Why The Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop

By Liz Dubelman

Annually, I torture myself by reading A Room of One’s Own, which essentially posits: In order to create, one needs a room of one’s own and 500 British pounds. If you don’t have those, stick to short bursts like poetry or Internet posts. I have never had those, but I persist.

I am now a woman of a certain age and looking to redefine my life. One day, in one of the many email lists I subscribe to in a futile effort to replace the suppressing voice in my head, came the detail of a contest: A Hotel Room Of One’s Own. It was a sign. I had to win this so next year I wouldn’t experience anguish when rereading A Room of One’s Own. I would have found meaning.

At this point, I must point out how much I love omelets. I could live on them. The soft beautiful encasement for cheese, mushrooms or really anything savory. The contest promised solitude, humor writing classes, and omelets. I didn’t win.

I had been working with a client who told me that The Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop was the best writing workshop she had ever taken. I liked her book. It was one of the best I had read all year. So, while I may be an angst-ridden non-contest winner, I still had the chance to open myself up for surprises. I would go to Dayton anyway, and maybe next year I will have figured out how to have a room and a few dollars and the rest of my life.

 

VidLit Press / Feb 03, 2018 / No Comment

Finding Success as an Online Writer

I knew I wanted to be a writer when I was pretty young. I won my first writing contest when I was in elementary school. From what I recall, it was some kind of short story about Mars and water? As time went on, that dream only became more vivid. I never wanted to be anything else.

I know I’m not the only one, which is why today I’m going to show you an infographic that will help you turn your dream into a reality. Whether you’re a blogger, author, copywriter, or just someone who wants to get paid doing what they love, this is the post for you.

VidLit Press / May 05, 2016 / No Comment / Read

VidLit Link Roundup 2/11/2016

 

A Valentine’s Day Reading List

25 Excellent Novels About Americans Abroad

Can a Passion for Literature be Taught in High School? A Review of David Denby’s ‘Lit Up’

If Jane Austen Got Writing Feedback From Some Guy In A Writing Workshop

Elena Ferrante’s ‘Neapolitan Novels’ to Get TV Adaptation

 

VidLit Press / Feb 11, 2016 / No Comment

The Over-Privileged English Teacher

NEW YORK - MAY 04: Model/TV personality Heidi Klum attends "The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion" Costume Institute Gala at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 4, 2009 in New York City. (Photo by Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images)

By Laura Cella

My husband Jamie’s job as the CEO of a movie studio came with quite a few social, business, and political obligations. While these events were always glamorous, they were usually not a lot of fun. Well, not a lot of fun for me. Jamie networked and schmoozed and worked the room all night while I perched somewhere with a glass of Pellegrino and watched the Beautiful People in their native habitat. People seldom spoke to me; because I wasn’t in The Business I was all but invisible. Oh every once in a while someone would smile benignly or compliment my outfit, but generally I was thoroughly ignored.

VidLit Press / Oct 15, 2015 / No Comment / Read

Precious counselor

11879275_10153214652087725_3131375102200620186_oby Adam Greenberg

On my sixteenth birthday, I received a most curious, wonderful gift from my neighbor, Adriano. He gave me guardianship of a wise, wish-granting counselor. The counselor was only 36” tall and immeasurably handsome, with glowing features, blonde hair rolling across his forehead as if without a care in the world, and a sparkly gold tan to his flesh. He always wore perfectly-tailored gray velvet trousers and jacket, with a living violet, which never withered, flourishing on the lapel. He spent most of the day in meditation on my mantelpiece, but when I returned home from my long, bitter days as a slave in the factory, he would spring up to greet me and give me all sorts of wise bits of advice and predictions, and occasionally grant me wishes. All he required for sustenance were four peas per day — simple, ordinary peas, the kind that grow everywhere in the countryside, even out of cracks in the sidewalk. By the power of his perfectly accomplished meditation, my counselor was able to subsist endlessly on this grub, only growing lovelier and wiser with each passing year, and never aging a day. He required feeding at the moments the sun made pivotal transformations in the sky, one pea each at sunrise, noon, sunset and midnight. Such was my devotion to my precious counselor that no matter the circumstances, I happily forced myself to his service, returning home from the factory at dawn and noon, and tearing myself out of bed at midnight each day to feed him.

VidLit Press / Oct 01, 2015 / No Comment / Read

The Movie Star’s Shoe

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By Laura Cella

New York has some pretty big rats. (I mean the ones waddling along the stone walls of the Park at night, not the ones showing up on the front page of the Post.)  When my husband took a job running a Hollywood film production facility I presumed we had left New York’s rats, pigeons, cockroaches, waterbugs, and the rest of the gritty zoologica behind; we were going to live in ocean-fresh Santa Monica with California brown pelicans and Pacific spinner dolphins just outside our door.  It never occurred to me that rats would also share our So Cal paradise until our neighbor, Debbie, told me how relieved she was that Jean Pierre, another neighbor, was having his twenty-foot tall Washingtonia filifera palms pruned.  Not understanding, I asked why.  “Ask the tree guy when he gets here” she replied knowingly.

VidLit Press / Sep 11, 2015 / No Comment / Read

Minions’ Lament

Click here to read part 1 of the series, The Philosopher King
Click here to read part 3 of the series, Lone Fang

By Rachel Artenian

Meow, meow, mew, mew, nibble, nip, coo.
Psst, Gwendolyn, is that working for you?
Purrrrr, play, leap, scratch, paddle, wriggle my rear
Cecily, I don’t think anyone knows that we’re here.

There’s a new cat in town; nothing’s the same
He makes us so mad; Punim’s his name
They kiss him and coddle him and bedeck him with jewels
They fête him with sushi; he follows no rules.

We owned this house before he arrived
We strutted and feasted and both of us thrived
Now, no more kisses, no more creamed caviar
Punim, the prince, is the one shining star

VidLit Press / Aug 27, 2015 / No Comment / Read

Confession

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by Barry Allen Herzog

     During late afternoons in November the sun would glide across the metal-coated building behind Howard Abrams’ office and cast a smear of copper on the wall opposite his desk. The smear would slide up slowly, melting, until it met the ceiling, bent and oozed inexorably in his direction.
     The sun always set before it reached him.
     By then the secretaries outside his door would be ending the tasks they had worked on since lunch and would be straightening their desk tops for tomorrow. Pleadings would whir through copy machines to be collated, stapled, affixed to blue construction paper and attached to forms directing the messenger service where they should be filed the next day in court.
     Abrams heard Martha take out her purse and remove the top of her lipstick with the little popping noise it always made. He pictured her sliding the red gloss carefully along her upper lip while he stared at piles of manila folders scattered on the floor, file cabinets and chairs around him.
     The intercom on his desk phone buzzed, insistent and shrill. He touched the ‘receive’ button.
     The voice of the new receptionist came out metallic, thin. “Your five o’clock is here.”

VidLit Press / Aug 06, 2015 / No Comment / Read

My Private Frida

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by Harriet Reisen

The other day I saw the exhibit of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s garden at the Bronx Botanical Garden. It was a perfect day spent in glorious weather with a new friend. She called it a “play date.” I’d call it a good day to go on a pilgrimage, the kind Chaucer wrote of in The Canterbury Tales centuries ago.
I’d been making pilgrimages to shrines of Frida Kahlo for a very long time, more than twenty-five years, from the day when from far across a slushy winter street a Frida Kahlo self-portrait on an Art in America magazine cover bewitched me. I crossed a network of intersections to get to the Out-Of-Town newsstand in Harvard Square to buy the magazine, although it was expensive, and I had never read it before. The subject of the cover story was an exhibit of Frida Kahlo’s work, at the Gray Gallery in New York. Like a magician’s stooge carrying out a post-hypnotic suggestion, I got on a Boston southbound train to see it.

VidLit Press / Jul 18, 2015 / No Comment / Read

Deconstructing The Beatles

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By Dan Dubelman

Watch the VidLit here: Deconstructing The Beatles

Intro:

Oh yeah, all right, Are you gonna be in my dreams tonight?

Was it Just a Dream?

I was born in New York City at 6:06pm on January 25th, 1965. John Lennon always said 9s had meaning for him and 6 seems to be my number. My ex-girlfriend said that I have undiagnosed dyslexia, and while I’m not sure if she’s right, 6’s and 9s seem related to me, and it always seems like it’s 6:06 or 6:09 or even 9:09. If six were nine, I don’t mind.

My parents figured I would die. Their first son died, but not before they had two or three years to love and bond with him. Out of fear, they didn’t let too many people touch me. It was okay to look, but don’t touch. If people were going to look at me I had to be entertaining. I had early reinforcement that being able to express myself in a manner in which others were amused brought joy and laughter. I craved this feeling the way a normal person feels when they wake up after a long sleep and the smell of fresh blueberry-banana buckwheat pancakes permeates the air. I know you don’t think buckwheat would be tasty, but you haven’t had mine. Just a small amount of really good maple syrup – the expensive shit you have to buy at the hipster store – really complements the flavor.

VidLit Press / Jun 24, 2015 / No Comment / Read

Roses and the Snow

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By Laura Cella

It was my twentieth wedding anniversary a few Thursdays ago and my husband Jamie and I went out to dinner. I went with two of his sisters to a restaurant in Manhattan and he joined his cousin and her husband at their house in Santa Monica. He flies home every Friday night and, like a 36-hour clock precisely wound, returns to Los Angeles on Sunday evening.

Sometimes I wonder if the ceramic bride and groom on our wedding cake were accidentally placed facing in opposite directions. While living in the same place at the same time has sometimes proved difficult, our marriage only became a cross-country relay event three years ago, when he became the President and CEO of The Culver Studios, known throughout the movie-going world as the big, white house seen in the introductory frame of every David O. Selznick film.

While living simultaneous lives on opposite coasts can be Hell, it also comes with unexpected moments of incomparable sweetness that I don’t think would be there if we were together all the time. Sometimes these moments are simultaneous. Sometimes they involve snow.

VidLit Press / Jun 18, 2015 / No Comment / Read

The Philosopher King

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By Rachel Artenian

Watch the VidLit: The Philosopher King

Click here to read part 2 of the series, Minions’ Lament
Click here to read part 3 of the series, Lone Fang

Punim the cat was alone and inscrutable
Searching and yearning for a home that was suitable
He was tiny and brave; his requirements few:
Humans that tended him and Minions that mew.

Espying two cats in a window one day
Who were eating caviar and engaging in play
And teasing poor Punim by wiggling their rears
Punim thought: I could bring those kitties to tears!

Splaying himself on the porch of the house
With Pitiful cries and folded small as a mouse
Out came the owners: oohing and cooing
Punim thought: I won’t have to do any wooing.

And now Punim has grown to a most regal beast
With two mewing Minions that lead him to feast
With Humans that cater to his every whim
And all who enter must kowtow to him.

VidLit Press / Jun 11, 2015 / No Comment / Read

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