"You write funny one day."

StoryStudio Chicago is offering tickets to see David Sedaris as the prize for a humor essay contest.
Details here.

Just a story about a man and his dog...

The lit mag Creative Nonfiction is "seeking new essays about the bonds--emotional, ethical, biological, physical, or otherwise--between humans and animals." Top prize is ONE MILLION DOLLARS. Wait, no, sorry -- one thousand. One thousand dollars. That could buy a lot of milkbones.

Details here along with submission guidelines and other contests.

Buy this book.

Two and a half years ago, we posted a classified ad on Craigslist in the hopes that we could find a few people willing to join, as Katie says, "a lil' creative writing group." And guess what? Out of all the misfits and vagrants and criminals that attended our meetings, one became a real, live, published author. His name is Stephen Markley. And I present to you Publish This Book, out in stores and available online March 9.

As someone who read this thing in its pre-agent infancy, I can tell you it's funny and offensive and full of vulgarity. So what I'm saying is, you should probably read it.

Without further ado, the back cover copy:
Dear Reader-
This is called the "back cover copy," and you are no doubt familiar with its purpose. It describes what the book is about, so you can decide if you want to read it.
Here's the problem, though: I can't even describe this book, and I wrote the damn thing.(1)
Basically, it's like this: fed up with the Byzantine quest of trying to publish a novel, I decide instead to cut to the chase and write a memoir about trying to publish a book-this book, to be precise.
Of course, now you're saying to yourself, "That is stupid," which is fair. But then you'll read it, and you'll say, "Damn, that was actually pretty good."
Because obviously it's about much more than just publishing a book. It's about life and love and friendship; politics, pop culture, and basketball; sex, drugs, and mild, inoffensive, slow-tempo Christian rock.(2)
It's about the pitfalls of narrating your life as it unfolds, freaking out when an agent actually (spoiler alert!) takes an interest in this bizarre experiment, and the surreal shock you undergo when a publisher actually buys it(3) and you suddenly realize that every secret drunk, drug, and sex story you've related will now be required reading for your parents, aunts, ex-girlfriends, and thousands of strangers who-you were kind of hoping-would never find out that you once accidentally shut your penis in a dresser drawer.(4)
And finally, but most importantly, it's about those tumultuous early years of adulthood-the years when hope and fear and rage broil together and the promise of youth still holds the capacity to inspire awe. This is a story of those struggles-to find your true voice in your work and in your life. And the best part?
You pretty much know it has a happy ending.(5)
1 What's beside it on the shelf? Something with a sexy vampire? If you're looking for sexy, I do full-frontal nudity in Chapter 11.
2 It is not really about that last one.
3 And then later makes you write your own back cover copy even though you clearly do not know what you're doing.
4 Although I'll dodge a bullet there because I totally left that story out of the book.
5 Except for what happens to the puppy at the fertilizer plant. I admit, that part is kind of a downer.

PS -- Because this lil' writing group read the book as it was being written, we make token appearances in print! Exciting, no?

Video killed the radio star. But NPR may liven up your fiction.

Cool short-fiction contest on NPR. 600 words inspired by the photo they've chosen. Details here.

You should read this.

Oooh, look, a new issue of Brevity, the online lit mag for short creative nonfiction.

"If you want to be a great writer, be a man."

I'm a sucker for op-eds that tackle gender issues and writing.

Like this one from Julianna Baggott in the Washington Post, in which she talks about the ways we idolize male writers (yes, even in today's equal-rights world) and leave the women in a pile of chick lit and romance novels.

To quote: "In my grad school thesis, written at 23, you'll find young men coming of age, old men haunted by war, Oedipus complexes galore. If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a man, write like one.

No one told me this outright. But I was told to worship Chekhov, Cheever, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Carver, Marquez, O'Brien. . . . This was the dawn of political correctness. Women were listed as concessions. In the middle of my master's, a female writer took center stage with a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award -- E. Annie Proulx. Ah, there was a catch. She was writing about men and therefore like a man."

Salon's Broadsheet column has more on this.

You could submit something:

To the Chicago Reader, for the annual fiction issue.
Details here.

You could write about this:

Details on Slate here.

Girls Gone Wilder

OK, there's a part of me that waxes nostalgic about reading Laura Ingalls Wilder because I share her last name. But the other part really loved reading those books when I was a kid. So it was with intrigue and fondness that I read this piece in Salon about Rose Wilder Lane and her life. The Wilder women also are the subjects of an Aug. 10 New Yorker piece.

From the Salon piece (quoting author Wendy McClure here): "For some reason Rose went out of her way to promote the idea of her mother as the sweet little lady pouring out her life in notebooks. She did it at her expense, and maybe ours, too, because I really wish that as a kid I'd gotten to hear more about Rose's writing life. For God's sake, the woman spent a whole winter in an unheated Greenwich Village flat typing and sleeping under newspapers, and somehow that's not as cool as twisting hay?"

Poetry from normal, banal life

Robert Pinsky writes about Alexander Pope and finding poetry in the mundane on Slate, here.