Adrian S. Potter has won several writing awards, including the 2007 Saturday Writers One-Page Poem Contest and the 2006 Cervena Barva Press Fiction Chapbook Prize. He has been published in more than 90 different literary journals, magazines, and websites, including Colere, City Works, Reed, Loop, Denver Syntax, Cherry Bleeds, Blue Earth Review and Poesia.
His short fiction chapbook, Survival Notes, is available through Cervena Barva Press.
He is working on several projects, including a poetry chapbook manuscript and several short stories. He is also searching for a publisher willing to take a chance on his recently finished full-length poetry manuscript called The Blues Almanac.
He can be reached at aplus3@gmail.com.
Friday, September 11, 2009 at 09:40PM Writing is the watering hole and safe house for dreamers and malcontents who never got around to reading the memo that people aren’t supposed to be creative anymore.
Random Thoughts in Random Thoughts Friday, July 17, 2009 at 09:41PM You know how it is when you get to spend time with a friend who knows you really well, how you can just fall back into conversation when you see them, like nothing’s ever changed? That’s what it was like when I found time to do some writing this evening. Like I never even had a hiatus from it at all.
Friday, July 3, 2009 at 08:51PM I spent a large portion of the past two months reading and critiquing poetry instead of writing it.
Why? Because I had the honor of judging a contest for the first time, the 2009 Shine Journal Poetry Contest.
The talent of the entries was impressive and choosing winners was challenging. You can read the winning poems by clicking here.
I learned a lot serving as a judge and getting a chance to be on the “other side” of the whole contest rigmarole. Thanks to Pamela Tyree Griffin for this opportunity – I enjoyed the experience and believe in the long run it will also help me in my development as a poet.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009 at 10:56PM ...how it is June already, please. Not nearly enough is done.
Saturday, May 23, 2009 at 09:48AM Coming attractions: info about my writing, rants about various subjects, mentions of writing resources, sarcasm, etc. Check back soon.
Saturday, March 28, 2009 at 08:22AM Okay, I’m running with the hybrid manuscript idea. It’s all put together and proofread – and it reads smoother than either book did separately. I’ve sent out The Blues Handbook (that’s the title I settled on) to a contest. I’ll send it to two or three more in April, depending on money. Book contest submission fees are getting pricey. But that’s another rant for another day.
Where does that leave the orphaned poems, the ones that up until awhile ago were strong enough to be in a book but are now are just floating in limbo (and not the good kind of limbo, with a pole and reggae music)? Some of these have been published or won awards, so I can’t ignore their existence.
I identified three categories of these leftovers, and I have a fair amount of each group: approximately twelve toxic love/relationship poems, ten or eleven “what the hell’s wrong with humanity”/social commentary poems, and eighteen or so surreal poems. I’ll take those groupings, try to pen a few more poems that mesh with the categories, and get three chapbook manuscripts ready to submit by mid-summer.
This will work well with my writing schedule. I planned on writing poetry through April and May, and then focus on short fiction for the remainder of the year. On non-creative days or days when I don’t feel like laboring over prose, I’ll edit and refine the chapbooks.
But any idiot can come up with a plan. Now I have to execute.
Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 09:43PM
I've been (obsessively) tinkering with my two poetry manuscripts.
I had an idea to combine them. At first this seemed impossible. I had 60+ pages of urban, soulful, narrative poems, and 50+ pages of surreal and disjointed abstract poems. But I've been playing around with the pieces and it might work. The themes wander along similar lines, as does the imagery. Also, I trimmed cellulite from some poems, and divorced myself from others - not sure what I ever saw in them, anyway.
My recent poems are cleaner, shorter, and less elaborate than my early work. I'm tempted to revise the older poems. But I can't bring myself to change them into something more like what I'm writing now. It feels like someone else created them, and they're perfectly fine in their own way, and I just can't make them anything more than what they are. And I'd be ecstatic to have them published in a book, but I'm growing farther and farther away from them.
When I looked at the recent poems in light of the others, they fit together reasonably well. They bounce against each other, causing an interesting amount of friction. The surreal ones seemingly tug the other ones in that direction more so than standing alone.
I need to come up with a title. Maybe a hybrid of the two manuscripts’ names...perhaps the The Blues Handbook or My Own Brand of Truth or something entirely different?
It would make me slightly less anxious to know there's only one manuscript out there and not two of them that may never get published. Of course on the slim chance either gets accepted on their own in the meantime, all this babbling is all null and void.