About Joan Kremer's Creative Writing

The absurdity of suggesting that some types of writing are "creative," while others are not, always makes me laugh! We humans love to put things in categories and components! But since these kinds of verbal boxes have become standard communication shortcuts, I use them here for convenience, to organize my writing products. See my Writing/Design Services page for details about my nonfiction writing. On this page, I talk about my poetry, short fiction, and novels.

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Poetry

quillI tend to write poetry in life-stages. I wrote tons of it in college, published a couple ounces of it, and even won a "Certificate of Merit" in the Atlantic Monthly's 52nd annual creative writing contest for college students — which, they told me, put my poem "Surgery" among the top 100 poems submitted to the 1973 contest. (Now, that dates me!)

It took nearly 30 more years for me to work up the courage to submit a poem for publication, and when I did, the online publication Gin Bender Poetry Review willingly accepted it. I will be forever grateful to T.A. Thompson, editor and publisher of Gin Bender for helping me break through my fear of submitting creative work to publishers. My poem, "It's Only Business: On the Death of a Friendship," was published in theJuly 2004 Issue of Gin Bender Poetry Review.

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Short Fiction

SelectricI have always had a short story or two in the back of my mind and occasionally on a piece of paper in my typewriter or the word-processor of my computer. Many of those stories are waiting to be recorded. Others have been committed to paper, and a few have even been published:

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Novels

creating novel worldsAhhhh.... Writing a novel is the caviar of writing pleasure for me! To revel for months and years in the world of characters I know only in my imagination! Novels are what I most love to read — and most love to write. I wrote my first "novel" the summer after fifth grade. To learn how that happened and about the tragic story of the muse who inspired it, read this account.

I have recently completed my first full-length novel, Saving Rainbows. A mainstream novel with a touch of magical realism, it is the story of a single mother who, obsessed with saving her teenage daughter from inner-city gangs, finds herself fighting an enemy she believes is even worse — the grandmother who raised her, and the dark German Catholicism of the small town in which she grew up.

As of August 2007, I have just begun the process of querying agents and editors about Saving Rainbows.

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