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12th Annual BrainStorm Poetry Contest for Mental Health Consumers and Survivors

The winners of the 12th Annual BrainStorm Poetry Contest have been announced and included in the Spring 2014 issue of Open Minds Quarterly. “The winning poems exhibit strength in imagery, attention to the sound of language, and left the readers with a sensation long after they were read.” The honorable mentions include “an echo” by Sophie Soil, “As She Gently Brushed My Hair” by Sandy Jeffs, “With a huge love shattering my heart” by Georgina Paul, and “Medicated” by Sandy Jeffs. Here are the winners along with a sample of their poetry:

First Place
“Quebec City” by Ashley Laframboise

Sitting in your warm apartment, with
snow falling outside frosty windows, you
are wearing purple leg warmers over blue jeans, and green
slippers that used to be your grandmother’s.
You are singing along to
French folk music I’ve never heard before, and lazily
sucking on an electronic cigarette that smells of
honey.

Second Place
“Airport, Heavy Water” by Tyler Gabrysh

Tiny moon shadows plop on my dash;
an orchestral pitter-patter
forming the dew we never see born

Maybe once this was enthralling;
now it’s a swirl of overtaxed night
and dilated mourning.

Third Place
“Waiting to be Found” by Aaron Simkin

The night the meaning dissolved, it was just for me the
heads turned in the cars as I ran from the neon green street signs
a doomed cipher roaming the barren Winnipeg winter night
a prisoner of the light,
bathing in a conspiracy of clues derived from the indelible public grain,
no movies on the marquee at Portage Place,
just question marks like silver lights clawing at the clouds,

I Was a Teenage Girl, Apparently

The cover of the current issue of Dogwood is a still frame from a work-in-progress short, animated film by Nina Frenkel and Lyn Elliot: I Was a Teenage Girl, Apparently, the story of a woman who goes back in time to visit her teenage-self. In the back of the issue of Dogwood is a small interview with each of these featured artists:

Elliot, the writer, said that the collaboration is really helpful for her because she can still direct an animated film despite her “complete lack of drawing ability.” She writes, “I like making very short films; many of my films are five minutes or shorter. SO it seemed to me that my writing and directing impulses could be well0suited to short animation, where virtually anything you can imagine can be made to happen onscreen.”

Frenkel, the animator, says that they are using the “tradigital” style of animation; “it’s a combination of traditional frame-by-frame animation drawing using a digital tool.” This allows it to have “the looseness of the drawn style with the efficiency of the computer.”

The project was funded by Kickstarter and should be completed by late summer. For more information about the project, visit their Kickstarter page.

Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week

While in other parts of the country Spring may have come earlier, in Michigan, our trees have only just started to bloom. So in honor of our first real week of Spring and warmer weather, here’s all the covers this week that are both striking and Spring-filled.

Concho River Review‘s Spring 2014 cover couldn’t be more inviting. The photograph is by Danny Meyer.

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The Aurorean‘s Spring/Summer 2014 issue features “Flowering Tree at Emily Dickinson’s House” by Cynthia Brackett-Vincent.

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So Exit 7‘s cover isn’t quite the aesthetic as the other two, but nothing sounds better now than a nice bike ride. The art is Simple by Jeff Cohen, and his piece Berlin with Bicycle is on the back cover.

Psychopomp’s Transparency

The two editors of Psychopomp literary magazine, Cole Bucciaglia and Sequoia Nagamtsu, posted a blog post revealing the whole submission process. They say that they both read every piece and try to get to it within 10 to 14 days, labeling each piece “no,” “yes,” or “maybe.”

“For me, language is very important,” writes Nagamatsu. “A close second is an awareness of form. A well-crafted submission that reads well (and sounds good) is going to be met with more sympathy on my end. Those stories, regardless of whether or not I’m interested in the subject matter, almost always get a closer read.”

And Bucciaglia confirms that they both have similar tastes. “I think one of the ways in which we different is that I tend to favor stories that are a little sparer with their language,” she writes. “We get a lot of very poetic and lyrical pieces, but I’m very wary of stories in which every line is painstakingly written to evoke heart-aching Beauty. I get more excited about fairy tale-esque stories that are economic with their language. I think shorter pieces tend to get away with sustained lyricism more, which is why we do take many short pieces.”

To read more about the process as well as about the magazine itself, click here.

Writing with At-Risk Youth: The Pongo Teen Writing Method

From Richard Gold, founder of Pongo Teen Writing Project, Writing with At-Risk Youth: The Pongo Teen Writing Method (Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2014) is Pongo’s primary teaching tool, the basis of Pongo’s training and given to all workshop participants. It describes the context of trauma in the lives of youth, explains the particular role of poetry, provides the specifics of Pongo’s teaching methods, and tells how to design your own writing project.

The Pongo Teen Writing Project is an 18-year-old nonprofit in Seattle that provides therapeutic poetry programs to youth who’ve suffered childhood traumas, such as abuse and neglect. Pongo has worked with over 6,000 youth inside juvenile detention centers, homeless shelters, psychiatric hospitals, and other sites. The Pongo website features writing activities, poetry, and teacher resources.

Drinkable Book Provides Clean Water

WATERisLIFE has created the first-ever manual that teaches safe water tips and serves as a tool to kill deadly waterborne diseases, The Drinkable Book. Created by Chemist Dr. Thersea Dankovich, the text of the book is been printed with food-grade inks that teach safe water habits and are printed on technologically advance filter paper capable of killing water-born diseases. Each page can provide someone with up to 30 days of clean water, and each book with up to 4 years of clean water.

2013 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize Winners

The Spring 2014 issue of The Missouri Review features the winners of the 2013 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize:

Fiction
Melissa Yancy: “Consider this Case”

Essay
Dave Zoby: “Cafe Misfit”

Poetry
Kai Carlson-Wee: 5 poems

“Kai Carlson-Wee, focuses on the gritty, visceral details of growing up on the West Coast as two brothers scavenge grocery store Dumpsters, dead rats rot in an alley and a severed head is found in a playground,” writes Speer Morgan in the foreword. “Carlson-Wee expands moments of growing up into a larger contemplation of the human condition, including our desire for transcendence despite our physical limitations and time’s inevitable passing.”

Nano Fiction Celebrates Short Story Month

The editors of NANO Fiction ask you to join in celebrating National Short Story Month by getting your  flash on! Visit the NANO Fiction website each day for a new writing prompt, some of which will be linked to a selection of editors’ favorites published in NANO Fiction. At the close of the month, NANO will re-release the prompts along with their linked stories with a dozen never-before-seen new prompts in an anthology. The anthology can be pre-ordered – free to educators with an .edu email address (e-mail your request to them) and only $10 to others.

Redneck Noir Literature :: A Movement?

In the latest issue of The Chattahoochee Review, Ron Cooper hosts a conversation with Paul Ruffin and Eric Miles Williamson about a possible movement called “‘redneck noir,’ composed of writers strewn across the country—from the Bible Belt to the Rust Belt, from the Appalachians to the Sierra Nevada—who are from poor backgrounds and proud to write about them.” Cooper asks Williamson if he considers it a movement:

“It’s never been a movement. This has nothing to do with a bunch of–what do you want to call us?—rednecks, white trash, working poor… None of us likes any of these terms.” He explains how it has to do with the availability of higher education. At the end of WWII, people could afford to go to school under the GI Bill. “This is now ending, however,” he says. “With the defunding of state colleges and universities, tuition is no longer affordable for working-class kids. If I were eighteen today, I’d have to stay a construction worker. … The era, about fifty years, of the working-class novel, the working-class writer or artist of any sort, will be over when my generation dies.”

It’s an insightful and interesting interview, well worth the read whether you are into the genre (? movement?) or not.

Also in this issue are contest winners Jeremy Collins (nonfiction) and Alexander Weinsten (fiction) as well as work from Stephanie Powell Watts, Tori Malcangio, Michael Noll, Bipin Aurora, Jessica Piazza, Okla Elliot, and more.

May is National Short Story Month

Inspired by April’s National Poetry Month and thanks to the StoryADay in May writing challenge, May has started to become identified with the short story. This is now the second year of an organized International Short Story Month. Visit Short Story Month website for ideas on how to celebrate this month as a writer, publisher, teacher, librarian, bookseller; resources for finding short stories to read; listing your own story sources. You can also find follow the #ShortReads hashtag on Twitter (started by publisher AAKnopf) and sign up for the mailing list to receive all the news about International Short Story Month. “And most of all, read a great story today.”

American Life in Poetry :: Jeanie Greensfelder

American Life in Poetry: Column 477
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

When a poem has a strong story to tell, the simplest and most direct language is often the best choice because the poet may not want literary effects to get in the way of the message. Here’s a good example of straightforward language used to maximum effectiveness by Jeanie Greensfelder, who lives in California.

Sixth Grade

We didn’t like each other,
but Lynn’s mother had died,
and my father had died.

Lynn’s father didn’t know how to talk to her,
my mother didn’t know how to talk to me,
and Lynn and I didn’t know how to talk either.

A secret game drew us close:
we took turns being the prisoner,
who stood, hands held behind her back,

while the captor, using an imaginary bow,
shot arrow after arrow after arrow
into the prisoner’s heart.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright © 2012 by Jeanie Greensfelder from her most recent book of poems, Biting the Apple, published by Penciled In, 2012. Poem reprinted by permission of Jeanie Greensfelder and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Flood-Dispersed Books Become Art

Photos from artist Micah Bloom’s Codex project (“involves film, photography, and installation”) is included in Ruminate‘s Spring 2014 issue. I encourage you to take a look as his artwork will hit the souls of any writer or reader. ” In an artist’s note he writes about how growing up, his family instilled in him a certain respect for books: “In our home, books were elevated in the hierarchy of objects; in their nature, deemed closer to humans than furniture, knickknacks, or clothing. Under these impressions I was forced into this relatinship with displaced books.” His work uses the books that were “strewn in streets, across roadways, along railroad tracks” after the Souris River ravaged Minot, North Dakota in June of 2011. “These books were vessels—surrogates of human soul, these shelters—housing our heritage—displaced, now driven over by boomtown commuters and shredded by oil tankers on their way from the Bakken oil fields. It was this surreal situation that stirred me to alter the fate of these books.”

And although I truly wish more information about the actual art rendering was including, it’s a pleasure just to flip through the pages. You can find a little more information by watching their (already funded) kickstart video.

The Briar Cliff Review Awards

The 2014 issue of The Briar Cliff Review marks another year for its contest winners. Here are the first prize winners with a short quote from their work (which can be found inside the issue):

Fiction Contest Winner
Leslie Kirk Campbell: “Thunder in Illinois”
   
   “He’s not a gambler but he’s made his own secret bet. If he wins, he won’t need to go back to Bangkok. If he loses, well, his bag is still packed.
     ‘What did you say, Lenny?’
     ‘I said I can die as soon as I get more points that you, dear. And I’m a hair’s breadth away from that moment.'”

Nonfiction Contest Winner
JLSchneider: “Call Me T

2014 Switcheroo Winner

The Broadside Press annual Switcheroo poetry winner is “Disappear” by Philip Schaefer, whose work has been matched with the artwork “Another Portal” by Maura Cunningham. The broadside is available for free, full-color download from the Broadsided website. Public posting encouraged! Finalist “Before Man” by Lauren Wolk is also available for reading on the website.

Fiction Issue :: The Southampton Review

The newest issue of The Southampton Review is a special fiction issue. To conclude the editor’s note, Lou Ann Walker writes, “This fiction issue, edited by Susan Scarf Merrell, is devoted to the obsessive myopic passion of all artists, and particularly novelists and short story writers. ‘…because,’ as Luthi notes, ‘a writing life can help it all make sense.” And Merrell writes in her note that “As you page through this fiction issue of TSR, you will find a wide variety of storytelling styles . . . Famous writers and young students appear here, grappling with the questions that most interest and concern them . . . Funny, sad, painful; experimental, traditional, flash—no matter what form the stories here take, or what tales the authors choose to tell, each one has truth at the core of its created world.”

The issue starts its fiction with Edwidge Danticat and “Je Voudrais Etre Riche: A Trickster Tale.” Here’s how it begins so that you can get a taste: “It was too good not to be true. Two women. One black. One white. One old. One young. The young black one, pregnant, with a slightly shrieking wailing voice. The old white one hunched over under a red, ankle-length coat, and a fog of white hair creep out under a crocheted mauve beret.

Rhino Contest Winners

The new Rhino announces and publishes the winners of their 2014 contests.

2014 Founders’ Prize
Winner
Jose Antonio Rodriguez – “Poem in honor of the one-year anniversary of my sister Aleida’s death, which is five days away”

Runners-up
MaryJo Thompson – “Body Breakers”
Adam Scheffler – “Americas”

2014 Editors’ Prizes
First Prize
Brandon Krieg – “Comedy of Mirrors”

Second Prize
P. Scott Cunningham – “Planet Earth”

Honorable Mentions
C. Ann Kodra – “Dowsing”
Octavio Quintanilla – “Tell Them Love is Found”

Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week

The artwork on the latest issue of Phoebe is by Jaime Bennati, an artist who “makes the viewer question our relationship to things we keep and discard daily” by using materials often overlooked. The center of the issue features more of her work as well as a self-written how-to guide so you can try a piece of your own. Her included collection comes from using bus tickets that were discarded. “On average about 200,000 were discarded per day.” As a person who makes jewelry out of discarded materials, I’m intensely interested in her work.

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The Fall 2013 issue of Kestrel features artwork by Julie Anne Struck titled A Story which is photo transfer, ink, collage, and colored pencil on panel. It’s great to look at up close. Struck “has always touched upon and explored anything that illustrates her interest in dissolving boundaries and celebrating connections between fine art, design, writing, and other creative disciplines.” More of her work is featured in full color inside the issue.

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Not only are the colors and the actual skill of this cover art for Ruminate fascinating, but Sarah Megan Jenkins’s Jean Lafitte Swamp (acrylic and mixed media) feels like today in Michigan. The trees are gloomy, the world looks sad after a harsh, long winter, but the sun is coming up and there’s hope on the horizon.

Poetastic Wants Your Poetry Video Recording

Poetastic is a new poetry website curating “transformative video recordings of poetry readings.” The video submissions are of reciters reading and recording themselves reciting other people’s poetry, transforming meaning for the listener/viewer.

Poetastic is a project created by Harrod J Suarez, Assistant Professor of English at Oberlin College, but in terms of this project, it “is best understood as a category comprised of a legion of collaborators, contributors, and co-conspirators.” Submissions are accepted on a rolling deadline.

Poetastic provides guidelines for recording as well as resources for finding poems to read and record. Participants must be at least 18 years old.

Celebrating William Stafford at 100

Guest Editor Israel Wasserstein puts forth North Dakota Quarterly‘s newest issue that celebrates William Stafford at 100. “Stafford’s poems stayed with me in their quiet resolve, and their commitment to his values, to the elegance of plain speech, and to finding that which is holy in one’s experience,” writes Wasserstein. “All of which to say, when the opportunity arose to edit he William Stafford Celebration issue . . . I was thrilled.” As a closing note, he writes, “I hope that you will find in these pages proof of the continuing relevance of Stafford’s words and life, and of the powerful, moving, and diverse work being done by those whom he has influenced. I hope that you will find these remarkable works celebratory, even when they face tragedy and loss, even when they are at their most serious.”

The issue itself features work from Paulann Petersen, Regina and Tim Gort, Jeff Gundy, Philip Metres, Fred Whitehead, Richard Levine, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, Mark Dudley, Abayomi Animashaun, Linda Whittenberg, Karin L. Frank, Meg Hutchinson, and so many more.

New Traveling Midwestern Podcast Series

Founded in 2012 by Grant Garland, Middle Literate is a traveling reading series, in the form of a podcast, which features literary work that stays true to the Midwestern state-of-mind and effectively represents the intricacies of the people who call the Great Plains home. The recording quality is good with occasional music which adds a nice transitional touch without being overbearing. Garland has a relaxed, friendly approach, and overall, the recordings are something that could be listened to at the desk or on the road.

Inspired by radio shows and podcasts, like This American Life, Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me, and You Wrote The Book, Middle Literate Middle Literate episodes thus far include:

Episode 1 “Happiness” features “A Girl Named Mercedes,” a story about the elusive “happy ending” by John Rubins, an award winning instructor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I started by listening to this one, just to try out the sound quality, but Rubins premise for his story hooked me and kept me listening (yes, with a smile on my face).

Episode 2 “Nothing is Extinct”: Middle Literate travels to Monmouth, IL to visit with writer Chad Simpson in his hometown, reading stories from his award winning collection Tell Everyone I Said Hi.

Episode 3 “Rule of Three”: In Bloomington, Indiana, Middle Literate hears poetry from Scott Fenton, Brianna Low, and Paul Asta, three MFA students at Indiana University.

Most notably, Middle Literate was the spearhead for the “They Hardly Knew Us” reading series, a series dedicated to showcasing the work of prospective MFA students from the University of Illinois. Readers included David Ethan Chambers, Emily Penn, Dan Klen, Paul Asta, Ethan Madarieta, and Bryan Bachman.

Middle Lieterate reading period is December 1 to September 1. Work from writers at any point in their literary careers is welcomed. ML accepts simultaneous submissions, as well as previously published work.

2014 Shortlist of The International Prize for Arabic Fiction

The latest issue of Banipal features excerpts from the novels of the 2014 shortlist for The International Prize for Arabic Fiction:

Inaam Kachachi – Tashari
Abdelrahim Lahbibi – The Journeys of ’Abdi, known as Son of Al-Hamriyah
Khaled Khalifa – No Knives in this City’s Kitchens
Youssef Fadel – A Rare Blue Bird that Flies with Me
Ahmed Saadawi – Frankenstein in Baghdad
Ahmed Mourad – The Blue Elephant

Read more about the authors and the issue itself here.

The Masters Review 2014 Shortlist

Congratulations to all writers that have made The Masters Review 2014 Shortlist which honors the top 2% of all stories reviewed. “At this time our guest judge, Lev Grossman, is reviewing stories and will select the top ten to be published in our anthology,” write the editors of The Masters Review. The final announcement will be made no later than May 15.

“Fisherman’s Band-Aid” – Alexander Papoulias
“Lynx” – Alice Otto
“Bury Me” – Allegra Hyde
“Braids” – Amanda Pauley
“Finders Keepers” – Andrew Cothren
“The Turk” – Andrew MacDonald
“Picketers” – Blake Kimzey
“Cleaning Lessons” – Cannon Roberts
“Every Thing You Never Said” – Courtney Kersten
“Someone Else” – Diana Xin
“The Behemoth” – Drew Ciccolo
“Go Down, Diller” – Eric Howerton
“Whit Vickers, The Pitcher Who Lost His Stuff” – Ezra Carlsen
“Objects in Transit” – Heather Dundas
“We Welcome All Sorts” – Heather Lefebvre
“Moonshot, 2003” – Jake Wolff
“Magicicada” – Jeffrey Otte
“County Maps” – Joe Worthen
“Tiny Little Teeth” – Justine McNulty
“dissolving newspaper, fermenting leaves” – Kiik AK
“Parade” – Laura Willwerth
“Lullwater” – Lena Valencia
“Strange Trajectories” – Lindsay D’Andrea
“Rivers” – Liz Knight
“Contrition” – Mallory McMahon
“Custody” – Maya Perez
“Electronic Heads” – Meng Jin
“Birmingham Goddam” – Scott Latta
“OpFor (Oppositional Force)” – Shane Collins
“Allure of The Sea” – Tatyana Kagamas

To see this list and the honorable mentions, please click here.

Graphic Journalism :: Women’s International Labor

In August of 2013, the independent news publication Truthout‘s graphic journalism column Ladydrawers began a yearlong investigation into women’s international labor, primarily through the global garment and sex trades. It began with fashion (“Fast Fashion”) as “one of the largest employer of women worldwide as well as one of most significant ways through which sexuality is expressed, in the US and around the world. Fast fashion, in particular: cheap, cute, disposable threads on which we spend about $1,700 per year.”

Other columns in this series include: “Thin Line Between Garment and Sex ‘Trades'” (Anne Elizabeth Moore, Ellen Lindner and Melissa Gira Grant); “It’s the Money, Honey” (Anne Elizabeth Moore and Ellen Lindner); “A Very Small Satisfaction”: An interview with Oscar-Nominated Rithy Panh on Cambodia’s Missing Pictures (Anne Elizabeth Moore); “The Business of Thrift” (Anne Elizabeth Moore and Julia Gfr

The FiddleHead’s 23rd Annual Literary Contest

The new (Spring 2014) issue of The Fiddlehead features the winners of its 23rd Annual Literary Contest:

Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize:
Kayla Czaga, “That Great Burgundy-Upholstered Beacon of Dependability”

Poetry Honourable Mentions:
Kyeren Regehr, “Dorm Room 214”
Maureen Hynes, “Stone Sonnet”

Short Ficiton First Prize:
Myler Wilkinson, “The Blood of Slaves”

Fiction Honourable Mention:
Jill Widner, “When Stars Fell Like Salt Before the Revolution”
Wayde Compton, “The Front: A Selected Reverse-Chronological Annotated Bibliography of the Vancouver Art Movement Known as ‘Rentalism,’ 2011-1984”

Editor Wanted for TETYC

NCTE is seeking a new editor of Teaching English in the Two-Year College. In May 2016, the term of the present editor, Jeff Sommers, will end. Interested persons should send a letter of application to be received no later than December 15, 2014. Letters should include the applicant’s vision for the journal and be accompanied by the applicant’s vita, one sample of published writing (article or chapter), and two letters specifying financial support from appropriate administrators at the applicant’s institution. Applicants are urged to explore with their administrators the feasibility of assuming the responsibilities of a journal editorship.

Glimmer Train Short Story Award Winners

Glimmer Train has just chosen the winning stories for their February Short Story Award for New Writers. This competition is held quarterly and is open to all writers whose fiction has not appeared in a print publication with a circulation greater than 5000. The next Short Story Award competition will take place in May. Glimmer Train’s monthly submission calendar may be viewed here.

1st place goes to Melanie Lefkowitz of Ithaca, NY. [Photo credit: Chelsea Fausel.] She wins $1500 for “The Mango” and her story will be published in Issue 94 of Glimmer Train Stories. This is Melanie’s first fiction publication.

2nd place goes to Kathleen Boyle of San Francisco, CA. She wins $500 for “Burial Rites of Northern Italians.”

3rd place goes to Olivia Postelli of Ann Arbor, MI. She wins $300 for “In the Glow.”

A PDF of the Top 25 winners can be found here.

Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week

The overall style of Santa Monica Review isn’t particularly striking, but the image they selected for this Spring 2014 issue is. There’s something about the young girl’s eyes and the way the black lamb just gently rests in her arms, not trying to get away, that makes it hard to look away. The piece is by Deborah Davidson titled Leaving Home.

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The cover of the latest North Dakota Quarterly is James Bassler’s Rib Shield, painted silk wrap, woven, cut, and sewn. “In the 1980s his work underwent a dramatic change after his exposure to the Navajo wedge weaving process and the art of John Cage.” You really have to see it up close to appreciate it as you should—I’d love to see it in person!

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The image on Poetry‘s May 2014 issue takes over the cover. It’s titled “Torch” and is done by Kate McQuillen as part of her collection called Body Scans. See more here.

When in Drought Zine

A new zine called When in Drought is hitting the streets in a small print run from Los Angeles. With a tongue-in-cheek and often political attitude, it has no problem standing out from a crowd of other literary magazines. Each issue is themed and contains writing, art, and translation “with neglected literature from around the world.” To get a feel for them, here’s some excerpts from their submission guidelines: “Whatever it is, we’re against it. Just kidding. We love you.” And at the bottom of each page on their site, they declare, “Stay horny for art.” And on their contest page, they have some sample titles of books that if written, they would pay good money for: Nude on a Chair; Look Mom, the Children Don’t Have Any Pants Today; Mein Kampf, Your Kampf, Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off; Tits Laid Heavy on My Thoughts: A Memoir; and other humorous suggestions.

The latest issue is themed Prague: “never in recorded history has the municipality of Prague experience drought. On the contrary, it has withstood floods, torrential downpours, &, quite often, thunderstorms . . . It is no wonder then that the editors of this journal should be fascinated with such a place . . . We hope you will soon find your thirst slaked—& please, when in Prague, do not forget your umbrella.” The issue itself contains 100 pages of original work combined with passages from Franz Kafka.

William Matthews Poetry Prize Recipients

The editors at The Asheville Poetry Review to announced the William Matthews Poetry Prize Recipients for 2014, judged by Billy Collins.

Bruce Sager, from Westminster, MD was awarded first prize for his poem, “The Lot of Stars,” and will receive $1000, plus publication in the 20th Anniversary issue of The Asheville Poetry Review (Vol. 21, Issue 24, 2014), which will be released in November, 2014

Second prize is awarded to T. J. Sandella, from Cleveland, OH, for his poem, “Flight.” He will receive $250, as well as publication.

Dave Seter, from Petaluma, CA, was the third prize recipient for his poem “What My Uncle Is Trying To Say,” and he will also be published in the next issue. All three authors will be featured at a reading in Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, NC this summer.

New Lit on the Block :: Isthmus

Isthmus, edited by Ann Przyzycki, Randy DeVita, and Taira Anderson, is a new biannual print magazine that publishes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Hailing from Seattle, Washington, Isthmus offers “good writing that will make you want to pass the issue to a friend.” Przyzycki says, “We value the traditional as well as those pieces that organically can only be told through experimentation with form.”

Przyzycki recalls a time when all three editors were stuck together in traffic on the interstate highway running north to south through Seattle. One editor remarks that the reason for the bottleneck traffic in Seattle is that the city is built on an isthmus. Later, when coming up with a name for the journal, Przyzycki says they looked back on this moment and chose Isthmus to refer not only to the city it was based out of but also to the geographical term and the accompanying metaphor: “a narrow connection between two larger objects, as the printed journal is a connection between the writer and the reader,” she says.

But as with all new journals, we ask why? Why start a literary magazine? And in Przyzycki’s research, she found that most start because the editors don’t feel like there is “a venue for a certain kind of story, that there is some hole to fill”—and she would be right. She is fully aware of the vast amount of venues already out there but says “I don’t think that there can be too many opportunities for good writing to be shared.” Inspired by the independent presses and magazines at AWP this year, she believes that many writers are looking to independent lit mags for “new voices.” She loves the honor of allowing someone else to trust her with their work; “I love working on books and so perhaps naively I feel that my passion for publishing and connecting writers to readers is reason enough.”

As the journal grows, Przyzycki hopes to include translations on a regular basis, increase the online presence, and include more book recommendations and author interviews on the website.

The first issue features fiction by Jennifer Bryan, Michal Davis, and Leslie Parry; nonfiction by Kelly Chastain, Elizabeth Mack, and Mark Rozema; poetry by Louis Armand, Cody Deitz, Suanne Fetherolf, Natalie Giarratano, Matt Hemmerich, Gabe Herron, Patrick Kindig, Jed Myers, Jason Olsen, Natania Rosenfeld, Mike Smith, Haley Van Heukelom, Laurelyn Whitt, and Theodore Worozbyt.

Isthmus editors read year round for poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. You can submit through Submittable only; please find complete guidelines on their website. They also note that you should check in regularly with their blog and Facebook page for announcements of any upcoming special issues or future contests.

BBC Season of Classic Literature

This season on the BBC, writers and directors have taken on four big classic works: Jed Mercurio’s adaptation of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Ben Vanstone’s adaptation of Laurie Lee’s novel Cider With Rosie, Adrian Hodges’ adaptation of LP Hartley’s The Go-Between and J B Priestley’s classic play An Inspector Calls. Each have been made into 90-minute adaptations. Read more on the BBC website and from John Plunkett on The Guardian. Though not everyone is pleased with this; check out Mof Gimmers’s article on Anorak.

A Paper Cut I Think You’ll Like

Awkward Paper Cut is a literary site devoted to supporting and inspiring innovative artistic creations incorporating words, images, and sound in a new kind of storytelling that mixes different formats and media with original and inventive ideas and approaches. Featured pages include Writers on Writing, Swoon’s View (picks from “video addict” Marc Neys), and Podcasts of multiple authors/works under a connecting theme. The most recent podcast, Episode 14-8, is titled D

Seneca Review Challenges Genre in New Issue

In the latest issue, Seneca Review is challenging genre. “In 1977, Seneca Review made room for a cross-fertilization of poetry and nonfiction it called ‘the lyric essay,'” the editor note states. “With this special issue of SR (Fall 2013/Spring 2014), we are making room for a different chimera we’re calling Beyond Category—work that crosses bigger lines of genre and form. Not just between poetry and essays but between writing and visual art, between analog and digital. These hybrids and outliers will be a regular part of future issues”

And it is, indeed, beyond categorization. In addition to the bound print copy, which includes a wide variety of art and photographs of projects, Seneca Review‘s new issue comes with a poster filled with thought bubbles, two witty tattoos, a newspaperesque handout combining drawings and sketches with tiny type that must be read with magnifying glass (also included), and more beyond category pieces rolled into tubes. It’s certainly exciting!

This is also the start of the Beyond Category Online feature that includes digital work. Currently, you can find pieces by Susan Howe & David Grubbs, Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, Derek Gromadzki, Sarah Minor, Noah Saterstrom, and more. I didn’t play around there too long, but you should definitely do so. As a sample, the piece “Memory Collective” explores the nature of memory as six essayists share a fleeting or fragmented memory. Then, another essayist takes that memory and remembers it, in whatever format they choose. “This process may involve speculating, soldering, or drawing on one’s own reservoir of memories to complete or cohere another’s memory.” It may sound a little confusing at first, but I urge you to take a look.

Grant :: Documentary Photography Project

The Open Society Documentary Photography Project is soliciting calls for the 2014 Audience Engagement Grant Program. Since the program’s inception in 2004, they have funded 54 photographers who have gone beyond documenting a human rights or social justice issue to enacting change. Beginning this year, they will offer two tracks of support for individuals at different phases of their Audience Engagement projects.

Track One: Project Development
Grantees will receive funding to attend an Open Society–organized retreat in December of 2014. This event will be designed in collaboration with Creative Capital’s Professional Development Program, whose nationally recognized workshops provide participants with essential practical tools and strategies to help them move their project and career goals forward. Attendees will become part of a larger Audience Engagement Grant cohort, with opportunities to connect both during the conference and after.

Track Two: Project Implementation
Grantees will receive funding to execute (or continue executing) their projects as well as attend December’s retreat.

Eligibility Criteria
•Documentary photographers, photo-based artists, and socially engaged practitioners who use their work to move target audiences beyond the act of looking, to directly participate in activities or processes that lead to change around an issue.
•Individuals who establish meaningful partnerships with others committed to realizing change and who bring a complementary set of skills and expertise.
•Projects that use photography or photo-based art creatively and innovatively to reach a project’s unique audience.
•Projects with goals that are ambitious, yet realistic and achievable.

Deadline
The application deadline for BOTH tracks is: Tuesday, July 8, 2014 at 5:00 p.m. EST.

Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week

As you’ll quickly be able to tell, this week it’s all about color. It’s been a dull and dreary winter, and I loved having a collection of colors filling my bins this week:

I saw this staring up at me from the top of my magazine pile, and I gravitated to it. Teen in Body Paint, Key West, Florida is a picture by Roger Sacha of a young man painted by Tony Gregory with body paint in 2005. You’ll have to pick up an actual copy of Subtropics to get the full effect.

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The color on the cover of The London Magazine‘s new issue is fascinating as though it’s a rainy day, there’s still a rainbow of color. It’s detail from Leonid Afremov’s Rain of Fire, oil on canvas, 2007.

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This cover of Boulevard completes the list of colorful action as the lights dance of the bridge in the photograph. It’s by Charles Gross and titled Crossing the Tuo River at Night.

2013 Consequence Prize in Poetry

The 2013 Consequence Prize in Poetry was selected by Brian Turner and awarded to William Snyder. Snyder’s winning piece “They Give Me Money Near Karbala”is published in the current issue of Consequence (Spring 2014). Also included are the pieces by the finalists.

First Prize
William Snyder: “They Give Me Money Near Karbala”

Finalists
Heather Bell: “Decoding The Poem”
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: “To the Women of Trabzon”
Aubrey Ryan: “Song”

American Life in Poetry :: Amy Fleury (Again!)

American Life in Poetry: Column 474
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

Let’s celebrate the first warm days of spring with a poem for mushroom hunters, this one by Amy Fleury, who lives in Louisiana.

First Morel

Up from wood rot,
wrinkling up from duff
and homely damps,
spore-born and cauled
like a meager seer,
it pushes aside earth
to make a small place
from decay. Bashful,
it brings honeycombed
news from below
of the coming plenty
and everything rising.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Copyright © 2013 by Amy Fleury from her most recent book of poems, Sympathetic Magic, Southern Illinois University Press, 2013. Poem reprinted by permission of Amy Fleury and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Literary Couples and their Writing

Iron Horse Literary Review‘s latest issue is the “Duet Issue,” featuring writing from some writers who are in relationships with other writers. “Every writer, at some time or another, imagines finding a mate who understands the ups and downs of creativity, the victories and failures of publishing,the obsessive love/hate relationships we have with our manuscripts,” writes Editor Leslie Jill Patterson in the foreword. “Who else could this soulmate be but another writer, whom we might collide with at a reading, or while traveling, or during a workshop? …. Writer couples, we believe, encourage each other to write, and support one another steadfastly when readers turn critical…”

This issue features work from these couples: Kim Barnes & Robert Wrigley, Landon Houle & Adam Houle, Jessica Jacobs & Nickole Brown, and Eula Biss & John Bresland. The magazine’s regular features also revolve around this “duet” theme.

ZYZZYVA Hits 100th Issue

The Spring & Summer 2014 of ZYZZYVA marks 100 issues. “So now, 100 issues in, having persevered through many a difficult time and may a close call, our hope is to keep this journal thriving and vibrant for as long as we can,” write Editors Laura Cogan and Oscar Villalon. “In an environment crowded with dazzling and questionable new technologies, ZYZZYVA asserts the cerebral and tactile pleasures of reading, of holding a well-bound book in your hands, of losing—and finding—yourself in the pages of a story. . . . We hope you will join us in celebrating 100 issues of preeminent and daring literary publishing, of Pulitzer winners and poet laureates, of the finest contemporary minds and astonishing raw talent, and twenty-nine years of cultivating a cultural community around the arts and letters.”

The issue features fiction by Ron Carlson, Daniel Handler, Michelle Latiolais, Paul Madonna, Scott O’Connor, Erika Recordon; nonfiction by Katie Crouch, Jim Gavin, Glen David Gold, Jonathon Keats; poetry by Dan Alter, Valerie Bandura, Noah Blaustein, Christopher Buckley, and more.

Hello Modernists! Today is Your Lucky Day!

The Modernist Journals Project, a joint project of Brown University and The University of Tulsa, focuses on the years 1890 to 1922 and features:

  • journals that have been digitized by the JP
  • a searchable databse, teaching and research guides to using the MJP
  • the “MJP Lab” – a site for experimenting with MJP data
  • biographies of authors and artists whose work appears in the MJP journals
  • books and essays about MJP journals and topics
  • a directory of periodicals published within the years 1890-1922
  • the “Cover-to-Cover Initiative” for locating full runs of magazines with their advertising intact

The year ends at 1922 “for both intellectual and practical reasons. The practical reason is that copyright becomes an issue with publications from 1923 onward. The intellectual reason is that most scholars consider modernism to be fully fledged in 1922, a date marked by the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.”

The materials on the MJP website, its curators note, “will show how essential magazines were to modernism’s rise.”

Kore Press 2014 First Book Award Winner

Silent Anatomies by Monica Ong has been selected winner of the 2014 Kore Press First Book Award as selected by Joy Harjo. Fnalists were Sass Brown (Alexandria, Virginia) for USA-1000, and Jennifer Franklin (New York, New York) for Daughter.

Joy Harjo (2014 Gugenheim Fellow) said of the winning work, Silent Anatomies: “This is one of the most unique poetry collections. It’s a kind of graphic poetry book, but that’s not exactly it either. Poetry unfurls within, outside and through images. The images are stark representations that include bottles that have been excavated from a disappeared age, contemporary ultrasound images of a fetus, family photographs and charts. They establish stark bridges between ancestor and descendant time and presence.This collection is highly experimental and exciting.”

Monica Ong is a poet and artist dwelling in experimental spaces. She completed her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in Digital Media, and is also a Kundiman poetry fellow. Her work has been published in Seneca Review, Drunken Boat, Glassworks Magazine, Tidal Basin Review, and others. An exhibiting artist for over a decade, she draws from her professional design practice to innovate on the alchemy of text and image.

You Can Now Enroll in Hogwarts Online

Hogwarts Is Here: free, online classes in the same subjects studied by Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Not only that, but you can also become a Hogwarts Professor. Slate‘s Alex Heimbach writes: “The website works as a sort of cross between a MOOC (massive open online course) and an RPG (a role-playing game, like Dungeons & Dragons). You start by creating an account and choosing a house. (No sorting hat here, unfortunately.) I went with Ravenclaw, which seemed fitting for an optional intellectual endeavor. I wasn’t alone in that decision: Ravenclaw is the second most popular house (after Gryffindor, of course) and has the most house points (which you gain by completing assignments).” Read his full review here.

River Teeth Reveals Acceptance Process

The editors note of the second issue of volume 15 of River Teeth reveals a very important process for the editors: how they accept work and find work that will uphold their standards. The editors and readers “peruse every one of the more than a thousand unsolicited manuscripts that come [their] way each year—even though [they] know [they] can accept only about ten or twelve of them,” writes Dan Lehman. “We root for each and every submission, hoping to find not only the perfect piece by a great writer whom we already love, but, as has happened, the fledgling writer whose first published piece will appear in River Teeth and will snare a Pushcart for the writer and for us.”

So where do the rest of the pieces that make up the issues come from? The editors travel to conferences and workshops and search websites for pieces they know they just have to have. “If we hear something that is great, we go for it. Right then. We don’t suffer a turn-down easily. Something about our enthusiasm for a piece, and about our vision for the journal and what we do, has convinced writers who otherwise don’t owe us the time of day to take a shot with River Teeth,” Lehman writes. Here’s what he has to say about selecting pieces:

“At heart we always ask two questions: Is this the sort of piece I would want to call the other editor in the middle of the night to say we have to have? And would we die if we saw this piece in someone else’s journal and knew we could have had it for ourselves? Those are the criteria, nothing else really. As we wrote a few issues ago, we will publish the work of friends and acquaintances (even ourselves) if it meets those standards. Only then. That’s all. That our two Best American essays come from writers with close ties makes our case. Both were among the best dozen or so essays in this or any other year; it would have killed us to see them win those prizes for someone else. And we confessed that fact in writing before the prizes were won.

“We know all this sounds more than a little intuitive, even presumptuous, and quite a bit less than arm’s length. That’s the nature of love, we guess.”

Check out more from the editors note and see what’s in stock of this issue here.

I AM: TWENTY-SEVEN

Here’s an interesting call for submissions: I AM: TWENTY-SEVEN is a yearlong curated art project consisting of twenty-seven pieces about the age of twenty-seven. All pieces will be posted and archived on the project’s site. This project is curated by Rachel Ann Brickner, writer and Managing Editor of Weave Magazine. Deadline: JUNE 1, 2014.

Summer Teaching Fellow in Fiction

Summer Teaching Fellow in Fiction Antioch College, an independent, selective liberal arts college located in Yellow Springs, Ohio, invites applications for a three-month teaching fellowship in fiction for Summer 2014. The Summer Teaching Fellow will teach two courses in his/her area of expertise, including one workshop-style creative writing seminar (LIT 250) and one course intended to offer undergraduate students an introduction to the genre (LIT 242).

Responsibilities

  • Teach one creative writing workshop-style seminar and one introductory-level literature course to undergraduate students focusing on fiction during Antioch College’s Summer session (July 8-September 19)
  • Give one public reading of current work
  • Assist students in the coordination of a student-led fiction reading in September 2014

Qualifications

  • MFA or comparable degree in creative writing
  • Record of publication in fiction
  • Enthusiasm for and experience teaching fiction

Application Process
To apply, submit a cover letter, curriculum vita, brief writing sample, and three letters of recommendation, to: nwilburnATantiochcollegeDOTorg

Electronic submission of all materials is strongly preferred. If necessary, hard copies may be mailed to Literature Faculty Search, c/o Nancy Wilburn, Antioch College, One Morgan Place, Yellow Springs, Ohio, 45387. Applications will be reviewed as received. Deadline for submission of materials is May 15, 2014.

Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week

Michigan Quarterly Review‘s Winter 2014 issue features quilt art by Rachel May. The issue contains a story from her along with more of her pieces. Although I don’t see a link for it on their site yet, you will be able to see her story and art pieces in full color.

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Workers Write!‘s 2014 issue, “More Tales from the Cubicle,” features the side of, well, a cubicle. It’s not fancy or flash, but it’s perfect for this issue.

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The Laurel Review‘s latest issue is very simple, but oh-so-juicy. I selected for a cover of the week purely because seeing it instantly made my lips purse.

2014 Bellevue Literary Review Prize Winners

Bellevue Literary Review‘s latest issue (Spring 2014) features the winners of the 2014 BLR Prizes:

 Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, selected by Nathan Englander
Winner: “Pediatricology” by Abby Horowitz
Honorable Mention: “Death Defiant Bomba or What to Wear When Your Boo Gets Cancer” by Lilliam Rivera

Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction, selected by Helen Benedict
Winner: “Forty-One Months” by William McGrath
Honorable Mention: “Double Exposure” by Elisha Waldman

Marica and Jan Vilcek Prize for Poetry, selected by Tina Chang
Winner: “Chronic Care: ‘Broken Leg’ by Keith Carter, Photograph” by Laurie Clements Lambeth
Honorable Mention: “The Rules of Surgery” by Kristin Robertson

The issue also features fiction by Susan Bartlett, Sean Kevin Campbell, Lillian Huang Cummins, Soniya Greenfield, Abby Horowitz, D. Quentin Miller, Billy O’Callaghan, Lilliam Riverea, Pamela Ryder Jean-Marie Saporito, Sheena Suals, and Jessica Stults; nonfiction by Mary Arguelles, Will McGrath, Leslie Van Gelder, and Elisha Waldman; and poetry by Alison Bradford, Steven Cramer, Catherine Freeling, Rachel Hadas, Kip Irwin, Will Johnston, Laurie Clements Lambeth, Laura Lauth, Michal Lemberger, Kaitlin LaMoine Martin, Marty McConnell, Thomas R. Moore, Jennifer Perrine, Kristin Robertson, Avery Leigh Thomas, Amy Tudor, Kathryn Weld, and Stacia Gyrene Yearwood. See more information about the issue and contest winners here.

Ecology and Science Fiction

I am happy to shamelessly assist Gerry Canavan* with his shameless self-promotion of  Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, a collection of essays he has put together with Kim Stanley Robinson. The book is due out next month from Wesleyan University Press in paperback, hardback, and on Kindle.

Here’s a table of contents borrowed from Gerry’s blog:

Preface by Gerry Canavan
Introduction: “If This Goes On” also by Gerry Canavan

Part 1 Arcadias and New Jerusalems
1 ► “Extinction, Extermination, and the Ecological Optimism
of H. G. Wells” by Christina Alt
2 ► “Evolution and Apocalypse in the Golden Age” by Michael Page
3 ► “Daoism, Ecology, and World Reduction in Le Guin’s Utopian Fictions” by Gib Prettyman
4 ► “Biotic Invasions: Ecological Imperialism in New Wave Science Fiction” by Rob Latham

Part 2 Brave New Worlds and Lands of the Flies
5 ► “‘The Real Problem of a Spaceship Is Its People’: Spaceship Earth as Ecological Science Fiction” by Sabine Höhler
6 ► “The Sea and Eternal Summer: An Australian Apocalypse” by Andrew Milner
7 ► “Care, Gender, and the Climate-Changed Future: Maggie Gee’s The Ice People“ by Adeline Johns-Putra
8 ► “Future Ecologies, Current Crisis: Ecological Concern in South African Speculative Fiction” by Elzette Steenkamp
9 ► “Ordinary Catastrophes: Paradoxes and Problems in Some Recent Post-Apocalypse Fictions” by Christopher Palmer

Part 3 Quiet Earths, Junk Cities, and the Cultures of the Afternoon
10 ► “‘The Rain Feels New’: Ecotopian Strategies in the Short Fiction of Paolo Bacigalupi” by Eric C. Oto
11 ► “Life after People: Science Faction and Ecological Futures” by Brent Bellamy and Imre Szeman
12 ► “Pandora’s Box: Avatar, Ecology, Thought” by Timothy Morton
13 ► “Churning Up the Depths: Nonhuman Ecologies of Metaphor in Solaris and ‘Oceanic’” by Melody Jue

Afterword: “Still, I’m Reluctant to Call This Pessimism” by Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson

There’s also a lengthy “Of Further Interest” appendix that’s an annotated list of some key texts in the subgenre of ecological science fiction.

*In case you’re wondering why I would do this for Gerry, check out his blog. I have followed it for YEARS and it’s like having an aggregate of all things I am interested in. Well, except Star Trek, but then, I have lots of people I share that stuff with and they love it. Not to mention, this collection of essays just sounds amazing.

Terrain.org’s New Face

Exciting new things are happening over at Terrain.org, a literary magazine that “publishes editorials, poetry, essays, fiction, hybrid forms, articles, videos, reviews, an interview, the ARTerrain gallery, and the UnSprawl case study.” Now, Terrain.org has a newly designed website that makes it easier to move through genres while “continuing with [their] image-rich and multimedia focus.” And indeed, the new website is much more image heavy, with rolling landscape pictures that help emphasize the theme of the journal. There’s also a cleaner font and easier-to-read layout. I’d say it’s a nice move forward for the magazine.

In other news, they’ve also switched from putting out issues to publishing on more of a rolling basis, currently with three or four contributions per week. Another minor change is that the blog is now part of the site, instead of hosted at a separate URL.

The latest contributions include three poems by Beth McDermott, a video essay about glaciers by Nancy Lord and Irene Owsley, an interview with Derrick Jensen, and some reviews and recommended reads. Check it out here.

David James Poissant on Rejection

In this month’s Glimmer Train Bulletin, David James Poissant, author of The Heaven of Animals (Simon & Shuster March 2014) writes “On Relentlessness, Or, How to Make Submitting Your Superpower.” In this featured essay, he advises writers, “don’t let the first dozen rejections stop you” when it comes to submitting works. A story oft told, and yet, relentlessly needing to be oft told. Poissant’s more humorous than stern approach may help some new writers better understand, three or four rejections is no big deal: “Invariably, my response is, ‘Three or four?’ Then, I lead said student or writer to my office where a corkboard hangs prominently above my computer. To the face of the corkboard, I have thumbtacked about fifty rejection slips.” But it’s not just about rejection, but about the sensibility of revision and in some cases, knowing when a work is “probably a dud” and may just need to rest a while.