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Books :: For the Cook on Your List (Yourself Included)

Dining in Refugee Camps: The Art of Sahrawi Cooking
Cenando en los Campamentos de Refugiados: Un Libro De Cocina Saharaui
by Robin Kahn

From the publishers site: “A full-color, bilingual, collage journal that documents Robin Kahn’s month cooking with the women of the Western Sahara. As a guest artist selected to participate in ARTifariti 2009, Kahn stayed with Sahrawi families living in refugee camps in Algeria and in the desert of The Free Territories of the Western Sahara. There she created the collages for this publication by combining the sparse materials available locally with photos, recipes, histories and drawings. The result is a 50-page full-color journal that examines the art of Sahrawi food production: how kitchens are improvised, food is procured and prepared, and traditional recipes are innovated from UN rations and international aid. The book is a testament to the daily struggles of Sahrawi women whose role is to provide sustenance, fortitude and comfort inside a compromised society.”

Anita Shreve :: Literary Fiction is Written by Men

“A book editor once had the gall to tell the popular American novelist Anita Shreve that literary fiction is written by men. What women write is women’s fiction. Her retort started with Alice Munro and went on from there.”

…

“A large part of writing is daydreaming. We all do it,” says Shreve, who confesses to occasionally missing her exit when driving. “You are rehearsing a conversation you had last night, and you are going to change the dialogue a bit so it comes out right, or you imagine what you are going to say when you get home. The only difference with a writer is a writer loves the challenge of structure and crafting sentences.”

Read the rest Profile on Anita Shreve: “You don’t sit waiting for the muse to come” by Kate Taylor (Globe and Mail)

Film :: Little Town of Bethlehem

Little Town of Bethlehem is a groundbreaking new documentary that shares the gripping story of three men — a Palestinian Muslim, a Palestinian Christian, and an Israeli Jew — born into violence and willing to risk everything to bring an end to violence in their lifetime.

Sami Awad is a Palestinian Christian whose grandfather was killed in Jerusalem in 1948. Today he is the executive director of Holy Land Trust, a non-profit organization that promotes Palestinian independence through peaceful means. Yonatan Shapira is an Israeli Jew whose grandparents were Zionist settlers who witnessed the birth of the Israeli nation. Today he is an outspoken advocate for the nonviolent peace movement, both in his homeland and abroad. Ahmad Al’Azzeh is a Palestinian Muslim who has lived his entire life in the Azzeh refugee camp in Bethlehem. Today, Ahmad heads the nonviolence program at Holy Land Trust, where he trains others in the methods of peaceful activism.

Little Town of Bethlehem was produced by EthnoGraphic Media (EGM), an educational non-profit organization exploring the critical issues of our time. Copies of the film are available for half price through December. Screening copies with full screening kits are available for schools, churches, clubs, groups, or local theaters.

Memoir (and) on Pants on Fire

In her Editorial Board Chair’s Note to the newest issue (v3 n2) of Memoir (and), Claudia Sternbach comments on (re)reading Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes:

“But as popular as the life story of McCourt is, there are those who take issue with it. Those who question McCourt’s ability to recall in such great detail events which took place decades ago. How could he remember which of his brothers begged for berries or the look on his mother’s face when she had to plead for an egg or the head of a pig for her children to eat at Christmas.

“These are fair questions. If I can’t remember what I had for dinner last night or whether I recharged my cell phone this morning, how can a writer sit down at his desk and starting with words, build sentences, paragraphs, pages, and finally an entire life story like a bricklayer constructs a solid house? And would a reader trust the construction?

“We have been taken a few times, I’ll admit. Well-regarded memoirists have turned out to be not so honest. Their pants burst into flames and it makes news. But I believe it makes news because it is rare. For the most part I believe when people sit down to tell their story, they do their best to tell it with truth. Their truth. And that is the key. They are communicating to the reader what they remember. They are spilling out on the page those images and sounds they have carried with them their entire lives.”

Exactly.

Chad Walsh Poetry Prize Winner

Charles Wyatt of Nashville, Tennessee, is the 2010 winner of the Beloit Poetry Journal’s annual Chad Walsh Poetry Prize. The editors of the BPJ select on the basis of its excellence a poem or group of poems they have published in the calendar year to receive the award. This year’s choice is a group of poems from “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens” that appeared in the Spring 2010 issue. The awarding of this year’s prize to Wyatt also gives the journal the opportunity to recognize the extraordinary body of his work it has published beginning in 1965.

I-90ers – Submit to Sean Thomas Dougherty

Sean Thomas Dougherty (Broken Hallelujahs, and Sasha Sings the Laundry on the Line both from BOA Editions) will be the guest editor for Redactions: Poetry & Poetics issue 14 the I-90 Revolution. “It’s I-90 becuase I-90 runs the breadth of the country. It’s 3,099.07 miles long and runs from Boston to Seattle,” writes editory Tom Holmes. “…we are inviting people who live within 50 miles of I-90 to submit poems. Make sure you first read the I-90 Manifesto…then send in your poems that are written in the spirit of the I-90 Manifesto.” Non-I-90ers are also welcome to submit their works.

Open Minds Poetry Contest HM

The Fall 2010 issue of Open Minds Quarterly: Your Psychosocial Literary Journal includes the honorable mentions of the 2010 BrainStorm Poetry Contest. This is the eighth annual poetry contest for mental health consumers and include works by Catherine Martell, Eufemia Fantetti, Zan Bockes, Kate Flaherty, Anthony Chalk, Mark Murphy, E.V. Noechel, Brock Moore, Christopher Gaskins, Lisa Morris, Jerome Frank, Debrenee Adkisson, Gail Kroll, Diane Germano, Carla E. Anderton, Monika Lee, John Parsons, and Robin Barr Hill.

Narrative 30 Below Contest Winners

Narrative has named the finalists and winners for their 30 Below Contest 2010 (All entrants in the Contest were between the ages of eighteen and thirty.):

FIRST PRIZE
Kevin González – “Cerromar”

SECOND PRIZE
Jacob Powers – “Safety”

THIRD PRIZE
Erika Solomon – “Rules for Jews in Damascus”

FINALISTS
Caroline Arden
Stephanie DeOrio
Katharine Dion
Kelly Luce
Michael Nardone
Hannah Sarvasy
Samantha Shea
Douglas Silver
Cam Terwilliger
Jessica Wilson

The Fall 2010 Story Contest, with a $3,250 First Prize, a $1,500 Second Prize, a $750 Third Prize, and ten finalists receiving $100 each. Open to fiction and nonfiction. All entries will be considered for publication. Contest deadline: November 30, midnight, Pacific standard time.

Tupelo Press Recieves NEA Grant

Rocco Landesman, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, announced that Tupelo Press has been approved for a grant of $20,000 to support production, publication and promotion of thirteen exceptional books of poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction. Tupelo Press is one of 1,057 not-for-profit organizations recommended for a grant as part of the federal agency’s first round of fiscal year 2011 grants. In total, the Arts Endowment will distribute $26.68 million to support projects nationwide.

Glimmer Train September Fiction Open Winners :: 2010

Glimmer Train has just chosen the winning stories for their September Fiction Open competition. This competition is held quarterly and is open to all writers for stories with a word count range between 2000 – 20,000. The next Fiction Open will take place in December. Glimmer Train’s monthly submission calendar may be viewed here.

First place: Lydia Fitzpatrick [pictured] , of Brooklyn, NY, wins $2000 for “In a Library, in Saltillo.” Her story will be published in the Winter 2012 issue of Glimmer Train Stories.

Second place: Andrea Scrima, also of Berlin, Germany, wins $1000 for “Leaving Home.”

Third place: Brenden Wysocki, of Marina del Rey, CA, wins $600 for “A Dodgy Version.”

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

Short Story Award for New Writers Deadline: November 30

This competition is held quarterly and is open to all writers whose fiction has not appeared in a print publication with a circulation over 5000. No theme restrictions. Word count should not exceed 12,000. (All shorter lengths welcome.) Click here for complete guidelines.

Can Technology End Poverty?

The lead essay in the Nov/Dec 2010 issue of Boston Review forum by Kentaro Toyama, Can Technology End Poverty?, is available full-text online with responses from Nicholas Negroponte, Dean Karlan, Ignacio Mas, Nathan Eagle, Jenny C. Aker, Christine Zhenwei Qiang, Evgeny Morozov, and Archon Fung and a final reply by Kentaro Toyama. The forum is also open to reader responses.

Free Tanka Teachers Guide

Offered as a free PDF download from the Modern English Tanka Press (MET Press), Tanka Teachers Guide contains primary materials and resources about tanka poetry which educators and students may copy without seeking permission (Creative Commons License).

Modern English Tanka Press is dedicated to tanka education and welcomes innovative uses of their print and online resources: “We want to facilitate the use of our publications to the maximum extent feasible by educators at every level of school and university studies. Educators, without individually seeking permission from the publisher, may use our publications, online digital editions and print editions, as primary or ancillary teaching resources.”

The Immortality of Fairy Tales

“About 50 years ago, critics were predicting the death of the fairy tale. They declared it would fizzle away in the domain of kiddie literature, while publishers sanitized its ‘harmful’ effects. Academics, journalists and educators neglected it or considered it frivolous…” (Read the rest: Why Fairy Tales are Immortal by Jack Zipes from Globe and Mail.)

Poets Introducing Poets :: dg nanouk okpik

Poet Lore‘s Fall 2010 issue introduces the poems of native Alaskan dg nanouk okpik in their feature Poets Introducing Poets. Poet Lore Editors writer: “Nowhere are the effects of climate change more palpable than in the far North. Ms. okpik’s ritualistic narratives – steeped in Inuit folklore and sobered by the rudimentary predicaments of survival – conjure up a way of life as miraculous and endangered as the Arctic itself. In ‘Oil is a People,’ she writes: ‘I see the pipeline cracking, the Haul road / paved. I fall asleep as you are dancing / with the dead….’ Is this a vision? A warning? The eerie lines do what poetry does best: unsettle us with the truth – and maybe move us toward it.” Poet D. Nurkse introduces okpik’s poetry, of which 12 pieces featured.

Artistic Merits of Fictive Sex

What is Good Sex vs. Bad Sex writing in literary fiction? Is there even a “need” for fictive sex in this day and age?

“Nobody needs it anymore”, says Rhoda Koenig [co-founder, along with Auberon Waugh, of the Bad Sex Award]. “Not that long ago, people would read quality fiction (as well as, of course, lots of rubbish) to discover what actually went on during sex, how people did it. Virgins wanted information, and experienced people wanted inspiration. If you were too young or poor to buy pornography or instruction books and had to go to the library, it was a lot less embarrassing checking out Lady Chatterley than a sex manual.”

Read more: Bad Sex Please, We’re British: Can Fictive Sex Ever Have Artistic Merit? by Arifa Akbar for The Independent.

Are Lesbians Going Extinct? Part Two

Trivia: Voices of Feminism 11, edited by Lise Weil and Betsy Warland, is the magazine’s longest issue published to date and the second in a two-part series featuring writers responding — in prose and poetry — to the question “Are Lesbians Going Extinct?”.

Contributors include Sima Rabinowitz, Verena Stefan, Kate Clinton, Lauren Crux, Sarah Schulman, Susan Hawthorne, Arleen Paré, Renate Stendhal, Urvashi Vaid, Erin Graham, Bev Jo, Christine Stark, Elana Dykewomon, Sharanpal Ruprai, Elizabeth X, Lyn Davis, Monica Meneghetti, Betsy Warland, Lise Weil, Harriet Ellenberger, and Michèle Causse.

Editor-in-chief Lisa Weil will be stepping down with this issue and the magazine is in search of new leadership. Information about the changeover and contacting the publication is available at the close of Weil’s editorial.

Tribute to Ai

The most recent issue of Cimarron Review is a tribute to the poet Ai (1947 – 2010). Nonfiction includes works by Lisa Lewis, Guest Editor whose work “Ai in Oklahoma” opens the issue, Dagoberto Gilb (“Poet Ai” available online), Clay Matthews, Chip Livingston, Rigoberto González, and Janet Varnum’s interview with Ai. Works of poetry include authors Yun WangMonique S. Ferrell, Labecca Jones, Jeff Simpson, Kimiko Hahn (“Theft” available online), Samantha Thornhill, Patricia Smith (“The Day Before What Could be the Day” available online),Cyrus Cassells, Ralph Burns, Oliver de la Paz, and Marilyn Chin (“Naked I Come, Naked I Go” available online). Cover image by Christopher Felver – “The Poet Ai at the Los Angeles Book Fair.”

Narrative Poetry Contest Winners

Narrative Magazine Second Annual Poetry Contest Winners

First Place: Kate Waldman
Second Place: Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
Third Place: Ezra Dan Feldman

Finalists:
Mermer Blakeslee
Laton Carter
Katharine Coles
Maria Hummel
Gray Jacobik
Jenifer Browne Lawrence
Lynn Melnick
Steve Price
Marsha Rabe
Christie Towers

The Narrative Magazine Fall 2010 Story Contest is still open to fiction and nonfiction. All entries will be considered for publication. Deadline: November 30, at midnight, Pacific standard time.

Remembering Bill Bauer

The latest edition of Fiddlehead (Autumn 2010) includes “Remembering Bill Bauer (1932 – 2010)” an editorial by Brian Bartlett. Bill Bauer had been Co-Editor, Assistant Poetry Editor, and Poetry Editor for nearly ten years, then Fiction Co-Editor for two years, and published two full-length collections of poetry with Fiddlehead Poetry Books, along with several other collections of poetry and short stories. Bill Bauer was lost to his battle with cancer in June of 2010.

The editorial is followed by several of Bauer’s poems, including one previously unpublished work.

CV2 Celebrates 35 Years

Canadian poetry lit mag Contemporary Verse 2 is celebrating 35 years of publishing. The newest issue (Summer 2010) is the first of two issues looking back over these three and a half decades – starting with “The Early Years” – the first ten years of the journal’s history. Included is an interview with Robert Enright, “CVII’s first book review editor and one of its founding staff,” and “some of the archival materials still in CVII’s posession, including originals of the late bpNichol – editorial reports and the one poem published by CVII.”

CVII is also planning a number of celebratory events and a coast to coast reading tour. Check their website for more information.

Barns + Poetry + Art = Cool Stuff

Artist Bill Dunlap was selected recently to do a series of murals on barns across Maryland. Each mural will be a text and image piece featuring poetry. The project is organized by the University of Maryland Art Gallery in College Park, and is called “Poetic Aesthetic in Rural Maryland.”

Why barns and why poetry? Dunlap writes on his blog, “I think it’s because they go so well together. This is a chance to bring art out of galleries and urban settings and put it in rural areas where it is rarely seen. And those kinds of peaceful settings are perfect places to take in a bit of poetry as well.”

Dunlap has completed the first mural on a barn near Gaithersburg, MD. The barn is owned by a company of glass blowers called The Art of Fire. The painting is 10 ft tall and about 43 ft long and features the poem “Lost” by David Wagoner.

Dunlap plans to complete five more murals throughout 2011.

ALA Stonewall Book Award

The first and most enduring award for GLBT books is the Stonewall Book Awards, sponsored by the American Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table. Since Isabel Miller’s Patience and Sarah received the first award in 1971, many other books have been honored for exceptional merit relating to the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered experience.

A Richard Wilbur Symposium

Field‘s Fall 2010 issue features a symposium on the work of Richard Wilbur, including his poem “The Beautiful Changes,” with essays by Bruce Weigl, Annie Finch, Steve Friebert and Stuart Friebert, DeSales Harrison, David Young, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Carole Simmons Oles, and Stephen Tapscott.

Soft Skull Press Closes New York

“Soft Skull Press, the indie publisher that was rescued from financial ruin when it was acquired by the Berkeley-based publisher Counterpoint in 2007, became a West Coast outfit on Friday after 17 years in New York with the closing of its office in the Flatiron District. Both of its full-time staffers, editorial director Denise Oswald and associate editor Anne Horowitz, were laid off, and titles that were already in the pipeline have been reassigned to editors at Counterpoint…” Read the rest on The New York Observer Media Mobster.

New Lit on the Block :: and/or

Editor-in-Chief Damian W. Hey, Art Editor George Kayaian, Literary Editor Tracy Kline, and Managing Editor Mike Russo are the working force behind and/or, a PDF (Issue) and print journal “for creative experimental writing and/or innovative graphic art.”

Hey writes in the editorial for the first issue: “What is experimental to one person may be old hat to another. In general, we have sought to include works that represent as broad an experimental spectrum as possible. We have given preference to those works that provoke the reader or the viewer to question some aspect of tradition, convention, or expectation. We have looked for writing that teaches the reader how to read it, and art that teaches the viewer how to view it. And, in our evaluation of submitted work, we were not beyond the occasional outburst of: we know the good stuff when we see it!”

The first 100+ page issue of and/or features works by Carol Agee, Tanner Almon, George Anderson, Michael Andreoni, Jenn Blair, Ric Carfagna, James Carpenter, Brian Cogan, Kirk Curnutt, Nicole Dahlke, Arkava Das, Tray Drumhann, Joseph Farley, Adam Field, Howie Good, Thomas Gough, Aimee Herman, Jared Joseph, Mark L.O. Kempf, Ron. Lavalette, Donal Mahoney, Ricky Massengale, RC Miller, Antoine Monmarche, Kyle Muntz, Christina Murphy, Matt Parsons, Dawn Pendergast, Michael Lee Rattigan, Francis Raven, Mary Rogers-Grantham, Christine Salek, Chad Scheel, James Short, Bruce Stater and Lori Connerly, Felino A. Soriano, Orchid Tierney, David Tomaloff, Echezona Udeze, Justin Varner, and Christopher Woods.

The journal seeks submissions from writers and/or other sorts of artists whose work openly challenges the boundaries (mimetic, aesthetic, symbolic, cultural, political, philosophical, economic, spiritual, etc.) of literary and/or artistic expression. The deadline for Volume 2 is March 1, 2011.

On Teaching and Pain

“What teacher has not felt this pain—the pain of the audible yawn from the kid in the back row just as you launch into the lesson you worked on for an hour and a half—or worse, the lesson you spent only ten minutes preparing and are now feeling vulnerable about? This is not acute pain, not the pain of discovering that a student has craftily plagiarized an essay for your class, or reading a mean-spirited comment on a course evaluation, or being insulted to your face. This is the low-grade fever, the chronic hypertension of teaching, the apathy, dismissiveness, and dehumanization I suspect are part of most teachers’ everyday lives.”

From Strange Flowers and Gubbinals: On Teaching and Pain by Frank Kovarik

Read the rest – it does offer hope.

C4’s Best of the Web Fiction Anthology

Chamber Four Fiction Anthology: Outstanding Stories from the Web 2009/2010 is available for free download (PDF and mulit-eReader formats) and includes 25 stories chosen by C4 editors for their “availability online and that hard-to-define but unmistakable hallmark of quality.” Full table of contents and author bios, as well as bonus content (interviews with Angie Lee, Roy Giles, Andy Henion, Scott Cheshire, and “Publishers Lie and Other Things We Learned From Publishing ‘The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology’”) is available on C4’s Anthology page.

Authors whose works were chosen for the C4 Anthology: Andrea Uptmor, Angie Lee, Scott Cheshire, Alanna Peterson, Eric Freeze, Steve Almond, Sarah Salway, Svetlana Lavochkina, Valerie O’Riordan, L.E. Miller, B.J. Hollars, C. Dale Young, Andy Henion, Aaron Block, Steve Frederick, Trevor J. Houser, Roy Giles, Emily Ruskovich, David Peak, Castle Freeman, Jr., Ron MacLean, Corey Campbell, Taryn Bowey, Michael Mejia, William Pierce.

Hint Fiction on NPR

‘Hint Fiction‘ is the latest in literary downsizing: 25 words or fewer that hint at a story. Read/listen to the ‘long’ story of Robert Swartwood call for submissions the the anthology the that resulted – along with several examples (full-text, of course).

Essay: Reine Dugas Bouton “My Inner Latina”

“I’m a mix, a Mediterranean cocktail of sorts, like many people in New Orleans. My dad’s French and Italian; my mom’s Spanish with a touch of Welsh. The closest link I have to my ethnicity is my cousin in Los Angeles. Lisa is proud of her Latina heritage — she lives it. She spends time with her boisterous, voluble, in-your-face, never boring family; they dance at parties, make tamales for the holidays, speak in English with Spanish words sprinkled like bits of jalapeño into a salsa verde. Proud of who she is, Lisa’s got a spicy personality and speaks rapid fire.”

Excerpt from “My Inner Latina: Dancing toward a lost heritage” by Reine Dugas Bouto, published online in Etude: New Voices in Literary Nonfiction.