Followup: Light to Dark: Using Mood to Create an Effective Narrator

Published March 31, 2017 by Philip Ivory

I just wanted to thank everyone who was able to show up on March 23 for our Writer Studios lecture event, “Light to Dark: Using Mood to Create an Effective Narrator.”

We got a sizable crowd that filled up most of the space at our location, a meeting room in the Woods Memorial Library. Many old friends were there, some who had taken our classes before, and some who seemed to be new faces.

Reneé Bibby (at podium), director of the Tucson branch of Writers Studio, was the moderator, and I was one of the panelists, along with Lilian Vercauteren (left side of table) and Donna Aversa (center). It was really fun to be part of the discussion and talk about examples from our own work to illustrate how we had made certain technical choices to sustain a viable narrator and evoke effective mood.

Writers Studio hopes to have more such events in the coming year, focusing on choices we all make to be better writers. I’ll report on them here.

Light to Dark: Using Mood to Create an Effective Narrator

Published March 15, 2017 by Philip Ivory

The Writers Studio Tucson Lecture Series presents

Light to Dark:
Using Mood to Create an Effective Narrator

Join us for an evening of craft and conversation featuring local Tucson writers Donna Aversa, Phil Ivory, and Lilian Vercauteren

When: Thursday, March 23, 6:30 to 7:30 p.m.
Where: Woods Memorial Library (3455 N. 1st Ave)

This event is free and open to everyone.

The moderated panel discussion will feature these Tucson Literary Luminaries:

Donna Aversa is a fiction writer who has studied and trained to teach at The Writers Studio Tucson, and is passionate about The Writers Studio method. With degrees from the University of Arizona, she is an attorney in private practice. Donna is currently working on a collection of short stories.
Phil Ivory studied literature at Columbia University. His fiction has been published in The Airgonaut, Literally Stories, Devolution Z, Bewildering Stories and elsewhere. Nominated in 2017 for the Pushcart Prize, he was previously a winner of the 2015 Writers Studio “Write-to-Read” contest and Bewildering Stories’ 2016 Mariner Awards. Phil teaches at The Writers Studio Tucson and maintains a blog at writeyourselfsane.com
In her early twenties, Lilian Vercauteren came to the US to see what the fuss was all about. More than a decade later, she has only barely scratched the surface of discovering the American spirit. She has written and published several short stories and is currently querying a novel length manuscript with literary agents. She is an alumni of The Writers Studio Tucson Master Class.

Questions? Contact Reneé Bibby at renee@writerstudio.com or 520-591-8795.

Pushcart Prize Nomination

Published March 8, 2017 by Philip Ivory

“A distinguished annual literary event.”
— New York Times

Early this year, I received a letter from Pushcart Press informing me that I am nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

This means that I was invited to submit to the Pushcart Committee up to three stories I had published in 2016. The pieces are now under consideration for publication in the upcoming Pushcart Prize XLII: Best of the Small Presses 2018 Edition, to be published in November. To win the Prize is to be published in the book. And vice versa.

(Okay, it’s a mite confusing. I’m submitting stories from 2016 for a book that will be published in 2017 but which will be labelled 2018. If I win, I will take a TARDIS to the ceremony. Well, I would, if I had a TARDIS. And if there were a ceremony.)

“Of far more significance than other awards.”
— Joyce Carol Oates

As a teacher with The Writers Studio, I know how valuable these annual volumes are. We use them in teaching our students, selecting stories and poems that demonstrate craft techniques that we ask our students to emulate in their own writing.

To comply with the nomination, I submitted the following three stories:

“Most of Us Are from Someplace Else” (published in Literally Stories, July 2016)
“On Hyacinth Mountain” (published in Devolution Z, May 2016)
“The Yellow Man” (published in Bewildering Stories, May 2016)

Where did the Pushcart Prize come from? Here’s an excerpt from an article in Poets & Writers, “Pushcart Prize Turns Forty”:

The idea for the Pushcart Prize anthology was first conceived in the early 1970s by founding editor Bill Henderson, who at the time was a senior editor at Doubleday. “I was tired of the publishing industry turning writers into dollar signs,” Henderson says, citing the tendency for big houses to favor marketability over substance.

I’m grateful to whomever nominated me for this prestigious honor. That person’s identity is unknown to me. Truth be told, many people are nominated and there are long odds against winning. I should know by end of May whether I’ll be a winner or remain a humble nominee, and I’ll report any news here.

“This is the anthology that the writers read.”
— Russell Banks

Meanwhile, you can purchase the Pushcart’s most recent edition, Pushcart Prize XLI: Best of the Small Presses 2017 Edition at Amazon.com.

Probably Last Meeting of Bluebell Ridge II Homeowners Association

Published March 1, 2017 by Philip Ivory

Please check out my new piece of flash fiction at The Airgonaut, a monthly online literary journal specializing in absurdist, fabulist, magical realism, and surreal work.

I set a challenge to myself to see if I could write a piece in the format of notes from a homeowners association meeting. The resulting story can be read here: