WomenArts Quarterly Journal Summer 2011 features the paintings of Iceland artist Kristin Halldorsdottir Eyfells (1917-2002). Eyfells painted large color portraits of popular figures in arts, entertainment, and politics. “No one ever sat for a portrait in her studio; instead, Eyfells formulated her interpretation of each subject from knowledge of their lives. She read everything she could find on her subjects and studied endless photographs of them before she began to paint” (Sherryl Brown, “Artist Profile,” WAQR). In addition to the cover, WAQR features a full-color section of portraits by Eyfells, including Mike Tyson, Nancy Reagan, Clint Eastwood, Dwight Eisenhower, Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill, and Jimmy Durante.

Cover image: “Self Portrait” by Kristin Halldorsdottir Eyfells

This Thing Called the Future (Cinco Puntos Press, May 2011) is the second young adult novel by J.L. Powers, better known around NewPages as Jessica. Jessica has been connected with NewPages for nearly a decade, writing reviews, feature columns and interviews. She is also editor of The Fertile Source, a literary ezine devoted to fertility-related topics, and publisher of a number of collections with her press, Catalyst Book Press.

Her first young adult novel, The Confessional (Random House/Laurel-Leaf, 2009), endeared her fiction writing to me, especially after it was banned from (and her speaking engagement cancelled with) the Jesuit high school that influenced the setting for the story. I taught the book in my college developmental writing class, and while it was challenging – dealing with issues of drugs, alcohol, homosexuality, immigration, racism, and all starting off with a murder – it was very well received by the students because of its honesty in discussing real-life issues. This Thing Called the Future might be the book to take its place. No less controversial, and no less honest in dealing with difficult subject matter, This Thing Called the Future is the story of 14-year-old Khosi set in HIV-ravaged South Africa.

The story begins –

A drumbeat wakes me. Ba-Boom. Ba Boom. It is beating a funeral dirge.

When I was my little sister Zi’s age, we rarely heard those drums. Now they wake me so many Saturdays. It seems somebody is dying all the time. These drums are calling our next-door neighbor, Umnumzana Dudu, to leave this place and join the ancestors where they live, in the earth, the land of the shadows.

– and follows Khosi through several weeks of her life, living with and caring for her aging grandmother and little sister while their mother works away in the city to help (just barely) support them. The story deals very openly and matter-of-factly about the threat of HIV for young girls in Africa, but does so through the strength of Khosi’s character – providing a clear and level-headed role model for any young adult responding to such challenging life issues. Khosi watches her careless friend Thandi involve herself with older men (who prefer younger girls less likely to have been exposed, and virgins most especially). Khosi cautions Thandi against her reckless behavior, warning her time and again of the dangers of HIV. Thandi’s response is unfortunately typical of so many young people who believe they are infallible. Any young reader will have no trouble identifying with Khosi’s rational and sexually conservative stance of self-preservation.

In addition to this clear front message of the book, Powers includes a great deal of South African Zulu culture as it straddles the generations and struggles to survive. Powers’s own background includes a master’s degree in African History from State University of New York-Albany and Stanford University, a Fulbright-Hayes to study Zulu in South Africa, and serving as a visiting scholar in Stanford’s African Studies Department in 2008 and 2009. Her acknowledgements for the book give credit to a number of people with whom she worked in Africa to gain education and insight into the culture, as well as to live it day in, day out. This becomes fully integrated into the writing with the use of Zulu language throughout the text, and a full glossary of the terminology in the back of the book. This is the best kind of cultural exposure and immersion for young (and old) adults. Because there is repetition of key terms and concepts early on in the writing, readers come to learn this language by the end of the book.

Khosi’s character and her relationship with the women in her family and the women in her community provide the symbol of the struggle for Zulu cultural survival. Khosi’s grandmother believes in the traditional medicine and healing rituals of the Sangoma (female healer) and engages Khosi in a ritual cleansing with her. Khosi’s mother has abandoned these ‘ancient ways,’ but also is either not accepting of contemporary, Western medicine, or is in denial of needing it. Khosi often finds herself conflicted, growing up in this divide of adults and their beliefs. Through the scope of the novel, she comes to make her own decision about what she will choose to follow – traditional medicine to help heal her AIDS-ravaged community, or the way of the sangoma to maintain the strong connection with her ancestral roots.

While Khosi’s character provides a strong model of coming to “right behavior” in a variety of situations, understanding how scary and difficult it can be to make the right choices is only evident because Powers writes this fearlessly into the novel. Without knowing the truth of what exists and what young people face – in South Africa, in the United States, in ANY country – we cannot have the real and truthful conversations about what is right behavior, what it means to self-preserve, and what it means to honor both the past and the future. This Thing Called the Future does it all through the voice of a South African teen, tiny in stature, but large enough to shadow all we see looming.

Many YA titles deal with controversial subject matter, and I can only imagine many of them do not make it onto school reading lists. I am hopeful, though, that the young adults themselves are still finding access to these books – in libraries, bookstores, or on their personal e-readers. Controversial subject matter is the most difficult to discuss with young people, and all the more why it needs venues – such as books of fiction – that make it accessible for them to find.

The first five chapters of This Thing Called the Future are available on Powers’s website, as well as AIDS & South Africa: A Teacher’s Guide to This Thing Called the Future.

Blueprints: Bringing Poetry into Communities
“With essayists ­— including Elizabeth Alexander, Robert Hass, and Patricia Smith — describing how poets and artists have brought poetry into different kinds of communities, and a ‘toolkit’ loaded with experience-based advice, tools, and strategies, Blueprints is a necessity for arts organizers and those in the poetry community.” A copublication with The Poetry Foundation, this book is also available for purchase in print.

The Poetry Forum on the Beloit Poetry Journal website is an online conversation with BPJ poets. During the month of July, join Jenny Johnson in a discussion of the interplay of sounds and (queer) bodies in her crown of sonnets, “Aria.” Audio is available to listen to her read section 1 of the poem.

From the New Orleans Review website: Be a part of New Orleans Review redesigned.

Call for Design Entries

Each issue will be illuminated by designers whose work reflects and responds to contemporary culture. We believe that good design encompasses art, typography, motion, photography, and illustration, and welcome it as an element that both complements and enhances the quality writing that has always been at the heart of the magazine.

Call for design submissions that explore text and image in a dynamic way. We believe that good design encompasses art, typography, motion, photography, and illustration, and welcome it as an element that both complements and enhances the quality writing that has always been at the heart of the magazine.

Work will be selected by our design editors and a guest designer. Please enter unpublished original designs. Each designer is allowed up to 5 submissions. Winners will be featured in the first redesigned issue of New Orleans Review due out in early 2012.

Open to all designers with the exception of current students, or employees, or others affiliated with New Orleans Review or Loyola University of New Orleans.

Deadline October 1, 2011. Please label files accordingly: Smith_John_01.jpeg (or other acceptable formats), Smith_John_02.jpeg (or other acceptable formats), etc. Winners will be contacted by October 15, 2011 for print-ready files.

From The Literarian, The Center for Fiction online magazine, The Strange, Beautiful, Subterranean Power of Fairy Tales: A Forum Moderated by Kate Bernheimer (Fairy Tale Review) with Kevin Brockmeier, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Timothy Schaffert, Maria Tatar, and Nicoletta Ceccoli.

[Illustration by Nicoletta Ceccoli]

Edited by J.C. Martin and Michelle Davidson Argyle, Stories for Sendai is “an anthology of inspirational short stories loosely themed around the strength of the human spirit…in honor of the victims of the earthquake and tsunami in Sendai, Japan.”

All proceeds will be donated to GlobalGiving in aid of victims of the earthquake and tsunami. GlobalGiving will disburse the funds to relief organisations and emergency services on the ground, including International Medical Corps and Save the Children.

Stories for Sendai is available for only $7.99 on Amazon. Send in a copy of your receipt to the editors, and you can be entered in a prize drawing for a number of fun prizes. See Stories for Sendai website for details.

A Road Not Taken is a book/DVD project by two Swiss artists and film makers, Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller, about the story of the Jimmy Carter White House Solar Installation.

Publisher Synopsis:

You may not remember this but in 1979, President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the roof of the White House West Wing.

The panels, which were used to heat water for the staff eating area, were a symbol of a new solar strategy that Carter had said was going to “move our Nation toward true energy security and abundant, readily available, energy supplies.”

But in 1986, President Ronald Reagan removed the solar panels while the White House roof was being repaired. They were never reinstalled.

In 1991, the panels were retrieved from government storage and brought to the environmentally-minded Unity College about an hour southeast of Bangor, Maine. There, with help of Academy Award winning actress Glenn Close, the panels were refurbished and used to heat water in the cafeteria up until 2005. They are still there, although they no longer function.

Swiss directors Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller follow the route the panels took, using them as a backdrop to explore American oil dependency and the lack of political will to pursue alternative energy sources.

In the movie A Road Not Taken, the filmmakers took two solar panels from Unity, placed them in the back of two students’ 1990 Dodge Ram pick-up truck (which had been retrofitted to run on vegetable oil) and delivered one of them to the Jimmy Carter Library & Museum in Atlanta and the other to the National Museum of American History in Washington.

In 1979, Carter warned, “a generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people – harnessing the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.”

It turns out Carter’s warning was at least partially correct: two of his solar panels are museum pieces now.

Michael Redhill will step down as proprietor and publisher of Brick effective with the publication of the current issue (87). In his introduction to the issue, Redhill explains that he will still be with the magazine as part of an editorial/ownership collective which also includes Michael Helm, Michael Ondaatje, Esta Spalding, Linda Spalding, and Rebecca Silver Slayter.

Redhill imparts some of what he has learned from his having “been involved with Brick, in one form or another, for much of [his] adult life.” He writes:

This is the eighty-seventh issue of Brick, a small Canadian literary journal that has existed for thirty-three years and, at any given time, has never had more than 2.5 employees. As a business model, Brick could be in MBA textbooks as an example of what not to do. A small cultural concern is about the worst kind of business you could have: humans may begin to die from the moment they’re born, but arts businesses need daily resuscitation from the moment of inception. Innovation, legwork, networking, enthusiasm, and a refusal to be surprised by disaster are just a few things you need to make a go of it. And success is not expressed in profit, or even survival. Success for something like Brick is simply being able to play a meaningful role in a time and place, be part of a conversation, and stick around at least long enough to be taken seriously. In that regard, Brick has been a smashing success and all signs point to it continuing to succeed for many years to come.

Kartika Review, a national Asian American literary arts journal, recently published Issue 9 for Spring 2011. The issue features two author interviews, with Amy Chua on her memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and Jessica Hagedorn on her novel Toxicology. Kartika Review is available in print as well as online.

Go the Fuck to Sleep by Adam Mansbach and illustrated by Ricardo Cortes, published by Akashic Books. Pre-orders are still being accepted and will come signed by both the author and illustrator. It’s also available for download on Audible, read by Samuel L. Jackson.

Letter Machine Editions celebrates the dual selection of Farid Matuk’s debut collection This Isa Nice Neighborhood for Honorable Mention in the 2011 Arab American Book Awards (administered by the Arab American National Museum) as well as the runner-up for the Norma Farber First Book Award by the Poetry Society of America. This September, Farid will be honored at the Awards Ceremony of the Arab American National Museum in Washington, D.C. In anticipation of this event, Letter Machine Editions is offering copies of the book for $10 postage paid until September 1.