I can say confidently that subjecting my work to peer review is the best thing I have done in the last 10 years.
I can say confidently that subjecting my work to peer review is the best thing I have done in the last 10 years.
Got this email from Writer's Digest selling critique services with the heading "Polish Your Writing with a Professional Critique from Writer's Digest!" I thought they had mispelled "Publish" or that it was making fun of the Poles. I sent them an email asking if the Polish joke was intentional. This was while I still thought it was a mistake. Laura from customer service wrote back, "Are you kidding?" Here is Laura's phone message on my voicemail. The greeting for my phone says "Hello you've reached David Cooke The Lawn Guy..."
A. Molotkov–Producer, poet, vocals, handsonic, duduk, percussion Bruce Greene–poet, percussion Carrie-Ann Tkaczyk–poet, vocals David Cooke–poet Ragon Linde–Music Director, music Shawn Austin–poet, percussion
Raining Back Up performance at Broadway Books Spring 2011.
A. Molotkov–poet, vocals
John Sibley Williams–poet, vocals
David Cooke–Poet, vocals
Ragon Linde–Music Director
Carrie-Ann Tkaczyk–poet, vocals
I am certain that everyone has stories. I’m equally convinced that everyone is capable of writing these stories up into novels, short stories, articles, letters, notes, emails, blogs, texts, bumper stickers, billboards, songs, or graffiti. Writing is the legacy of our opposable thumbs and our ridiculously labyrinthed brains. However, just as not all runners are equal, nor all athletes, all writing is certainly not equal. At some point during my college years I promised myself to never, ever waste my precious time reading junk. Never. Unless it’s a magazine. Then it’s all bets off. For several years I only read the classics. Only the names bound in those Literary Anthologies you read in college: Hardy, Whitman, Woolf, Shakespeare. Under my definition of “classic”, Steinbeck was a bit of an upstart. Then after living in Nepal, I went through a long bout of only reading Indian writers—preferably ones who used...
Recently I wrote a list of books that influenced my writing and I thought it would be interesting to pose a question to this writing group. Tell me about a book or author that inspires your writing. The Guttery responses were (not) surprising. Bruce Greene‘s writing scratches like fingernails down the vertebrae of class and culture. Listen to the performance, Love Outlives Us, and you’ll appreciate that the writers who influenced Bruce were Kenneth Patchen and John Steinbeck. Bruce claims that he likes them both because they tackle “big ideas and are thought provoking.” Bruce does too. His “Goldfish” piece read in the Moonlit Guttery’s reading of Love Outlives Us uses the metaphor of a harmless goldfish to pry open the box of the Vietnam war. My mother, whose brother’s life was shattered by his three tours in Vietnam, could not sleep after listening to Bruce read his piece....
