Monday Morning Webahol
Image chosen by word association game with one of the main subjects of this post. Any guesses?
There’s a new poetry blog in town. Contributors to The The Poetry include the Maggy Poetry editorial A-team, plus about eight more fine people, plus^2 some sort of daily-rotating tag-team editorial arrangement. And a key word cloud-sphere that rotates bewitchingly. What else do you want from life? GO THERE.
Several pieces of news from Sentence: (1) The winner of the Sentence Book Award is (for a book-length manuscript of prose poems or a book-length manuscript consisting substantially of prose poems) is Sinead O’Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds by Maureen Seaton and Neil de la Flor. (2) 25 Sightings of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker by Re’lynn Hansen has been selected as the winning manuscript of The Firewheel Chapbook Award. (3) Sentence #7 is now available. (4) Also available now, An Introduction to the Prose Poem. Congrats all you winners!
Some people know about my doppelganger, the Other (or, since he’s older, perhaps the Original) Justin Taylor, who is a Baptist preacher out of Wheaton, Illinois and the co-author of a book called Sex and the Supremacy of Christ. ANYway, JTO left a comment on his friend David Murray’s post at The Gospel Coalition Blog the other day, which naturally triggered my Google alert, and though I don’t always keep this close track of JTO’s doings, the title of the blogpost caught my eye: “101 Writing Tips.” Turns out that Mr. Murray actually meant “Writing Tips 101;” he’s actually offering his Top 5 writing/preaching tips, which themselves are actually only intended to summarize some video about “preaching blunders” that he linked to. Here’s one now-
3. Don’t overuse nouns
Use verbs much more. Not, “It is our suggestion…” but, “We suggest.”
Heartily recommended to all you young preachers out there. Also: JTO’s blog, Between Two Worlds, is here.
2 Recordings of Flannery O’Connor Reading Her Work!
This comes with a tripple hat-tip, and proves why the internet is awesome.
1) Did you know I have the same name as a somewhat famous preacher? That’s right. Justin Taylor of Wheaton, Illinois, who blogs at Between Two Worlds and is the author and/or editor of several books, including Overcoming Sin and Temptation, Communion with the Triune God, The Supremacy of Christ in a Postmodern World, and Where Did Christianity Come From? I often wonder if he knows I exist. I mean, if he searches his own name on Amazon, he’ll get my anthology The Apocalypse Reader, as his #3 response, right between Communion with and Supremacy of.