NewPages Blog

Get Lit!
April 10-19, 2009
Spokane, WA

The Northwest’s best festival for readers and writers features author presentations and readings, writing workshops and panels, author visits to schools throughout eastern Washington and into northern Idaho, youth poetry slams, and more. Many events are free to the public. The festival, now celebrating its 11th year, is produced by Eastern Washington University Press.

This year’s authors include: Simon Armitage, Charles Baxter, Margaret Lippert, Paul Roberts, Jane Smiley, David Suzuki, Ellen Wittlinger, Pamela Aidan, Zan Agzigian, Glenda Burgess, Patrick Carman, Sarah Conover, Chris Crutcher, Claire Davis, William Dietrich, Kathy Fagan, Deby Fredericks, Sam Green, Adina Hoffman, Christopher Howell, Sandra Hosking, Sherry Jones, John Keeble, Jim Kershner, Melissa Kwasny, Laurie Lamon, Ken Letko, Phillis Levin, Buddy Levy, Samuel Ligon, Tod Marshall, Brenda Miller, Kelly Milner Halls, Kenn Nesbit, Laurie Notaro, Oliver de la Paz, Midge Raymond, Claire Rudolf Murphy, Brandon Schrand, Martha Silano, Gregory Spatz, Mark Steilen, Rachel Toor, Manny Trembley and Eric Anderson, Kathryn Trueblood, Jeanette Weaskus

Cancel out any idea of an Obama Presidential Library? Some think so.

Check out Jessica’s expose on the perils and pitfalls of online publishing: Now You Read It, Now You Don’t: A cautionary look at online magazines. A must read for writers and editors alike.

From the latest issue of Granta comes this essay, How to Write About Africa, by Binyavanga Wainaina. Should be required reading on at least a dozen lists I can think of: “Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about Europe or America in Africa. African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life — but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause…”

Tucson Festival of Books
March 14-15, 2009
University of Arizona

Featured authors include Jimmy Santiago Baca, Josh Bazell, Jennifer Lee Carrell, Billy Collins, David Eagleman, Diana Gabaldon, Brent Ghelfi, Temple Grandin, J.A. (Judith) Jance, Elmore “Dutch” Leonard. and Richard Shelton. Separate events for children and teens.

According to this article on Reutgers, Poet Laureate Andrew Motion believes students can’t “get past ‘go'” in such classics as Milton’s Paradise Lost without having basic knowledge of the Bible. Other classics that suffer in their loss of students understanding their full meaning also include Shakespeare, with something as simple as the title “Measure for Measure” (which comes from the Bible) being a lost reference for students.

Interestingly enough, Professor John Mullan comments that this lack of Biblical background may come from universities “accepting young people from much broader social backgrounds, with less frequent immersion in classical literature, than they had in the past.” Or perhaps more specifically, less exposure to the Bible and Christianity? (Though they do argue religious adherence is not a requirement.)

I’m sure it is a lament of every generation, but will there come a time when Milton and Shakespeare are no longer the “classics” to be studied? Will their references, regardless of how “archetypal” be so without point of grounding in student understanding that they become irrelevant? Me thinks it is only a matter of time…

Protests over one teacher’s inclusion of Ken Follet’s Pillars of the Earth draw encouraging support from her former students.

NYU’s Violation of Student Rights
Tuesday, February 24, 2009

From John K. Wilson’s post on College Freedom, “I was not a fan of the student occupation of a New York University cafeteria. I didn’t like the incoherent list of bizarre demands, and I don’t like the use of occupation as a tactic in general. But the response of NYU in suspending 18 students, who were arrested when the occupation was ended, is a gross abuse of due process.” Read the rest.

Check out the World Press Photo of the Year contest winners. The overall winner is a very telling image of our tough economic times: “Following eviction, Detective Robert Kole must ensure residents have moved out of their home. Cleveland, Ohio, 26 March”

Tom Lombardo is now Poetry Editor at Press 53. Last year (2008), Tom edited and published After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events (Sante Lucia Books), which features 152 poems by 115 poets from 15 countries. Tom is a widely published and respected poet and is a graduate of the MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, NC. His mission is to bring 4-6 poetry collections to Press 53 each year and to be the preliminary judge for Poetry in the Press 53 Open Awards.

Essayist Karen D. Culley offers an overview of black authors in American literature: African-American Writers: Legends of Literature

For anyone who has never attended the AWP conference and would like an overview persepective on it, check out Robert Gray’s post on Fresh Eyes Now. Here’s an excerpt:

“All those headlines declaring the book is dead and readers are an endangered species seemed to have little effect on the 8,000 writers, give or take a few hundred, who inundated the Hilton Chicago last week for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs annual conference. . . Was everyone attending the conference carrying a manuscript in their back pocket? Probably. Was the possibility high that few of those books would ever see the light of publication? No doubt. Did it matter? Not so much, at least not last week.”

Canadian author Margaret Atwood has pulled out of an international Dubai literary festival after organizers banned a novel by a British author because it contains references to homosexuality.

In a letter addressed to the festival’s director, Atwood said she could not attend Dubai’s inaugural International Festival of Literature next week because of the “regrettable turn of events surrounding” the book “The Gulf Between Us.”

Read more here.

Glimmer Train has just chosen the winning stories for their December Fiction Open competition.

First place: Cary Groner of Tucson, AZ, wins $2000 for “Elaborate Preparations for Departure”. His story will be published in the Summer 2010 issue of Glimmer Train Stories, out in May 2010.

Second place: Aaron Carmichael of Broomfield, CO, wins $1000 for “Driver Yu’s Penance”. His story will also be published in an upcoming issue of Glimmer Train Stories.

Third place: Aaron Cutler of New York, NY, wins $600 for “15 Shots”.

A PDF of the Top 25 winners can be found here. This quarterly competition is open to all writers and all themes, with a word count range of 2000-20,000. Click here for guidelines

Also: Very Short Fiction Award competition (deadline February 28)

Glimmer Train hosts this competition twice a year, and first place is $1200 and publication in the journal. It’s open to all writers, no theme restrictions. Word count must not exceed 3000. Click here for complete guidelines.

J.S. Tonutre, a designer for survival games for the newly fledged “aggression arcades” industry, gives his perspectic on AWP for Agni Online. Here’s an excerpt:

[WARNING: Do not drink hot liquid while reading, for any number of reasons as to why you might spill it on yourself!]

In AWP Convention Game regulations, a salutation, an exchange such as the above, between people who already know each other, technically counts for nothing. It must either be truncated—for economical use of time is vital—or else parlayed, turned to advantage. The point of play, if I haven’t made this clear enough yet, is to trade up, to advance the avatar, and the only way this can happen is when someone with a higher-stratum position (more publications, better publications, more ascertainable connections) sees you, and with that certification promotes you along the board. This is hardly arbitrary. For as everyone knows, being seen from a higher position only happens when there is something to be seen, though of course the appearance of being seen has value insofar as you might be seen being seen, and therefore score second-order points (described in game book) whether or not there is genuine substance behind the encounter. The calculus is very tricky, and point scoring is often hotly contested…[read the rest on Agni].

Provided by Amnesty International, this “Activist Toolkit” most definitely can be appreciated by anyone working with community and/or student activist groups. Provided fully online are helpful resources: starting a group, running a group, planning events and activities, and promotion. Each of these sections is loaded with separate and specific resources, such as how to recruit and keep members, how to run a meeting, how to lobby congress, etc. An absolute wealth of information, whether the goal is creating an Amnesty International group or any other activist group.

Narrative has expanded their current “Third Person” contest to include entries written from any point of view – first, second, limited third, or omniscient. The contest is open to all fiction and nonfiction writer: short shorts, short stories, essays, memoirs, all forms of literary nonfiction, and excerpts from longer works of both fiction and nonfiction.

The Southern Review announces an opening for a Postdoctoral Researcher (The Southern Review Resident Scholar). This is a two-year, non-renewable twelve-month appointment and carries a salary of $32,000 and benefits (pending final administrative approval). Preferred start date is August 1, 2009. Founded in 1935 by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, The Southern Review is published four times a year on the campus of Louisiana State University. For more information, please check The Southern Review website.

AWP 2009 has come to a close, and NewPages is exhausted and recharged all at the same time!

What great energy we give and receive during those chaotic three days of sessions, bookfair, readings, and dinner talks. And what a difference this year was from five years ago, when NewPages first began rolling the aisles among the journals and publishers, trying to explain our work and hearing: “New what? You do what?” to this year, hearing random shout-outs from people in the halls, “I love NewPages!” and overhearing one magazine editor say to another, “You’re on NewPages, right?”

Thanks to ALL of you. It can really be lonely work sitting here behind the computer all year, plugging away at links and trying to make the best selections for the site, hoping readers are finding the site useful and usable. Three days at AWP really helps us to connect and know that we’re on the right track here, and not just because of what we do, but because of what so many other people are doing.

As I said time and again when editors thank us for what we do, we thank them right back. NewPages could not do what it does without the great efforts of so many other people who love to read and write, and, like me, who love to help make those connections between readers and writers.

And this year seemed especially upbeat, even given the downward spiral in the economy. More so than last year’s AWP, I heard journal staff say they had gained subscribers – SO IMPORTANT – and publishers say they had sold out of books or at the very least were actually making sales this time. Not that anyone who goes to the AWP bookfair will regain their costs to go (at least none I know of!), but to know that there is support, there is interest, this is all very promising for the future of literature and of reading we have so often heard bemoaned.

I think it was a wonderful AWP, and I’m already looking forward to next year, Denver, Colorado, where I’d like to see this famed midwest hospitality continued and even surpassed.

More on AWP later. For now, a bit of R&R – rest and reading.