Debbie Foster

As Dorianne Laux wrote, "Good writing works from a simple premise: your experience is not yours alone, but in some sense a metaphor for everyone's."

A cento, from the Latin word for "patchwork," is a poetic form composed entirely of lines from poems by other poets. This means none of the writing is yours; the lines belong to others, and your work as the writer is selecting the necessary pieces, then assembling the fragments to make a new whole. In my experience, juxtaposing lines from

White space in fiction or narrative nonfiction can act like cuts in film: a way to shift from location A to location B, or from scene to scene.

A hermit crab essay, named by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in their craft book ‘Tell It Slant,’ gets its name from the crab that is born without a protective shell, so must scavenge one and make a home inside it. A hermit crab essay takes on an existing form as a container for the essay, such as an obituary, a recipe, or a social media post. The

In prose, white space can indicate transitions in time, place, or ideas, and it can do some of the work line breaks do in verse. White space can be disruptive, showcasing, or suspense-building. White space is a charged silence that activates the imagination and slows the reader down.

Nothing has impacted my work more than thinking about the interplay between line and sentence. Lines have a vertical energy: They pull down the page, almost as if gravity is tugging from the bottom of the page. Sentences, on the other hand, have a horizontal energy: They push across the page, beginning on the left and pressing toward the right marg

A fascinating fact is that the syntax center of the brain is in the part where we process music, not in the part responsible for vocabulary acquisition. So making beautiful sentences is a musical endeavor.

1. End on a significant image


2. Bookend the piece


3. Close with a line of dialogue, internal or external


4. Experiment with rhyme


5. Give it an extra beat


6. End a little earlier

There's no better feeling than when I'm after something, and I can sense it nearby, but I don't quite know what it is yet. The poem or essay hasn't materialized, but I trust that it will.