Fairy Tales for Writers holds up a magic mirror to the joys and struggles of the creative process and the writing life, reflecting them through the lens of the powerful archetypes of these formative stories.
In these pages the reader will find:
•the new writer who encounters a wolf along the path to publication;
•that member of a writing workshop who always needs to be the fairest of them all;
•a writer who gives up her voice for love;
•and even that shy, anonymous author who slips away before the end of the reading, but is nonetheless tracked down at last by an editor who wishes to publish her work.
Because sometimes there is a happy ending, even in publishing.
Everyone who has ever felt lost in the deep, dark forest of the publishing world will find resonance in these cautionary tales.
Fairy Tales for Writers
by Lawrence Schimel
ISBN-13: 978-0-9794308-0-1
ISBN-10: 0-9794208-0-6
Poetry/Writing/Folklore
32 Pages, perfect bound
Pub date: June 2007
US: $6.50
Canada: $7.50
Europe: €4,95
UK: £3.50
Australia: $7.95
Order from the publisher at http://www.amidsummernightspress.com
Support your independent bookstores and ask for the book there! Can also be ordered from Amazon.com.
Some excerpt from the book:
Fairy Tales for Writers: The Little Mermaid
by Lawrence Schimel
She gave up her voice for him,
learning to mimic the minimalist style
he advocated in his workshops.
They had met at a conference.
He was one of the guest lecturers,
and all during his talk about passion
and craft, he kept his eyes on her.
In the one-on-one discussion of her work,
he complimented her form
and said she showed tremendous promise.
The things he could show her...
His deep-timbred voice was full of assurances
and innuendo, and she succumbed to both.
She slaved to scrape together
enough money to join the MFA
where he taught, working double shifts
as a waitress that sent sharp pains
shooting up her legs from being on her feet
all day and night. She had no time to write.
But she bore it all silently, buoyed by the memory
of their time together at the conference,
and the promise the future held.
At the cocktail party, the night before
the first day of classes, where the students were
to meet and mingle with the faculty and each other,
he introduced her to his wife,
who had also once aspired to write, but now
was content to remain in his shadow,
to be seen on his arm when he won awards and
to look the other way when he followed
his wandering eye.
Copyright © 2007 by Lawrence Schimel.
Fairy Tales for Writers: Sleeping Beauty
by Lawrence Schimel
There are many who yearn to be frozen
while their youth is at its peak,
to stretch out that ephemeral time
into a hundred years or more.
There are others who seem not to discover themselves
until late in life, following sundry other paths
until they stumble upon a true vocation, such as writing.
We call them sleeping beauties, these authors
who blossom in a later season, their measured, mature prose
a welcome antidote to the youthful brouhaha
that's all the rage in the marketplace these days.
But far too many are the true sleeping beauties,
who at a tender age find a harsh critic
who belittles their talent and their fantasies
with a verbal barb sharper than the nib of any fountain pen
that silences the stories, poems, daydreams
they might have written.
Be it from parent or teacher, sibling or spouse,
just one tiny prick of criticism is all it takes sometimes
to put a burgeoning writer to sleep
for a hundred years,
for a lifetime,
for so long that no princes are left
to hack through the brambles,
or if one is, he can't imagine that he should bother.
Copyright © 2003 by Lawrence Schimel.
