Writers of any experience level can sometimes use a nudge, a creative boost, a prompt, and the Arkansas International and the University of Arkansas Museum are teaming up to offer scores of prompts to writers and would-be writers.
The Arkansas International is a publication dedicated to transnational literature and has, since its founding in 2016, featured fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction and graphic storytelling from writers in more than 70 countries.
To better understand how the prompts from the University of Arkansas Museum idea, officially known as Museum as Muse, will work, we asked three principals involved in the project to come to the Carver Center for Public Radio: Anne Greeott, the editor-in-chief of the Arkansas International; Laurie Biggs Marshall, the editor for the Museum as Muse feature; and Laurel Lamb, curator of education and engagement at the University of Arkansas Museum.
Laurel says the museum is helping writers in the Museum as Muse project by selecting quite a number of possible prompts.
Lamb: The museum already has an online public database with about 1,200 objects, and this is available for anyone on the internet to check out. You know, that’s a very small fraction of the millions that we have in the collection, but especially for this feature, what we did was we picked out some really interesting highlights across cultural and natural history collections that we have there.
And kind of made a guide for the writers to kind of help jumpstart it because it can be a bit overwhelming when you first see the collections. There are so many possibilities, which is a good thing, but also it’s overwhelming. So we created a guide, especially for this feature, to get them started.
Kellams: Laurie, you’re a writer, you’re guest editing this. What advice would you give to someone who you might want to include in this feature for how to approach a prompt from these many, many items?
Marshall: I, as a writer, love a prompt. And so the idea of being able to look at the description of an item or the photo. Not all of them have photos, but there are very nice descriptions of where things were found, or the dates or sometimes the people that they were associated with.
So for me as a writer, and I think probably a lot of us are the same, being able to think about all of those little details and how they might turn into a story is one of the things I’m excited about when I’m going to be reading some of the stuff that’s coming in.
So yeah, that would be my thought is, well, we’re accepting poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics and translation pieces, translated pieces. So there’s a wide variety of ways that you could approach any of the items in the archive. And I think once people start reading all those descriptions, I think it’s going to be easy for them to see where a story might bloom.
Lamb: Could I add to that? I just, it’s interesting how you explain that because as with my job as a curator, it’s the same thing for me. It’s those little details, those little hooks within the object story that I’m always looking for when I’m trying to find something to really engage with our audiences. So, you know, it translates across the board there.
Kellams: Anne, have you looked at some of the items that people might be inspired by?
Greeott: Yes. Last summer I went through with Laurel and with Nan and, yeah, definitely. Some of the natural history items of actual flora and fauna that were here in Arkansas. There’s a meteorite, a small meteorite that actually came through the atmosphere here in Arkansas, I believe it was in the 1930s, if I’m correct. So and there is a dinosaur, if I’m not mistaken.
Lamb: Yes.
Greeott: Which is unique to Arkansas. Is that...
Lamb: It is. Yes. It’s a totally new species. Only found here.
Kellams: Is that the Arkansaurus?
Lamb: It is the Arkansaurus, the foot of the Arkansaurus.
Marshall: So imagine a story that was a different mascot for the University of Arkansas instead of the Razorbacks. What if our mascot was the Arkansaurus? I mean, I just feel like that screams, you know, story.
Kellams: There’s also a stuffed platypus in the collection.
Marshall: There are fossils there. There’s a wool suit, which I don’t know all of the history of, but there are political items. There are home items and natural items. And there’s just a breadth of things that I think people will find interesting to look at.
Lamb: Yeah. When I was creating the guide, I was really trying to create a broad scope, locally to internationally to, you know, extraterrestrial with the meteorites, to hopefully find something for everyone that would be of interest.
Kellams: So Anne, what do writers, creators do now? How do they submit?
Greeott: Oh, yes. Well, writers can go to our website, ArkInt, arkint.org. And up at the top, there’s a banner for submissions, where you are able to go to the Museum as Muse feature and submit through the Submittable platform.
And we’re also open for two other opportunities while you’re there at the submissions button. There is our Emerging Poets Prize, the C.D. Wright Emerging Poets Prize, which is open now through, I think, the end of November. And there’s also general submissions open now.
Marshall: One thing to know is that this feature is going to be online digitally. So it’s exciting as a writer to have a piece of writing in a book that you can open up and look at and you know it. I think that’s like the pinnacle of how we feel as a writer. “Look, I’m now published.” But it’s not as easy to share with your friends. And we’re all on social media.
And so being able to put these pieces in our digital form will give writers a chance to be able to share those out. And that will not only be helpful to them to have links that people can go to to see their work, but it’ll also be helpful to the museum and to ArkInt to be able to get our name out there a little bit more to people who don’t see our magazine because they don’t live here, they don’t see us at the library or wherever.
Kellams: Who can submit?
Greeott: Anyone can submit.
Kellams: Okay. That’s great.
Marshall: Yes. Anyone can submit because we want people to take a chance, even if you’re not an experienced writer, and send us your best work, your freshest work, your newest work.
One of the things that’s exciting about this particular submission is that everything is going to be written, theoretically, we assume, directly to one of the prompts. And so it’s not going. We love getting things to our regular submission windows that are sitting in someone’s file, but we also are excited about how this is going to be fresh stuff that they just created just for us. That’s really special.
Greeott: And I’m also really interested in this project because the way that it involves art responding to art. So art is responding to other artwork. So as a translator myself of literary work, I love how translation is a derivative product from another work of art. And at the same time it’s also its own work. So I think this project furthers that kind of collaboration and conversation between works of art.
Lamb: Yeah. And I would add to that, I think that, you know, all these objects in the museum, they have their own stories, but every person who sees these objects and experiences these objects will have their own perspective about that object, which just adds to the possibilities of those collections. And so I’m really excited to see what all of these different perspectives will have on the objects.
Kellams: Laurel Lamb is curator of education and engagement at the University of Arkansas Museum, and Anne Greeott is the editor-in-chief of the Arkansas International, and Laurie Biggs Marshall is editor for the Museum as Muse feature with the Arkansas International. Submissions may be made through the end of November and all of the information related to submission available at arkint.org. Our conversation took place in the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio last week.
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