Category: Literary Matters

IWSG, June 2025: Impactful Books of Yore

John Winkelman

And suddenly here we are in June! As seems to happen with every year now, as I age the days drag but the months fly by.

The past three weeks have been the first normal-paced weeks for me this year. Work projects had sucked up all of my free time and mental capacity, and the current polycrisis – climate change, wars, politics, the ongoing COVID pandemic – is, to say the least, distracting.

And since I have a little free time, I am celebrating by filling it back up with literary work.

Since late last year I have been part of the Grand River Poetry Collective, headed by Grand Rapids Poet Laureate Christine Stephens-Krieger. There are two parts to the collective: Publishing books of poetry by Grand Rapids poets, and promoting poetry to the community.

We have published one book so far, Melissa Wray’s Small Gestures. We have close to a dozen more books in various stages of completion, and hope to have some of them on shelves by the end of the year.

We are also participating in the Grand Rapids LitFest, which runs from June 16 -22. This is the first-ever literary festival in Grand Rapids, and an event which is long, LONG overdue.

And now on to the monthly question.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for June 2025 is:

What were some books that impacted you as a child or young adult?

Wow. This is a difficult question to answer.

No, I take that back. It is an easy question to answer, but a difficult list to pare down to blog post length.

I think the first books which affected me were those dealing with animals and the outdoors, either as protagonists or as subjects. From the moment we moved to the farm after my mother re-married I dove into books about rural life, the great outdoors, and the (very much glamorized) life of the farmer.

Books like My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford, James Herriot‘s All Creatures Great and Small, and the great animal adventures by Jim Kjellgaard. Then there were the foraging books by Euell Gibbons – Stalking the Wild Asparagus and Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop.

All of these were books about being in the outdoors, persevering through hardships, and being around animals. Great stuff for a young kid newly arrived on a farm. But I was also a nerd and a bookworm, so the realities of the the rural life were not all that great for me in the long run. And being surrounded by incurious people, both at home and at school, meant that inspiration became escapism. And that pattern continued until I left the farm for college in 1987. So it goes.

Thanks for stopping by!

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IWSG, May 2025: Fear, Hope, Whatever

John Winkelman

A closeup of a small morel mushroom among blades of grass in an unkempt lawn.

[A closeup of a small morel mushroom among blades of grass in an unkempt lawn.]

Oh, what a month it has been. Last week was the first week since early March in which I did not have to work at least one 10, 11, 12, 14, etc. – hour day. This week I am on vacation, working through my vast backlog of tasks, chores, and errands. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

April was National Poetry Month, and I made a better showing that in the past few years, with about a dozen first-drafts of poems added to my journal. One or two of them even show promise, which is statistically pretty good.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for May 2025 is:

Some common fears writers share are rejection, failure, success, and lack of talent or ability. What are your greatest fears as a writer? How do you manage them?

My greatest fear is a writer is that, despite all the drafts of books, short stories, essays, and poems which fill my hard drive and countless old journals, I will never actually complete any of them to the point where they can be considered for publication.

While it is true that if I have time to write a new story I have time to edit an existing story, I easily and repeatedly fall into the trap of believing that I need a guaranteed minimum of X consecutive, uninterrupted hours to even attempt an edit of even the shortest of short stories. I can mull over new work in my head when I am e.g. walking to work or driving to the store for groceries. The new stuff doesn’t need to be written down write away, and much of the creative process is subconscious.

But editing is not the same. To edit requires singular focus.

I am aware that there is no such thing as a perfect moment for specific work; or at least such moments are rare enough that they might as well be snipe hunts. Adequate time is good enough. I understand that in my head, but I don’t yet understand it in my heart.

So there it is: For want of an hour, the manuscript was lost.

One of my goals for my vacation is to print out a large pile of first-drafts which I can carry around and edit by hand in my spare moments at work or sitting around the house. While not ideal, it is much better than staring at the television with a vague feeling of unease as the days turn into seasons and the pile of possibilities turns into compost.

Happy May, everyone. Write well!

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IWSG, April 2025: The Varieties of Companions

John Winkelman

I wasn’t sure what I would write about in this post, other than the usual recap of my lack of creative writing over the past month.

Then I saw this video, posted this past Monday (March 31). It is an update on the state of NaNoWriMo, both the event and the organization. To sum up – after several years of struggling, NaNoWriMo is shutting down. There are multiple reasons, but the core issue, even more than finances, is a lack of communication between the various staff and volunteers. Having had many jobs over the years and having worked with multiple organizations, I can say that without clear and open communication channels, no organization with more than one person in it will last long.

IWSG has talked about NaNoWriMo many times over the years, and I have written quite a lot on the event since I first attempted the Month of Writing back in 2013, so no need to recap the past decade of participation.

I am grateful for the good that NaNoWriMo brought into the world, and I am sad that it is shutting down under such unfortunate circumstances.

Anyway.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for April 2025 is: What fantasy character would you like to fight, go on a quest with, or have a beer/glass of wine with?

This was a fun question! Picking characters from almost 50 years of reading fantasy was difficult, but here are my final choices. Which is to say, my choices this week, which are probably different from my choices next week.

The character I would like to have a drink with is Li Kao, from Barry Hughart‘s magnificent Bridge of Birds. I am sure Li Kao would be able to drink me under the table, but that seems to be how apprentice-ships work in Hughart’s books. I don’t think I have the intestinal fortitude to participate in what Li Kao would consider an adventure, and as for fighting him, he is far too much of a pragmatist and would likely assassinate me if events pointed toward us getting in a fight.

I think Gideon Nav from Tamsyn Muir‘s Gideon the Ninth would be an absolute blast on an adventure. She is smart, a superb fighter, and has a wicked sense of humor. She seems a bit mopey when drunk, so not so great as a drinking companion, and she would likely immediately kill me if we got in a fight.

The fantasy character I would most like to fight is Corwin of Amber, from Roger Zelazny‘s Chronicles of Amber. I have no doubt I would lose, but of all the other fantasy characters who are fighters, I believe Corwin is the one least likely to kill me once I start losing. Heck – we might even end up as drinking buddies or going on an adventure.

Have a wonderful April, everyone!

[NOTE: a partially-completed version of this post went live earlier today. This is the updated version. I was distracted in the middle by a sudden need to pump several-score gallons of water out of my basement.]

 

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IWSG, March 2025: A Thing for Just One Day

John Winkelman

I suppose I’m not the only person to find the idea of creative output exhausting here in the cyberpunk hellscape of 2025. Most of my creative sparks last just long enough to make me feel optimistic before being smothered under the latest news of the fascist bootlicks and apartheid fanboys currently running rampant in Washington, DC. But like Sisyphus I keep rollin’ that boulder, while Orpheus sings the blues.

My partner found an unlined journal with paper thick enough that I can use my fountain pens without bleed-through, so I have been scratching out rough drafts of new poems therein. I love my Moleskines, but the paper is just a little too thin for fountain pens.

On the creative front, two things have been keeping me stable this year. First is the ongoing work of the Grand River Poetry Collective, spear-headed by the Grand Rapids Poet Laureate (and my very good friend) Christine Stephens-Krieger. And second, the recurring re-connections with my many creative friends from Back In The Day, particularly with old college friends and co-workers from my several years at Schuler Books, back in the 1990s.

In a bit of fortunate timing, I recently started reading through The Evergreen Review Reader, 1957 – 1966, which is a collection of the best of the first decade of the Evergreen Review literary journal. Most of the writers in the Review were names I first encountered while working at the bookstore. This coincidence has sent me down a rabbit hole of nostalgia, which is good for re-energizing the writing habit, but perhaps not so good for moving in new directions. Then again, time only moves in one direction (or rather, we only move in one direction through time), so everything old can be new again.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for March, 2025 is: If for one day you could be anyone or *thing* in the world, what would it be?

I have thought about this question many times in the past, though more in the guise of “What would you like to come back as?” This version is much easier to answer, as one day is much shorter than a lifetime, unless I choose to come back as a mayfly.

I think, for one day, I would like to true being a tree, on the southeast  side of a mountain, overlooking a river, in late Spring. Someplace far away from people. Most of all, some place quiet. There is far too little quiet in the world any more.

 

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IWSG, January 2025: Pedestals

John Winkelman

The first week of 2025 has been…okay. I planned out some writing projects for the first few months of the year, but so far I haven’t had a chance to write. Work, ConFusion 2025 prep, and general burnout are using up all of my time and energy right now. Thus the meandering tone of this month’s IWSG update.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for January 2025 is: Describe someone you admired when you were a child. Did your opinion of that person change when you grew up?

I have been pondering this for a while. From the vantage point of my mid-fifties, looking back, I don’t remember really admiring anyone. As a child I loved my family, of course, and thought various people were “cool”, but isolated on that small farm and attending that small school in that small town, I don’t think I found anyone to admire simply because I had no context for what was “admirable.” I don’t think I would have even known what that word meant.

So forty years on, I can look back on the people from my childhood and say “this person was a good person, and worthy of respect.” Famous real people, living or dead, came to us filtered through the TV or radio, and so politicians and war heroes were no more tangible than super heroes or the characters in, say, Miami Vice. General Patton, John Rambo, and Captain America occupied the same ontological space. What does “not real” mean to a sleep-deprived 13-year-old who is milking cows at 6 am the morning after watching Return of the Jedi?

So as a child, the people I looked up to or wanted to emulate, however briefly, were characters from movies or TV or books.  Real people were just too…real.

 

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IWSG, December 2024: Is There More?

John Winkelman

The Month of Writing is over, and for the first time since my first attempt at NaNoWriMo in 2013, I did not participate at all. This year has just been too busy and distracting to allow for concentrated creative efforts. I did attend the opening and closing events for the regional group, the West Michigan Author Alliance, but in between, other than cultivating a mild angst about not writing, I did nothing.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for December 2024 is: Do you write cliffhangers at the end of your stories? Are they a turn-off to you as a writer and/or a reader?

I don’t write cliffhangers. I like to wrap things up at the end of a story. Where aesthetics allow I will keep things open-ended to allow for sequels, etc. I have nothing against cliffhangers, they’re just not my style.

 

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IWSG, October 2024: Scary Stories

John Winkelman

A young opossum on a white wooden porch rail, sniffing a green watering can.

Happy Fall, y’all! We finally have some seasonally-appropriate weather. And some seasonally-appropriate animals, like this young opossum which stopped by for a visit a few days ago.

The Insecure Writers’s Support Group question for October 2024 is: Ghost stories fit right in during this month. What’s your favorite classic ghostly tale? Tell us about it and why it sends chills up your spine.

Maybe it is because I have recently been reading a collection of interviews with Jorge Luis Borges, but the first story which came to mind when I read this month’s question was Ambrose Bierce‘s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” While not a ghost story in the traditional sense, nor supernatural in character, it is the story which most disturbed me when I first read it as a teenager. I had read many more immediately frightening stories – Jaws, the Stephen King collections, and scores of others from books and magazines of the 1980s. Those stories bothered me for days or weeks (lookin’ at YOU, The Shining!) after reading them, and caused many a sleepless night. But they eventually faded into the background radiation of the larger horrors of my childhood. Eighth grade, for instance.

But it was Bierce’s story which threw me off-kilter in the long term. In fewer than 4,000 words, Occurrence cast into doubt the entirety of my lived experience. I had no way of knowing if I was not experiencing something of the kind at any given moment. Maybe I had been hit by a car and the past week was all a hallucination as I slowly slipped off this mortal coil. Or maybe I had been crushed in the barnyard as I tried to coax recalcitrant cows into the milking parlor. I couldn’t be certain if that which felt real was actually real, or if it was some combination of dream, memory, and imagination.

[At the time, I was unaware of Samuel Johnson’s “appeal to the stone” and likely would have broken my foot trying to prove that this was, in fact the really real world, even though the pain of a broken foot is experienced by the same mechanism that tells us we are in reality in the first place, and thus this would have been a pointless experiment. Reality may not be subjective but it is often contextual.]

Like all the other scary stories of my childhood, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” slowly dissolved into the larger morass of my teenage years, leaving me with a continual sense of existential angst long before I had heard either of those words.

Then I read the story in college. And again after college. And as the 1990s became the 2000s and The Real suddenly found itself in competition with The Virtual, “An Occurrence” made its way back to the surface. People began asking interesting and uncomfortable questions about the nature of reality, consciousness, perception, and the mind. If we had a sufficiently lifelike Virtual Reality environment, could we fool someone into believing that it was the real world? And if something is indistinguishable from the real world, does it matter that it is not, in fact, real? Are we all just brains in jars hooked up to something like The Matrix? Is the entire universe really just a simulation running on a vast computer network? Barring obvious and unambiguous breaks in causality, such things are impossible to prove or disprove.

A few years ago I began reading essays by the late Mark Fisher, particularly those concerned with hauntology – the ghosts of lost futures which haunt the present. The protagonist of “An Occurrence,” Farquhar, is experiencing the ghost of his lost future in the time between when he is dropped and when the noose snaps his neck. Objectively the rest of his life lasts about a second. Subjectively it lasts several days. Which is the real future? In a sense, both and neither.  For an infinite moment he is neither alive nor dead. Schrödinger’s protagonist. Solipsism and nihilism fistfight in heaven.

And that’s not even getting into the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Somewhere out there is a version of reality where Farquhar slipped the noose off of his neck and dove into the river, alongside another version where he never traveled to Owl Creek Bridge in the first place.

So to sum up, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” did a serious number on my head, and continues to do so to this day. Reality may not be real. The most useful thing we can do is choose to believe and behave as if it is.

After all, what are ghosts, but restless spirits mourning their lost futures?

 

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IWSG, September 2024: Incompatible Advice

John Winkelman

Lake Michigan, seen from the shore at Rosy Mound Natural Area in Ottawa County, Michigan.

[ Lake Michigan, seen from the shore at Rosy Mound Natural Area in Ottawa County, Michigan. ]

The Insecure Writers’s Support Group question for September 2024 is: What’s a writing rule you learned in school that messed you up as a writer?

Honestly, other than standard grammar, and oddball things like “‘I’ before ‘E’ except after C”, I don’t remember any rules which might have been sent my way that really stuck. For instance, “The first word in every line of poetry must be capitalized” was disproved the first time I read a poem written after about 1900.

The writing attitude which messed me up the most, and which still causes me some angst here in my mid-fifties, is that  writing is meant to be published. The quiet parts here being “for other people to read” and “and monetized.” With such debased motivation and viewpoint, the characters in a story are no longer living, they are performing.

Here we can easily be pulled into the infinitely-regressive fractal layers of reality, simulation, imagination, dream, metaphor, nothing, Nothing, memory, wu-wei, etc., until Baudrillard and Laoze are fist-fighting in heaven.

(And don’t get me started on AI [sic].)

Writing is meant to be written. Everything else is secondary.

 

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IWSG, August 2024: AI, Yea or Nay?

John Winkelman

This past month was an uneven mix of exceptionally busy, quiet and dull. Most of the quiet parts were when I was recovering from the busy parts.

Last week I spent a few days in Chicago with my partner Zyra, where we walked several miles, visited some museums, and ate a lot of exceptionally good food. The food highlight was breakfast on our last day, when we visited Kasama, the world’s first Michelin-starred Filipino restaurant. It was…amazing.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for August 2024 is: Do you use AI in your writing and if so how? Do you use it for your posts? Incorporate it into your stories? Use it for research? Audio?

I don’t use AI [sic] for any part of my writing process, though I do write about AI [sic] fairly regularly. As has been discussed previously, AI [sic] is here to stay, and it will be to the detriment of all of the creative arts as well as a large chunk of business, where business is art-adjacent (writing, design, coding, etc.) AI generative tools are, at best, the equivalent of an enthusiastic-but-inexperienced intern or apprentice, in the sense that they can produce something like a first draft, or maybe the rough notes or sketch which can be edited into a first draft. But the process of making AI output usable takes as much time and effort as it would otherwise take for a human to do all the work without help [sic] from an AI [sic].

The one place where AI is an unqualified boon is in corporate capitalism, where companies are riding the hype wave to a minor spike in profits, much like they did with NFTs, cryptocurrencies, etcetera. It’s all glitz and grift, and though something genuinely useful might come out of the current mess, it will likely be something we haven’t thought of yet. As William Gibson wrote in “Burning Chrome“, “The street finds its own uses for things.”

 

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The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
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IWSG, July 2024: Tools of the Trade

John Winkelman

A meadow in The Highlands at Blandford Nature Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

[A meadow in The Highlands at Blandford Nature Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan.]

After many months of burnout, distraction, sleep deprivation, and something which is almost certainly depression, I have written some words.

Not many, granted, and those words will almost certainly be swapped out for other, better words at some point in the future.

But for now, I have written some words.

The Insecure Writer’s Support Group question for July 2024 is: What are your favorite writing processing (e.g. Word, Scrivener, yWriter, Dabble), writing apps, software, and tools? Why do you recommend them? And which one is your all time favorite that you cannot live without and use daily or at least whenever you write?

The first draft of most of my creative work starts in one of my journals. For poetry, journals are where I create first, second, and sometimes even final drafts. Sometimes, naturally, the first draft is the final draft, never to be touched again.

For prose, journals are where I write outlines, snippets, character names, and descriptions, and so on. Again, many times that is as far as things go.

But for those ideas which have promise, I exclusively use Google Docs.

I use Google Docs for everything, for the following reasons:

  1. It is online. I don’t need to install anything
  2. Auto-save (!!!)
  3. Stored remotely. A computer crash or errant cup of coffee won’t erase my text
  4. Easy to export/download in a variety of formats, if I need to pull the text into a more feature-rich tool like Scrivener or MS Word.
  5. Can access my files from a variety of devices.

Regarding point 4, I have almost never needed to use a tool more complex than a Google Doc. If I create an epic fantasy novel, I imagine Scrivener will become vital.

Happy July, everyone!

 

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The Insecure Writer’s Support Group
is a community dedicated to encouraging
and supporting insecure writers
in all phases of their careers.