NewPages Blog

Are we still talking about our addiction to Facebook despite its evils? Apparently, yes, we still are, with New England Review Editor Carolyn Kuebler contributing a new perspective to the conversation – especially for writers. In her editorial for Issue 38.2, she addresses some of the known issues with the social media platform, and comments that “Facebook seems to present a special kind of hell for writers” in that it “offers the possibility of an audience beyond one’s circle of friends (the real kind)—and even better, an audience that responds immediately, positively, and in great numbers.”

But, alas, what about when there is NO response? What about the silence of a Facebook post? “Writers have always known that theirs is a lonely art,” Kuebler comments, “but after spending time on Facebook it’s as if we have to learn this all over again. We have to remember that the audience for literature is largely silent; it takes its time.”

Read the full editorial here, and Kuebler’s closing comment of appreciation for writers, even if it is only ever offered in silence.

Issue 43 of New Orleans Review is themed “The African Literary Hustle” and opens with the editorial by Mukoma Wa Ngugi and Laura T. Murphy, “This Hustle is Not Your Grandpa’s African Lit.” The two issue editors examine the historical ‘presentation’ of African literature published in Western culture as “all too often realist, in English, and in the spirit of Chinua Achebe. But romance, science fiction, fantasy, epic, experimental poetry, satire, and political allegory all find expression in Africa, though not necessarily publication.” The editors confront this disparity, “Those who are called to write often have to hustle to get recognition by writing a coming-of-age colonial encounter tale or hustle even harder to have their unique voices heard. So the post-Achebe generation writer faces all sorts of firewalls.”

Thus, the call went out for this issue, and writers responded with the editors hoping “to provoke some interesting and unpredictable writing and thinking that would reflect and respond to the spirit of the hustle.” Oddly enough, the editors note, “eighty percent of the submissions were from white non-African-identifying writers who thought they could hustle their way into a volume of African literature and had no qualms about it.” Seriously.

The editors close on the comment, “But what is African literature? Is there, can there be, was there ever and African literature? In asking you have answered your question. African literature is a question. It is an open question that invites, and has to keep on inviting, different geographies, languages and forms.”

Thus, this issue of New Orleans Review: The African Literary Hustle.

The Southampton Review Editor Lou Ann Walker recounts the day, ten years ago, when Robert Reeves, who would be rebuilding the MFA Creative Writing Program at Stony Brook University, opined that a “distinguished MFA program” should likewise have a “distinguished literary journal as its intellectual and creative center.” Then he asked Lou Ann: “Do you happen to know anyone who might be interested in founding and editing a literary review?” She writes that it had been her “secret dream” to do just that. Ten years later, Walker has created exactly the publication worthy of the university’s writing program – and vice versa! Publishing two issues per year, readers can also find selections available to read on the TSR website.

Hanging Loose, published by Hanging Loose Press since 1966, includes the section “Writers of High School Age” in each issue. Featured in issue 108 are two young poets who contribute several works each.

Elizabeth Girdharry writes of math and sciences with “Filling Empty Spaces,” including the lines “Mathematical formulas, / on how to stay tangent to the line, / somehow slipped my mind,” and “There Was Geometry” begins: “There is geometry in my junk drawer.” And comes back around to, “More importantly, / there is geometry in my junk drawer. / Angles and tangents twist out of circles / the same way you smooth back flyaway wisps of baby hair / when you’re pondering a hard science theory.”

Elise Wing crafts strong imagery to draw her readers in. “The Microscope” begins “Dead diatom / Crisp as a leaf skeleton,” and “The Living That Terrifies” begins with the amusing but poignant, “Your ears are the trees for egrets to nest in,” and “Tomorrow, the Seagulls” starts, “The future is as frightening as a three-headed hyena.”

NewPages includes Hanging Loose in our Young Writers Guide where we list publications written by and for young writers and readers as well as a vetted, ad-free list of contests for young writers.

In celebration of TLR’s 40 years of publication and “looking toward the future,” Sena Jeter Naslund writes in the Editor’s Note, four guest editors all under the age of forty were invited to select works for this first issue year 41. “Each of them is a graduate, in various areas of concentration, of the Spalding University low-residency MFA in Writing Program,” notes Naslund. Making the selections: Eva Sage Gordon, nonfiction editor; Ellyn Lichvar, poetry and Children’s Corner editor; Amina S. McIntyre, drama editor; Flora K. Schildknecht, fiction editor.

The summer 2017 issue of Rattle features a tribute to poets living with mental illness. “An estimated 26% of Americans experience mental illness in a given year,” write the editors, “and we wanted to acknowledge and explore that reality, while also helping to diminish the associated cultural stigma of these illnesses. [. . . ] While the topics of the poems themselves vary greatly, each of the poets live with some form of depressive, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, bi-polar, post-traumatic stress, or eating disorder—all of discussed openly and bravely in their contributor notes. In the conversation section, we talk about mental illness and a wide range of other topics with Francesca Bell.” [Cover Art by Jasmine C. Bell.]

Artists say things with objects, images, symbols, and metaphors that are difficult, if not impossible, to express any other way.
Artists have tremendous courage, a necessary quality when it comes to expressing personal dreams and emotions so all can see them.
Artists break down barriers of thought, time, custom, and expectation.
Artists make the intangible tangible.
Artists see the trees and the forest.
Artists challenge us to see and understand our world differently than we do now.
Artists are born with open hands and open hearts, courageously willing to accept whatever is given.
Imagine our world without artists, without their ability to see, dream, express, break down barriers, and challenge the rest of us to imagine our world differently.

Excerpted from Christine Brooks Cote, “Imagine Our World Without Artists,” from Still Point Arts Quarterly, Summer 2017.

The June 2017 issue of Poetry features photographs and artifacts from the Poetry Foundation’s forthcoming exhibit, Matter in the Margins: Gwendolyn Brooks at 100, curated by Anna Chen, June 16–August 25, 2017.

Chen writes: “Gwendolyn Brooks’s literary archives, now in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, reveal that she clustered and bundled papers as well as life experiences: she tucked notes inside pieces of paper folded into makeshift pockets, slid photographs behind other photographs in albums, and pasted clippings on top of each other in scrapbooks. She added further layers of meaning with her copious annotations, like the detailed notes she wrote on the backs of many of her photographs (given in quotation marks in the accompanying images) in order to preserve the knowledge of the people and events they captured.”

Read Chen’s full introduction to this feature as well as view a slideshow of the photographs and artifacts here.

Fusion is Prarie Schooner’s online series, which Editor Kwame Dawes says, “is an opportunity to create dialog across geographical spaces and cultures through the sharing of art and writing. It represents an effort to create bridges between the many silos that separate us, and to do so by asking writers to think about the very things that connect us and distinguish us in different parts of the world.” Issue #11 is a collaboration with Ugandan poetry and art on the theme “Shoes.”

In her essay, “Ngato! Ngato! Shoes!” Ugandan Poet Beverley Nambozo Nsengiyunva [pictured] writes, “It’s often the most silent shoes that are the strongest. It’s the shoes that allow thieves to stalk upon unsuspecting people and the shoes that enable a cheetah to pounce on its prey. The silent shoes do not desire unnecessary attention to detract them from their mission.”

Read the full issue here.

In his introduction to Issue 63 (Spring 2017) of Creative Nonfiction, themed “How We Teach,” Lee Gutkind writes about attending a yoga and creative writing retreat where he is teaching creative nonfiction to an “ecclectic” group of attendees. Just as varied is the group’s experience with yoga, which the yoga instructor misjudged by giving too rigorous of a few first sessions. Gutkind writes that the instructor backed down after that, teaching technique and form basics, regardless of the participant’s experience level. “We hard-core students thought we knew all of this stuff—some of us have been practicing for decades—so we were somewhat apprehensive at first. But as the lesson progressed, we began to realize that going back to the basics and relearning what we thought we knew was quite helpful.”

Gutkind likens this to our need to review our own practice, weed out bad habits we may have developed over the years, and get back in tune with the basics: “In yoga or writing—or in practicing any art or skill—it does not hurt to start over once in a while just to make sure you know what you think you know. In fact, it occurs to me this is also why teaching can be reinvigorating—I know many writers who make their primary living by teaching and who often find their inspiration in writing prompts given to their students. But maybe there’s also something about focusing on the basics that can inspire innovation and transformation.”

Read the full editorial here.