Inside Look

By Bob Johnson, Associate Professor, Bluegrass Writers Studio

This is why you write:

By Lindsey Stockton Frantz, Bluegrass Writers Studio Alumnus

            When Dr. Young Smith approached me a few years ago and asked if I’d like to be Editor-in-Chief of Jelly Bucket--the Bluegrass Writers Studio’s literary journal--I was thrilled. I’d worked on the journal as production manager and I thought I was fully prepared for the duties being Editor-in-Chief entailed. In retrospect, my naïveté is almost endearing. Almost.

            As the production manager of the second issue, I had my hands on every piece of fiction, nonfiction, prose, and visual art that went into the journal. I placed each piece in the journal and formatted each page. It was very time-consuming and very rewarding. I thought moving from that position for issue three would be a break.

By Jen Parks, Bluegrass Writers Studio

     If you are a fiction writer like me, getting to know your characters can be like going on a bad first date: having to field a long list of banal questions you’re not even sure you want the answers to, interspersed with random awkward pauses. And all the while, you wonder, what am I doing here?

     At Winter Residency, I attended a craft lecture by Alissa Nutting, author of the novel Tampa. I wasn't sure if her topic of writing villains would apply to me. After all, I don’t write about evil people; I write about evil things that happen to good people. Totally different, right?

     Not exactly.

By Derek Nikitas, Director, Bluegrass Writers Studio

Didn’t see that coming?

I lucked out in grad school. A handful of my professors weren’t allergic to plot. They understood and explained the deep value of narrative structure, traditional and experimental.  

Often, workshops focus on the finished draft with little mention of process. Strategizing itself is sometimes met with suspicion. But still, some of my deepest insights into story came from sessions where my mentors addressed the scaffolding of story, the blueprint, even before it was written. We worked through faults in story logic and rifts in causality, the “contract with the reader,” dips in interest and the fundamental importance of the turn, the rhetoric of character action, the setups, the payoffs.