Vocabulary Building Was Never So Much Fun
Back in June, I told you about Logorrhea, an anthology built around tough spelling bee words. One story from that collection, Jeff VanderMeer‘s “Appoggiatura,” even used all the other words that the anthology’s other contributors had picked. And now, editor John Klima reports, most of those twenty other writers have teamed up to promote a podcast of the story read by Jason Erik Lundberg and posted to his Lies and Little Deaths website. Each author reproduces the section of VanderMeer’s story featuring the word from their story on their website, along with a link to the appropriate segment from the podcast, and explains why they picked the words they did for their own stories.
On his own blog, VanderMeer explains how his first attempt to write a story called “Appoggiatura” wound up as a novel he’s still working on. “I still wanted to write a story for John’s anthology, but was having trouble coming up with another idea,” he recalls:
“So I asked John to send me a list of the words the other writers had chosen, just to see what they were. ‘Smaragdine’ jumped out at me and suddenly I had the bare bones of a story revolving around a mythic city. What I found kind of neat about the resulting process is that the constraint of having to use a different word as the ‘theme’ of subsection really helped me to focus and to flesh out the central story. By not attacking the story head-on, but at angles created by the separate words I think I also created a more interesting and nuanced narrative, as well. It resulted in a very organic collaboration between structure and imagination.”
I’m hoping that the twenty segments will be edited into one MP3 file, but in the meantime I’ll make do with downloading them one at a time…
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