Writing Shotgun

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Colette Sartor’s Writing Resources
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Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor
The Complete Stories, Flannery O’Connor
ZYZZYVA
The Paris Review
The New England Review
Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott
This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz
Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson
The Stories of Richard Bausch
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver
Fires, Raymond Carver
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Raymond Carver
Tenth of December, George Saunders

“while birds exploded into heavenly hymns of rough song”
Mary Oliver, “At Loxahatchie,” Dream Work

“She’s dark and heavy-browed and has a mouth like unswept glass—when you least expect it she cuts you.”
Junot Diaz, “Otravida, Otravez,” This Is How You Lose Her

“the violence embedded in silence”
Adrienne Rich, “From the Prison House,” Diving Into the Wreck

“sexless as a comma”
Kaveh Akbar, “An Apology,” Calling a Wolf a Wolf

“The wild roses riot / along the fence”
Philip Levine, “The Invention of the Fado,” Breath

“this season of strange devastations”
Amanda Petrusich, “Hurry, Boy, It’s Waiting There for You: Weezer Covers ‘Africa,’” The New Yorker, May 30, 2018

“linguistic lingerie”
Katy Waldman, “Ivanka Trump, Samantha Bee, and the Strange Path of an Ancient Epithet,” The New Yorker, June 1, 2018

“my heart / is a kitten of butter”
Anne Sexton, “The Witch’s Life,” The Awful Rowing Toward God

“my tongue is thick with worship and whiskey”
Anthony Hecht, “The Man Who Married Magdalene,” The Hard Hours

“the pen of Mirth and the ink of melancholy”
Machado de Assis, Epitaph of a Small Winner

“I was referring to the sounds we make, each of us, which are whorishly amplified in the car, and not exactly my preferred music. Sounds of hunger, sounds of anxiety, sounds that have no explanation whatsoever—just the body at work, leaking and churning, groaning at a frequency that no one was ever meant to hear. Live with someone long enough, and you learn all his gruesome lyrics, all the squishy instrumentals that gurgle out of him, note by note.”
Ben Marcus, “Stay Down and Take It,” The New Yorker, May 28, 2018

“The listless cello / Of flies tuning in shadows”
Anthony Hecht, “Three Prompters From the Wings,” The Hard Hours

“What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?”
Ellen Bass, “If You Knew”