Charlotte Lit’s Blog

Welcome to Charlotte Lit’s literary arts blog. What you’ll find here: reviews, interviews, craft essays, previews of literary arts events, and anything else that catches our attention.

Helen Fowler

Writing for the Love of Discovery: On Research and Ekphrasis

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Editor’s Note: In this entry, Helen Fowler reflects on attending Charlotte Lit’s Poetry Workshopping feedback group with Danny Romine Powell last fall. Knowing I have to write to meet a deadline can send me on a frantic search for a good prompt, that holy grail that leads to something worth writing about. Before I signed […]

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Bryn Chancellor

Flash Fiction

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If a novel is a vast, tumultuous summer sky, and a short story a fast, feverish storm, then flash fiction is a cloud-splitting fork of lightning that electrifies the air. Flash stories (aka short-shorts, smoke-longs, or sudden, quick, nano, micro, or hint fiction—Yasunari Kawabata called them “palm-of-the-hand” stories) are tiny, contortionist shapeshifters that slip between […]

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Jaime Pollard-Smith

Lingering in the Language of the Soul

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In a couple of weeks, I will begin a new semester with a fresh group of unsuspecting students. After reviewing the syllabus, I will open the course by suggesting a shift in perspective and proposing a revision to their role as writers. Writing to think becomes our motto, and I explain that we rarely know […]

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Fiction worth a Listen for Book Clubs
Tamela Rich

Fiction Worth a Listen for Book Clubs

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Of course, an audiobook is a “real book.” Don’t let anyone try to shame you with their belief that listening to a book isn’t “real” reading. I’ve been reading books with my ears since the 1980s. First, I listened to them on cassettes, then CDs, before joining the Audible digital subscription service circa 2000. I […]

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