Tag: writing

Candlelit writing desk with handwritten pages, autumn leaves, books, and jack-o'-lantern

Flash Prose Submission Tips and October Publishing Opportunities

Published on by Nadja MarilLeave a comment

By Nadja Maril, a founding member of the Old Scratch Press

It’s October, the month of the harvest when the leaves turn vivid shades of red, orange and yellow before falling to the ground. Scores of literary publications have call-outs for scary stories to mark the Halloween season.

The celebration, from which Our Halloween evolved, is the Gaelic holiday Samhain. During Samhain, the curtain between the living and the dead was lifted for one night. Dressed as ghosts, people celebrating what became known as Halloween would go door-to-door to ask for food. Trick or Treat.

Scary is the goal. The carving of malevolent faces into pumpkins and the display of anything creepy outside your home was intended to calm the ghosts roaming the earth on October 31st. The creepier the better.

When it comes to submissions, many magazines including our own Instant Noodles Literary Magazine prize brevity. IF submission guidelines ask for stories less than 500 words, keep your submission below or as close to 500 words as possible. A short piece of fiction or nonfiction, should still be powerful and compelling to read.

Here are a few simple tips to get you started.

A close-up of a person's hand writing with a pen on a notebook, illuminated by soft light from a nearby candle.
Photo by furkanfdemir on Pexels.com
  1. Begin close to or with action. In a short piece you don’t have time for backstory.
  2. Write about one event, something simple but telling.
  3. Limit your characters. In a short piece there is no time for character development and too many characters will confuse the reader. Stay focused.
  4. Cut the adverbs. Look for all the words that end in “ly” such as slowly or carefully or quickly. You don’t need them. Choose a descriptive verb instead.
  5. Eliminate any filler words such as: just, almost, really, but.

If you’d like to read an example of a good piece of micro fiction, here is the link to the story that won the Fractured Fiction  2025 Micro Fiction prize.  “No Voltage on a Quiet Road” by Maxwell Orsen.

WRITING PROMPT: Think of a scene where something is about to change. A storm is coming. A thief is about to grab your protagonist’s wallet. How does the main character react? Are they changed by the experience? What made this situation explosive? What did they feel at the time? What were they thinking about?

At Instant Noodles Literary Magazine we are still reading submissions, but our “In Box” of fiction is getting full.  Ditto for our poetry submissions. There is more room in the Creative Nonfiction category.  To increase your odds of being published, I’ve put together a list of five more magazines you may want to consider submitting to via Duosoma this month.   https://duotrope.com/duosuma/    You can go directly to the Duosoma website to look for opportunities, but I recommend reading the magazines first to see if the writing they publish is writing you admire.

Inkhorn Review (reading poetry and short prose).

Iron & Salt Press  ( reading  horror and mystery flash short stories).

Macrame Literary Journal.  (reading poetry, fiction and micro fiction)

Bright Flash Literary Review (reading flash and short fiction)

Orion’s Belt  (Literary speculative fiction: reading poetry, flash and micro fiction).

If your work is repeatedly rejected, consider revising. Read it out loud sentence by sentence. Does each sentence provide action, description or surprise?

Keep writing and thank you for reading. Please follow us here on Word Press and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/OLDSCRATCHPRESS/

Check out our newest chapbooks by Beatriz Fernandez and R.David Fulcher.

English: Wendell Berry stands before the solar panels on his farm in Henry County, KY. Photo by Guy Mendes

We Recently Lost One of the Greats

Published on by virginiawattsLeave a comment

Wendell Berry was a beloved farmer and conversationalist, English professor, forest lover, and writer from the hills of Kentucky. He wrote about land and how mankind must strive to use it ethically. Berry came from a long line of tobacco farmers. His father was famous for cofounding a farming co-op that matched supply and demand. The co-op served the people it was meant to serve: small, hardworking farmers.

During his lifetime, Berry got behind causes he believed in. He protested the Vietnam War and nuclear power. He marched on Washington in 2009 as part of a protest to bring about cleaner emissions. He opposed mountaintop removal mining in Kentucky. He worried about what is lost in modernization. He fought to preserve land, regional economies, and human health in local communities.

His relationship with the University of Kentucky, where he taught, became strained when he withdrew papers he had loaned to the school after the university accepted $7 million from a coal producer.

Berry published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and essays and received many prestigious honors for his writing, such as the T.S. Eliot Award and the National Humanities Medal. The message in all his work remained clear, essentially that man must live in harmony with the earth. He was against large-scale farming controlled by large corporations that relied on chemical pesticides and fertilizers, promoted soil erosion, depleted aquifers, and drove small farms out of business, destroying local communities in the process. He himself used horses to work his own land and used organic fertilizers and pesticides.

His poetry themes include the countryside, the routines of farm and family, and spirituality found in the natural world. It has been said of Berry that he ennobled the commonplace. Here are two of his most famous poems.

What We Need Is Here
by Wendell Berry

Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes.
Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear in the ancient faith: what we need is here.
And we pray, not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart,
and in eye, clear.
What we need is here.

Virginia Watts is the author of poetry and stories found in The MacGuffin, Epiphany, CRAFT, The Florida Review, Reed Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Eclectica Magazine among others. She has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut short story collection Echoes from the Hocker House was short listed for 2024 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, selected as one of the Best Indie Books of 2023 by Kirkus Book Reviews, and won third place in the 2024 Feathered Quill Book Awards. Please visit her.

Virginia’s new book is now available from Old Scratch Press:

Her prior poetry chapbooks Shot Full of Holes and The Werewolves of Elk Creek 

 are available from Moonstone Press. And her debut short story collection Echoes from the Hocker House is not to be missed!

IT’S LIT MAG WEEK!

Published on by diannePLeave a comment

It’s #LitMagWeek, a celebration of the independent literary magazines that give writers a place to take chances, find readers, and get their work out into the world.

Start with our own Instant Noodles Literary Magazine, sponsored by Current Words Publishing and curated by the Old Scratch Press Collective.

Then go exploring! Check out some of our fellow literary magazines celebrating this week:

F(r)iction
Mom Egg Review
The Dolomite Review
Midnight Mind Magazine

Read a lit mag. Discover a writer. Find something wonderful and weird.

Happy #LitMagWeek!

Current Words Publishing and Old Scratch Press congratulate 2026 Best of the Net Nominees

Published on by wyn001100Leave a comment

by Robert Fleming

Best of the Net 2026 Nominees

Visual Art selections by Robert Fleming and Alan Bern

Andy Gordon, Car Side View Mirrors

Joseph Barbella, Horse Power

Robert Fleming, Frozen Sanctuary

Creative Non-Fiction selections by Nadja Maril

Tamara-Lee Brereton-Karabetsos, From Cage to Street

Patty Perreault Bennett, Our Christmas Surprise 

Fiction / Flash Fiction selections by Anthony Doyle and David Fulcher

Liz deBeer, Cracked Pie Crust

Robert Fleming, Dairy Queen Jesus

Poetry selections by Beatriz Fernandez

Merilee Johnson, She Walks Train

Pat Roe, Love Me Some Gravy

David Lee, Gravy Boat Apocalypse

Rebecca O’Hagan, In Defence of Budget Airlines

Robert McAfee, Acela Blues

Jonathan Ukah, Aboard a Ryanair Flight

********************************************************************************************

Yours Truly is:

Robert Fleming, a contributing editor of Old Scratch Press

who published an Amazon best seller visual poetry book: White Noir

an editor of the digital magazine Instant Noodles

Thank you for reading. Please sign up to follow us on Facebook and to follow us here on WordPress to expand your knowledge about poetry and short form writing as well as to receive the latest news about publication opportunities.

Join the Masquerade! Writing Persona Poetry

Published on by Beatriz F.Leave a comment

If you’ve never written a poem in any voice but your own, you might want to try writing a persona poem—it may lead you down unexplored paths of creativity!

The Academy of American Poets defines a persona poem thus:

“A persona poem is a poem in which the poet speaks through an assumed voice….Also known as a dramatic monologue, this poetic form shares many characteristics with a theatrical monologue: an audience is implied; there is no dialogue; and the poet takes on the voice of a character, a fictional identity, or a persona.”

The voice you adopt when you write a persona poem can be a fictional, imaginary or historical character, an animal, an inanimate object, a collective such as a country, or even an omniscient god-like voice.  This is when the fun begins!

In “Richard the Lionheart’s Mummified Heart Examined,” a poem inspired by a true story and reprinted in my latest collection, Stone & Star: Poems in Voices Across Time, I alternately adopt the voice of the King’s Minstrel, the Royal surgeon, Richard I, his wife Berengaria of Navarre, the heart itself, and the forensic scientists who examined the heart in modern times.  Needless to say, this was a fun poem to write and the voices seemed to meld seamlessly to tell the story.

In psychological terms, Jung described persona as a social mask that conceals “the true nature of the individual.”  The term originates from the theater in ancient Greece where actual masks were worn by actors on stage to represent different points of view.

However, I find that writing persona poetry rather than concealing, frees the writer to reveal their subjective truths to the reader without the constraints of their own personality. 

Writing persona poetry is the closest I will ever come to acting, and I find it incredibly liberating.  I first found my own voice via persona poetry and it is still my favorite poetical form to use.

When writing as a historical character, I do some research and try to read letters written by that person if they are available, to pick up some of their personal vocabulary.  The way they address and sign their letters, their general tone, their “voice” is usually apparent and I use that to guide my own writing of the poem. 

Recently, my poem “Lafayette Gingerbread” was published in an anthology,  Poets Respond to the American Revolution: The US250 Persona Poem Project by Highland Park Poetry, which was devoted entirely to persona poetry about U.S. history from 1765-1800, leading up the American Revolution. 

We were asked to write from the point of view of fictional or historical persons, animals or objects:  one poet wrote from the perspective of Brown Beauty, the horse Paul Revere rode, some wrote from the perspective of symbols such as the Tree of Liberty or the Liberty Bell.

When writing as a fictional character, I try to stay within the confines of the work they appeared in, and use vocabulary suited to the time period of the novel.  I have fun imagining what some fictional characters would say, given a chance, especially when in the original work they were not given much dialogue.  In this spirit, I’ve given voice to Weena, the Time Traveler’s mostly mute companion in H.G. Well’s The Time Machine, and Nova, the beautiful mute heroine in the original 1968 Planet of the Apes film. 

I find most of the persona poems I write are emotional in nature, speaking from the heart in a more direct and universal way than I could write from my own limited experience. Some writers may feel uncomfortable putting words into another’s mouth, so to speak. Unlike novelists or playwrights, who regularly write dialogue for fictional and in some cases historical characters, poets are used to thinking of their writing as highly personal and not open to other’s voices. But isn’t most poetry persona poetry, in a way?  Because whenever we write, we almost unconsciously adopt a persona, a writing voice, that is not our everyday voice, but which nonetheless reflects our authentic and true nature.

Beatriz F. Fernandez is a poet and short fiction writer. Join me for my November 1st reading (along with Miguel Mitchell) as part of the Speculative Sunday Reading series!  Presented and moderated by Akua Lezlie Hope. Readings are live on Zoom and tickets are free via the Eventbrite link.

Thank you for reading and please follow us here and on Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/OLDSCRATCHPRESS/

Old Scratch Press’s latest publications: Old Scratch Press Catalog

Guest Posting: Go Write Somewhere Else! Yes, You, Get Outta Here!

Published on by diannePLeave a comment

Our own Dianne Pearce (me) has a new post up at Authors Electric, and it begins with an important literary question:

Which author, living or dead, would you most want to get with? (A topic that deserves serious, serious daydreaming.)

The weirdo answer from Dianne (again, me) is Tom Robbins. Not because of what he looked like, but because of what his writing revealed about the strange, funny mind behind it. From there, Dianne (still me) wanders into attraction, humor, imagination, and the peculiar intimacy of reading someone else’s words.

I (Dianne, obviously) encourage you to go read it.

But while we’re (actually me, or rather, I, I am) sending you over there, there’s another reason writers should have Authors Electric on their radar.

Write somewhere that isn’t yours already!

Get off your duff, friends. Authors Electric accepts guest posts, and opportunities like that are worth looking for.

If you’re an author, it’s easy to spend all your blogging energy writing for your own website. That’s useful, but the people visiting your website are generally people who have already found you. A guest post puts your name and your writing somewhere else, in front of someone else’s readers.

And you don’t necessarily need to write about your book. In fact, please don’t turn every guest post into an advertisement for your book. And, on your own blog, don’t do that either. And certainly don’t blog on one blog solely about going to read something on another blog. That’s something we, here at OSP (well, rather I, me, actually; the rest of OSP has no idea what I’m writing here and will probably refuse to be held accountable for it), would never do. (Go read my post!)

Write something funny. Write about the books you love. Write about research that sent you down an unexpected rabbit hole. Write about some peculiar part of the writing life. Write something that makes a reader think, I like this person. What else have they written? People think that about me all the time (I am assured by my caretakers, who wish to keep me relatively compliant and still).

That’s the point.

Guest posting can give you another byline to share, another place for readers to encounter you, another link leading back to your work, and, perhaps most importantly, a chance to introduce yourself without standing on a chair yelling BUY MY BOOK (but seriously, people, buy our books. Well, mine’s not out yet, but buy the other books from OSP. Go ahead. Make a poet smile, and put down the bread knife. God, poets eat a lot of bread!).

Freaking gorgeous bread.

glorious poppy seeds

glorious poppy seeds
delicious and replete
I love your taste
so very much
I happily pick you

from my teeth

Authors Electric is one place to consider. There are others. Look at blogs and publications connected to your genre, your subject matter, your profession, your interests, or the subjects you research for your books. See whether they accept guest contributions. Read what they publish before you pitch them. (Or just pitch wildly, like me in AA softball in 1970-something; you don’t need to know the date. Shut up about the years gone by! I pitched so wildly they [the coach, my own father] stuck me on second base where I could chomp on a huge wad of Bazooka Joe, blowing bubbles so large they hid my face, and not do too much damage to our losing streak. Wait, what are we discussing here?)

EXCLUSIVE!
Actual for real 100% photo of me in little league, wearing my official AA shirt and standing on second base with my beloved glove in my hand, age 9. People never could steal second from me because I was standing on it, and I could not see them coming, because of the gum.

Then come up with something their readers (which is to say readers who read their website/blog) might actually enjoy. Why would they let you post for them? Certainly because you are a serious author taking things seriously and not at all running around the yard barefoot and dangerously late for work. (By the way, forget the job. Poetry is lucrative!)

And how do you know what kinds of posts their gossamer readers like to read? I don’t know. Why you asking me? (Oh, um, read their blog and see what they write about? That might help.)

A quick scan of Authors Electric tells you that its readers are people who like books, writing, writers, publishing, and the odd places a writer’s mind wanders when nobody has stopped it in time. Posts range from writing and publishing to books and reading, author events, technology, literary memories, travel, personal stories, and whatever else can be dragged back, however tenuously, to a life lived among words. They’re personal, conversational, sometimes funny, sometimes serious, and not particularly interested in behaving like somebody’s content-marketing strategy. They seem to be genuinely nice people (as opposed to faking being nice), and that tracks because they’re mostly in Australia and the UK. I cast no stereotypes or aspersions on one side of the pond, the bog, the gulf of unreachable miscommunication, or the other. If you suggest that I am or that I do, or that I should, I will deny it with the vigor of a Dickens character.

They are also intentionally very light on salty words, unlike me and my prose, because I like every damn thing with extra freaking salt.

Why would anyone want a guest post from you? Your mother may have the answer. She thinks you’re great. But also because posting on a regular basis is really quite exhausting, and you can give another author access to another set of readers while giving the blog’s regular writers a bit of a break. Many hands make light work and all that. (Man, I’m tired. I wish someone else would write this and I could just go empty the percolator!)

And if you think you might like to guest post here, absolutely not, you shameless opportunist! Wait… No. I mean, hey, we might like that. Post a response to this post if you’re interested and tell us how to reach out and touch you (in a platonic way, of course).

And if you’d like to see one example of exactly that, go find out why that lunatic Dianne Pearce (moi, bien sûr) had such a deep (and purely, very pure) professional affection for author Robbins that she would, apparently, have overlooked quite a lot, including the possibility of belly-button fungus.

I mean, it’s Tom Robbins we’re (me, I’m) obsessed with, not John Cheever.

Read “Which Author Do You Most Want to Get With?” at Authors Electric. Go ahead. You know you want to (well, actually, you may not want to, but I would certainly like you to, so consider yourself cajoled)!

Dolly Parton and Bob Dylan singing with guitars onstage

The Power of Oral Tradition in Songwriting

Published on by Nadja MarilLeave a comment

By Nadja Maril, a founding member of Old Scratch Press Poetry and Short Form Collective

Before humans had pen and paper, or stone and chisel, they had their voices. The oral tradition of storytelling goes back to the days preceding recorded history. Repetition and rhyme aid memory. In many cultures, the story becomes a poem or a song.

            I was thinking about this as I mourned the death of Dolly Parton. Not only was she an extraordinary performer and philanthropist, she wrote over 3000 original songs. Many of her songs, were inspired by her life experiences. Her song, “Coat of Many Colors” is really a mini memoir that shares a part of her early childhood.

The best creative nonfiction is written with honesty. Intuitively the reader can sense when the writer is inventing or exaggerating truth. Dolly Parton’s work comes across as genuine. I wrote in my personal blog about her authenticity as a human being. For the Old Scratch Press platform I’d like to further explore the art of songwriting.

In “Light of a Clear Blue Morning,” she shares her resolve that professionally following a path, minus her mentor Porter Wagner, is the right choice for her performance career. Listen to the first two lines of the chorus “Cause I can see the light of a clear blue morning/ I can see the light of a brand-new day’ https://genius.com/Dolly-parton-light-of-a-clear-blue-morning-lyrics

Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels.com

 Most of us have family members who challenge our patience. In her song “Family” Dolly conveys her feelings that despite their differences “When it’s family, they’re a mirror/ Of the worst and best in you.”

          Dolly is not the only great American Songwriter. I would be remiss if I didn’t give some space to Bob Dylan, another legend.   In 2016 the Nobel Prize Committee broke convention by awarding the Literature Prize to Bob Dylan for “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Yes, songs are poems. Here is a link to the complete speech.

It’s hard to know where to begin when sharing which Bob Dylan song is my favorite. The first one I learned when I started playing the guitar was “Blowing in the Wind.” The song that always brings tears to my eyes is, “Forever Young” and the one I find particularly nostalgic is “If You See Her, Say Hello.”

Before I ever started writing poetry, I was writing little songs inside my head because that’s what all toddlers do. I am not unique. I just remember.

Photo by Enrique on Pexels.com

If you are having difficulty writing a line or a sentence, try saying it aloud as a chant. Maybe you hear it accompanied by music. Maybe you don’t. Not every songwriter has a voice meant for performing, but the act of saying/singing/chanting phrases can provide a new approach to your creative journey. It’s worth a try.  Writing includes experimentation.

If you’ve written a poem, song, or flash prose ( under 500 words) you are proud of, we’re still reading submissions for the Winter issue of Instant Noodles Literary Magazine. We accept multi-media submissions. Check us out and THANK YOU for reading. Follow us on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/search/top?q=old%20scratch%20press

Hank

Published on by virginiawattsLeave a comment

            Charles Bukowski wrote about the gamblers, the rejects, factory workers, his job at the post office, those who had lost their way, his cats, his typewriter, a radio he threw on the roof repeatedly. He drank too much, gambled too much, treated women poorly, treated his wife poorly. He threw away tradition in poetry and aimed straight for the gut with unflinching honesty. His poetry focused on pain and boredom, uselessness and hopelessness, old age, heavy drinking, the underbelly of trying to survive a working-class life or worse. He’s a cult hero. He inspired a counterculture in poetry that lives on and continues around the world. He is one of the unforgettables. 

            Yes, he was unapologetic and rough and crude sometimes. He wasn’t always a good person, but his fan base runs deep. An icon, worshipped by many for how he took the foundations of traditional poetry and stood them on their head. His is one of the most polarizing writers of our time and one of the most inspirational to artists, singers and of course writers. It’s true that his work explores uncomfortable and upsetting things like sexism, racism, homophobia, inebriation. He wanted to write about what life can be and often is whether we like it or not and not try to act otherwise. Like him or not, he will always be seen as leading the way for poetry for the common man. Poetry for people and not for poets. Poetry for the social outcasts. Honesty in poetry. I say YES to all of that. 

            He wrote more than 5000 thousand poems during his lifetime. I am a fan and an admirer of Charles Bukowski. When I read him as a younger writer, I was able to believe that it was okay if I wanted to write about everyday life and nothing else. That even someone like me could have some worth as a writer.  He was not a fan of poets who are overly slick, the conformists, the poets who try to tell us what to do. In other words, there is no right or wrong way to be a poet. There are no subjects that aren’t worthy of a poem. If you are a human being, you can be a poet. Click the photo below to see a favorite of mine by Bukowski:

            There were reasons in his life that led to Bukowski’s style. He suffered as the son of a harsh, abusive father and he also had a disfiguring acne condition. The only way to really appreciated Charles Bukowski is to read a book of his work or several.  Read a lot of poems. In this way, you will see beyond the language, the bravado, the street fighter, the drinker. You will come to know the heart of a complicated man who cared very deeply about his fellow man. He wrote so much about human suffering because he worried about human suffering and not just his own. 

            He was the master of direct language. The hero of not holding back. In any case, you don’t have to like him or how he lived to fall in love with his poetry or at the least learn from it or be inspired by it. Even if you hate it, you’ll feel emotion and I think Hank would say that’s good enough for him. It’s fun to try and write a poem in the Bukowski style too as a poet. As poets we are always learning. Below is a poem I wrote with him in mind. Give it a try!  And read you some Hank as soon as possible!!!

FAIRY DUST
Virginia Watts

I never have anything to say to children 
I’ll do anything to avoid those little shoes
hit the crapper, blow my nose
bones make lovely dust
the white and the wispy clouds
the silver of angel wings peeking
even though I don’t believe in angels
this little tiger lily really cornered me
stuck with a minimum wage dad
like it wasn’t his fault 
scoring a six pack
and some Beam before noon on Sunday 
she got herself up on that stool
I don’t know how without breaking her neck
How old. Four?
set patent toes on the side
of my bar stool and pushed off
Spun that thing
around and around like a pro
when I joined in she giggled the corner
of 9th and Fitzwater Street
down a waterfall and out to sea
he yanked her off that chair so hard
I would have beaten
the bejesus out of him 
if she hadn’t been there

Virginia Watts is the author of poetry and stories found in The MacGuffin, Epiphany, CRAFT, The Florida Review, Reed Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Eclectica Magazine among others. She has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut short story collection Echoes from the Hocker House was short listed for 2024 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, selected as one of the Best Indie Books of 2023 by Kirkus Book Reviews, and won third place in the 2024 Feathered Quill Book Awards. Please visit her.

Virginia’s new book is now available from Old Scratch Press:

Her prior poetry chapbooks Shot Full of Holes and The Werewolves of Elk Creek 

 are available from Moonstone Press. And her debut short story collection Echoes from the Hocker House is not to be missed!

For the Love of Literary Late Bloomers

Published on by Beatriz F.Leave a comment

Some flowers spread their fragrance in spring, some tease us until late summer:  just when we think they’re dried up, spent, they surprise us with an explosion of blooms!

I’ve always had a soft spot for the late bloomers of literature.  (Maybe because I myself identify as a late bloomer!)  As thrilling as it is to read about young prodigies like S.E. Hinton of The Outsiders fame, (she wrote that book as a high school senior!), the late bloomers are just as amazing to me.

What is considered a late bloomer in literature?  The general consensus seems to be a writer whose first major work is produced after age 40.  

Debra Eve, publisher of the website Later Bloomer (now an archival site) has collected many fascinating essays and information about late bloomers in all fields of life, including literature and poetry.

Bloom (via Substack now) is another site devoted to the late bloomers in life.

This Write and Journal article states that late-blooming authors are more common than we think and why this may be a forward trend.

Eva Q. Tennant’s article on late bloomers shows how “the creative spark doesn’t dim with age — it deepens.”

Old Scratch Press founding member Nadja Maril has written about another late blooming author and OSP member, Morgan Holladay, author of The Song of the North Mountain, and her experience publishing this collection after age 50.

One of my personal favorite literary late bloomers is Mary Wesley, who turned to writing adult fiction in her 70s and went on to write ten bestsellers in the last twenty years of her life!  I learned of her work via the 1992 mini-series adaptation of one of her most well-known novels, The Camomile Lawn. 

In poetry, there are many later bloomers, but one that may not come to mind is Thomas Hardy, whose early fame was built on his 14 novels, but who considered himself a poet and wrote poetry for 30 years before publishing his first collection when he was 58.  After that, during the rest of his life, he published only poetry.

When I think of late bloomers, writer Winifred Watson also comes to mind, not because she was a late bloomer herself, but she wrote about an older woman experiencing a Cinderella-like transformation in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, an experience that mirrored her own rise to fame in late life when her novel was rediscovered and republished by Persephone Books and made into a delightful film of the same name in 2008 starring the incomparable Frances McDomand.  This article on Anne Sebba’s site discusses how Watson’s unlikely second act came about.

So tell me, who are some of your favorite late bloomers?  Please share in the comments!

Beatriz F. Fernandez is a late-blooming poet and short fiction writer. Join me for my November 1st reading (along with Miguel Mitchell) as part of the Speculative Sunday Reading series!  Presented and moderated by Akua Lezlie Hope. Readings are live on Zoom and tickets are free via the Eventbrite link.

Thank you for reading and please follow us here and on Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/OLDSCRATCHPRESS/