Charlotte Lit’s Blog

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

Betsy Thorpe

Query Letter: Going Beyond the Pitch – Knowing About Who You Are

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I’ve read thousands of query letters. Thousands and thousands. At the beginning of my career, the queries came from agents. They were polished. They were short. They were resting on the laurels of that agent’s reputation. If a high-powered agent sent a submission to me or my boss, I knew I had to put whatever […]

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Paula Martinac

What’s a Sensitivity Reader…and Do I Need One?

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The fairly new term “sensitivity reader” might make warning bells go off for authors, who need to have artistic freedom and be free from fear of censorship. No fiction writer or memoirist wants to have their portrayal of characters from a different race, class, gender, or culture than their own stamped with a big “WRONG.” […]

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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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