Edited and published by Richard Peabody, along with the work of Associate Editor Lucinda Ebersole, Gargoyle celebrates 40 years of publishing with a ‘two-sided’ issue: Issue 65 – Side 1 and Issue 66 – Side 2. Sadly, Lucinda passed away March 20, 2017, as Peabody notes, “I’m heartbroken that my literary partner in crime has passed away. My plan is to shepherd her short story manuscripts and novel into print over the next few years. She was one of a kind and the funniest human I have ever known.”

Gargoyle‘s impression on the literary landscape is vast, and it’s with great hope and support for Richard and his staff that they will continue well into the future. In celebration, from the Gargoyle website:

In our first 40 years, Gargoyle has published work by:

10 Acker Award winners,
6 National Book Award-winning authors,
3 PEN/Faulkner winners,
4 Pulitzer Prize winners,
2 MacArthur Fellows,
2 Nebula Award winners,
2 Yale Younger Poets,
1 Hugo Award winner,
1 Poet Laureate,
6 Iowa Short Fiction Award winners,
6 Flannery O’Connor Award winners,
3 James Laughlin Award winners,
2 Lamont Poetry Selection winners,
2 William Carlos Williams Award winners,
8 National Poetry Series winners,
5 Orange Prize Long List writers,
2 Orange Prize Short List writers,
2 National Book Critics Circle Award winners,
6 Lambda Literary Award winners,
1 Gertrude Stein Award winner, and
3 Firecracker Alternative Book Award winners, among others.

In her Editor’s Notes to Issue 13 of Saranac Review, Elizabeth Cohen begins by quoting Emily Dickinson: “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”

Cohen writes, “We are sometimes asked at Saranac Review  how we select the work we publish, and I think Dickinson’s words are applicable. Of course we seek work that has strong voice, craft and originality, but in the end, it is the visceral response that probably most informs our choices. We choose poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction and plays that make us feel and evoke in us a response that physically affects us, while simultaneously reminding us why we read in the first place. If you could read our notes to one another on Submittable, you would see a lot of this: ‘Made me tingle,’ ‘heart stopping,’ ‘took my breath away.'”

With such discerning criteria, writers have got to meet that bar, providing readers much to look forward to in each issue of Saranac Review.

“Twenty years ago,” writes Brevity Editor Dinty W. Moore, “I had an idea for a magazine that combined the swift impact of flash fiction with the true storytelling of memoir, and Brevity was born. To be honest, I expected it to last a year.”

Instead, Brevity has aged into the most well-known publication of its kind, with a rich history of publishing new authors who have become some of the most respected in the genre, and guiding writers as they learn and practice their craft.

In celebration, Brevity reached out to authors who have appeared multiple times in Brevity over the years and commissioned their submissions for an anniversary issue. Authors includes Lee Martin, Diane Seuss, Brenda Miller, Sue William Silverman, Rebecca McClanahan, and Ira Sukrungruang. Moore notes that readers “may detect a common theme (or at least a common word)” among the works.

Read Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction as well as book reviews and craft essays online here.

After publishing 12 print issues from 2004-2015 in association with Columbia College Chicago, and a brief hiatus, Court Green is back with issue 13, “the first in its new incarnation as an independent online journal” edited by Tony Trigilio and David Trinidad.

Featured in this revival issue are poems by Matthew Burgess, Chris Green, Ginger Ko, Robert Siek, Kimiko Hahn, George Kalamaras, Annah Browning, Kimberly Lyons, Hafizah Geter, Megan Fernandes, Diane Seuss, Lynn Crosbie, Harlee Logan Kelly, Kenyatta Rogers, and C. Russell Price.

A special bonus features: “Robert Siek: 13 Instagram Photos”; Peter K. Steinberg, “‘A Fetish Somehow’: A Sylvia Plath Bookmark”; and “Radio Free Albion: Interview with George Kalamaras.”

Welcome back Court Green!

Boulevard‘s fall symposium on campus protests includes essays by Jim Craig, Megan Giddings, Ena Selimovic, Andrew Weinstein, and Robert Zaller responding to the question: “Have the recent campus protests – ranging from demonstrations to the use of safety spaces – against mainly right-wing speakers contributed to a dumbing down of American colleges, or are they effective and necessary?”

Celebrating its 35th Anniversary, Alaska Quarterly Review Editor-in-Chief Ronald Spatz, while marking the milestone with gratitude, considers this passage of time and what AQR, like many literary publications, has witnessed. “In the past we counted on artists, scholars, scientists, and journalists as reliable firewalls against ignorance. But increasingly there are powerful efforts to silence or marginalize these agents of understanding and change . . . as writers, poets, editors, and publishers, we must redouble our efforts to seek truth in all of its parts while creating every possible opportunity for compassion and empathy. In our view, the role of the arts has simply never been more crucial.”

New England Review Editor Carolyn Kuebler writes in the 38.3 Editor’s Note that, while the twenty-three pieces in issue 38.3 (2017) were not chosen for nor do they have a focused message or singular theme, “. . . it surprised me to see how frequently the shadow of war—to take one obvious example of a culture of violence—darkened the edges of these disparate writings. With the world always in the throes of some violence or other, it’s no wonder; whether we’re civilians or soldiers or doctors, we all become part of it. Born during the Vietnam War, finishing college at the start of the Gulf War, and then becoming a parent during the War on Terror, I’ve learned that being in a state of war doesn’t always have a clear beginning and end, and now it’s not even always clear where the war is actually happening and who’s fighting it. It’s not just in this magazine or in this moment in time that writers are contending with such themes; it’s always.”

Read the full editorial here and access full-text of several works from this issue, including Louise Aronson’s “Necessary Violence.”

Cover: Warfare  by Sabra Field

“The decision to consider the work in the current issue of Bennington Review through the lens of threat,” writes Editor Michael Dumanis, “- be this threat political, global, localized, or existential – was made during an uncharacteriscially emotional editorial meeting on Thursday, November 10, 2016, two days after a certain historical event. We felt completely unprepared to imagine what might come next. Animated by collective anxiety – this sense of abrupt dislocation of expectaions, as well as new actual danger – we gravitated toward poems and stories and essays where paradigms were similarly disrupted, where characters suddenly found themselves destabalized by external forces, where institutions and individuals in which we’d placed our trust failed to hold up their end of the bargain.”

See a full table of contents with several sample works from the issue here.

Cover image by Prague-based artist Jakub Geltner: “Cultural Landscape.”

In its Spring 2017 issue, Michigan Quarterly Review editor, Jonathan Freedman, offers a wonderful tribute to Managing Editor Vicki Lawrence who stepped down in May after twenty years with the magazine. As managing editor, Freedman writes, “she did just about everything: copyedited, proofread, supervised all the other manifold details of the publishing process, helped select the covers, talked the authors into her judicious recasting of the more infelicitous, erroneous, or just plain aberrational turns of phrase or thought. She schlepped copies of the journal to the Ann Arbor Book Festival and the AWP convention with equal vigor and tenacity.”

NewPages enjoyed our professional relationship with Vicki, looking forward to our annual meetings with her at AWP. Along with many others who came to know her as the face of MQR, we will miss her greatly in our literary circle, but look forward to seeing her again soon to fulfill our promise of beers in Ann Arbor!

The Rust Belt extends from the Great Lakes to the Upper Midwest and refers to the deindustrialization the region experienced as needs and supplies changed over the decades. As a Michigander, Detroit and Flint are well-known names from our state representing the Rust Belt sector. But on the tails of any discussion of decline and decay are examples and stories of revitalization and renewal, and these are common literary themes. Rattle takes a uniquely complex approach in issue #57, looking instead to the impact “the shifting political attitude of this region” had on the 2016 election and checks in to “find a first-hand account of what’s going on through the poet’s eye.”

Featured poets include: Joseph A. Chelius, Edward Derby, Heather Finnegan, Jim Hanlen, Zachary Hester, Donna Hilbert, Ananda Lima, Bob Lucky, Herbert Woodward Martin, Andrew Miller, Behzad Molavi, Al Ortolani, Li Qingzhao, Lee Rossi, Michael Sears, Matthew Buckley Smith, and Dennis Trudell, with a conversation with Detroit-based psychotherapist and poet Ken Meisel.

Emma Lazarus’ sonnet “The New Colossus” has gained new popular attention of late, thanks in part to White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller’s comments dismissing the value of its message to immigrants. But, before Miller, this poem engraved on The Statue of Liberty was the inspiration for Breathe Free Press, a magazine the Editor Deborah Di Bari says was “founded in great part to resist the Trump administration’s oppressive policies.” Continue reading “New Lit on the Block :: Breathe Free Press”

An exerpt from “Darling America” by Kelli Russell Agodon from the ongoing series of Letter to America published on Terrain.org:
…
Listen, the dolls in my dollhouse

are being deported and the landlord is typing
in all caps. How do we recognize humanity

when we’re just a name on a screen? An avatar
of a flag or resist, a red cap or a pink hat?

We’re holding the door for people, until we know
how they voted then we’re tripping each other

into the future, getting high off how fast they fall.
…
Read the full poem and hear it read by the author here.

Publishing fiction, poetry, and essays from the Department of English at Auburn University, Alabama, Southern Humanities Review celebrates 50 year in print with volume 51.1. The issue features an essay by Greg Varner; fiction by Craig Bernardini, Megan Fahey, Beck Hagenston, Ted Morrissey, and Hannah Pittard; and poetry by Jessica Rae Bergamino, Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello, Tarfia Faizullah, Joe Jiménez, Elizabeth Langemak, Kamilah Aisha Moon, Melissa Mylchreest, Sam Ross, sam sax, Derek Sheffield.

After the first few months of getting their online feet wet, Aquifer: The Florida Reviw Online is now open for general submissions. Writers are encouraged [as always] to review the publication content to make sure their writing is a good fit before submitting. “We are seeking top-quality digital stories, graphic narrative, creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry” the editors say. TFR  is also introducing a January annual $50 “staff picks” award from among all the authors published in the print TFR  and Aquifer.

Under the Sun online creative non-fiction annual offers teachers “Ten reasons why our online journal would be a good choice in your writing courses,” including the fact that the editors are teachers and writers themselves. They’ve tested Under the Sun  in their own classrooms to positive feedback from students. And students – you have a voice! Let your teachers know about Under the Sun  and other great, free access, literary and alternative magazines at NewPages!

Happy 40th Anniversary to Willow Springs magazine of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and interviews published out of Spokane, Washington. Issue 80 features approriate celebratory cover art by Marta Berens (“Crystal Structure”) of a small girl seeming to be caught in mid-dance, and inside this issue, the poem “Anniversary,” by Elizabeth Austen includes these closing lines: “I twist as if I, like the jellyfishdress, / am suspended, still / thick with possibility, still buoyant.”

May Willow Springs continue on another forty years – buoyant and thick with possibility!