is important, and that it's making a comeback.

An excerpt:

From a hieratic, hermetic art object the novel is blooming into something more casual and open: a literature of pleasure. The critics will have to catch up. This new breed of novel resists interpretation, but not the way the Modernists did. These books require a different set of tools, and a basic belief that plot and literary intelligence aren't mutually exclusive.

In fact the true postmodern novel is here, hiding in plain sight. We just haven't noticed it because we're looking in the wrong aisle. We were trained—by the Modernists, who else—to expect a literary revolution to be a revolution of the avant-garde: typographically altered, grammatically shattered, rhetorically obscure. Difficult, in a word. This is different. It's a revolution from below, up from the supermarket racks.

What do you think, readers? Is plot the next big thing? Do you prefer a suspenseful plot, or do you put more value on other aspects of the novel?

PSR Book Club-- Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild

I discovered this book the last time I was at the wonderful Indigo Bridge Books in the Haymarket. (Sadly, I missed the book signing they did there a couple of weekends ago.) Great Plains: America's Lingering Wild by Michael Forsberg is a book of photography, essays, and maps chronicling the beauty of the Great Plains. I had a chance to look through it a little, and I can tell you that it's a really gorgeous book. And I'm not the only one who was impressed:

(via the Amazon page)

It takes a big book to portray such an immense, complex place, and this spacious volume, vividly introduced by poet Ted Kooser, fits the bill. Intrepid photographer Michael Forsberg presents breathtaking images of wide-open spaces and portraits of wildlife from bison to butterflies, bobcats to frogs. Historical geographer David Wishart contrasts the lives of the region's Native peoples with the deleterious impact of settlers, who plowed up the grasslands, sending countless species into decline and losing precious topsoil to wind erosion. Wildlife biologist, rancher, and writer Dan O'Brien-flinty, funny, and skeptical-dissects the mythology of the Great Plains, the `monumental hubris, greed, and lack of common sense' that led to its near destruction, and, on the upswing, today's bold restoration efforts. In all, a quintessential and crucial American story, powerfully told. -Booklist

You can learn more about the book and Michael Forsberg from this Journal Star article.

P.S. It looks like the book is on promotion right now on Amazon, if you're looking to buy your very own copy for the sale price.

The Deepest Cave in the United States

There's a cool post up on boingboing.net about the deepest cave in the United States, located on the Great Plains in southeastern New Mexico. It's called Lechuguilla Cave and it wasn't even discovered until 1986! It is in the Carlsbad Caverns National Park, but you can't visit this particular cave. Only scientists and explorers can go in. However, you can take a tour without even getting out of your chair, because boingboing has posted this video of the cave from Planet Earth.

Link

This American Life on Laura Ingalls Wilder

As part of the "The Book That Changed Your Life" episode, This American Life has a segment on Laura Ingalls Wilder books. The piece is by Meghan Daum, a New Yorker who moved to Nebraska partially because she fell in love with the idea of the Great Plains after reading Laura Ingalls Wilder's books.


Listen here!

Neatest Travel Website Ever!

Regular readers of the PSR blog might know that we at PSR have a deep love of roadside attractions, tourist traps, and other strange places on the Great Plains. And now we've discovered the best website ever for scouting out potential roadtrip destinations.

The Atlas Obscura describes itself as a "compendium of the world's wonders, curiosities, and esoterica." They have a huge database of interesting and strange places all over the globe. If you're looking for places close to home, you can use their interactive map to explore specific regions. The places range from the Shoe Tree of Middlegate, Nevada, to the Mystery Tomb of Trinidad and Tobago, to Madurodam, a tiny city in Holland.

Here's some of our favorite curious places on the Great Plains:
The Kansas Underground Salt Museum
Carhenge
Bishop's Castle

Do you know of any curious places that the Atlas Obscura missed? Let us know! We love making new discoveries about strange and interesting things on the Great Plains!

PSR Book Club: The Echo Maker

I was trawling through the New York Times book reviews, looking for something to read, when I came across their review of The Echo Maker by Richard Powers, which won the National Book Award and was a Pulitzer finalist. It's a novel that deals with neuroscience, family, and Sandhill Cranes. I couldn't believe I'd never heard of it before.

The novel follows Mark Schluter, who gets in a car accident outside of Kearney, NE. His sister Karin rushes to his side, but when Mark wakes up from his coma, he is convinced that Karin has been replaced by a look-alike sent to spy on him. Mark is diagnosed with Capgras Syndrome, and a neuroscientist is brought in to help him. Throughout, there is a strong sense of Great Plains as place. From the review:

What caused the accident, no one can say — the only witnesses are the sandhill cranes, half a million of them, who stop outside Kearney each year on their migratory journey. Ancient and silent, the birds “dance as they have since before this river started,” re-enacting their hard-wired ritual of departure and homecoming. That Powers will use these denizens of the natural world as feathered avatars of his human characters is a given; that he is able to tease out surprising resonances is part of his gift.

Check it out on Amazon
A very illuminating interview with the author about novels, cranes, and the Plains.

PSR Book Club: Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer (?!)

For this installment of PSR Book Club, we have a rather intruiging graphic novel by a writer close to home:
Van Jensen was born in Lewellen and attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (where he edited the Daily Nebraskan).

Jensen has written a book with a very strange title: Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer. In this graphic novel, Geppetto has been killed by vampires, and Pinocchio goes out looking for vengeance, using his growing wooden nose as a stake. According to reviewers, the book is "moody and gothic" with "moments of grim humor."

Watch the video trailer here.
Check out an interview with Van Jensen in the Lincoln Journal-Star.