Join Kerry in the dark

If you like short, dark fiction, you will love Kickstart student Kerry McPherson’s revamped website. It features her own flash fiction about justice, vengeance, and the scary edges of life.

Join her there, where the scales tilt. If you’ve been bad, you have reason to be afraid.

Small grants available to celebrate women writers

Want to observe a favorite woman writer’s birthday? Lead a discussion of her work? Organize a reading of women writers on a particular topic?

Soapstone—our local grassroots literary organization that focuses on women writers—is ready to help. Soapstone’s small grant program provides modest funding to support public study groups or events that celebrate the work of women writers. Past awards have focused on the work of Adrienne Rich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Sylvia Plath, Jane Austen and Sappho.

You have to come up with your own dough for food, alcohol, and reader or travel expenses, but Soapstone will provide funds for most of the rest: a venue, printed materials, other incidental expenses, and a portion of the organizer or study group leader’s time. The event must be new and open to the public, and not a book release or promotion.

If you submit your grant application by June 15, you could be the next person to host an event or study group. Share your love for Adichie Chimamanda, Zadie Smith, Emma Donoghue, Louise Erdrich, Amy Tan, Karen Armstrong, or whoever you read most eagerly.

Total poempalooza!

April is National Poetry Month. Organized by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, National Poetry Month is the largest literary celebration in the world. Tens of thousands of people take part by reading, writing, and teaching poetry of all types.

But April, schmapril! Why not celebrate your own total poempalooza all year long?

Markets:

Opportunities for outsiders

Writers feeling a little out of the mainstream these days might find a literary home at a journal that publishes work by people on the cultural margins. The choices are many (see below). If you submit to one of these and are accepted, let us know and we will feature your work in a future issue of Kickstart!

Mortar (a new online journal) publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by people who “exist on the borderline” and can “articulate marginalized experiences through new or undefined genres and forms.”

The Black Napkin publishes poetry by marginalized poets: “people of color, people who are disabled, women, people who identify as nonbinary, people who identify as neurodivergent, people who identify as asexual, immigrants, people who are undocumented, trauma survivors, atheists, agnostics, members of underrepresented religions—any poets whose voices are often unheard in the media.”

Queerlit publishes short stories, comics, and literary or personal essays by LGBTQ+ creators, about LGBTQ+ themes or with LBGTQ+ characters or settings.

Brickplight publishes poetry that explores unique identities. It seeks work by poets who “revel in undermining conventional thinking by giving voice to what conformity would have us bury and forget.”

The Geeky Press wants narrative essay, creative nonfiction, script, photo, and poetry submissions for a book on race in America.

Comma misuse deadly, expensive

By Ann Sihler

Ah, the mighty comma! Years ago I started to appreciate the outsized power of this humble punctuation mark when a friend pointed out the difference between “Let’s eat, Grandma!” and “Let’s eat Grandma!”

Just this past month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit determined that the lack of a comma made a Maine law so ambiguous that truck drivers can now claim $10 million in overtime pay from a dairy company. (This class action lawsuit hinged on whether the drivers were exempt from overtime pay for distributing certain foodstuffs [which is what truck drivers do], or for packing the foodstuffs in preparation for distribution [which they do not do].)

In light of this legal decision, I have to take seriously the Maine Legislative Drafting Manual’s description of the comma as “the most misused and misunderstood punctuation marks in legal drafting and, perhaps, the English language.”

If you have an important writing project coming up, check out these handy guidelines on comma use. They might save you some money—or even your life!

“When Mom Went Deer Hunting”

By Elizabeth Menche

Elizabeth Menche has been a Kickstart student on and off for several years. Currently she is working on a memoir about her brother’s experience with polio. She started the project to help her sons understand more about their family, particularly their grandparents. “I feel this is a story best told on paper,” she says.

Through Kickstart, Menche has both improved her writing skills and come to enjoy writing more. She says that she finds it “especially interesting to write my thoughts down on paper and then see how they look when I read them back.”

When I was old enough to figure out that hunting meant killing, I was surprised that Mom—especially because she was a nurse—wanted go out and kill deer. I was even more surprised when I learned why she liked to go hunting.

Each year before hunting season, the family hunting group went target practicing. Mom said she didn’t try to be a good shot. In fact she made sure she was the least accurate shooter of the group. That way the group placed her up on top of a hill and changed her role from hunter to look-out. Her responsibility was to keep a watch out in the fields below and blow a whistle for the hunters when she saw a deer.

Though she took her gun (a 30-06 as I remember), she had no intention of using it. What Mom was looking forward to was sitting on the hilltop with her thermos of coffee and her pockets stuffed full of Hershey chocolate bars. She added with a shy grin that she really didn’t look for deer very often. She mostly watched the birds.

I still smile when I picture Mom sitting up on a hill, eating chocolate bars, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and watching the birds.