Deborah Adams's Blog

I set out to provide a list of submission opportunities every month, hoping this would be of help to some of my readers. Should I continue? Let me know whether these posts are of help to you.

Girls Right the World is a literary journal inviting girls and young, gender-expansive writers and artists, ages 14–21, to submit work

The Westchester Review considers previously unpublished stories, creative nonfiction, and poems by established and emerging writers wherever they reside. https://www.westchest...

A few months ago I heard about the American Sentence. How has this eluded me for so long? Allen Ginsberg “invented” it by eliminating line breaks in the haiku and making a 17 syllable sentence. Sort of.

I’m no master of the form, but I’ve found that attempting the American Sentence helps me get past the writing blahs. A few of my own:

DHARMA TALK

Guilt lives everywhere, truth is a shapeshifter, nothing is ever lost.

WHAT THEY DON’T PUT IN THE HISTORY BOOKS

We are the end result of the past; we’re the...

Julie and I have been offering up our monthly b.read.crumbs wisdom for four years now. We’ve written from random prompts, prompts generated by a deck of writing cards, tarot cards, fairy tales, and at one point we grabbed random words from the air and wrote about them.

During these years, we’ve been able to have in-person discussion as well as phone and email chats with each other about all sorts of things, including b.read.crumbs. This month we were at a writing conference, chilling in the hotel...

In case you missed Julie Herman’s most recent b.read.crumbs post, I’m sharing it here. It’s important.

Deb sent me a prompt, which I may or may not share later, mostly because her prompt brought a long answer.

The word of my moment right now is “short, as in, “I’ll get to that shortly.” Also, an exercise I did this week, trying to understand the flow of a new short story I’m working on. A short story, I will add, that has more complications than a Halloweeen witch’s hair has snarls. This story is ...

a replay of one of my earlier posts, containing advice from poet Sylvia Woods

We all need more poetry in our lives. Well, today we’re in luck. Sylvia Woods agreed to answer a few questions about her new poetry collection and the path that got her there. Thank you, Sylvia!

My first book of poetry, What We Take With Us, was published April 20, 2021. The poems trace my roots in Appalachia, my teaching career and my experiences as a mother and grandmother. It is mainl...

I’m told that there are people out there who still haven’t finished their holiday shopping. It’s November, y’all! You must be frantic at this point, so here’s my well-intentioned effort to help get your life back on track.

Readers require little from life, and those needs with which they are burdened may be easily met with a small amount of thought and consideration. When next you find cause to provide some token of affection to a Reader, you may wish to consider one or more of the following sugg...

I set out to provide a list of submission opportunities every month, hoping this would be of help to some of my readers. Should I continue? Let me know whether these posts are of help to you.

The Zone 3 Writing Festival is looking for presenters.

Last Leaves wants to see poetry. “We don’t have a type. Send us your beautiful, send us your raw, send us your quirky, send us your best.”

I-70 Review is looking for “ writing that offers work grounded in fresh language, imagery, and metaphor. Although w...

Because garbage is everywhere. Because Iron Eyes Cody shed a tear. Because Lady Bird urged us to Keep America Beautiful, when keep was possible and before we could only try to restore the beauty.

Because we were driving to visit my grandparents when my father said he could tell the instant we crossed from Kentucky into Tennessee by the change in litter on the roadside.

Because a trashy yard is a sign of a trashy household.

Because white trash.

Because they’ll talk trash about you if you act that way...

First, a confession. This post is a cheat, because I’m devoting the months of October and November to some hard-core writing (PST contest entries and NaNoWriMo even though it’s not official any longer). All my writing neurons are tied up with that, so I’m falling back on an older piece that (to my great sadness) is still relevant. I hope you’ll find this never-before-published-outside-a-writing-class-I-taught article to be helpful at best, and amusing at worst.

Here’s an excerpt from “...

Posted on October 17, 2025by Deborah-Zenha

Wherein my guest, a yoga instructor and writer, answers three questions and shares one (sometimes more than one) pose that yogis and writers will find informative, intriguing, and entertaining.

Which came first, your yoga or your writing?

Oh, what a wonderful question! My writing came first. I started writing in high school to process all that teenage angst. However, yoga followed not too long after. During my sophomore year of college, I had a s...