Confidence

Pro tips for channeling your inner creative warrior.

Amanda Kooser gazes lovingly at Submittable's front page - Pyragraph

Dear Submittable, My Sweetness

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Submittable, you remind me of bones bleached against the gypsum sands of New Mexico, where time and wind mark the passing of the hours, days, weeks, months since I submitted my creative nonfiction personal essay to The Gettysburg Review.

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Zahra Marwan, Burning the Anguish - Pyragraph

Circumstantially Free

Zahra Marwan - Pyragraph

“Zahra, where is that from…oh, did you know that Iraq invaded Kuwait?” “Yes, I was there.” He asked what my thoughts about the Taliban were, twice.

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Vigil for George Floyd by Fibonacci Blue - Pyragraph

Full Circle

Joy Ike, Singer-Songwriter - Pyragraph

The problem isn’t that our laws are flawed (even though they are). The problem is that we care only to the degree that it won’t be an inconvenience or mess with our comfort…or even worse, our narratives. This is our problem.

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Evolution 01 - ADAM RUBINSTEIN - Pyragraph

Artistry Means Evolution

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Mastery means knowing in your bones what you donʼt know. It also means form is second nature—you didnʼt get up that mountain without learning how to hike. And it means youʼre free. When you come back down, youʼve been changed.

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Keshet Salon for Women and Creativity - Pyragraph

Watering the Seeds of Failure

Keshet logo - Pyragraph

Keshet’s Carolyn Tobias asks: How do we water the seeds of failure to have that pain actually produce something valuable? Learning is a verb; an action; a continual process. Learning from failure is actively choosing to see each failure as the beginning, and not the end.

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Saint Anselm College - Pyragraph

The Rise and Fall of the Liberal Arts Luddite

I was a bookish, literarily-devout writing major. The type who read prose poems and flash fiction anthologies in the corner at parties, that sort of thing. And though I wouldn’t have admitted it then, one of the reasons I didn’t own a smartphone was because I was afraid of it.

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Rock concert - Pyragraph

So You’ve Got a White Supremacist in the Audience

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Staying silent is a way of obeying the rules and protecting yourself while doing nothing to address the bigotry on display in front of you. Every day that a bigot thinks they can get away with their hatred in public is another day they can influence others to their way of thinking.

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Tabatha Shaun - Pyragraph

My Perception of My Perception

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There’s a saying you’ll hear all over the arts world that goes, “If you like anything else, do that instead.” It can mean whatever you want it to. For me, it meant, “If you do something else, it’s because you failed at acting.”

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