Category Archives: Blogs

A favorite daily read

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One of my favorite websites is The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor. Each day the site provides a poem and sometimes several entries about a writer or some historical event involving some writing of historical significance. For me, a writer, this site provides, dare I say, community, or at the least, a sense of camaraderie. And there are always bits of wisdom and encouragement for all sorts of writers in all sorts of situations.

For instance, just the other day, October 22, 2019, there was an entry about John Gould, a New England newspaperman working out of Maine. One day the principal of the local high school delivered one of his students to Gould. The student had produced a satirical edition of his own, called The Village Vomit. Guess who the student turned out to be?

The Writer’s Almanac is also available in an audio format. Check it out.

Lessons from Vonnegut, Part 3 

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David Fortier

There is a message in there somewhere for us writers—not would be writers: writers—about sticking to our task, connecting with those who can help us improve (not perfect) our craft—whether it is from a family member (his first wife said that she felt it in her bones that Vonnegut was meant to be counted among the best and did what she could to support his efforts, from typing up manuscripts and keeping the books) or from other professionals, even to the point of taking creative writing classes, and while there is no evidence from the Wakefield piece that Vonnegut ever belonged to writers group, joining an active writers group. 

I suppose it is a matter of whatever works as long as it appears to be working for us. 

On another note, in Vonnegut’s case, having some New England experience in his blood might have only helped. Of course, he was not born here, but he did reside on Cape Cod for many years, and I am thinking that some of that good old New England stick-to-it-iveness got under his skin. But then, that’s only me. 

For those of you with manuscripts close to sharing, please consider submitting to Lefora. Look for our submissions schedule on the submissions page of our website. 

Part 1

Part 2

Lessons from Vonnegut, Part 2 

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By David Fortier

  What I learned from Wakefield about Vonnegut. 

  1. Many of his early attempts were rejected.
  2. When they were rejected, as was the tenor of the day, he received valuable feedback from editors who were took an interest in his submissions, and when he received this feedback, he followed an editor’s advice.
  3. Vonnegut followed up on leads, including networking, with old college classmates.
  4. Vonnegut, at one point, sought the services of one of those manuscript doctoring outfits, but did not have the money to contract with one.
  5. Having followed up with old classmates and having received a detailed critique of his submission, Vonnegut would apply the appropriate fixes and resubmit; to which he often received a second critique which he set to work on.
  6. He worked on his fiction weeknights and weekends.
  7. Even when he followed up on fix after fix and the piece was ready finally submitted to the publisher, there was no guarantee that the piece would be published. This did not stop Vonnegut from continuing to work on a piece and resubmitting it elsewhere. In not a few instances, a story that he started on one year might be published three years later.
  8. He was not above working on salable stories. In fact, when his stories started getting picked up regularly, he made a deal with himself that as he made more money writing stories than at his day job, he would leave his day job. Which he did. Which worked, until it didn’t, as the venues dried up with the advent of TV.
  9. When the time came, his editor friends handed him off to an agent, who pushed Vonnegut harder to write salable stories.
  10. Vonnegut had a supporting cast, from his first wife to his dad. The latter pasted the letter in which Vonnegut shares his vision—of leaving his day job—on Masonite and covered them over with varnish to memorialize them.
  11. When the short story market dried up, and before he hit it big with Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut once borrowed $300 dollars from his son, who made the money on his paper route.
  12. Vonnegut was appreciative of all the help he received, especially from his editors. In a letter about the role of creative writing courses, he says in so many words, creative writing instructors have always been with us, in the form of those editors.

Part 3

Part 1

Lessons from Vonnegut, Part 1 

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By David Fortier

Kurt Vonnegut Complete Stories, Collected and Introduced by Jerome Klinkowitz & Dan Wakefield, Foreword by Dave Eggers, is a treasure for writers like me, and I am hoping, for writers who one day will submit to Lefora. I will get to my reasoning in a moment. For the time being, I confess I would not have gotten to it myself if it hadn’t been for my Fiction Masters class at the high school where I teach English. This honors-level English class features Shelley’s Frankenstein, Voltaire’s Candide, James’s Turn of the Screw, and most recently Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. 

Taught in the spring of their senior year, the course is a gift both to me and to my students. In many ways, it liberates both of us from the high school thing. They are heading out into the world—which means new horizons on a college campus of their choice; I get to  send them off by giving them a taste of what being in a college classroom might be like. For this semester, together—the students, Vonnegut, and I managed to keep the infamous and mind-numbing senioritis at bay. 

It helped that a good handful of the students are curious. Curiosity about the world among young people appears to have been kept at a distance from them. This curiosity spilled over to the book—one has read it and would love to read it again, but without the typical and cumbersome high-school treatment that would ruin it for him.  

This high-school treatment thing is something that I have been trying to get my head around for the past 15 years or so: why is it that kids come to high school hating to read, and, no, it is not because they hate to read, period; it is because they hate to read for school. 

As it turned out, I had two large classes of seniors, but not enough copies of the book to go around.  Rather than tossing in the towel, I visited several branches of my local library where I found four copies of Slaughterhouse waiting for me on fiction shelf. 

Alongside the books was this 911-page tome of Vonnegut’s short stories. I opened the table of contents. I recognized a few titles. I could not say that I was familiar with many of them. I saw Dave Eggers, a favorite of mine, provided a preface. Despite having little to no time, to get through the book, I managed to talk myself into taking the book with me, so that I could read what Eggers had to say. Maybe, I just might get to a few of the stories. 

When I did get to the book, it was already overdue. Eggers had some nice things to say about Vonnegut. I read a few of the stories. What turned out to be the biggest surprise, though, was Wakefield’s short essay, “How Vonnegut Learned to Write Short Stories.” The Vonnegut we know today, Wakefield contends, is not the early Vonnegut who labored over his stories while working full time. It is this subject, Vonnegut as apprentice, that is most helpful to those of us who aspire for publication to begin to understand and experience. 

If it weren’t for having to teach Vonnegut to some seniors on the verge of senioritis, I would not have stumbled across this helpful material. 

Part 2

Part 3

I’ve always been drawn to aviation

Blogs, Chuck Radda Blog, Drafts and Previews, from Chuck RaddaLeave a comment

I’ve always been drawn to aviation—maybe because I had an uncle once who flew bombing missions in the Pacific during World War II, crash-landed in New Guinea, and somehow made it back alive. He seldom spoke of the incident, but to the rest of the family he was always a pilot.

I’m not a pilot. I never became one (just as Kramer in Seinfeld never became a banker) but that didn’t keep me away from airports—even dragging my family there incessantly in years past—less so these days when heightened security measures make it difficult to find a location to watch take-offs and landings. But of course aviation is often linked to disasters, and the piece previewed here involves one of them: the crash of American 191 in Chicago, May, 1979. Though the story takes place today, its seed grew from that event.

The link below will take you to my website where you can download an early chapter. I’d love to hear what you think.

And Let All Sleep