Writing-Related Top Five

1. Pentel Needle Point Pens, .05 mm.
2. Large red softcover Moleskine notebooks
3. Making mistakes like “the great is assured” instead of “the grant is assured”
4. Broken sonnets
5. Portability

— Adrian Gibbons Koesters

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Writing-Related Top Five

1. thick skin
2. determination
3. attention to life
4. a sense of the absurd
5. a functioning computer

— G. K. Adams

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Top Five Words to Avoid While Writing, at Risk of Pain, Death, and Awful Writing

1. Suddenly
2. Narrative (studying literature has made me despise this)
3. Because
4. Fleeting
5. Dark (though I am guilty of using it all the time)

— Stephen Koster

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Writing-Related Top Five

— Lisa Cheby

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Writing-Related Top Five

1. Striking ideas against each other to create sparks that ignite words into a firestorm.
2. Digging through the archives for the significant shard.
3. Transmitting the shine of a beautiful concept to others.
4. Giving the quite shadow a voice.
5. Being alone.

— Robert Cunningham

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Top five poets with five-letter names
that you will recognize without a first name

1. Auden
2. Basho
3. Celan
4. Rilke
5. Simic

— Kim Peter Kovac

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The Top Five Editorial Conveniences to Include When Submitting

1. Paper (or electronic paper equivalent)
2. Borders (top and bottom)
3. Margins
4. Numbers (convenient for word or line counts; may be #1 for mathematical submissions)
5. Words

 — James Dorr

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Writing-Related Top Five

1. I like the challenge of writing within the limits of the brief form; the process insists on focus.
2. As a former psychotherapist who listened to stories for a living, I began to write poetry as a way to explore my own truths. Poetry writing compelled me to pay attention to the choice of words and their meaning as well as how words create both a rhythmic structure and shape on the page.
3. I attended Pine Manor’s Solstice MFA Program where I learned to write memoir and narrative essays that were coherent and imbedded in story telling.
4. I like grabbing a topic, laying the words down and delving deeper and deeper into the question of what the piece is about.
5. There is nothing more satisfying than revising until you’ve mined the piece to its core and know the truth of its meaning the best you can.

— Faye Snider

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Top Five Writing Snack Foods

1. Ghirardelli 100% cocoa squares: Nothing to get in the way of the chocolate buzz.
2. Pistachios: shell removal provides for quite useful procrastination.
3. Babybels: Once removed, the wax coating makes quite a nice make shift stress ball to play with during writer’s block.
4. Tazo Rest Tea: The rose flavor makes one feel quite refined and writerly.
5. Corn nuts: One can’t be refined all the time.

 — Jennifer Schomburg Kanke

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Top Five Writing Monstrosities (In No Order)

1. Expectations of men based on Christian Grey
2. Expectations of women based on the Bible
3. Expectations of working-class wizards based on Harry Potter
4. Expectations of vampires based on Twilight
5. Expectations of me to write this list

— Alex Grover

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