What kind of reading material can you never have too much of? You guessed it: blogs! Well, perhaps that’s not true– several blogs out there are quite tiresome, verbose, or irrelevant. HOWEVER, not here! We at Vernacular only choose the wittiest, sharpest, and quirkiest blogs to peruse, so here are two new ones to hit the blogosphere that any emerging writer, publishing type, or literati should find interesting enough to add to their readers:

Read the Rest…
The Condenser: Hunting Down the Good Bits
penned by David Cory and Meg Moseley

In their words:
The Condenser is a place where we can share some of our favorite excerpts from historical documents and primary sources. Our interests lean toward the surreal, grotesque, obscure, stylish and out-of-place, and we have a loose rule not to publish anything post-1920. We often try to find an appropriate image to accompany each post. Unless noted, a post’s image is not taken from the same source as the text.

It’s like digital excerpts of archives! Care for a new source of plot ideas, writers? Fans of Megan Marshall or Emersonians who plan to take her “Sources of Inspiration” archival research class may want to subscribe.

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Live Essays: An Experiment of Up-to-the-Minute Nonfiction
penned by Matthew Salesses
Matthew is an Emerson MFA student in fiction, living in Korea for a year with his fiancé as he works on his novel. He has had stories published or forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Hobart, Mid-American Review, Pleiades, Quick Fiction, among others, and has received awards from Glimmer Train, MAR, and IMPAC. Googling will reveal more.

The premise:
Matt writes an essay in discreet posts (published live each day), and the post accrue to build a larger essay over time. This leads to a less straightforward, but pretty darn interesting blog– when one thinks about writing as a process, and nonfiction writing in particular as a process of shaping a narrative from one’s own life or the world around us.

Matt has set up the posts so that you can read an essay in the order it was written, as opposed to the usual blog setup (most recent post first). Having read his fiction writing, I was intrigued by his choice to change up his genres, and was pleased to discover that he’s maintained his trademark dry wit and at times almost absurdist narration. He’s shaped his posts into sharply etched slices of writing–even as he narrates in real-time. I decided to ask Matt about his motivation for using the medium of a blog in this way:

K: I’m curious about why you chose this premise for a blog.

M: I chose the premise after thinking about whether writers were really taking advantage of the internet as a different forum than books. I figured the difference could be that writing online could appear as it was written, something books really could not accommodate.

[Also], I couldn’t believe how many slightly horrifying things or extremely horrifying things were happening to us, and that made me think the essay was a good idea, for some reason. Nonfiction can be crazy.

K: How do you think this changes the composition process of writing an essay?

M: For one, a lot of what I wrote affected what I wrote the next day, because my fiancee would read it and react to it and that would change the events in our lives, or maybe she or I would be self-conscious. Also, it had to be organized differently. I couldn’t have a sense of the arc I wanted before writing, as I often do in fiction. Instead I included events I thought matched the theme from the opening, and hoped life would create an arc, the way life does. I had to fight to include the ending to the first essay that I did.

Also, the form made this inevitably meta in some ways, but I hope meta in an unavoidable way, because it was really about a kind of honesty.

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So for a good literary time, check out these blogs! And leave your comment here: what are your favorite blogs that you go to for a good read, or to get new ideas about writing or the publishing industry?

Tags:   blogs · emerson courses · kim · matthew salesses · Megan Marshall · writing process1 Comment