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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!

“Geek Girls” issue of Room

room-v37-n3-fall-2014Paying full notice to the current phenomenon of women pretending to be geeks to attract males and “the insidious ‘Idiot Nerd Girl’ meme,” Meghan Bell introduces this special “Geek Girls” issue of Room to be in despite of all of “that noise.” She writes, “‘Geek Girls’ includes Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Torchwood fandom, poetry inspired by comic books and fairy tales, as well as new work by acclaimed speculative fiction author Larissa Lai, an interview with horror writer and illustrator Emily Caroll, and comic book-inspired artwork by Sandraw Chevrier. Hockey nerds slip ‘lightly homoerotic’ fan fiction into the hands of a Canucks player, biochemists attempt to fit in with mathematicians and physicists, experimentalists and theoreticians, skeletons come to life , and zombies fall in love.”

The cover, by Sandra Chevrier, is a perfect selection for this issue. The artist writes, “The cage series is about women trying to find freedom from society’s twisted preconceptions of what a woman should or shouldn’t be. The women encased in cages of brash, imposing paint or comic books that mask their very person symbolizes the struggle that women have with false expectations of beauty and perfection as well as the limitations society places on women, corrupting what truly is beautiful by placing women in prisons of identity. By doing so, society is asking them to become superheroes. I use collage or loose and heavy textures of paint that make the woman seem to be emerging from the surreal world within the canvas. A dance between reality and imagination, truth and deception.”

In an interview with Emily Carroll, the issue of women interested in “geek culture” being called fake is brought up. However, Carroll says she has never seemed to have a problem with the issue: “I don’t think I’ve ever really experienced being called a fake geek . . I have friends who have experienced it because I do have a lot of friends who are involved with video games. I hear reports of them being spoken down to or treated like they don’t actually play the game. It’s definitely a huge thing. I feel like I’m too much of a recluse to get the full brunt of it. Maybe it’s because I draw Dune fan art that nobody has ever questioned my Dune cred.

American Life in Poetry :: Jennifer Maier

American Life in Poetry: Column 497
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

I’d guess everybody reading this has felt the guilt of getting rid of belongings that meant more to somebody else than they did to you. Here’s a poem by Jennifer Maier, who lives in Seattle. Don’t call her up. All her stuff is gone.

Rummage Sale

Forgive me, Aunt Phyllis, for rejecting the cut
glass dishes—the odd set you gathered piece
by piece from thirteen boxes of Lux laundry soap.

Pardon me, eggbeater, for preferring the whisk;
and you, small ship in a bottle, for the diminutive
size of your ocean. Please don’t tell my mother,

hideous lamp, that the light you provided
was never enough. Domestic deities, do not be angry
that my counters are not white with flour;

no one is sorrier than I, iron skillet, for the heavy
longing for lightness directing my mortal hand.
And my apologies, to you, above all,

forsaken dresses, that sway from a rod between
ladders behind me, clicking your plastic tongues
at the girl you once made beautiful,

and the woman, with a hard heart and
softening body, who stands in the driveway
making change.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2013 by Jennifer Maier from her most recent book of poems, Now, Now, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013. Poem reprinted by permission of Jennifer Maier and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

The Kenyon Review Transitions to Bimonthly

kenyon-review-v36-n4-fall-2014The most recent issue of The Kenyon Review will be the last one printed on the quarterly publication schedule as, after 75 years, the magazine transitions to a bimonthly schedule with six issues out each year instead of four. In addition, the issues will be slightly smaller so that they are easier to browse; “the format of the Review has come to feel rather unwieldy, even intimidating. It’s a lot of heft arriving everything three months,” writes Editor David H. Lynn. He writes that these plans have been in place for a while, and that they spent the last year working on an innovative design.

“The new Kenyon Review will be fresh and inviting,” promises Lynn. “…This reading is about pleasure, about relishing. But it will surely be easier to pick up one of these attractive, slender issues before bedtime or as you’re heading out the door. We’re surely not backing away from great writing, not relaxing our standards or our commitment one iota. Going forward, The Kenyon Review will faithfully publish literature that matters and to the standards we’ve proudly held all these years. Our future is brighter than ever.”

The current issue itself features the winners of the 2014 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contests, a credo from Joyce Carol Oates, and a selection of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and reviews.

Florida Review 2013 Editors’ Awards

florida-review-v38-n1-2-2014The current issue of Florida Review features the winners of the 2013 Editors’ Awards, which were awarded in essay, fiction, and poetry categories. As a new feature to this section, the editors invited the winners to contribute about “the creative genesis and evolution of their winning work.” Editor Jocelyn Bartkevicius writes, “Dan Reiter, whose story of Holocaust survivors, ‘All Your First Born,’ won the fiction award, tells of viewing a videotaped interview with his grandparents, who, unlike other family members of their generation did survive the Holocaust, and how their testimony inspired his writing. Lisa Lanser-Rose, whose braided essay, ‘Turnpike Psycho,’ revolves around a friend’s murder and her own harrowing encounter with a stalker, writes about transitioning from a simple retelling of a particular situation to an exploration of its deeper ramifications as a ‘story.’ John Blair, winner of the poetry award, writes of the links between his poems and history, autobiography, and memory, an eclectic continuum with such varied topics as atrocities in Somalia and Chechnya, the Roman Inquisition, leukemia, and hands-on labor in the garden.

Essay Winner

Lisa Lanser-Rose: “Turnpike Psycho”

Essay Finalist

Tanya Bomsta: “Traditions”

Fiction Winner

Dan Reiter: “All Your Firstborn”

Fiction Finalist

Rachel Borup: “Crash”

Poetry Winner

John Blair: “The Lesser Poet,” “And Yet It Moves,” & “Dirt”

Poetry Finalist

Tanya Grae: “Like Darwin’s Finches,” “Verbal Abuse,” & “Cage Sonnet”

American Life in Poetry :: Grant Wood

American Life in Poetry: Column 496
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

One of Grant Wood’s earliest paintings is of a pair of old shoes, and it hangs in the art museum in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where Wood grew up. Here’s a different kind of still life, in words, from Jim Daniels, who lives in Pittsburgh. The shoes we put on our feet gradually become like the person wearing them.

Work Boots: Still Life

Next to the screen door
work boots dry in the sun.
Salt lines map the leather
and laces droop
like the arms of a new-hire
waiting to punch out.
The shoe hangs open like the sigh
of someone too tired to speak
a mouth that can almost breathe.
A tear in the leather reveals
a shiny steel toe
a glimpse of the promise of safety
the promise of steel and the years to come.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem reprinted from Show and Tell, Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2003, courtesy of the University of Wisconsin Press. Copyright ©2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Jim Daniels’ most recent book of poems is Birth Marks, BOA Editions, Ltd., 2013. Introduction copyright © 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Creative NonFiction Craft Essays

The fall issue of Brevity: A Concise Journal of Literary Nonfiction features three new craft essays: “Consider the Prompt” by Dinah Lenney; “When Writing Will Not Make You Free: Resistance Training for Writers” by Judith Pulman; and “On Riding and Writing Boldy” by Monica McFawn. Whle Brevity’s nonfiction submissions are capped at 750 “brief” words, these craft essays go well beyond, allowing writers to freely share their advice and give us readers a great deal from which to glean.

The Understory

“Let me explain. I hunt for twins,” says Jack Gorse, narrator of Pamela Erens’s The Understory. “Not your run-of-the-mill fraternals, your IVF side effects, but identicals only, life’s natural aberrations. Nothing so far but Nature can make those mirror images, her rare gift of likeness in the world of infinite variety.” Originally published in 2007 by Ironweed Press and reissued this past April by Tin House Books, The Understory is a book about doubles, a search for second selves and other halves. It is about what it feels like to be alone and the lengths we will go to in order to find completion. Continue reading “The Understory”

Lake of Two Mountains

What is this life all about? That type of philosophical query may seem an unlikely undercurrent to a book of poems ostensibly focused on a writer’s experience of a specific place. Yet, when read as a whole, the direct, lyrical poems in Arleen Paré’s Lake of Two Mountains, weave a wide web of overlapping stories and impressions that casts a deep sense of wonder on the nature of particularity. Continue reading “Lake of Two Mountains”

Things To Do With Your Mouth

The reader has a lot of work to do after entering Divya Victor’s piece of expression, Things To Do With Your Mouth. The writing is a hybrid of text, speech, and performance. The body, the vocal cords, the mouth. This is about who can speak and be heard and who cannot, about who has power in the system and who does not, and we experience this from the side of those who are not heard and who do not have power in the system. Continue reading “Things To Do With Your Mouth”

Nonfiction

Shane McCrae in Nonfiction, a collection of poems, urgently requires readers to face both the visible and invisible truths of our American culture and society, present and past. Throughout these poems, the lyric voice of our culture and its various speakers emit a language that insistently stammers and stutters, resulting in poems that stun readers with pure lyrical beauty. The rhythm of the line, the stutter and repetition, so closely mimics the messy, rarely perfect, inner dialogues of the soul. Continue reading “Nonfiction”

Heart of the Order

For fans, baseball is poetry in motion. One team that continues to demonstrate grace is the Los Angeles Dodgers. Love or hate them, the team of Jackie Robinson and Sandy Koufax who has Magic Johnson among its co-ownership are still captivating, starting with manager Don Mattingly. As a Yankee in the 1980’s, “Donnie Baseball” and Keith Hernandez, his equal, opposite number on the New York Mets, gave daily clinics on the art of playing first base. No line drive or off-balance throw was too impossible for either of them. Continue reading “Heart of the Order”

Ecodeviance

I usually start a book review with some information on the author, including past publications, academic affiliations and other markers of importance that might help the reader slot the work into whatever framework he or she has for deciding what books are worth reading. While CAConrad definitely has the required pedigree, detailing it seems counter to the ethos of the book’s rejection of received knowledge in favor of lived experience.

Continue reading “Ecodeviance”

Elise Cowen

Elise Cowen is a name unlikely to ring a bell for any readers unfamiliar with the now rather legendary American literary phenomenon of the Beat Generation. Yet her writing will likely intrigue and warrant interest to a readership well beyond that demographic. Cowen’s brief life (1933-1962) proves rather remarkable for a young, unmarried woman of the era: she freely and openly explored her sexuality with multiple lovers of both sexes, including Allen Ginsberg, with whom she appears to have formed a deeper attachment, likely unreturned in kind; spent time living in both New York City and San Francisco, establishing relationships and friendships with artist communities in both cities; experimented habitually with drugs and alcohol; and dedicated herself to the pursuit of a poetic, intellectual life as much as possible all the while. Continue reading “Elise Cowen”

Corridor

One gets the feeling that she is always stuck in a hallway, or a “corridor.” But a corridor is not only a way of connecting rooms or railway cars; it also serves as link between two lands, and as a migratory path for birds. Continue reading “Corridor”

Broken Cage

Joseph P. Wood’s most recent poetry collection, Broken Cage, is a short book that takes ideas of symmetry and formal constraint to the extreme. Broken into three sections, the poems grow longer as the book progresses, and then shorter again in the third section. Wood focuses most of his energy on the triolet, an eight-line French form that includes rhyming as well as repeated lines.

Continue reading “Broken Cage”

My Favorite Tyrants

Smart, funny, tender, and always sharp with language, Joanne Diaz’s new book of poems My Favorite Tyrants is both elegy and celebration of those tyrants—cultural, historical, mythical, and personal—that shape our understanding of our current selves and the world we’ve produced. Divided into three sections, “The Perimeter of Pleasure,” “Elegy,” and “Metastasis,” the occasion for these poems is centered around the sudden and tragic loss of the speaker’s mother, a mother while dearly loved and respected, was perhaps, in her own way, a bit of a (shall I say it?) tyrant. Continue reading “My Favorite Tyrants”

Confessions of a Book Burner

Confessions of a Book Burner is award-winning poet and children’s book writer Lucha Corpi’s latest collection of personal essays and stories of growing up in a large family in Mexico and pursuing her passion for the written word. These twelve essays delve into childhood memories, cultural heritage, family, love, and the craft of writing. The essays explore Corpi’s Chicana heritage and offer a nuanced look at the intimate histories of Mexican Americans and their struggles straddling two cultures. Continue reading “Confessions of a Book Burner”

Zymbol Fundraiser Offers Limited Edition Print

Zymbol magazine was started in 2012 as a publication which joined art and literature inspired by symbolism and surrealism. In the short time they have been publishing, they’ve shared the work of artists and writers from over 20 countries, some of whom have gone on to publish award-winning books, opened solo shows, and speak at various conferences and festivals.

Now Zymbol is fundraising to support printing their publication, including some full-color issues, distributing copies to students and contributors. releasing eBook versions and free content on their website, and hosting free literary events a various festivals.

If they exceed their fundraising goals, Zymbol will co-sponsor awards for young artists & writers to further their craft through education, artist residencies, and exhibitions/publications.

kimonoLike a lot of fundraisers, you get cool stuff for various levels of support, including this limited edition fine art poster print, “Kimono,” by Susanne Iles – at just the $25 level. In addition to supporting a great literary/art organization, this seems a great bonus!

New Book from Jesse Glass

jesse glassBased on a widely celebrated case of senteenth century lycanthropy and embodying the Sadean idea of literature as a crime unlimited by time, space, and circumstance, The Life and Death of Peter Stubbe was From Knives Forks and Spoons Press comes Selections from The Life & Death of Peter Stubbe by Jesse Glass. From the publisher: “Based on a widely celebrated case of seventeenth century lycanthropy and embodying the Sadean idea of literature as a crime unlimed by time, space and circumstance, The Life and Death of Peter Stubbe was originally composed from 1980 to 1985 and published in a fine-press, limited edition by Birch Brook Press in 1995. . . In 2012, Glass returned to the manuscript, excerpted from it, and illuminated the redacted text using gouache, pencil, pen and ink, and the result. . . is a further added dimension to the original exploration of metaphysical violence, social chaos, night, and the autonomous nature of language.”

Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week

meridian

Geogrpahic Tongues is a photo series by Elisabeth Hogeman featured both on the cover and the inside of Issue 33 of Merdian. And yes, it’s really tongues. And yes, they really are quite lovely.

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slipstream 34

Aptly entitled “Rust,” this image by nyk fury sets the theme for issue 34 of Slipstream: Rust, Dust, Lust.

 
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room

Room‘s cover art by mixed media artist Sandra Chevrier is a beautiful expression of this issue’s theme “Geek Girls” (37.3). The piece is “La Cage aux fenêtres laissant entrées un soleil déja mort” (2013).

American Life in Poetry :: Karina Borowicz

American Life in Poetry: Column 495
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE

We’re at the end of the gardening season here on the Great Plains, and the garden described in this poem by Karina Borowicz, who lives in Massachusetts, is familiar to tomato fanciers all across the country.

September Tomatoes

The whiskey stink of rot has settled
in the garden, and a burst of fruit flies rises
when I touch the dying tomato plants.
Still, the claws of tiny yellow blossoms
flail in the air as I pull the vines up by the roots
and toss them in the compost.
It feels cruel. Something in me isn’t ready
to let go of summer so easily. To destroy
what I’ve carefully cultivated all these months.
Those pale flowers might still have time to fruit.
My great-grandmother sang with the girls of her village
as they pulled the flax. Songs so old
and so tied to the season that the very sound
seemed to turn the weather.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright © 2013 by Karina Borowicz, whose most recent book of poems is Proof, (Codhill Press, 2014). Poem first appeared in the journal ECOTONE and is reprinted by permission of Karina Borowicz and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2014 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

Gimmer Train Very Short Fiction Winners

Glimmer Train has just chosen the winning stories for their Very Short Fiction Award. This competition is held quarterly and is open to all writers for stories with a word count under 3000. The next Very Short Fiction competition will take place in October. Glimmer Train’s monthly submission calendar may be viewed here.

Luchette cred Kate Van BrocklinFirst place: Claire Luchette, of Brooklyn, NY, wins $1500 for “Full.” Her story will be published in Issue 95 of Glimmer Train Stories. [Pictured; Photo by Kate Van Brocklin]

Second place: Omid Fallahazad, of Framingham, MA, wins $500 for “Arrested.” His story will also be published in an upcoming issue, increasing his prize to $700.

Third place: Louise Blecher Rose, of New York, NY, wins $300 for “Deux Ex Machina.”

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

Deadline coming up! Family Matters: September 30 Glimmer Train hosts this competition twice a year, and first place has been increased to $1500 plus publication in the journal. It’s open to all writers for stories about families of all configurations. Most submissions to this category run 1200-5000 words, but can go up to 12,000. Click here for complete guidelines.

Structo Atwood Interview & More

Structo12coverPlainThe most recent issue of Structo features an interview with Margaret Atwood that took place in London after she gave the annual Sebald Lecture at the British Library. Interviewer Euan Monaghan follows up on the talk, entitled “Atwood in Translationland,” in which Atwood spoke on the “many kinds of translations” she has lived through in her life as well as her work creating a challenge for translators. Atwood and Monaghan also discuss play writing, the use of genre labels on Atwood’s writing (touching on LeGuin, Bruce Sterling, and slipstream), and of course, the process of writing. Twenty pages in all, this interview is no light fare.

Structo specializes in the true, conversation interview, and three months after publication, makes the interviews available on their web site. There now you can find interviews with Richard Adams, Iain Banks, David Constantine, Lindsey Davis, Stella Duffy, Steven Hall, Inez Lynn & Aimée Heuzenroeder, Ian R. MacLeod, Chris Meade, Kim Stanley Robinson, Sarah Thomas, Katie Waldegrave, and Evie Wyld.

Idaho Review Awards & Recognitions

idaho-review-v14-2014Awards and recognitions abound for the Idaho Review: Nicole Cullen’s short story, “Long Tom Lookout,” which appeared in our 2013 issue, has been selected for reprint in The Best American Short Stories 2014, edited by Jennifer Egan. “How She Remembers It” by Rick Bass, also from the 2013 issue, will be appearing in The Pushcart Prize 2015.

The newest issue features the Idaho Review 2014 Editor’s Prize, “Tough Love” by Janet Peery.

Contest Winners :: Arc Poem of the Year & Diana Brebner Prize

arc-poetry741Arc Poetry Magazine #74 features the winners of the Poem of the Year Contest. Selected from over 500 submissions, one winner receives $5000 – a daunting process even the editors recognize the “craziness” of, beginning with: How were we going to agree on what was the best poem when we sometime can’t even agree on what a poem is? How can anyone just have one “best” poem when so much of what poetry does is question the very ideas of aesthetic hierarchies and commonly agreed upon truths?

Alas, the editors were able to sort, select and agree upon “Consider the Lilies” by Kristina Bresnen. Judges, editors, and e-poetry readers also helped select other poets worthy of “high accolades”: Nancy Holmes, Matt Jones, Michael Lithgow, Steve McOrmond, and Jennifer Zilm.

Additionally, this issue features winning poems of the annual Diana Brebner Prize, open to poets in the Ottawa area who have not yet published a book. Judge Pearl Pirie chose Anne Marie Todkill as the winner and Vivan Vavassis as the runner-up.

The Black Dog of Depression & Alzheimer’s

Another commntary of interest from Psychology Today, this time from reporter and storyteller Greg O’Brien whose memoir ON PLUTO: Inside the Mind of Alzheimer’s is out this September from Codfish Press. O’Brien uses the Black Dog from literature – engaging refrences to Robert Bly, Homer, Apollonius of Tyana, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Winston Churchill – as a means of exploring the “demons of depression.” O’Brien writes about the misunderstandings of what depression means: “It is not a mood swing, a lack of coping skills, character flaws, or simply a sucky day, a month or a year; it’s a horrific, often deadly, disease. . . In depression, there is no off button.”

O’Brien’s book is also the subject of the short film, A Place Called Pluto, directed by award-winning filmmaker Steve James. In 2009, he was diagnosed with Early Onset Alzheimer’s. His maternal grandfather and his mother died of the disease. O’Brien also carries a marker gene for Alzheimer’s.

Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week

gargoyle-n61-2014

Gargoyle‘s covers are regularly striking, but this issue in particular for its lack of any identifying information about the publication printed over the image, “Urban Graveyard Crows,” © Donna Snyder 2010.

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cimarroncover188

“Disambiguation” is the name of this photo by Nosael Gleason on the Summer 2014 cover of Cimarron Review. Despite the vividly images prickly spindles, I was completely drawn to grab up this issue and run my hand across its cover.

 
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tar online-03

There’s just something hauntingly sweet about this cover image, “Birds” by Jennifer Balkan, on the second issue of The Austin Review.

Poet Lore Turns 125

poet-lore-v109--n3-4-fall-winter-2014

Established in 1889, Poet Lore celebrates 125 years of publication with this Fall/Winter Issue. Aside from the who’s who among contemporary poet contributors (nearly 70 in all), the journal includes a special selection of essays. Review Editor Jean Nordhause comments: “To highlight Poet Lore‘s contributions to American letters over the past 125 years, we’ve asked scholars and poets to contribute essays about aspects of the journal and its history.”

Poet Lore Essays: Melissa Girard “‘ Who’s for the Road?’: Poet Lore, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and the Open Road of 19th-Century American Poetry” Joan Hua “ Without Borders: Poet Lore’s Early Attention to World Literature in Translation” Megan Foley “ Lovers: A Tribute to Poet Lore’s Founders” Bruce Weigl “ Learning to Hear the Spirits Rumble: My Four Years with Poet Lore” Rod Jellema “ Finding the Undercurrent: Three Reflections on the Reading, Writing, and Teaching of Poetry”

The Longbox :: Collecting Comic Book Memories

AmazingSpider-Man050Got a box of old comics hanging around somewhere? The Longbox Project would like you to pour back over them, not to see what they may be worth for sale, but to have you share your memories of reading them, of collecting them, of keeping them all this time.

Yes, The Longbox Project is “a memory project for comic geeks.” Inspired by Max Delgado and Kevin Leslie’s own reminiscing through boxes of old comics, The Longbox Project started online in March 2013 with the mission: “To create the most comprehensive anthology of collector-focused memoirs anywhere on the web.”

The prompt is a simple one: “Why is this comic book important to you?”

The Longbox Project publishes interviews, personal stories of comic book writers and artists, and personal stories from any collector looking to share what made that book special, memorable, worth keeping in the box.

A Tribute to Alistair MacLeod

antigonish-reviewThe Antigonish Review Summer 2014 issue features a memorial section to Alistair MacLeod, including a tribute by Associate Editor Sheldon Currie, “Alistair Macleod – Memories in a Window” by Randall Maggs, “The Splendid Man from Dunvegan” by Reynold Stone, and three poems by MacLeod from previous issue of The Antigonish Review.

Westchester Review Writers Under 30 Contest Winners

The newest issue (volume 7) of The Westchester Review: A Literary Journal of Writers from the Hudson to the Sound, includes the winners of the 2nd Annual Writers Under 30 Contest, which is open to writers of poetry and fiction who live, work, or study in the Lower Hudson Valley and who are under the age of 30. The prize for fiction was awarded to Matt Nestor for his short story, “Bushwick,” and the prize for poetry was awarded to Kay Cosgrove for her poem, “Study in Blue.” Both winners received $100, publication, and two copies of The Westchester Review. Runners-up will be considered for publication.

Call for Contributions :: The Virtual Education Project

From The Virtual Education Project: One of the most effective ways of learning is to immerse ourselves in the cultures we study; yet, we often encounter problems when these cultures are separated from us by constraints such as geography or time. When studying various people, places, events, and works, students and teachers rarely have the resources to visit each (if any) historical landmarks pertaining to their subject matter, restricting both research and teaching to textbooks and/or an amalgam of materials from various resources. The Virtual Education Project (VEP) is a large-scale pedagogical undertaking directed at providing both students and teachers with visual introductions to historical and contemporary landmarks (worldwide) relevant to the study of the humanities. Thus, the purpose of the VEP is twofold: 1) to provide educators with a central resource that facilitates both teaching and research, and 2) to encourage independent inquiry amongst students, regardless of their locale.

The Virtual Education Project is currently seeking submissions for photo (or video—email for details) tours of domestic and international sites relevant to the study of the humanities. We are interested in tour submissions that explore local museums, author/artist homes, memorials, public artworks, and any significant cultural or community sites that will aid in the study and/or teaching of the humanities.

We welcome proposals for virtual tours related to the study of the arts, humanities, and sciences, including literature, theatre and/or performance, history, philosophy, rhetoric, and the STEM fields (e.g., the Nikola Tesla Museums in Brograd, Serbia, and Shoreham, NY). The list of examples for this initial Call for Contributions is a starting point, and we encourage you to submit a proposal for a site near you.

Potential tours topics might include (but are in no way limited to):
The Old Manse (Concord, MA)
Emily Dickinson House & Museum: The Homestead & The Evergreens (Amherst, MA)
W.E.B. Du Bois’s National Historic Site (Great Barrington, MA)
Walt Whitman House (Camden, NJ)
William Carlos Williams House (Rutherford, NJ)
Edgar Allan Poe Museum (Richmond, VA)
Thomas Wolfe House (Asheville, NC)
Mark Twain House (Hartford, CT)
Harriet Beecher Stowe House (Hartford, CT)
Ida B. Wells-Barnett House (Chicago, IL)
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum (Chicago, IL)
The House of Happy Walls Museum, Jack London (Glen Ellen, CA)
The Wolf House Ruins, Jack London (Glen Ellen, CA)
John Steinbeck House (Salinas, CA)
Andalusia, Home of Flannery O’Connor (Milledgeville, GA)
Kennesaw Mountain Battlefield (Kennesaw, GA)
Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum (Key West, FL)
Lamb House, Henry James (Rye, East Sussex, England)
Monk’s House, Virginia Woolf (Lewes, East Sussex, England)
Thomas Hardy’s Cottage (Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England)
Capela dos Capuchos (Sintra, Lisbon, Portugal)
The Houses of Pablo Neruda (Chile)
Vladimir Nabokov House Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia)
Borobudur Temple Compounds (Magelang, Central Java, Indonesia)
Nelson Mandela’s Capture Site (Howick, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa); Prison Site (Robben Island, Wescape, South Africa); and The Mandela House (Orlando, Soweto, South Africa)

Arkansas Review Celebrates Hemingway

Fifteen years ago, the July 1999 issue of Arkansas Review celebrating the opening of the Hemingway-Pfieffer museum in Piggot, Arkansas, and now, the August 2014 issue celebrates the museum’s 15-year anniversary. Guest edited by Adam Long, current museum directly, the issue contains “essays, images and creative pieces that evoke the Hemingway-Pfeiffer connection and updates the scholarship on Hemingway’s creative output during the years he spent as part of the Pfeiffer family.”

Literature in the Age of STEM

Well, if this isn’t a “must read” in our age of STEM and “how will that degree get you a job” mentality toward college:  The Second Greatest Psychologist of All Time  by Michael Karson, Ph.D., J.D., who begins his article , “One of the main reasons I switched my major in college from English literature to psychology was that I was worried about making a living.”

So on my list of great psychologists, I would put George Eliot, Shakespeare, and Leo Tolstoy near the top. I would literally prefer that my students read Middlemarch, the great tragedies, War and Peace, and Anna Karenina than any psychology book, even my own (except Skinner’s Science and Human Behavior). The Magic Years by Selma Fraiberg is a wonderful professional book about childhood and its passing, but Stephen King’s It and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn are even better and they’re more fun to read. The list of important works on attachment theory is lengthy, and you ought to know it if you want to look credentialed, but if you really want to understand attachment, you won’t do any better than Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin. There’s a terrific corpus of work available on family dynamics, but as glad as I am that I’ve read some of it, I’ve gotten even more mileage in my consultation and therapy work out of reading Junichuro Tanazaki’s The Makioka Sisters.

Lit Mag Covers :: Picks of the Week

It wasn’t my intention when I started posting covers here, but it seems I found myself in a “white” theme that worked out fairly well for the week.

nowhere

The cover of Nowhere Number 12, an online journal of literary travel writing, is a strongly composed image of balanced whites and beige. A very simple but striking image, a still life that moves the reader to travel to the inside.

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permafrost

This rainbow greyhound on the cover of the Winter 2014 Permafrost issue is a stand out. Of course, generally anything with a dog will garner my attention.

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literaryreview

The Literary Review‘s Summer 2014 cover is in keeping with the publication’s theme, “The Glutton’s Kitchen: Tales of Insatiable Hunger.”

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chagrin-river-review

To finish out the covers comes this one from the online publication Chagrin River Review, which features a painting by JenMarie Zeleznak.

Call for Non-Fiction Digital Stories

Afterlife of Discarded Objects is “a digital non-fiction storytelling project that explores the stories that discarded objects can tell about our history. The project will examine how people’s memories of their childhood games with discarded material objects inform the way they imagine the cultural landscape of their childhood.”

Curated by Natalia Andrievskikh, Fulbright alumna and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University, plans are to transfer stories “onto an interactive map where users will be able to click on marked locations and read stories from that location.” Andrievskikh will also reflect on the shared stories in the book that she is am currently working on, titled “Afterlife of Discarded Objects.”

American Poetry Review :: Stephen Berg

american-poetry-review

American Poetry Review September/October 2014 features a special supplement in honor of Stephen Berg (August 2, 1934 – June 12, 2014), with eight sonnets, a prose piece entitled “Hello, Afterlife!” and a selection of works “Versions of Poems by Zen Master Dōgen.”Also included are essays “What do I know?” by David Rivard and “Being Here, Like This” by Edward Hirsch.

Whitefish Review – Summer 2014

Whitefish Review carries a constant byline of “Art, Literature, Photography.” This particular issue carried a special theme of “fire,” and some of its words will continue to smolder inside me for a long time. Poetry, fiction, and visual imagery all have some very bright spots, but the nonfiction entries take the cake! Every page felt like it was making the most of itself to give pertinent information while remaining entertaining. Continue reading “Whitefish Review – Summer 2014”

AGNI – Number 79

Because Agni 79 begins with an editor’s note titled “Ten Broad Swipes at the Problem of Structure in the Essay (and Perhaps Other Genres as Well),” I first turned to the essays collected in the issue to see how they managed to meet Sven Birkerts’s argument for the arbitrariness of chronological structure. “As we all know,” Birkerts writes, “there is a huge difference between a narration that unfolds an experience in sequence (as they say in the movies, when the witness is being questioned, “Just start at the beginning”)…” Continue reading “AGNI – Number 79”

Bellevue Literary Review – Spring 2014

Published by the Department of Medicine at NYU Langone Medical Center, Bellevue Literary Review explores literature that addresses aspects of the human condition that relate to health, healing, and disease. In this volume, selections of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction recover images from hospital rooms and doctors’ offices, caregivers’ homes and nurses’ stations. They find language deeply rooted in the human body, with all its strength and resilience, limitation and vulnerability. These selections speak a common language with which most of us can identify and relate. Continue reading “Bellevue Literary Review – Spring 2014”

The Bitter Oleander – Spring 2014

The Spring 2014 issue of The Bitter Oleander is like a smorgasbord laden with curious-looking food that you’re not sure you would like, and which even seem a little intimidating. But egged on by your adventurous spirit and that childhood admonition at the dinner table—you don’t have to like everything, but you ought to try everything—you pick it up and discover that the rewards can be great indeed. The magic lies in the deft mix of the accessible and the unfamiliar, in the selections as a whole as well as in the individual pieces. Continue reading “The Bitter Oleander – Spring 2014”

burntdistrict – Winter 2014

One of the best young journals out there is burntdistrict, each issue promises tons of beautiful, thought provoking, and unique contemporary poetry and this issue is no different from all the rest. In its third year of publication, burntdistrict is still going strong and publishing some of the best up–and-coming and well-established writers from across the world. One of the most interesting poems in this issue is Alexander Lumans’s poem “What We Don’t Know About Natalie Portman Can Still Hurt Us.” This poem masterfully uses the narrator’s obsession with the actress and the narrator’s lack of knowledge about her to reflect how obsessed society is with things unknown Continue reading “burntdistrict – Winter 2014”

Cleaver Magazine – September 2014

Not having reviewed Cleaver Magazine since its launch with the preview issue, I felt it was high-time I check back in to see how it is evolving, and this issue did not let me down. Each contribution to the issue is well thought-out and carefully crafted. After reading Amelia Fowler’s “Space and Time,” I was surprised to find out that it is her first publication. Props to Cleaver for snatching her up, because I imagine there is only more publications to come for this writer. Continue reading “Cleaver Magazine – September 2014”

Conduit – Spring 2014

This issue of Conduit carries a byline of “Failing Famously.” It is roughly 11 inches high by 4 inches wide and is a visual pleasure with interesting color schemes and artwork sprinkled throughout. The physical layout truly lends itself well to the presentation of poems that might not have fit on more traditional 7-inch pages. Viewing a poem on a single page carries substantial effect for empowering the words! I would love to be able to give specific pages of reference to anyone interested in picking up a copy of Conduit based on this review, but I can’t. Editors made a very bold choice to use words associated with failure as their method of pagination! What some might call page 1, the creative team at Conduit decided to call “accident.” The last page of the magazine is called, “zero.” Continue reading “Conduit – Spring 2014”

CutBank – 2014

CutBank is a biannual literary journal run by the English department at the University of Montana. The journal is in its 40th year of publication and prides itself in publishing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and art from both established and up-and-coming writers and artists. CutBank proclaims they are “global in scope, but with a regional bias” that allows people joy by helping them to “discover and develop a fondness for the new work” that it features. In this issue of CutBank, there is page after page of phenomenal writing that your heart will grow fond to love. Continue reading “CutBank – 2014”

Drunken Boat – August 2014

For an online literary, Drunken Boat has a huge amount of content to read, from the regular fiction, poetry, and nonfiction to translations, art, a Greek poets folio, and a special section of funny flash. While there is way too much here to touch on even every genre, I simply offer you some of my favorites: “On Monasteries” is a piece of nonfiction that weaves together stories of clients Allison Vrbova had as a social worker with her desire to visit and her experience with Taize, “a magical place where pilgrims join the life of the monastery, eating, praying, singing and working in a community.” Continue reading “Drunken Boat – August 2014”

Nimrod International Journal – Spring/Summer 2014

Stories build bridges in the human community, and this issue of Nimrod explores the rebuilding and re-purposing of many such bridges. As Eilis O’Neal points out in the editor’s note, the focus of this themed issue is work that reimagines “fairy tales, myths, historical events, and family legends, as well as work that reimagines voice, poetic form, art, and even language via translation.” Life reimagined in the presence of death, temporal and spatial reality reimagined in terms of various binaries, old tales adjusted to newer realities, language reconceived with fresh nuances, all this and more is here. Continue reading “Nimrod International Journal – Spring/Summer 2014”

Open Minds Quarterly – Summer 2014

One of the older philosophies of critical theory maintains that good art should reflect reality or enlighten us about the real world. The variety of approaches and perspectives that are available promise us that we can always be surprised by the next work of the next author. Such surprises come quickly in this issue of the Open Minds Quarterly. A ‘new’ reality comes to us through the works of artists who have to deal with a world that we may not have experienced. All of the contributions to the quarterly are meant to create an awareness of mental health issues, and they all do it very successfully, whether the piece is poetry, photography, an interview, or an essay. Continue reading “Open Minds Quarterly – Summer 2014”

Out of Print – June 2014

Out of Print is an online magazine hailing from India that publishes short fiction in English or translated to English with a preference for literature that reflects the subcontinent. G. Sadasiv reimagines the end of Guy de Maupassant’s famous short story “The Necklace,” or, rather, he continues the story for one more final twist. The piece starts as a brief retelling of the original story over the phone and then delves into the continuation of the story as one character imagines it, starting with Mathilde regaining the expensive necklace she had returned. Continue reading “Out of Print – June 2014”