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!
Money. Blink Ink #55 asks, “Is it the root of all evil or a reward for solving problems? If you build a better mousetrap will money beat a path to your door?” Joan Rivers said, “Money isn’t the key to happiness but I always figured that with enough money, you could have a key made.” Contributors sent their best, unpublished stories of approximately 50 words about Money to fill the pages of this issue, including Lisa K. Buchanan, Ben Roth, Lisa Marie Lopez, John-Ivan Palmer, Howie Good, Westwood Diehl, Kathryn Shuff, Karen Crawford, Obaditan Oluwakorede, and more.
The Spring 2024 issue of Humana Obscura features poetry, prose, and art by 87 new, emerging, and established contributors from around the globe, as well as interviews with poet Djana Kolaj and artists Rosemary H. Williams and Flick. Among the contributors for this issue: Jocelyn Ulevicus, Deb Baker, Lauren Carson, Sally Anderson Boström, Kristine Narvida, Ed Meek, E. D. Watson, Gabriel Welsch, Rachel Orta, Walt McLaughling, Zak Schafer, Stephanie Hanlon, Roberta Beach Jacobson, Amy Ratto Parks, Anna Lueck, Diane Elam, Abby Harding, Mary Anne Abdo, Pauline Le Bel, Eileen Begley, Melissa Laussmann, Jennifer Collins, Jocelyn Elizabeth, Tianming Zhou, Carrie Carter, Cristina Chaidez, Christie Gardiner, Ian Wells, Susanne Wurlitzer, Alison Reed, Elissa Greenwald, Jennifer Miller, Debbie Strange, Libby Saylor, Judith Rayl, William Ryan, Kimber Devaney, John Nizalowski, Kathryn P. Haydon, Katie Busick, Allison C. Macy-Steines, and Susan Ksiezopolski.
While The English Understand Wool by Helen DeWitt book is a couple of years old now, Ann Patchett recently revived interest in it during one of her weekly videos for Parnassus Books. New Directions publishes these storybooks, as they call them, that look like Little Golden Books from childhood and are short enough for readers to finish them in one sitting. This format reinforces the seemingly simplistic story DeWitt has crafted.
The main character—whom some call Marguerite—has been raised to appreciate luxury and valuable belongings. The title refers to the idea that only certain craftspeople or artisans can use raw materials well to create beautiful clothing and belongings. However, readers find out that Marguerite’s story is more complicated than first appears, and that she’s writing a memoir about that complicated past, one her publisher wants her to write differently.
Marguerite seems to understand little about the broader world, only aware of the sheltered life of luxury her mother exposed her to. There is little more to the plot than that, but there is much more to the book than that. Saying more would spoil the final third of this brief novel, but readers should know by now they can’t judge a book by its cover.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
In the Fall 2023 issue of The Iowa Review, readers encounter a broken oven, bad friends, EMTs, a sulking room, breast cancer, claw machines, and more with fiction by Hannah P. Thurman, Sophia Emmons-Bell, Emily Kiernan, Amber Blaeser-Wardzala, James Whorton Jr., and Alanna Schubach; poetry by Felicia Zamora, Kate DeLay, K. Avvirin Berlin, Chloe Martinez, Mag Gabbert, Dorsey Craft, Cindy Juyoung Ok, Jessica Greenbaum, Eric Roy, Steve Langan, Shelby Handler, and David Gorin; and nonfiction by Joseph Holt, Katherine Zlabek, Sean Bernard, Jason Sepac, Joshua Unikel, Lesley Jenike, Tan Tuck Ming, and Matthew J. C. Clark. Also featured is Jason Sepac’s visual essay “Polaroid Automatic 104 Land Camera.”
Lit Mag Covers: Picks of the Week recognizes cover art and designs for literary magazines, whether in print or online. These are chosen solely at the discretion of the Editor. Enjoy!
Hailing from the great north of British Columbia, Canada, EVENT has been publishing for over 50 years, keeping the flame burning brightly! Cover art: “Creatures in the Flames” by Ben von Jagow.
Lake Effect: An International Literary Journal is a publication of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. This captivating cover features art by Aidong Ning and design by AJ Noyes.
Luna Station Quarterly invites readers to “the greatest show in speculative literature” with this enticing cover image, It Can’t See Me by Hannah Elizabeth. Available in print or digital formats.
51 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
And like that the first full week of March is behind us and NewPages is back bringing you our where to submit roundup for the second Friday in March 204. Don’t forget paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. Our next eLitPak is set to be released on Wednesday, March 13.
This Winter 2024 issue includes the winners of The Baltimore Review’s winter contests selected by Judge Marion Winik: Eileen Frankel Tomarchio for flash fiction; Sasha Wade for prose poem; and Elizabeth J. Wenger for flash creative nonfiction.
Readers can also enjoy the full regular content, including poems, short stories, and creative nonfiction by Christopher Blackman, Mike Cooper, Elizabeth DeKok, Derek Dirckx, Jessica Hammack, Kirsten Imani Kasai, Sophie Klahr, Derek Maiolo, Franz Jørgen Neumann, Bob Ostertag, Terrance Owens, Hayden Saunier, Eileen Frankel Tomarchio, Sasha Wade, and Elizabeth J. Wenger.
Many contributors also provide notes about their work, as well as audio recordings. All issues of The Baltimore Review back to Winter 2012 can be read online at no cost, and content from the online issues is also published in annual print compilations. Founded in 1996, The Baltimore Review showcases writers from Baltimore, across the U.S., and beyond.
With the end of the month comes our update of all the wonderful new and forthcoming titles that NewPages has received from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles. You can view the full list here.
If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.
[Thanks to our friends at The Book Store on the Hill in Richmond Hill, Georgia, for the image – and Happy Birthday!]
The March issue of The Lake online journal of poetry and poetics is now available, featuring Arvilla Fee, George Franklin, Lorraine Gibson, David Illich, J. D. Isip, Matthew Johnson, Tom Kelly, Craig Kirchner, Ted McCarthy, Marian Kaplun Shapiro, J. R. Solonche. Readers can also enjoy book reviews of Hannah Stone’s The Invisible Worm and Philip Metre’s Fugitive Refugee.
The Lake‘s “One Poem Reviews” feature allows poets to share a single poem from a current collection for readers to sample. This month spotlights Marion McCready and Kelly Sargent.
Also included in this issue is “A Tribute to Louise Glϋck” by Cathy Porter, in which she writes, “I believe Glϋck always thought there was more to say, even if it wasn’t ‘pretty.’ She was grit and soul, the real stuff. And in the ‘real’ stuff she managed to find herself and persevere.”
Each month we offer readers a round-up of new issues with content information for our featured publications. The newest in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, artwork, photography, media, contest winners, and so much more!
Acclaimed poet Diane Seuss continues her trend of publishing a new collection every three years with her sixth full-length, Modern Poetry. The title comes from the first textbook she encountered as a child and the first poetry course she took in college. Many of the poem titles are simple, using terminology from that book, like “Ballad,” “Allegory,” “An Aria,” and “Coda.”
As in her collection, frank:sonnets (2021), winner of numerous awards, Seuss plays with form here. A poem called “Villanelle” isn’t one, but begins, “I dreamed I was reading a villanelle / in front of a crowd.” The next poem, however, is titled, “Folk Song,” and it tells a more modern sort of villanelle, or peasant song, “Of selfhood I worked so hard to earn. Of work I worked so hard / to avoid. Of the working class. My class. Its itches and psychological riches.”
Seuss engages the imagination with straight talk about modern life as a working-class woman and relates both her lived experience and her complex relationship with her art in poems like “Ballad That Ends with Bitch,” with her Speaker relating, “At age ten, I turned away from tenderness. / I remember the moment. A flipping of a switch. / My house is a cold mess except for that thing in the corner. / Poetry, that snarling, flaming bitch.”
Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss. Graywolf Press, March 2024.
Reviewer bio: Aiden Hunt is a poet, editor, and critic, writing freelance book reviews and critical essays for literary publications. He is the creator and editor of Philly Poetry Chapbook Review, an online literary journal concerned with poetry chapbooks, their authors, and their publishers.
NewPages Guide to Independent Bookstores in the U.S. and Canada is a great resource for finding local independent brick-and-mortar bookstores both in your area and as you travel.There is no better way to get to know a city than to check in with their local independent bookstore(s).
For authors and publishers, our list is a great resource for finding sales outlets and reading venues to promote your books.
For booksellers with stores, we offer free enhanced listings in our Guide to Independent Bookstores to help you connect with book lovers.
“Writing the Polycrisis” headlines the March/April 2024 issue of World Literature Today with a cover illustration by Edel Rodriguez and content showcasing contributions by nine writers, mainly from the Global South. Additional highlights include a conversation with Tsotsil filmmaker María Sojob, Mai Al-Nakib’s booklist devoted to Palestinian women writers in translation, and a moving tribute to Sandra Day O’Connor. Noteworthy interviews with Bora Chung (South Korea) and Patrícia Melo (Brazil), creative nonfiction by Erica N. Cardwell, and a book review section brimming with trending must-reads also enliven the issue, making it your latest passport to the best new reading from around the world.
The newest issue of bioStories (13.1) features twenty new essays, including three of their 2023 Pushcart Prize nominees. Featured writers in this issue include Andrea Abbot, Dina Alvarez, Michelle Cacho-Negrete, Sally Carton, Yoon Chung, Madison Christian, Phil Cummings, Ria Parody Erlich, Cathy Fiorello, Lynne Golodner, Maria Hewett, Brian Huba, Pamela Kaye, Joshua David Laine, Sydney Lea, Julie Lockhart, Alli Mancz, Anthony J. Mohr, and Paolo Paciucci. Cover art is by another of the featured writers, Bradley Wester.
The majority of the creative nonfiction in this issue is in the form of personal narratives exploring everything from an Irish report on COVID isolation to journeys into the natural world and from a doctor’s experience with a young patient at the outset of the AIDS crisis to sustaining the camouflage required as a young gay man in a Catholic High School in 1969. All of bioStories’ content is free and accessible to read online.
47 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Happy Friday! I don’t know about March, but February didn’t want to be left out of the equation and decided after giving us some unseasonably warm days, we were in need of storms to be sent off like a lion. Let’s hope March decides to come in nice and soft like a newborn lamb. If you’re neck of the woods is giving you crazy weather, it’s a perfect time to work on writing, editing, and hitting your submission goals this year. How am I doing on mine? I haven’t started them yet, so do better than what I am doing with our first weekly roundup of March 2024.
Don’t forget paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
While February is letting us know that it is, indeed, still winter, this makes it a great time to curl up with some new issues of literary magazines, doesn’t it? Don’t know where to start? Check out our updated New & Noted Literary & Alternative Magazines received during the month of February.
Each month we offer readers a round-up of new issues with content information for our featured publications. The newest in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, artwork, photography, media, contest winners, and so much more!
The newest issue of december features poetry by Jennifer Atkinson, Tyler Barton, Allisa Cherry, Dante Di Stefano, Jordan Escobar, Scott Frey, Albert Goldbarth, Tami Haaland, Hunter Hodkinson, Catherine Howl, Greg Jensen, Patrick Kindig, Christine Kwon, Winshen Liu, Shannan Mann, Kate Miano, Kylan Rice, Natalie Louise Tombasco, Donna Vorreyer, Laval Williams, John Sibley Williams, and James K. Zimmerman; fiction by Tamas Dobozy, JB Hwang, Erin MacNair, Ed McBride, Sean Theodore Stewart, Stephen Tuttle, and Christine Waresak; nonfiction by Gary Belsky, Chelsea Catherine, and Allen M. Price; and art by Jessica Diamond and Kyle Kogut with cover art by Mary Lou Zelazny, The Poet (2022).
Martyr!, Akbar’s debut novel tells the story of Cyrus Shams, the only son of his mother Roya—who was killed when the United States shot down an Iranian passagener plane in 1988—and his father Ali, who dies shortly after Cyrus leaves for college, as if he has completed his job of raising his son. Cyrus is an alcoholic and an addict; he’s considering killing himself; but he’s also looking for a sign from God, as he is considering being a martyr, whatever that might mean for somebody who doesn’t have faith in anyone or anything beyond him.
The narrative focuses on Cyrus, but Akbar intersperses shorter chapters that follow Roya and Ali when they are younger, helping the reader understand who they were outside of Cyrus’s limited view. There are even a couple of chapters that focus on Arash, Cyrus’s uncle, whose role in the Iran-Iraq war was to ride around at night on horseback, wearing a black robe, portraying the angel Gabriel to convince the dying soldiers that their sacrifice was worthwhile.
Cyrus has a few brief conversations with Orkideh, a performance artist in New York City who is dying of breast cancer, as she sits in the museum, talking with anybody who sits down with her. Cyrus has begun writing a collection of poems about martrys in an attempt to understand them and himself, and he believes Orkideh might be one.
While the story itself is compelling, Akbar draws on his skills as a poet to create images and sentences that will resonate long after readers have finished the novel. While watching Cyrus struggle to find who he is is painful, Akbar’s writing makes the journey well worth the effort.
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar. Alfred A. Knopf, January 2024.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
The February 2024 (7.1) issue of River Heron Review online poetry journal features works by Bethany Bowman, Cheryl Waitkevich, Hayden Saunier, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg, K.Lipschutz, John A. Romagna, Shannon K. Winston, Julie Murphy, Kathy Nelson, Autumn Newman, Jen Stein, Tamara Kreutz, Martha Silano, Candice M. Kelsey, Emma Bolden, Darcy Smith, Tom Farr, Jane McKinley, and an interview with Rebecca Brock. Also included in this issue are works by 2023 River Heron Editors’ Prize Winner Amanda Hayden and Finalists Nico Sica, Patricia Wallace, and Emma Wynn.
Travis D. Roberson‘s watercolor and oil on paper Feline at Sunset adorns the cover of issue 38 of Radar Poetry 38, an online journal of poetry and artwork.
Themed “Witness,” this December 2023 issue of Fatal Flaw, an online literary and art magazine, features the work of Bristol UK-based illustrator, designer, and animator Alex Dimond.
Qu contemporary literary magazine from Queens University of Charlotte Winter 2024 features cover art by Thao Stovesand. Available in print with excerpts online, this issue includes “On Agenting” by Fred Leebron in The Writing Life section.
Kiley Reid has said that her second novel, Come & Get It, centers around money; that assertion is undoubtedly true—the novel even ends with a stop at Target. However, like all good novels, this one is about much more than the purported subject.
The reader follows three characters throughout the novel: Agatha, a visiting professor at the University of Arkansas who has also written a book about grief; Kennedy, a transfer student who has come to the university in the hopes of studying with Agatha; and Millie, the Resident Assistant for the dorm where Kennedy is staying.
Every relationship in the novel has the undercurrent of money’s influence, whether that’s Kennedy’s relationship with her suitemates Peyton and Tyler, both of whom believe Kennedy has way too much stuff for a dorm room; or Agatha’s romantic relationship with Robin, a dancer who earns little money; or Agatha’s paying Millie—who hopes to save enough money for a house—to help set up interviews with college students for her research. Class and race also complicate these relationships, not surprisingly when money is involved.
Reid interviewed thirty college students to help create her characters, and her research shows. She’s not condescending toward them, though, no matter how many poor decisions they might make. As in life, the adults are just as likely to make equally bad decisions. Though not a polemic, this novel seems designed to disprove the theory of the rational actor in any situation, economic or otherwise.
Come & Get It by Kiley Reid. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, January 2024.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
49 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Happy Friday! I hope you are ending your week better than I am. We are back with 49 submission opportunities including calls from literary magazines, anthologies, and presses. You will also find writing contests, book prizes, and post-publication awards. Hopefully you can find a new home for your work.
Don’t forget paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness.
The February 2024 online open-access issue of Rogue Agent features poetry and artwork that investigates the question: “What is it like to live in the body?” Contributors to the newest issue (with an excerpt from each) include Shloka Shankar (“Lanterns / glow brightly on a summer night, looking / for something you could sing but you don’t.”), Denise Alden (“Imagine quaffing thirteen beers in an evening then popping / up like a daisy the next morning.”), Melanie McCabe (“The tongue abides, sibilant / as ever in its wise tree. I let it beguile.”), Trystan Popish (“on days like this, I do not contain / organs, bones, or veins, / but a body of water, coursing with currents / I can’t control”), Horus Balogh-Zanin (“The first scars on my skin the tiny homes of other living creatures.”), Justin Vicari (“Men sometimes lead two lives. I knew this from an early age.”), Melissa Fite Johnson (“Each year, I decide to forget. Each year, I can’t.”), Xiaoly Li (“It was your thirst / that could not be doused.”), Jeannine Hall Gailey (“Fifty is the year a woman changes from waif to wolf, / from virgin to witch.”), and Michele Sharpe (“My future snaps like a rusted latch / and hasp. I live happily severed after.”). Rogue Agent publishes new content monthly with submissions open year-round.
Absolution, Alice McDermott’s latest novel, is technically an epistolary novel, though it doesn’t read like one. It’s an exchange of only three, long letters between Tricia and Rainey, mainly focusing on Charlene, Rainey’s mother. Tricia and Charlene met in Vietnam as the war was beginning there, both married to men who worked for the American government, but who were not actually part of it or the military. Rainey was a young girl then, but she remembers Tricia and reaches out to her to inform her of the death of a common acquaintance.
Charlene is, as almost everybody describes her, a “dynamo,” always working to try to do good, whether that’s raising money for toys and candy for children in the hospital or visiting a leper colony to provide them with nice clothing. Tricia is much more passive, but Charlene is able to use her shyness as a way to get other women to invest in her ideas, passing them off as Tricia’s.
The novel portrays the women, even Charlene, as hemmed in by their gender, exploring their role in a place where they have no choice but to be, much like the soldiers, but for a very different reason. The main question of the novel, though, is who needs absolution and why: while the obvious answer is the U.S. government and those associated with the horrors of the war, there’s enough unspoken guilt in this world to go around.
Absolution by Alice McDermott. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2023.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
Marriage 2001: A Bruised Odyssey by J. W Young is a book of poetry & writings which deals with the confines of marriage when defined and marred by subjugation, domestic abuse, and censorship in modern times. It is Young’s first published literary work. Though many of the writings were destroyed, this book contains survivors. The poetic expressions served as a means to cope and endure. Marriage 2001: A Bruised Odyssey is a journey of hope, pain, grief and the difficult pathway to reclaiming a sense of self.
Who doesn’t love getting a postcard in the mail? Especially one with contemporary art and poetry and no pithy guilt about not being somewhere else. Postcard is the brainchild of Editor-in-Chief and Designer David Wojciechowski who was initially interested in making broadsides but fell in love with the smaller, more economical postcard.
“I thought it was a funky idea for a literary magazine to be printed in that form,” Wojciechowski says. “Then I began thinking about the postcards, the poems, being sent through the mail. I loved the idea of people sending a poem to a friend—not just a link to a poem, but a physical object they can tape over their desk or wherever they need it. I also have this image in my head of a mail carrier stopping to read a poem; that image kind of motivated me to keep going with the idea.”
In a Body, Emily Hockaday’s second poetry collection considers a body that “feels / less and less like mine,” and what it might be like to be “outside / of time.” The movement from corporeal to incorporeal suggests trauma and an “interconnected web of pain.” The poems, offered to readers by a mother of a daughter located at the crossroads of a “diagnosis” and “the other side of us,” allude to substance abuse, mental health, chronic pain, breast cancer, and a father’s death.
Given that, it is no wonder that the narrator declares: “I want to be like the Earth, / but I want to be treated better.” Seen via the “micro and macro,” the body of these poems is “compartmentalized” and “becoming”; the body is seen in relation or comparison; the body is seen “after,” “in,” “as,” “at,” “of,” “above,” “before,” “from,” and “through” “momentum” and “metamorphosis.”Poem titles offer the body “Becoming the Owl,” the “Body in the Spring”; “Body Above Water” or “Body as Wood,” etc.
The poet returns to the “Body as Tree” idea several times. When the body is seen as a tree, the mycelia connecting it to other trees is analogous to the “power” that neural pain “wields,” and the network of shared grief over personal and communal loss. Both the narrator’s diagnoses and the death of her father tell us the “body / is ephemeral.”
These poems remind us that we live precariously with “how many batteries / lie below the surface” and our “humanity’s failures.” Survival and recovery depend on “the knowledge that / anything can happen.”
Hockaday’s In a Body “understand[s] what it means / to be” in a “future … never / imagined.”
In a Body by Emily Hockaday. Small Harbor Publishing, October 2023.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.
The Sequential Artists Workshop (SAW) offers free weekly online comics workshops on Fridays, each hosted by a professional cartoonist who leads participants through a structured drawing and/or storytelling exercise. The series was originally started by The Believer (‘We Believe in Comics’).
SAW is an online and in-person grassroots, non-profit comics school located in Gainesville, Florida, founded in 2011 by indie cartoonist Tom Hart. “At SAW we help budding cartoonists discover their own path in visual storytelling. Students learn core comics techniques like storytelling, character creation, panel design, storyboarding, inking and lettering.”
Numerous working groups meet via their online SAW Mighty Network Community, and the SAW Certificate Program enrolls every fall for a nine-month intensive instruction in drawing for comics, comic storytelling, comics history, and more. Many SAW graduates from the past ten years have gone on to publish full-length works.
Pénélope Bagieu’s newest memoir collection of comics, Layers, seems to follow the standard course of symbolism in deconstructing a past through layers of memories, some connected experiences, and some seemingly random recalls. However, by the close of the book, I felt more like I had been layered in warm comforting blankets of someone’s past, perhaps with a few snags and worn patches along the way.
Bagieu’s style is disarming in its simplicity. This black-and-white collection focuses each frame on a particular character or character object with very little if any scenery and minimal props. The focus is on narrative details, some of which follow a particular arc, such as the life of a family cat whose bad behaviors the family puts up with like saints, Bagieu’s recounting her involvement with physical activities that stem from a misunderstanding in her youth, and a lifelong battle with heat – as in the utility.
Other stories in the collection center on Bagieu’s experiences with sexual harassment, abuse, and just general crappy behavior, whether directed at her or others. The collection was built upon journal pages from Bagieu’s youth, now rendered in hindsight as an adult, but Bagieu retains the sense of being merely an observer and reporter here for the reader to make their own decisions in response to the image sequences.
Adding to the layering effect of the reading is the fact that each segment is followed by a blank page. Somewhat luxurious, but essential to the reading, as with the closing of each piece, that blank page allows the reader to rest a beat and let the story and its meaning settle in before just plowing ahead to the next. This is especially critical to pieces like the harrowing “Florence,” which are so fast-paced, that an extra page of rest is needed for the reader to allow the weight of the narrative to settle.
The closing stories are of strength and gumption, ending the collection with an adult Bagieu wrapping her youthful self in a blanket in one and meeting up with her grandmother in the afterlife in another. These provide closure to the stories collected here, and upend the trope of dismantling the layers of one’s life, as here, the reader feels more layered into the stories and the experiences they provided.
Wrapped in these memories, the reader’s own now entwined with the author’s, Layers feels as comforting as a life well lived.
Layers: A Memoir by Pénélope Bagieu. First Second :01, October 2023.
Reviewer bio: NewPages.com Editor Denise Hill reviews books based on personal interest.
The verse and prose poems of Tina Carlson’s third collection, A Guide to Tongue Tie Surgery, give tender attention to the lives of girls and women in history, our communities, in legend, myth, literature, and the poet’s life. Our narrator is a daughter who reckons with her life as a child caught between an agoraphobic father and an irresponsible mother who requires “mother me.” Around the family table, “she is they,” burdened by “the weight of words caught in her parents’ throats.”
The poems center on trauma related to intergenerational abuse along matrilineal lines and what follows “after generations of war” along patrilineal lines, but everyone within these poems has their personal, societal, and existential “battles.” Throughout this collection, the poet endeavors to give voice to the oppressed and that which is “made of scars,” to figure out “what to give up and what to throw away,” and how to “untether the tongue.”
Though tongue tie surgery is performed to improve breastfeeding, it has lasting implications for the children and adults who undergo the quick, effective surgery. Results such as these poems, speaking from their wish “to be unarmored.”
In these poems, there is an alternative to sorrow; there is perseverance.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.
Changing Skies Creative Nonfiction Journal is accepting submissions for online and print publication. We accept creative nonfiction writing on living through the climate crisis. We also accept forms of art including paint, drawing, photography, and more! Read our latest issues and submission details at our website.
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Deadline: March 10, 2024 About Place Journal‘s next issue invites you to consider and reimagine all things West. Send us your prose, poetry, and visual art that conceives of the West beyond its conventional and colonialized framework to help us decenter traditional subjects and propagandized histories of this region. Learn more and submit here.
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I’m going to let you in on a secret: I have so many ghosts and nowhere to put them.
Map Literary and the MFA program at William Paterson University are thrilled to celebrate the publication of Fiona Lu’s How to Become the God of Small Things. Come celebrate with us! View flyer to learn more.
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Fellowship Application Deadline: February 17, 2024 MVICW’s Virtual Writers Seminars offers four separate weekends this spring. Take a deep dive into your writing with award-winning faculty online. Seminars include fiction, poetry, CNF classes, evening readings, open mics. Weekends can be taken individually or as full series. Fellowships Available: 4 first prizes (winners receive the entire series), 4 second prizes. Fellowship Deadline: February 17th. Register at our website.
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Event Dates: September 10-16, 2024 Join Memoirist/Fiction writer Carolyn Flynn, Fiction writer/Writing Coach Karen Leslie, and #1 songwriter Clay Mills for a 6 day/night immersive writing retreat at Spannocchia, a 12th Century Tuscan tenuta. Generative workshops, time to write, individualized feedback, open mics, wine on the grass terrace, Tuscan food, and a writer’s excursion to Siena. Choose your track: Storyteller, Songwriter or Hybrid. View our flyer and visit our website to learn more. Zoom Q & A: 2/22/24. Register on website.
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Have you ever wished you could attend your own private writing workshop that would teach you exactly what you need to know, at the right pace for you, and provide feedback and guidance in extensive one-on-one sessions? That’s Your Personal Odyssey Writing Workshop. It’s an intensive, personalized, one-on-one online workshop experience combining advanced lectures, expert feedback, and deep mentoring. View our flyer and visit our website to learn more.
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Registration Deadline: May 1, 2024 Event Dates: June 9-13, 2024 A generative and restorative writing immersion in County Kerry, Ireland with Carolyn Dawn Flynn, acclaimed novelist, memoirist and TEDx speaker, and writer and poet extraordinaire Jona Kottler. Let the soul-stirring mountains and wild sea of Ireland’s Ring of Kerry be your inspiration for this generative and restorative retreat for writers of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry. Whether you’re writing essays or a book-length memoir, short stories or a novel, poetry or screenplays—or hybrid!—this immersive retreat is designed to help you deepen and refine your work-in-progress, emerging with clarity and vision. Find out more at our website.
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Deadline: February 29, 2024 We want to see your work! Fiction, creative nonfiction up to 1000 words, three poems, and art and photography. Our mission is to explore the edges of things, to find the hidden cracks that let the light shine through. We publish quarterly and are a paying market. Have you got something for us? We can’t wait to see it! Submissions open until the end of the month. View our flyer for more information.
Want early access to our eLitPak flyers? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter! You can also support NewPages with a paid subscription and get early access to the majority submission opportunities, upcoming events, and more before they are posted to our site.
49 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
Another week, another roundup of submission opportunities to enjoy! Our unseasonably warm weather took a nosedive, and we had a mini snowstorm yesterday with some nice strong winds following behind it. So, if your neck of the woods is just as bad or worse, grab a cup of cocoa and hit the ground running with the opportunities below to help hit those submission goals.
Don’t forget paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. You can view our February 2024 eLitPak here.
Zine Lunch! presented by Sarabande Books is a free weekly online workshop “designed to be a fun and low-stakes way to make time for creativity.” Each one-hour session (12-1PM EST) is hosted by an author or friend of the press who guides participants in a uniquely designed practice. A full archive of over 60 recorded sessions is available on the publisher’s Vimeo page along with video directions on folding a one-page zine.
Each workshop is unique, the presenter offers a concentrated writing and/or imaging practice (such as collage). Not every session actually produces a ‘zine’ booklet. It seems the ‘zine’ concept can also mean a condensed practice in creativity, though some presenters come a bit ‘overprepared’ for the limited time, leaving participants to finish their projects afterward.
There is also an opportunity for attendees to share their work if they would like. It’s a friendly, welcoming workshop; I have attended a live session and have viewed about half of the recordings. The series is run by Natalie Wollenzien, Publishing & Communications Assistant, who is wonderful at introducing the presenter, participating, sharing, helping troubleshoot any tech issues, and continuing to curate a superb lineup for the community.
Steeped in the tannins of Heraclitus’s philosophy and the ecology of the Credit River in Ontario, Canada, Maya Clubine offers readers her chapbook Life Cycle of the Mayfly, a series of poems memorializing her relationship with her grandfather and father through the sport of fly fishing.
The “river bugs” in Clubine’s poems are the mayfly, the poet, and the men in her family from whom she learned how to tie flies and inherited flyfishing accouterments such as the waders both her grandfather and father wore. Via declarative and descriptive sentences, the movement of the poems is “catch” and “release”; their form is a memoir-epistolary hybrid.
As the poet writes her letter to her dying father, “mayflies lead the way like lanterns rising / into the air.” The precarious lifecycles of the people and insects point to Heraclitus’s philosophical declaration that there is nothing permanent except change.
Life Cycle of the Mayfly offers readers a family story; the poet’s and the mayfly’s families are “interwoven webs /.. rivers make.” The movement of the river’s waters, of the people fishing those waters, and of “mayfly wings” are the “fragile movements” of Clubine’s poems, movements that will “leave” their “traces” on your earthly heart, dear reader.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.
ONLY POEMS. You might think that says it all, but the name is only the beginning of this new online startup that curates a Poet of the Week every Sunday as well as a Poem of the Month for Substack.
ONLY POEMS was founded by Shannan Mann and Karan Kapoor as a way to honor the literary community they are both an integral part of – “the true fire of which,” Mann states, “is stoked by lit mags. Both Karan and I are writers who submit a lot. We wanted to give back in some way, to create a unique platform for poetry, which is an ecosystem we are most familiar with.”
The unique platform of ONLY POEMS includes a Poet of the Week series which shines the spotlight on a poet’s oeuvre of work (“or a small beautiful sample of it”) by publishing 3-10 poems by the same poet. “ONLY POEMS also features a detailed interview with the poet,” Mann explains, “which includes conversations around their work, the poetry world at large, and anything else a life of letters might conjure for them.
By mid-2023, according to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, 110 million people worldwide had been displaced by political turmoil, war, economic instability, or ethnic or gender-based discrimination. But the numbers tell just part of this harrowing story.
Journalist Selin Bucak’s first book, The Last Day Before Exile: Stories of Resistance, Displacement and Finding Home, zeroes in on the social trauma that typically ensues for asylum-seekers and refugees and makes clear that it is not only adults who suffer. As the World Health Organization confirms, migrant children often experience poverty, disturbed schooling, and racism in their new homelands, experiences that can lead to lifelong emotional difficulties.
“There are a lot of statistics about asylum seekers and refugees and it is depressingly easy to ignore the individuals behind the numbers,” Bucak writes. By introducing eight people who fled Afghanistan, Gaza, Iran, Morocco, Pakistan, Turkey, Russia, and Ukraine, she hopes to change that.
While their stories are not representative–all of her interviewees were granted asylum–they nonetheless provide a nuanced introduction to the dangers facing political activists, LGBTQIA+ people, feminists, and select ethnic groups by anti-democratic governments. Lastly, although the book sidesteps the issues facing migrants at the US-Mexico border, perhaps this will be fodder for a future volume.
The book is now available in the United States with free shipping through April 12 of this year.
Reviewer bio: Eleanor J. Bader is a Brooklyn, NY-based journalist who writes about books and domestic social issues for Truthout, Rain Taxi, The Progressive, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Indypendent.
So many lit mags, so little time! Save time and energy by checking out the January 2024 New & Noted Literary & Alternative Magazine titles received here at NewPages.com!
Each month we offer readers a round-up of new issues with content information for our featured publications. The newest in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comics, artwork, photography, media, contest winners, and so much more!
Lit Mag Covers: Picks of the Week recognizes cover art and designs for literary magazines, whether in print or online. These are chosen solely at the discretion of the Editor. Enjoy!
A journal dedicated to the arts from Fairmont State University, this newest issue (#50) of Kestrel features In the Garden of Grace and Chaos, photography by Jj D’Onofrio, on the cover.
Published by the University of Findlay, the 2023 issue of Slippery Elm Literary Journal cover features lush and mesmerizing photography by Don Patty.
lazy dork working (from the series “Confinement”) a 2020 acrylic painting by Émilie Gleason is a humorous cover invitation for readers to enjoy the Spring 2024 issue of Epoch, edited by students and faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing, in Cornell University’s Department of Literatures in English.
In Sarah Rosenthal’s chapbook, We Could Hang a Radical Panel of Light, the reader is offered the opportunity to view the manual labor behind making cut-up and collaged poems from a dream journal. Black text on a white background affixed to a gray page creates little rectangular light boxes, illuminating the poet’s tactile and associative compositional process.
The composition itself is lyric and elegiac. At its center is a “self / positioning,” figuring out “how to / squeeze into language.” This “implies trauma.” The reader is addressed directly by “Estelle meaning star,” though others or other aspects of Estelle— “I” and “she”— contribute to the conversation from “broken down / years.”
Foremost here seems to be a “child… / en route to woman,” experiencing “a pain that stretches the length of a body” or “one hundred fifty / … years.” The spare, pressured composition matches well with concerns about female identity and pain.
The composition emits a quality of the embodied and disembodied; though words have been affixed to pages and fixed in space, meaning and definitions are in transit. For Estelle, “who dots the sky,” we are her observers. We witness how “night’s / middle daughter / disperses” and is given “a new name.”
To read Rosenthal’s chapbook-length poem is to remind us that “the / dreams we have / [are] divining rods.”
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona, and three chapbooks, including Mind of Spring (Vallum, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. Jami’s writing has been honored by financial support from Arizona Commission on the Arts, British Columbia Arts Council, and by editors at magazines such as The Capilano Review, Concision Poetry Journal, Interim, Redivider, Vallum, and Volt, where Jami’s poems appear.
We succeeded in making it through January! How are those New Year’s Resolutions holding out? Well, if reading more was one of them – great news!
With the end of the month comes our update of all the wonderful new and forthcoming titles that NewPages has received from small, independent, university, and alternative presses as well as author-published titles. You can view the full list here.
If you are a follower of our blog or a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, you can see several of the titles we received featured. For publishers or authors looking to be featured on our blog and social media, please visit our FAQ page.
The title of Evans’ most recent novel seemingly relates to the house that Alice—the mother to the three daughters whose lives make up most of the novel—wants to build in Benin so she can live out her remaining days in her home country. Then there’s the pun on house, as in the word for a family line. Given the focus on Alice’s daughters, especially Carol and Melissa, that title would also make sense.
However, Evans wants readers to think of house even more broadly, as most of the characters are searching for a home of some sort, whether that’s in their marriage or within themselves or in their country, especially given the UK’s colonial past. That past comes to the forefront early in the novel, as Alice’s estranged husband Cornelius dies in a fire at his house on the same day of the Grenfell Tower fire.
The Pitt family’s mourning of their father and husband is complicated by the abusive relationship he had with all of them—emotional, physical, or sexual, depending on the wife or daughter. Similarly, the Grenfell Tower reveals how the UK has treated those who seek a better life there, whether the working class, the poor, or immigrants, serving as a metaphor for a country who says they care for such people, but then abuse and exploit them.
As with those who suffered from the Grenfell Tower tragedy, the members of the Pitt family have only each other to rely on to create a home.
Reviewer bio: Kevin Brown has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. Twitter @kevinbrownwrite
48 Submission Opportunities including calls for submissions, writing contests, and book prizes.
If you are out at AWP, we hope you are having a fun and informative time and getting lots of swag. If you weren’t able to attend, we have plenty of submission opportunities to keep you busy in our second weekly roundup for February 2024. Let’s all try to keep our submission goals going strong this year.
Don’t forget paid newsletter subscribers can get early access to the majority of submission opportunities and upcoming events before they go live on our site, so do consider subscribing or upgrading your subscription today. You also receive our monthly eLitPak Newsletter which features even more opportunities and other literary goodness. Our next eLitPak will be hitting inboxes next Wednesday.
The February 2024 issue of The Lake is now online featuring Bharti Bansal, Mark Belair, Frances Boyle, Bob Bradshaw, Lynn Hoggard, Laura Celise Lippman, Niall Machin, Beth McDonough, Ruby Hansen Murray, Michael Salcman, Alison Stone, Stephen Wing. The Lake also includes reviews of poetry collections, this month taking a look at Pippa Little’s Time Begins to Hurt, Dorothy Wall’s Catalogue of Surprises, and Maurice Manning’s Snakedoctor. “One Poem Review” offers poets the opportunity to share a poem from a recently published book, with Melanie Hyo-In Han giving readers a sample with “My Dear Yeast.”
