Inside Look

By Kelley Davidson, Graduate Assistant, Bluegrass Writers Studio

How To Get Out of The Slush Pile and Into My Heart

     During Winter Residency 2k15, Ty Franck (one half of the genre titan James S.A. Corey) had this to say about the success rate of submitting work to journals and other publications: “Slush readers are typically poor grad students or interns who are tired and swamped with homework. They’re dying for a reason to throw your manuscript in the garbage. If you don’t have them hooked by the first few sentences, you’re doomed.” He couldn’t have said it better.

By Chelsea, Bluegrass Writers Studio

By Lance Hood, Bluegrass Writers Studio

     January second marked the first day of the 2015 Bluegrass Writers Studio Winter Residency, a ten day stretch of reading, writing, and the intermingling of writerly minds. We started the week out strong with a visit from the two-headed giant who singlehandedly revived the space opera genre, James S.A. Corey. The pseudonym, which combines the middle names of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, can make for some awkward sentences, as it’s not often that a single proper noun refers to two people. For the sake of clarity and in an attempt to retain my final shreds of sanity, I’ll henceforth refer to them in other manners. Probably. No promises.

By Kristen Thompson, Associate Coordinator, Bluegrass Writers Studio

     Anyone familiar with my literary ways knows that I’m a devotee of Dr. Peter Mark Roget. Roget was sort of the Charlie Brown of the 19^th century. He was a gloomy, sullen sort who most certainly would’ve fallen prey annually to the Van Pelt swiping of the Thanksgiving football, landing on his back with an untranslatable sound of anguish.

     By all reports, his melancholy was not entirely his fault, but had roots in the depression, schizophrenia, and suicide in his family. So his pathology was perhaps a bit more involved than a 5-cent diagnosis at a sidewalk stand (nickels! nickels! nickels!), but the result was the same: a quest to make sense of the madness.