GreenPrints “The Weeder’s Digest” celebrates 25 continuous years of publishing with its 101 issue of spring 2015. GreenPrints was the alternative path Pat Stone, Garden Editor, and Susan Sides, Gardener, took when Mother Earth News came under new ownership and ended their positions with the publication. Over the next twenty years, GreenPrints became a “family run” publication, with Pat and his wife Becky and their four children all participating in the production.

Today, GreenPrints continues to fill a unique niche in both the literary and gardening worlds. Only GreenPrints magazine “shares the human side” of gardening through its content: “the joy, humor, frustrations, and heart in fine prose and fine art.” GreenPrints also publishes a poem per issue and contains some of the best illustrations throughout as I have ever viewed in a literary journal, in addition to seasonally gorgeous cover art on each issue. Continuing to cross the genres of gardening magazine with literary journal, GreenPrints also features ads for bulbs, seeds, natural pest repellants, herbs, and much more to support the gardening community.

To see some of the illustrations as well as sample a story from the most recent issue, visit GreenPrints here.

Zymbol, an art and literature magazine, has teamed up with Los Angeles-based art gallery Century Guild for a Kickstarter straight out of the imagination of horror genius, Clive Barker. The magazine plans to use donated funds to build its 2015 issues around never-before-seen paintings and sketches from Barker’s “dream notebook.”

Clive Barker, a contemporary of author Neil Gaiman, first rose to fame in the eighties, with the Books of Blood. At the time, Stephen King called Barker “the future of horror”; a prophecy that proved true, as Barker’s talent easily translated across major films (Hellraiser, Candyman, Gods and Monsters) fine art and more fiction, with the bestselling Abarat series.

Now an elusive figure who makes few public appearances, Barker is baring his imagination for Zymbol readers, and offering some lucky Kickstarter patrons autographed prints, reproduced directly from the pages of his bedside notebook.

Other rewards on offer include rare autographed books and Zymbol Magazine subscriptions. The Kickstarter is underway now.

I’m not sure what it is, but in the most recent batch of lit mags coming through NewPages World Headquarters I’ve found a recurring subject: Dogs.

Grasslimb starts with the short story “To the Dogs” by Kurt Newton on its front page.

The Hollins Critic features “The Dogs of Literature – Seymour Krim: Bottom Dogs, Part II.”

The cover of Big Muddy: A Journal of the Missippii River Valley features a sweet pair of hounddoggies in a photo by Wes Anderson on its cover.

And finally, Barking Sycamores. Okay, it’s not about dogs at all, but I coudn’t help but make the connection. It’s a unique publication I covered in this blog post.

Blue Heron Review, an online poetry magazine specializing in mystical and spiritual verse, publishes the monthly feature Blue Heron Speaks!, “a heart-centered, poetic offering ~ either from the editor, one of the contributors, or a guest author. . . messages of inspiration, support, and nourishment for the soul.”

March 2015 guest author is poet, M J Iuppa, whose work appears in the Winter 2015 issue. The editors write, “For the reader, the senses come alive in Iuppa’s poems. Her writing is atmospheric, with great attention to detail. Iuppa’s obvious love of words results in her beautiful use of language in every poem.”

The Boxcar Poetry Review Spring 2015 issue features “First Book Poets in Conversation: Marc Di Saverio & Julie Cameron Gray.” It’s an interesting concept, to see each poet discussing their own approaches to writing, then spinning that into a question to ask the other poet, back and forth.

At one point in the conversation, Di Saverio reveals how his manic-depression guides his writing, “You ask me to take you through a poem, start to finish. I find my manic-depression somewhat dictates how a poem will be written. Usually, in manic states, I am overcome with inner wilderness, and I essentially explode onto the page, often a filthy, incoherent mess. I leave this mess alone until I am calm enough to rationally formalize or structuralize my raw manic material.”

And later, Gray offers, “The themes of loneliness and isolation are all self-imposed, all the narrators are in situations of their own creation. It’s such a common moment in everyone’s life, at some point (or repetitively so), being lonely and liking it, reveling in it, keeping others at arm’s length because you just don’t want to deal with them right now; elements of self-sabotage.”

Real the full conversation here.

Beltway Poetry Quarterly is an online literary journal and resource bank that showcases the literary community in Washington, DC and the surrounding Mid-Atlantic region. The Winter 2015 issue is The Sonnet Issue, guest co-edited by Michael Gushue (pictured).

The issue features sonnets by 67 authors, contemporary and historic, from DC, VA, WV, MD, and DE. The editors have selected from traditional Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets, variations on those forms (including envelope sonnets, hybrid sonnets, and nonce sonnets), and 14-line free verse poems that borrow from sonnet tradition.

In his introduction, Gushue tells that he has arranged the issue “into eight sections along loosely thematic lines, all representing aspects of the sonnet’s reach”: The Beloved, The Body, The Heart, The Body Politic, Pop Culture, Conservations With Myself, À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, Outdoors, Art And Its Boundaries.

Barking Sycamores is an online publication of poetry, artwork, and short fiction (beginning with Issue 3) by emerging and established neurodivergent writers (autistic, ADHD, bipolar, synesthesia, etc.) as well as essays on neurodiversity and literature. The magazines publishing cycle has a start date, and then publishes one piece every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday until the issue is complete.

For this most recent issue (#4), editors asked for submissions on the theme of “perceptions.” Editors N.I. Nicholson and V. Solomon Maday say they received and “amazing outpouring” of “poetry, artwork, and short fiction which interpreted our chosen theme as broadly or as narrowly as desired,” making the selection process quite challenging.

The inspiration for “perceptions,” the editors write, comes partly from William Blake’s well-known quote from “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.” Also named as inspirations are Aldous Huxley and Jim Morrison, along with the other members of The Doors. The editors give their own perception on perceptions: “We considered the idea that humans are called to challenge their perceptions of life and sometimes reality itself. Psychological factors, our own opinions, prejudices, and mental filters can alter and severely cloud the way we see reality around us. It is up to each one of us to choose for ourselves how we see reality — and through what lenses.”

The issue features (so far) works by Michael Lee Johnson, Craig Kurtz, Heather Dorn, Jessica Goody, Barbara Ruth (including the cover art) and Mikey Allcock.

Barely South Review 2015 Craft Issue online features interviews with artists, writers, and educators who participated in the Old Dominion University’s 37th Annual Literary Festival, October 2014. Managing Editor Michael Alessi writes, “The theme of this year’s festival was ‘The Hungry Heart is Telling You.’ Taken together, these interviews . . . form an expansive interrogation of what it means to devote yourself to a life in writing.”

The contents include:

The Making of a Writer/Chef: An Interview with Michael Ruhlman
Creative Eats: An Interview with Dr. Delores B. Philips
Those Who Stay and Those Who Roam: Annia Ciezadlo on Private Life and the Collision of War in the Middle East
Grappling with Seams: An Interview with Tarfia Faizullah
An Interview with Philip Raisor
An Interview with Playwright Brian Silberman
A Voice in Two Worlds: An Interview with Dr. Luisa Igloria
An Interview with Sasha Pimentel
Documenting Herstories: An Interview with Sarah Lightman
Food, Writing, and the Land of Zenobia: An Interview with Kate Christensen
Jane Hirshfield’s Poems Write Their OkCupid Profile
8 Questions, 2 Coffees, and 1 Voice: A Morning with Tara Shea Burke

Daniel Torday, Director of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College, shares his insight on writing monsters: “A number of years ago I encountered a workshop where, all at once, every one of the very talented writers I was working with seemed to want to write only fantastical short stories about monsters. Story after story came into workshop containing not just monsters, but the most fantastical of monsters: vampires who could fly and suck blood and seduce. Wolfmen who were as hirsute as the hirsutest of all wolves. Dragons that breathed fire and stole princesses and encountered hobbits. It was in a moment of desperation that, together with the most self-searching writers in that group, finding their stories needed something—but what?—we came up with a tool we called “The Monster Scale.'”

Read the rest in Glimmer Train Bulletin #98, a free monthly of craft essays.

To celebrate its upcoming 40th anniversary, Sinister Wisdom is offering a commemorative poster to donors. Sinister Wisdom is the multicultural lesbian literary and art journal founded in 1976 with Editors Harriet Ellenberger (aka Desmoines) and Catherine Nicholson. The poster reads, “We needed more to read on, feed on, more writing to satisfy our greedy maws.”

Current Editor Julie R. Enszer writes in the recent issue’s introduction: “When I first started as an editor of Sinister Wisdom, my sole focus was on keeping Sinister Wisdom alive. I wanted the journal to survive; I wanted the journal to live to carry the dreams and ideas of lesbians into the future. Today, almost five years later, I still am aware of the precarious nature of all lesbian-feminist projects (I do not think that we can ever believe our work and our institutions will last forever, that we can ever become complacent about the things that we value), but I feel more assured about the journal’s survival and about my role as editor.”

I couldn’t agree with Enszer more – that we need to stay actively engaged in those things we value. Supporting Sinister Wisdom through subscription and/or donation for the poster is a step away from that complacency. For forty years past and many more in the future.

Poetry Northwest Winter & Spring 2015 issue is the first since founding editor Carolyn Kizer passed away October 9, 2014. The issue honors Kizer’s vision and legacy, as Editor Keven Craft writes in his introduction, in that “the majority of the poets in this issue are women. The majority of men herein write about (or through) a particular she. Or contend with otherness in other forms.” The publication is entirely devoted to poetry, “including a substantial section of poetry in translation, reflecting an important part of Kizer’s early attempts to internationalize Poetry Northwest.”