At the NewPages Blog readers and writers can catch up with their favorite literary and alternative magazines, independent and university presses, creative writing programs, and writing and literary events. Find new books, new issue announcements, contest winners, and so much more!
Celebrating its 45th year in publication, AGNI, published out of Boston University, takes its name from the Vedic god of fire, the guardian of humankind. AGNI’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry are a fire in the darkness, illuminating the corners of reality we do not see.
I barely knew how to start with the 2017 edition of The Baltimore Review. It is huge. There are 325 pages of poetry and prose, a culmination of four online issues from Summer 2016 to Spring 2017. A little history in the Editor’s Note gave me a better sense of what I was delving into. The Baltimore Review has been around since 1996 and became an independent nonprofit organization in 2004. Though based in the Baltimore area, the journal accepts work from anywhere, and publishes online to a vast audience. There is such a wide variety of voices in the fiction pieces. There are stories about ballet dancers, dogs, gardeners, a young girl in Hawaii caring for her grandfather, an imagining of the future of online avatar use. The journal also feels current. The cover is a gorgeous painting by Sughra Hussainy featuring a self-portrait obscured by the zipped lip emoji, a statement about how women are often told to remain silent, even now. The Baltimore Review is not a place for silence. It’s a raucous collection of talented voices, passionate about a wide range of topics. It’s 325 pages of fresh new work.
I absolutely loved the August 2017 issue of PULP Literature! If the quality of the short stories within this issue is any indication of the overall quality of the publication, then I cannot wait to pick up the next issues! PULP Literature contains everything I love in short stories and novellas from my favorite genres of fiction: science fiction, fantasy, mystery, history, thriller, and chiller.
The Spring/Summer 2018 issue of Black Warrior Review features the winners of their annual writing contest:
Nonfiction Contest Winner
Judge: Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib
“The Best Lighting for My Body Was at the White Horse Inn and Bar, Oakland, California” by Tony Wei Ling
Flash Prose Contest Winner
Judge: Joyelle McSweeney
“Auto-Da-Fé: Confession And Camouflauge” by M.J. Gette
Fiction Contest Winner
Judge: Nicola Griffith
“The World Holds What It Remembers Most” by Tess Allard
Poetry Contest Winner
Judge: Rachel McKibbens
“From a Poet to her Rumbero” by Sarah María Medina
Cover Art: “Undomesticated Interior No. 7” by Lisa Krannichfeld
Every year, the National Writing Project selects five outstanding student writers, grades 10 and 11, who have received a national Scholastic Art & Writing Award for poetry. These Student Poets are invited to share in a conversation and read their poetry. This year’s event, NWP Radio – A Conversation with National Student Poets, will take place Thursday, April 12 at 4:00 p.m. PDT / 7:00 p.m. EDT. The audio for event will be available the day of on the NWP Radio page along with their full archive of NWP Radio programs.
Journal of the Month is an incredible resource for writers, readers, teachers, students, librarians – does that leave anyone out?
As a general subscriber, you will receive a new literary journal by the tenth of each month, never receiving the same publication twice during your subscription. If you already subscribe to some journals, you just let them know, and they will choose others for you. Yes, there are human beings making these selections, not automated machines!
For teachers, Co-Founder Jenn Scheck-Kahn (aka one of the humans behind this marvelous enterprise), will work with you to select four magazines you’d like to teach. Each student will then receive one publication a month – based on a delivery schedule you develop together, so that the publications arrive in advance of when you plan to teach them. Instructors receive a free set of the copies they plan to teach. Now is the time to plan those readings for the next school year!
Journal of the Month is a super easy gift idea! If you have writers or readers on your holiday or birthday list, what better way to support their interests!
Subscribers can select from 4, 6, 8, 12, and even 24 months.
Try it! See if you like it (how could you not?!), then sign up for more!
FIELD Magazine Editor David Young writes:
“As FIELD 98, our Spring 2018 issue, arrives, it’s time to let you know that just two more numbers are scheduled: #99, Fall 2018, and #100, Spring 2019. Many have expressed dismay at learning that FIELD will close down, but both David Walker and I feel the need to free ourselves from the burden of editorship. Nobody thought, when the magazine began in 1969, that it would last this long and become such an institution. All good things eventually terminate, however, and fifty years and one hundred issues make for good round numbers.
“We’re hoping to organize a farewell event at next year’s AWP meeting. Meanwhile, we’re very grateful to our fellow editors, our contributors, and our subscribers for their support and enthusiasm. Also, of course, to Oberlin College for its hospitality. It isn’t easy to say goodbye. Thank you for caring and for loving FIELD all these many years.”
Thank you David Young (top photo), David Walker, and all the staff, writers, and readers through the years who helped make FIELD a vital voice in our literary community.
I still remember being in awe as I first learned about the RMS Titanic in grade school. I pored over books with clear pages I could peel away to reveal the layers of the giant ship, I unsuccessfully tried to imagine the wonder the public felt at the size of the ship with its pool and gym and cargo and grand staircase, and I repeatedly played through the 1996 PC game, Titanic: Adventure Out of Time, that takes place onboard. Despite all of this, there was still always an incomprehensible aspect to it—the ship, accident, and amount of lives lost. With years between its existence and my own and with games and movies made about the tragic event, there was something “unreal” about the Titanic. That’s where Anna M. Evans comes in.
When first opening The Science of Lost Futures, I was already familiar with some of Ryan Habermeyer’s works, so I knew what to expect. Or so I thought. Habermeyer’s mysterious fiction defied all my expectations. This collection of stories pulled me into the strange world where a woman can turn into a snow leopard, people admire a giant foot, and turkeys take over a house. These strange occurrences, however, become fantastic circumstances for Habermeyer to explore human relationships. In this collection of witty stories, Ryan Habermeyer places humans in bizarre and sometimes absurd conditions which creates a rich world with relationships at its center.
If I can own anyone
I ask for noneunlike orchids that cannot
grow unless paired.I don’t know.
I remember you lovedto swim. Everything I am
become water
—“Madrona”
John Canaday’s newest book of poetry, Critical Assembly: Poems of the Manhattan Project, easily reads like a story about an era of American history that impacted the entire world. The Manhattan Project, code name for creation of atomic bombs during World War II, referred to the New York City borough where the project’s headquarters were located. The bombs, however, were assembled in New Mexico at the Los Alamos Laboratory and tested in a desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1945.
By some stroke of luck, I had Philip Sterling’s new book with me as I laid in bed, sick from the change in altitude after arriving in Bogota, Colombia. As I choked down saltines and felt sorry for myself, these self-effacing, wise, and often revelatory poems delivered me from myself for a few hours. Continue reading “And Then Snow”
Dong Xi, author of the novel Record of Regret, began submitting writing to Chinese magazines when he was fifteen, according to the novel’s translator Dylan Levi King. Since then, Dong Xi, the pen name of Tian Dailin, has written four novels and is a writer in residence at Guangxi University for Nationalities, China.
Monolith by Jeanne Borofsky on the cover of Volume 29 Number 1 2018 welcomes readers to the party celebrating New England Review‘s forty years of publication.
Kourtney Roy‘s pouting princess portrait entitled “Mythology” from autopotraits I is an intriguing cover choice for Hotel Amerika‘s Spring 2018 issue.
Croatian-born artist Moondrusannah’s artwork, featured in the online 8.1 issue of New Delta Review, is from her Illustrated Dreams Diary, of which she says, “Any clue to What Girls Really Dream About? I’m just starting to find that out myself, and I like what I see.”
Join in National Poetry Month celebrations!
While supplies last, you can request a free copy of the 2018 National Poetry Month poster from the Academy of American Poets, designed by AIGA Medal and National Design Award-winning designer Paula Scher. The design celebrates typography and is suggestive of concrete poetry and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
April 26 is Poem in Your Pocket Day. Carry a poem with you and share it with others! The Academy of American Poets provides a PDF Guide to Celebrating Poetry in Schools, Communities & Businesses, which includes a selection of pocket-sized poems (also cellphone, snapshot sized). Carry and share!
Teach This Poem features a poem each week from the Academy’s online collection accompanied by commentary and interdisciplinary resources and activities. Good for K-12 as well as early college.
Dear Poet Project invites grades five through twelve (Common Core lesson plan available) to write letters in response to poems written by poets connected with the Academy of American Poets. Deadline: April 30, 2018 for consideration for publication on Poets.org in 2018 as well as select letters receiving a response.
ReadWriteThink, the educational resource partnering with National Council of Teachers of English and International Literacy Association, provides classroom activities, websites, and related resources for teachers and parents of K-12 students.
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry, is all online all the time, providing poetry, poet biographies, news and educaitonal resources for all levels.
Reading Rockets, the national multimedia project from WETA Public Broadcasting, has a full page of resources: Poets on Poetry videos; Learning Through Poetry links to resources and organizations; Poetry Booklists; Video interviews with children’s poets; ideas for librarians; and a full list of activities.
American Life in Poetry features a weekly poem with brief commentary from Poet Laurate of the United States 2004-2006 Ted Kooser. Print and online news sources can sign up to reprint the columns.
NaPoWriMo, or National Poetry Writing Month, is an annual project in which participating poets attempt to write a poem a day for the month of April. Best to sign up early, but check it out this year to prepare yourself for next!
If this data shared by Iron City Magazine doesn’t startle or sadden you, then you need to get woke: “The U.S., with less than 5% of the world’s population, has more than 20% of its prisoners, more people by raw number than any other nation in the world, regardless of size. Given that 1 in 135 Americans lives behind bars, U.S. prison complexes are like vast cities. If they were made into a state, it would be the 36th most populated.”
Iron City Magazine: Creative Expressions By and For the Incarcerated is an annual online and print journal devoted entirely to writing and art from the prison world, and one that we should all be reading. The name, Iron City Magazine ’s Marketing Editor Jacqueline Aguilar tells me, comes from the image the word “prison” conjures in most of us: “Even though most prisons are chiefly nowadays made of concrete more than iron, it’s still the iron doors, iron bars, and razor wire that most resonate with our image of prison life.” Continue reading “New Lit on the Block :: Iron City Magazine”
Works by winners of the Ruminate 2018 Kalos Visual Art Prize can be viewed in the Spring 2018 issue, with a still from Eloisa Guanlao’s digital documentary Noli Me Tangere featured on the publication’s cover.
First Place
Eloisa Guanlao
Second Place
Janet McKenzie
Honorable Mention
Joseph Di Bella
Information about each of these selected artists and a full list of finalists can be found here.
Pittsburgh-based literary magazine Creative Nonfiction is the winner of the 2018 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Small Press Publisher Award. The prize was announced in Tampa, Florida, at an opening ceremony at AWP’s annual conference and bookfair, which brings together 11,000+ writers, teachers, and small-press publishers. The other finalists were Fence, the Normal School, and Terrain.org.
AWP’s Small Press Publisher Award is an annual prize for nonprofit presses and literary journals that recognizes the important role such organizations play in publishing creative works and introducing new authors to the reading public. The award acknowledges the hard work, creativity, and innovation of these presses and journals, and honors their contributions to the literary landscape through their publication of consistently excellent work. The award includes a $2,000 honorarium and a complimentary exhibit booth at the AWP Conference & Bookfair in the year following the recipient’s recognition. The prize is given to literary magazines in even years; Creative Nonfiction was a finalist in both 2014 and 2016.
Creative Nonfiction founder and editor Lee Gutkind said, “It’s really nice to be recognized in this way. Creative Nonfiction’s small staff is incredibly dedicated, and does so much with so little. And thanks go to our contributors—the writers and artists whose work makes the magazine possible. Twenty-four years ago, we brought the very first issue of Creative Nonfiction to this conference, and I was so nervous … but we sold every copy. So, thanks go to AWP, too, for all their support over the years.”
Creative Nonfiction is true stories, well told. Each issue of the quarterly features original essays and illustrations; writing that pushes traditional boundaries of the genre; notes on craft; micro-essays; conversations with writers and editors; and more. Almost every issue includes a writer’s first publication, and the editorial team emphasizes a thoughtful editorial process and rigorous fact-checking as vital elements of the organization’s overall educational mission. Visit creativenonfiction.org to learn more.
Thema‘s cover photo for their Spring 2018 issue is “Question the Answer” by Kathleen Gunton, appropriately fitting for the theme: “Is There a Word for That?” Perhaps not a word, but a beautiful image instead. Upcoming themes in search of submissions: “Where’s the food truck?” (July 1) and “The critter in the attic” (November 1).
The cover and internal art portfolio of Georgia Review‘s Winter 2017 issue features a very different kind of garden life by sculptor Toshihiko Mitsuya: Aluminum. “Far from static,” Mitsuya says of his medium, “it takes on the feelings of its surroundings – the wind, the light an the hands that touch it.As a material, aluminum starts in a huge factory and ends in something precious yet transitive: the installation reclaims an industrial material back to nature.”
As unique as the vision through the cylindrical optic toy, Kaleidoscope is a publication “exploring the experiene of disability through literature and the arts.” Kristin Gehrmann’s “The Vial Keeper” reflects the Winter/Spring 2018 theme: Life’s Unpredicatbiilty. Now available open access online, readers unfamilar with this journal should defnitely check it out.
The most recent issue of Cold Mountain Review (v45 n2) features winners of the 2017 R.T. Smith Prize for Narrative Poetry:
Winner
“We will Never Mend This” by Jeff Burt [pictured]
Read the beautifully heart-wrenching poem and hear it read by the author here.
Honorable Mention
“A Sestina for Traveling Season” by Geetha Iyer
“To Shadow” by Matthew Winberley
Finalist
“Prologue” by Jude Whelchel
Gerald Plain’s photo “Spider Rock, Canyon DeChelly, Arizona” dizzying perspective draws readers into the newest issue of The Louisville Review (#82, Fall 2017). Inside, The Children’s Corner features high school sophomore Haemaru Chung’s poem “Waking Up.”
Looking forward to summer, I enjoy this cover image (also a bit dizzying) on issue four of Cherry Tree national literary journal published out of Washington College: “Children Running in Backlight (Dozza, Italy)” by Claudio Cricca.
The Art of Miss Fluff is featured in the Winter 2017-2018 issue of The Writing Disorder, and online quarterly of new and emerging writers and artists. Fluff is “an enchanting design brand created by artist, Claudette Barjoud.”
I was fifteen-years-old when my brother enlisted in the Marine Corps and headed off to California for boot camp a few short weeks after his high school graduation. My cousin and then my aunt’s fiancé were the next to join, and before the three of them, it was my mother’s father and my great uncles. In a way, it has almost become a family affair to join the military, so reading online magazine Collateral Literary Journal felt like a welcoming and comforting experience—it is edited and filled with work by people who “get” the lifestyle. Each issue publishes voices from those touched by military service in poetry, prose, and art.
The fiction reads realistically, coming off almost as genuinely as nonfiction. “Homecoming” by E.M. Paulsen tackles the subject of PTSD when a soldier on leaves visits a laundromat and ends up frozen in fear when another patron’s child begins to choke on a cookie. Paulsen’s details put us in his shoes, stirring up the feelings of panic that can be triggered at any moment, even when you’re just innocently doing laundry.
After “The Ferry Back” by Morgan Crooks, Crooks reveals the fiction piece—featuring the complexities of a family relationship revolving around a military patch—”draws its conflict from personal experience: a war never truly ends, not within one lifetime or many.” Like Paulsen, Crooks writes with realism, the family interactions authentic.
With fiction so genuine and honest, one can expect the nonfiction to follow suit. Spoiler alert: it does. Kay Henry in “75 Years Later, What I Still Don’t Know” compares her life with her father’s seventy-five years earlier:
At 8:00 in the morning, I’m enjoying an ordinary breakfast outside on the front porch [ . . . ]. Except for a distant neighbor’s tractor, all is quiet.
Seventy-five years ago at this time of day, bombs began to fall on my father. Torpedoes began to hit his ship. [ . . . ] The U.S.S. Oklahoma, struck in the first minutes of the attack on Pearl Harbor, began to list. Young men began to die. My father was twenty-two.
She imagines him over and over, weaving between her life and his past: “Not to feel guilty or superior, nor to deepen my own sense of loss, but to see both days with more clarity. To know my young father. To bring him home.” By picturing this day and trying to put herself in his shoes, she is attempting to reach a greater understanding of the young man who experienced an incredible trauma, using writing to help achieve this.
Travis Burke utilizes a similar device in “Crawling Uphill,” the prose moving back and forth between present time in Portland and his past tour in Afghanistan. Burke repeatedly dreams of Massoud, an Afghan soldier friend who lost his life. Massoud and poppies haunt Burke, showing up again and again, in dreams and when awake. Massoud’s words stick with him: “An ant crawls uphill to go home.” And so Burke climbs a mountain as if climbing closer to home and the peace found there.
In “Dear Judith Wright” by Lisa Stice, the speaker wishes for peace for their daughter who keeps waking from nightmares, night after night. Stice gives her inspiration for the poem, explaining that she feels Judith Wright, who “wrote in support of the people with the least amount of power” would “empathize with the military children who are too young to really understand or express their feelings.” Stice’s speaker recycles Wright’s own words in an attempt to give some momentary peace and comfort: “it is only our past and future / troubling your sleep.” I remember my own nightmares from when I was a teen and my brother was overseas in Iraq. Much like the speaker’s child, I would wake up from dreams where I’d lose my brother in varying ways, unable to fully explain the fear and loss experienced in my dream world.
Tami Haaland’s “Noon Lockdown” is as timely as ever, especially after yesterday’s school walkouts protesting gun violence. A school is on lockdown, “men with guns / two floors down, swat teams, / nine police cars. We plan what to do.” Some students panic:
One is angry because
her mother failed to text love,
so I kiss her head as I would kiss
the heads of my own grown children.
The situation ends up being a misunderstanding. No one is in any real harm, and they’re all free to leave, the speaker visiting her own mother, “whose mind has turned / to lace.” The two sit together, the speaker not sharing the day’s events:
I hold her hand as if
there is nothing to say. [ . . . ]
I don’t
tell her a thing she will forget.
While the speaker offered comfort to her students when they needed it, she is left to quietly process on her own. Life goes on after the panic settles. Haaland has a new book coming out from Lost Horse Press next month: What Does Not Return. The distributor’s website says the collection “examines dementia and caregiving,” and if “Noon Lockdown” is any indication of the type of work one might find in the forthcoming book, it promises to be a thoughtful, skillfully written collection.
Art by Laura BenAmots accompanies the issue, pieces from “The Battle Portraits” collection staring out with emotive eyes. Readers can close out the issue with an interview with the artist along with full portraits from the series.
Collateral gives a personal, inside look into military and military-adjacent life. The journal offers community and comfort to those connected to military service, and for those living completely outside this lifestyle, Collateral still offers a welcoming, enlightening experience.
[www.collateraljournal.com]
Founded last year at Florida Atlantic University, Swamp Ape Review has just dropped its second online issue. Issues are split into two sections, one featuring work by writers from South Florida, and the other featuring work from elsewhere. With the name Swamp Ape Review, one can’t help thinking of the weird and wild, and the editors don’t disappoint with their choices.
Continue reading “Swamp Ape Review – March 2018”Glimmer Train is one of those lit mags, making frequent appearances on “best of” lists and respected by readers and critics alike. Its stories have been selected numerous times for the Pushcart Prize and The Best American Series, as well as the O. Henry Prize. This issue continues providing evidence for these honors.
Founded in 2006 by Brigid Hughes, A Public Space is considered one of the finest literary journals in the country; its stories frequently grace the pages of The Best American Series and The Pushcart Prize, and its editor has won the PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing. The mission of the journal is to “seek out overlooked and unclassifiable work, and to publish writing from beyond established confines,” which it certainly meets in Issue Number 26. This current issue features a syllabus for an architecture studio, an art manifesto, the transcript of a deliberately unreadable speech by editor and writer Gordon Lish, letters to Saul Bellow, an essay on audience and performance, a proposal for a new means of displaying art in museums, notes on Main Streets across the country, and a travel journal, among the usual fiction and poetry contributions.
I was more than excited to dive into the February 2018 edition of Crab Fat Magazine. This journal is available online for free, making it super accessible, and much to my elation upon entering the website, I was greeted by a welcoming little gif sticker that flashes between statements of inclusivity like “This journal is queer positive” and “This journal is asexual positive.” The journal actively seeks out the writing of marginalized folks.
I will be first to admit that I can’t remember the amount of times I’ve gone into an art museum, looked at a brilliant or famous painting and thought, “I have no idea what to pay attention to.” As much as I wanted to make a connection, my knowledge of the nuances in lighting and space are more than limited. As the name suggests, Ekphrasis features poetry exclusively about other works of art of any genre. These poems attach a personal narrative or wild description to the work in such a way that I was able to get my bearings when I looked at the original piece. During a reading of this journal, it was helpful to have a device with internet access available so I could look at the paintings and sculptures as I read the ekphrastic poem. This journal helped me to slow down and think about art a little differently.
Along with commentary from final judge Naomi Shihab Nye, the Winter 2018 issue of The MacGuffin, published by Schoolcraft College in Michigan, features winners of the 22nd National Poet Hunt Contest.
First Place
“The Last Time I head Her Play the Piano” by Bethany Reid [pictured]
Honorable Mention
“Big Sky Drive-in” by Kathleen McClung
“An Ordinary Afternoon” by Sue Fagalde Lick
The Spring 2018 issue of Raleigh Review Literary and Arts Magazine features “Eve,” a lush collage by Geri Digiorno.
“Summer Rain” by Kristina Gehrmann on the Spring 2018 cover of Rattle poetry journal brightened my day, as did the special section inside the publication, “Tribute to Immigrant Poets,” which includes works by 18 poets who “no longer reside in their country of birth.”
“Challenging Transitions” is the theme of most recent issue of The Antioch Review. Like the theme, David Battle’s cover image could be broadly interpreted but also directly reflective of Robert S. Fogarty’s Editorial, “The Brooklyn Bridge and Other Transitions.”
The HitchLit Review: A Secular Literary-Arts Journal publishes online twice per year, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and would consider short, stand-alone scenes from plays and screen plays as well as visual art and cover design. “There are many literary magazines,” The HitchLit Review Founder and Editor Daniel Ruefman tells me, “but in a growing community of secular voices, few publications are focused on giveing them a platform. In addition to that, there are a lot of misunderstandings about what it means to be secular today (atheist, agnostic, freethinker, skeptic, etc.). By highlighting secular voices through literature and art, HitchLit hopes to confront stereotypes and demonstrate just how diverse the secular community is.”
Continue reading “New Lit on the Block :: The HitchLit Review”
The Winter 2017-2018 issue of The Main Street Rag features an interview with Michael Dowdy, author of URBILLY, winner of the 2017 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. In it, Dowdy talks about his lifelong love of books and choice of the “academic route” over his “recessive hillbilly” DNA strain, his shifting majors in college, taking a stab at the family business, how the poetry for URBILLY came about, and his interests from Appalachian Latino literature to “undocumentary” poetry.
The Editor’s Note in New Orleans Review Issue 43 (Themed: “This Hustle Is Not Your Grandpa’s African Lit”) contained the following announcement:
“Since its founding in 1968, New Orleans Review has had the pleasure of including in its pages the work of hundreds of writers, poets, essayists, critics, celebrities, and artists from around the world. We take particular delight in having published numerous ‘first-time-in-print’ authors as well as offering eclectic volumes on a range of topics and forms – from Alexander Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’ to Post-Structuralism, from Spanish-language film to Czech writing in translation, and from Science Fiction to a set of seven chapbooks enclosed in a slipcase. As the journal enters its 50th year, this special issue on contemporary writing from Africa celebrates our final printed volume. Both honoring its past and embracing its future, New Orleans Review will continue to publish new work in an expanded digital venue, which will also include free access to all 50 years of print issues.”
Glimmer Train has just chosen the winning stories for their Family Matters competition. This competition is held once a year and is open to all writers for stories about family of all configurations. Glimmer Train’s monthly submission calendar may be viewed here.
1st place goes to 
Peter Nathaniel Malae [pictured] of McMinnville, Oregon, who wins $2500 for “El Camino.” His story will be published in Issue 103 of Glimmer Train Stories.
2nd place goes to Gregory J. Wolos of Millis, Massachusetts, who wins $500 for “Boy Strangling Goose.” His story will also be published in an upcoming issue of Glimmer Train Stories, increasing his prize to $700.
3rd place goes to Chloe Higgins of Wollongong, Australia, who wins $300 for “Things We Cannot Say.”
Here’s a PDF of the Top 25.
Twyckenham is a name linked strongly with South Bend and Twyckenham Notes Editor in Chief Austin Veldman, who grew up there at a time when the economic slump felt by many post-automobile industry cities lingered on. “In the early 2000’s,” Veldman says, “the prevalent attitude of the town’s youth was not lost on me: I wanted to leave as soon as I could. The common words among most were there is nothing to do here.” And yet, not even a decade later, Veldman founded Twyckenham Notes in response to what he saw happening in his city, “a reemergence, the founding of a new identity,” contributing literature to help in this rebirth and renewal.
The twelve stories in These Are Our Demands dip their toes into potential futures and alternate realities. The characters in Matthew Pitt’s stories are vivid and sassy, and the writing is otherworldly. This collection lures you in with the promise of comfort, and then pulls down the straps and sends you on an unexpected wild ride. The stories have an unrivaled originality that is bound to keep you reading till the las page.
Rachel Rinehart’s new collection The Church in the Plains is a historical, cultural, and religious journey, as Rinehart explores her German Lutheran roots in a richly reflective and imaginative book of poetry. With a knack for rendering human peculiarities and foibles, Rinehart writes poetry with echoes of Robert Lowell and the confessional poets, but with a streak of heritage and flair all her own.
Jennifer Elise Foerster’s brand-new poetry collection Bright Raft in the Afterweather is an elegant, lyrical journey across lands near and far and times past, present, and future. A very gifted poet with an NEA Creative Writing Scholarship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Scholarship, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, Foerster, a member of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma, writes poems that are teeming with connection to the natural world, yet also aware of the dangers of human greed.
A thing is a cicada when it tends toward sexual disorientation
& I is an orient in the sense that all things wend toward me.
Aditi Machado’s debut collection, Some Beheadings, is a delicate meditation on the origin of thought. Somewhere between Wittgenstein and Rilke, with splatterings of Gertrude Stein, each page is a flower opening to reflect spring. “A wind blows, the desert unfolds.” “The desert melts, the sky’s glass.” Some Beheadings reads like bits of a shattered rainbow.
If I told you the quick plot summary of Tina Goes to Heaven, by Lois Ann Abraham, you might visualize a familiar movie reel of hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold stories, and then you might yawn and ask me what else I was reading. But you’d have it wrong, and I’d have done you a grave disservice. Continue reading “Tina Goes to Heaven”
Have you ever taken homemade food to a picnic just to have it ignored? Then you might recognize yourself in Vincent Chu’s story called “Ambrosia,” which appears in his first book of short fictions, Like a Champion. In it, our narrator’s girlfriend brings the sweet dessert to a barbecue with this result: “In the middle of the table sits the uneaten ambrosia, cubes of strange fruit drowning slow deaths in white glob, wincing under the summer sun.” But in this case, a simple sentence will turn the embarrassing situation around with unexpected results.
Terry Ann Thaxton approaches her third book of poetry, Mud Song, with a native Floridian’s familiarity. We know about Florida oranges, alligators, and hurricanes, and she doesn’t ignore these attributes, but there’s a lot more of Florida in her book that won the 2017 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry.
Okay, ready? Would you rather be completely covered in fur, like, head-to-toe, monster type of shit or, stay with me, stay with me, be completely smoothie-smooth in all of the right places: thighs, crotch, armpit, upper lip, neck?
— from “We Play Would You Rather at the Galentine’s Day Party”
Autumn House Press annually hosts contests for full-length manuscripts of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Each winner receives publication, and $2,500 ($1,000 advance against royalties and $1,500 for travel and publicity). The 2017 winners will be available for purchase next month.
In fiction, Glori Simmons’s Carry You, selected by Amina Gauthier, is an intense read, a linked collection of intertwined stories. Advance praise calls the collection gorgeous, moving, and deeply empathetic.
Dickson Lam’s memoir Paper Sons was selected by Alison Hawthorne Deming. Paper Sons combines memoir and cultural history, violence marking the story at every turn. Deming calls the book important and “beautifully crafted, rich in poetic image and juxtapositions.”
Alberto Ríos selected Darling Nova by Melissa Cundieff as the poetry 2017 poetry winner. The collection makes “new connections, new sparks, new thoughts as often as line to line,” and covers “grief, love, humanness,” moving readers.
While you’re learning more about the 2017 prize winners, be sure to stop by the contest submission guidelines: entries are now open until the end of June.
Available this month is the winner of the 2017 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry: Bridled by Amy Meng. Selected by Jaswinder Bolina, Bolina says of his selection:
Bridled is poetry as slow-burn opera. [ . . . ] The poems here offer, in reverse chronology, the story of a crumbling relationship between an unnamed speaker and her nameless ‘lover.’ In this telling, Bridled articulates a politics of self versus other, of body and gender, of loneliness and togetherness. It’s a collection you’re going to want to read from start to finish and then from finish to start.
A Kundiman Fellow and poetry editor at Bodega Magazine, this is Amy Meng’s first collection. Stop by the Pleaides Press website to learn more.
Glimmer Train has just chosen the winning stories for their 2017 November/December Very Short Fiction Award. This competition is held three times a year and is open to all writers for stories with a word count under 3000. The next Very Short Fiction competition will take place in March 2018. Glimmer Train’s monthly submission calendar may be viewed here.
1st place goes to Corey Flintoff [pictured] of Cheverly, Maryland, who wins $2000 for “Early Stages.” His story will be published in Issue 103 of Glimmer Train Stories. This will be his first major print publication.
2nd place goes to Irene Doukas Behrman of Portland, Oregon, who wins $500 for “Permission.”
3rd place goes to Itoro Udofia of Oakland, California, who wins $300 for “To the Children Growing Up in the Aftermath of Their Parents’ War.”
Here’s a PDF of the Top 25.
Deadline soon approaching! Short Story Award for New Writers: February 28
This competition is held three times a year and is open to all writers whose fiction has not appeared in a print publication with a circulation over 5000. No theme restrictions. Most submissions to this category run 1000-4000 words, but can go up to 12,000. First place prize wins $2500 and publication in Glimmer Train Stories. Second/third: $500/$300 and consideration for publication. Click here for complete guidelines.
The Missouri Review v40 n4, 2017 features intriguing cover art by Su Blackwell entitled “Heroines of Literature,” a finely crafted paper sculpture. More of Blackwell’s work can be viewed on her website.
According to Editor and Founder Robert Stapleton, Booth 11 is a “stunning collection of contemporary femal writers. The issue includes new fiction, nonfiction, poetry comics, lists, and interviews by such esteemed authors as Emily St. John Mandel, Joyce Carol Oates, Marya Hornbacher, Elizabeth Strout, Krista Christensen, Aubrey Hirsch, Brenda Shaughnessy, and so many more. This full-color literary journal offers a powerful argument for the strength of female authors working in American letters.” Beginning it all: cover art by Tara McPherson.
The cover image by Lucy Engelman made me open Issue 15 of Creative Nonfiction’s monthly publication, True Story, the opening paragraph of “This Is My Oldest Story” by Emily Brisse made me drop everything and just read. It begins: “In May of 1992, a little before the end of fourth grade, my best friend Kristy and I and a few others from our street – Ryan, Tim, Tom, maybe Naomi – hopped on our bikes and started riding. Most of us had younger brothers, and we left them at home. We didn’t tell our parents we were going. They thought we were in the basement of Tim’s house, playing Tetris, and although their anxiousness had relaxed by inches over the past two and a half years, we knew that any request to bike farther than the outlined boundary of our street would receive a firm no. So we just went.”
Olives are a succulent fruit, each containing a seed with which to grow more nourishing deliciousness. What better inspiration, then, for MORIA, the new literary publication from Woodbury University, where an olive grove once stood on the land that now houses this Californian educational institution.
Faculty Editor of MORIA Literary Magazine, Dr. Linda L. Dove, tells me MORIA refers to a special type of olive tree in ancient Greece that is protected by the government. “As a tree sacred to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, the original ‘Moria’ was believed to have been planted by her at the Parthenon and includes the meaning ‘to be part of’ something larger than itself. Here at the literary magazine, we recognize and celebrate that Woodbury University is a part of a tradition of learning that is larger than itself, just as literature and the writers who make it are part of a tradition of creative engagement and cultural production that is larger than any one individual alone.” Beautiful.
Continue reading “New Lit on the Block :: MORIA Literary Magazine”
The Malahat Review issue #201 (Winter 2017) includes two prize winning works:
Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction
Selected by Steven Price
“Faster Horses” by Katherin Edwards
Constance Rooke CNF Prize
Selected by Brian Brett
“Flaubert’s Hummingbirds” by Nancy Holmes [pictured]
Read more about The Malahat Review prizes as well as interviews with each of the winners here.
In her craft essay in the February 2018 #133 issue of Glimmer Train’s Bulletin, Danielle Lazarin tells readers to “Question Everything” as she does in her own drafting process. Her essay opens:
“On some days, my writing notebooks look like an inquisition, my pages topped and ended with questions: in all-caps, underlined, circled. Many are small: What do the kids want to be called? What is her work? Handwriting=obsessive or careless? Maybe she cries on the subway home, after dinner? But they’re big, too: What is true, the memory of it, or the moment? Is she lacking? DO WE REQUIRE HOPE? Though they may appear frantic, a series of scribbled questions aren’t signs of confusion or desperation but of sufficient curiosity on my part to propel a story forward. At every stage of my work, questions are my most essential writing tools. I use them to move through to the other side of murky. It’s only by stepping into that unknown and uncomfortable space repeatedly during my process that I can become more deliberate in the story I’m telling.”
Also included in this month’s GT Bulletin are Thomas Fox Averill’s “Writing Archival Fiction” and Aline Ohanesian “On Rejection.” The Bulletin is free to read online and have delivered monthly to your e-mail.
Willow Springs Issue 81 features this brightly colored image, originally a 13 x 13 silkscreen. The “inside cover” replicates this image, but with “Spokane Garbage Goat” replacing the issue number. I had no idea what this was, so promptly headed to Google, where I learned of the iconic status of said goat. Absolutely delightful, as is artist Chris Bovey’s work, more of which can be found at Vintage Prints.
Rebecca Berlin’s marker on paper “Circles That You Find” brightens the cover of the Spring 2018 (#26) issue of Copper Nickel. See more of her work at Rebecca Berlin Art.
Keeping with vibrant colors, The Fiddlehead Winter 2018 (# 274) issue features Monika Wright’s “With Powerful Intention” acrylic on canvas. In her artist’s statement, Wright comments, “With organic shapes, fluid light, lines and circles, I am employing universal symbols of unity, wholeness and infinity connected by lines, representing the boundaries which separate us, but which also highlights our shared path.” See more of her work here.
