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!
The title and cover art for Wordrunner eChapbook‘s 2020 anthology reflect a future more uncertain than usual, as well as hopefulness as we intend to publish more excellent writing in the next decade. Fiction by Cathy Cruise, Sam Gridley, Ashley Jeffalone, Lazar Trubman, and more; nonfiction by Lisbeth Davidoff, Kandi Maxwell, and others; poetry by Michelle Lerner and a prose poem by Robert Clinton.
Sky Island Journal’s stunning 12th issue features poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction from contributors around the globe. Accomplished, well-established authors are published—side by side—with fresh, emerging voices.
The new issue of Orson’s Review is out. In this issue: “Mia” an excerpt by Kayla Eason, “Run Over Dog” by Brian Moore, “The Kushcopia” by Jordan Dilley, “The Little General,” by Joyce Polance, and “Four Years Later” by Michael Bourne.
In the new issue of Cumberland River Review, find fiction by Rebecca Reynolds; art by Brooke Shaden; and poetry by Corinna McClanahan Shroeder, E. B. Schnepp, Elisabeth Murawski, David Landon, Alice Friman, Julie L. Moore, and more.
Hole In The Head Review is a new online literary magazine founded in 2020 “on the perilous coast of Maine” where the “sun rises on the United States and darkness falls first.” Their debut issue, published earlier this year, features new works from Michael Hettich, Larkin Warren, Frankie Soto, Andrew Periale, Amy Young, Julia Wagner, Richard Heckler, Mawi Sonna, and Nancy Jean Hill.
They are enthusiastic about publishing both new and established poets together on a quarterly basis. In fact, their next issue is slated for release on May Day. They listen for a strong voice and look for a clarity of vision.
“You need another literary journal like you need a hole in the head.” Yes, yes we do.
The first Coal Hill Review issue of the year shares new voices: Brian Clifton and Ann de Forest. Plus, the journal’s first translated piece written by Henriette Rostrup. Also in this issue: Pittsburgh favorites including Joan E. Bauer and Ben Gwin.
Online poetry magazine The American Journal of Poetry is still seeking work for publication in their July 2020 issue. Home of the long poem, they seek work of all subject matters, styles, or lengths and highly value unique voices. Be bold. Be uncensored. They do charge a $5 fee. Learn more…
The latest issue of Anomaly is out. In this issue: comics by Mita Mahato, Kimball Anderson, Jason Hart, and more; fiction by Monica Macansantos, Feliz Moreno, and more; poetry by Turandot Shayegan, Rodney A. Brown, María Lysandra Hernández, Jacq Greyja, Hussain Ahmed, Hari Alluri, Gabrielle Spear, Fargo Tbakhi, Derek Berry, Ashely Adams, and more; and translated work by Zsuka Nagy, Yan An, João Luís Barreto Guimarães, and others.
Want to escape your home for a little while? Pay a visit to Francis House. Founded in 2017, this online literary magazine publishes issues known as “rooms” as well as print anthologies and chapbooks (“houses”). They publish poems of all shapes and sizes and especially love the oddly-proportioned and under-appreciated.
Their latest Room features work by Rose DeLeon, Aaron El Sabrout, Robin Gow, and Ashley Cline.
Deadline: July 31, 2020
Xi Draconis Books seeks socially engaged, book-length works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for its 2020 and 2021 production years. We accept novels, short story and poetry collections, memoirs, essay collections, and cross-genre book-length works. Our mission is to publish works that examine social justice issues of all kinds. Head to xidraconis.org/submission-guidelines/ to submit.
Guest Post by Leland Davidson
As COVID-19 has ravaged this world effecting many emotionally and physically, the emotions of how governments are handling are telling as well. Two books show a serendipitous attitude we are dealing with today as a society, while also showing history repeating itself.
One of these is The Hot Zone by Richard Preston, which gives a in depth story and research on Ebola. The book is based around different stories detailing where it came from, how it spread, and close call to a pandemic that almost ravaged the United States. What makes this book so chilling are the stories that took place in the 1980s and 90s in the continent of Africa and United States, but are detailed examples of what we are seeing today. These stories range from the beginning of the disease’s origins showing how messing with nature can cause a pandemic, or how nonuse of safety measures will help spread the disease. This book is a chilling narrative of how history, disease, and panic is not new, which should be a lesson for all.
Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution by Holly Tucker details the history of blood transfusion in England and France in the 1600s, going into detail of its history and the people involved in its transformation. Showing medical science experiments of the time may seem crazy today, but it is still relevant in modern thinking. With current news stories of people selling snake oils or ways to cure COVID-19, we see similarities in the core belief of the time that blood from a cow transfused with a sheep will make a monster. The book shows how scientific, political, and religious clashes of the 1600s mimic today’s clashes. Tucker details the narrative that stopping science and medical experiments will not only stop breakthroughs but keep humans in the dark instead of forward thinking to a better life.
The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. Penguin Random House, June 1999.
Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution by Holly Tucker. W. W. Norton & Company, May 2012.
Reviewer bio: Leland Davidson, a native of East Tennessee, holds an M.A. in Conflict Resolution and Coexistence from Heller School at Brandeis University, 2020.
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Guest Post by Doug Mathewson
I am a confirmed fan of Kevin Barry I enjoy his telling of a tale, his settings and plots, but it is his lovely and amazing use of language that wins me over. He is not for every reader, I’ll grant you that, but for those of us who enjoy the journey as much or more than the destination he is a delight.
The story of Night Boat to Tangier has our boys, two aging Irish gents Charlie Redmond and Maurice Hearne, in the old Spanish port of Algeciras. They are haunting the boat reception terminal in hopes of intersecting a specific passenger. She is Dilly Hearne, and intricately related to them both.
Through Maurice and Charlie’s charming recollections and reminiscences we learn of their shared history of violence, drug smuggling, betrayal, addiction, and madness. But here we are, on the other side of all that, as they wait for 23-year-old Dilly who they both truly love, and who may have done them wrong.
Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry. Penguin Random House, September 2019.
Reviewer bio: Doug Mathewson regards himself as quite grand but actually is a most modest fellow who spends his days writing short fiction and working as Senior Editor for Blink-Ink which publishes the finest in contemporary 50-word fiction. More of his work can be found at www.little2say.org
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Guest Post by Richie Swanson
Ever dreamt of saving turtles squashed on highways? Of creating clean water and carbon sequestration? Of undoing the havoc humanity has wrought upon nature? Then read Wading Right In. It interprets crucial science for the layman and sometimes reads like a novel, depicting wetland-loving characters irrepressibly driven to protect nature. Some wetland lovers save and incubate eggs from road-killed diamondback turtles and release hatchlings into the wild. Another knocks on doors with a rare spadefoot toad in hand and convinces a landowner to conserve its habitat. Another invents tidal gates made of olive barrels to restore a city’s impounded (and dying) saltmarshes. Others restore an eroding island, unloading 500 barges of sand and gravel by hand, growing their own native vegetation and enlisting 350 ninth graders to help plant a shoreline.
The wetland-loving scientists present themselves with humor. One describes sinking into freezing mud in the dark until a professor pulls her out. The book reveals nature’s genius: a fishing spider the size of a human hand has a waxy coating and hairs on legs that allows it to zoom through water as it turns prey five times its weight into “a sushi smoothie.” Wetland plants create their own air pipes and oxygen pumps, and beavers build mud piles and secrete scents that enable other beavers to know their nutritional health and kinship connections.
Authors Ashworth and Koning discuss the science of ecosystem services to assess mitigation, the legal process of compensating wetlands loss in one place by creating wetlands in another. The assessment involves water filtration, flood control, carbon storage, shoreline protection and species diversity—not dry details but valuable tools for activists. This book inspired me as much as Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson.
Wading Right In: Discovering the Nature of Wetlands by Catherine Owen Koning and Sharon M. Ashworth. The University of Chicago Press, August 2019.
Reviewer bio: Richie Swanson’s novel First Territory depicts the Yakama War 1855-56. His short stories about Indian-white relations and bird-related nonfiction are republished from journals at richieswanson.com.
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Guest Post by Ashanté J. Ford
The rawness and compassion of “White Oleander” by Janet Fitch had me turning pages so fast that I was surprised when it was finished. This book read like a favorite album that I can’t stop listening to on repeat. It carried me into the deep despair and depression that comes with being an orphan child, and raised me like I was its own. White Oleander is a book I will never forget.
Fitch captures the bond of a mother and daughter like a photograph, while simultaneously weaving the implications of imperfection into their relationship. This renowned fictional story follows a young girl by the name of Astrid Magnussen into adulthood while she navigates how to grow up and deems her religion as “survival.” This novel captivated me in the same way poetry does. I wanted to listen to the brute advice Astrid’s mother gave and I wanted to fall into lust with every person that gave Astrid hope. Hope was a loose character in this book. It left as soon as it was near and pulled away every single time.
This novel has gained praise from the likes of Oprah Winfrey, and was even adapted into a film after it became a national bestseller in the early 2000s. I applaud this book for its versatility and creativeness. The themes of motherhood were depicted in such a poignant manner—they made me grovel and thank God for the woman that birthed me.
White Oleander by Janet Fitch. Hachette, September 2006.
Reviewer bio: Ashanté J. Ford is 21 years old. She is in college pursuing her bachelor’s degree in International Relations.
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Guest Post by June Calender
While “sheltering in place,” I’m taking a serious look at the natural world through what I’m reading.
I began with Robert Macfarlane’s nonfiction Underland which explores the world of fungi and root systems under forests then goes much, much deeper in caves all over the world. I am a claustrophobic and had many breathless moments but survived with a sense of awe.
That was followed by Richard Powers’s novel, The Overstory, which is about old growth forests and people trying to save them.
Trapped in my apartment, I have still been able to see many parts of the world in depth.
Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane. W. W. Norton & Company, June 2019.
The Overstory by Richard Powers. W. W. Norton & Company, April 2019.
Reviewer bio: June Calender retired to Cape Cod after 20+ years as an off-off-Broadway playwright in NYC. She now teaches writing skills at the Academy for Lifelong Learning at Cape Cod Community College. Her work has been published in various small journals.
Buy The Overstory and Underland: A Deep Time Journey through our affiliate Bookshop.org.
The Tiger Moth Review brings readers eco-poems in their biannual issues. But if you’re still wanting more, they have it. Partnering with the Centre for Stories, The Tiger Moth Review is working to bring a new, online collection of eco-poems to the journal’s website this year.
Editor Esther Vincent Xueming will mentor a group of Australian poets from the Centre, while the Centre’s creative director Robert Wood will provide workshops. This collaboration connecting the cultural ecologies of Perth and Singapore will introduce readers to new voices and create more understanding about our relationship to the world we live in.
Find out more about this partnership at The Tiger Moth Review’s website, and keep an eye out for these new eco-poems.
Guest Post by Bill Cushing
Where have you been all my life, Giovanni?
You’d think that, studying lit, I’d have read Boccaccio’s Decameron during my studies, but somehow, that was not the case. Feeling guilty about that, I bought a copy last year, and the timing couldn’t have been better than the present to actually read it.
Full disclosure: mine isn’t the complete text but 25 stories chosen for this edition, but I’m still glad to have gotten around to it at some point in my lifetime because—even with what appears to be a somewhat “clunky” translation—I regret the years of never having visited this work. I’ve long known how Boccaccio inspired Chaucer, after translating it into English, to write The Canterbury Tales, but readers can also see the influence that this has had on many future writers.
In the first story of day one, Boccaccio recounts tale of a conman wrangling near-sainthood from the Church, a character reminding me of Moliere’s Tartuffe with a trace of Nikolai Gogol’s Chichikov in Dead Souls.
And so it goes.
By the way, that plagiarism of Vonnegut is not accidental since his view of human behavior and character are here as well. One even sees traces of Shakespeare in these ribald, often downright dirty tales that are occasionally a dark but always fascinating peek into the human condition—something that hasn’t changed much despite all our other advances. Written in a style very much in the oral tradition of storytelling, Boccaccio’s narrators regale each other during a time of plague, proving how important “stories” are to our spiritual, cultural, moral as well as mental health.
Anyone willing to take a deep dive about 700 years back will find a worthwhile literary journey in these pages. Plus it’s easily found it online!
The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio by Giovanni Boccaccio.
Reviewer bio: Bill Cushing writes and facilitates a writing group for 9 Bridges. His poetry collection, A Former Life, was released last year by Finishing Line Press.
Guest Post by Andrew Rihn
This month’s issue of The Ring magazine (“The Bible of Boxing”) straddles what has come to feel like two very distinct, almost distant, time periods. It arrived two days ago but, given the timeline for magazine publishing, most of the issue’s content covers events that happened roughly six weeks ago.
Example: the cover features Román “Chocolatito” González, hand raised in victory after his Feb 29 defeat of Khalid Yafai. Example: Robert “The Nordic Nightmare” Helenius is deemed “Fighter of the Month” for his upset over rising star Adam Kownacki on March 7.
I savor this issue of The Ring with a hastily cultivated sense of nostalgia; so much distance between that March to this April. Locked down in Ohio, it feels like time is telescoping away, these fights from another world, another life. Didn’t I just have friends over to watch Helenius vs Kownacki? Didn’t we share a pizza? Sit next to each other on the couch? How long ago was that?
There is some coronavirus coverage as well. An article titled “Standstill” opens with an arresting photo of an amateur bout being held in an empty stadium. And in “Voices from the Outbreak,” various fighters comment on how shutdowns and fight cancellations have upended their lives. “This is a time when we shouldn’t be talking about ‘We miss boxing,’” says recent Hall of Famer Bernard Hopkins. “This is a time we have to re-evaluate our good deeds and evil deeds.”
Known for responding to short questions with passionate, sometimes drifting monologues, Hopkins continues: “Ask someone you love how they’re doing. Ask someone about their dog.”
Reviewer bio: Andrew Rihn wrote Revelation, a book of poetry about Mike Tyson. He also writes The Pugilist, a monthly boxing column with a literary edge.
Deadline: May 1, 2020
The quarterly literary magazine Southern Humanities Review is currently open for submissions of poetry to its annual Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. SHR seeks submissions from writers in all stages of their careers, and especially in work from historically underrepresented voices. Poets may submit up to three poems for a prize of $1,000 and publication in the magazine. The winner will also receive travel expenses to give a reading at a poetry event at Auburn university in Alabama in October 2020 alongside the contest judge. This year’s judge is Paisley Rekdal. www.southernhumanitiesreview.com/auburn-witness-poetry-prize.html
petrichor is extending its submission deadline to May 1st. Send us your vispo, your twists, concrete distractions, code tomes, and sound signs. Now accepting apocalypse writings. Get weird with it. petrichormag.com
What are you reading?
Last month, we asked all of you what you’ve been reading while sheltering in place. We’re thrilled with the response and thankful for everyone who has shared their recommendations with us.
If you‘re reading anything you’d like to recommend, send it over—we’d be happy to share it here on our blog. We have a little more information on what we’re looking for at this post to help you get started: www.newpages.com/2020/03/25/what-are-you-reading.
We’re looking forward to checking out your recommendations!
Guest Post by Kelly Williamson
In her remarkable debut, The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, Molly McCully Brown revisits the history of a state-run institution that sterilized patients without their consent, offering readers the opportunity to confront the dark realities of the eugenics movement. With a documentary approach, Brown bases the poems on the historical evidence she gleans from archival research. Exploring the perspectives of the colony’s caretakers, and patients, Brown pays tribute to an unacknowledged chapter from our nation’s dark history.
This collection serves as evidence of Brown’s curiosity and bravery in facing what she considered unknown and scary. Similarly, it can be an act of discovery for the reader as well. Readers might be alarmed to come across such wreckage that they once failed to notice. However, Brown invites readers to understand, rather than rebuking them for not knowing. Brown’s collection reminds us that poetry builds empathy that can raise the awareness needed to foster change.
Readers may have never heard of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, a blind room, or known of the sterilizations posed as appendectomies in the state-run institution located in Virginia. Brown’s book allows readers to recognize that this lack of knowledge is a privilege, for the painful history that took life away from innocent girls is a history that must be known. Although much has changed, these poems can encourage us to understand ways in which our current society can do better. While it’s easy for readers to see the title and feel far removed from history, this collection of poems works to close that gap of separation, to use these imagined patients as windows into a haunting past.
The Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded by Molly McCully Brown. Persea Books, 2017.
Reviewer bio: Kelly Williamson is a senior at Loyola University Maryland minoring in writing. She has published poems in her school’s literary magazine, Corridors.
Guest Post by Serenity Schoonover
As 68.5 million people currently live as displaced persons on the planet, a short, potent anthology on immigration, emigration, and asylum-seeking is relevant reading for everyone. The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns showcases thirty writers’ artful examinations of striking out to start over, staying put despite instability, and even circling back to a country that disowned you.
Among established writers, Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s “The Bridge of the Golden Horn,” notes the wry negotiations of Turkish factory women in Germany: “the man made meatballs out of horses- we didn’t know that, because we couldn’t speak German. Meatballs were our mother’s favorite food.” Another, from Mehdi Charef’s “Tea in the Harem,” examines the volatile relationship between an Algerian mother and her son in France, both caught in the cross-hairs of identity crisis, “between two cultures, two languages, and two colors of skin.”
Emerging writer Djamila Ibrahim’s story, “Heading Somewhere,” laments an Ethiopian man’s marriage of convenience, a relationship based on leverage rather than love: “he resented Marianne her power. Divorce meant the loss of his permanent resident card, maybe even deportation.” Most unforgettable in the collection is Warsan Shire’s prose poem, “Conversations about Home (From the Deportation Center),” which begs the question: “Do you know how difficult it is, to talk about the day your own city dragged you by the hair?”
The power of this anthology, edited by Dohra Ahmad with a foreword by Edwidge Danticat, is its potential to be the first in a line of future works, literature that is willing to discuss, rather than dismiss or demonize, “people with deep histories-individuals as well as collective- that predate the migration, rather than newly created humans whose lives begin in a boat, plane or desert crossing.”
The Penguin Book of Migration Literature: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns edited by Dohra Ahmad. Penguin Random House, September 2019.
Reviewer bio: Essays by Serenity Schoonover have aired on NPR, with book reviews appearing in Split Rock Review, Women’s Independent Press, CALYX, The Bookends Review, among others.
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Submit by May 15 to the inaugural issue of Pensive, an interfaith global journal based at Northeastern University in Boston. Original poetry, prose, visual art, film, music, and translations welcome. Especially interested in work that deepens the inward life; envisions a more just, peaceful, sustainable world; and advances dialogue across differences. Submissions by global and historically underrepresented groups particularly encouraged. Submit up to 5 pieces; simultaneous submissions and previously published works welcome. Send documents in 12 point Times New Roman with a brief (3-5 line) contributor’s bio in third person to [email protected]. Email Alexander Levering Kern, co-editor, with questions.
Swan Scythe Press is now considering manuscripts for its 2020 Poetry Chapbook Contest. Submit a manuscript of 20-32 pages of poems that includes a title page with author’s name, address, phone number, and email address and a second title page without personal identifiers, book title only. Manuscripts can be mailed to 1468 Mallard Way, Sunnyvale, CA 94087 or submitted online, visit swanscythepress.submittable.com/submit. Entry fee is $18.00 payable to Swan Scythe Press. Deadline is June 15th. Winner receives $200 and 25 perfect-bound chapbooks. For full guidelines and details, please visit www.swanscythepress.com.
Guest Post by C.L. Butler
Have you ever read a book and felt that it was actually a call to action? I have been fortunate enough to be able to take refuge in art while social distancing. I’ve read a variety of different books written by authors ranging from Ta-Nehisi Coates to Bram Stoker. One book that stood out to me was Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race. Oluo tells of her personal experiences as not only a Black woman, but also a queer woman, single mother, middle class, biracial feminist. I found this intersectional approach to be a metaphoric glass of ionized water. It’s the refreshing kick in the ass that society needs in order to come to terms with progress.
By adopting a multilayered intersectional lens, Oluo allows the reader to fully explore numerous alternate perspectives beyond their own. Oluo asserts that societal norms and social constructs including, but not limited to, patriarchy, misogyny, and heteronormativity dictate the world around us. In reading the book, I felt that the author had a true understanding that these topics are uncomfortable which provides an authentic vulnerability rather than a purely academic narrative.
Oluo provides a conversational manual for all backgrounds. She also owns her personal privileges throughout the book. Her work challenges skeptics to not only hear, but also feel her point of view. After reading So You Want to Talk About Race my eyes were opened even wider. We all need the dosage of reality that Oluo offers being a queer female of color.
So You Want to Talk About Race is the perfect read and cultural model for a 21st century audience. This book illuminates the aspects of patriarchy running rampant throughout various institutions. I highly recommend to it anyone looking to do more for inclusion.
So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo. Seal Press, January 2018.
Reviewer bio: C.L. Butler is an African American poet, historian, and entrepreneur from Philadelphia based in Houston, TX. In 2017 his poem ‘Laissez Faire’ was published by the University of Houston-Downtown Bayou Review. In 2019 he published academic research with the Journal of International Relations & Diplomacy.
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Literary magazine Green Mountains Review has partnered with the Vermont School to highlight writers whose book launches have been “snuffed out” by the COVID-19 pandemic.
They post new videos to their Social Distance Reading Series twice a week on Wednesday and Sunday so that authors can read from their newly released collections of poetry. Right now the focus is on writers whose book events were cancelled in the months of January through May.
You can currently find readings by Chard deNiord, Kathryn Nuernberger, Felicia Zamora, Philip Metres, Tommye Blount, Penelope Crazy, and Matthew Lipman.
Deadline: May 15, 2020
Light and Dark is seeking your best short stories for our fifteenth online issue! We are particularly interested in stories that deal in some way with the dichotomous nature of existence. Please send us nothing longer than 3,000 words. All stories will be published on our website: www.lightanddarkmagazine.com. The author will also receive a token payment of $15. We look forward to reading your best work: lightanddark.submittable.com/submit.
Guest Post by Lynn Levin
Maggie Paul’s Scrimshaw gifts us with superbly crafted poems of graceful statement and gentle wisdom. I sense here a soul making peace with the near past and distant past as the speaker recollects mother, father, children, a lover, and others. Paul writes in “Linguistics,” a poem about some unspecified but insurmountable conflict between lovers: “So much goes on beneath / the surface that the tide never washes up.” Conflicts here are discreetly remembered and slantly alluded to. This is an approach I particularly admire as it counters much of the graphic rhetoric of pain we see in poems today.
A water motif runs through many of the poems, referencing ponds, streams, and the sea. There is both delight and melancholy in these poems, and the melancholy glows as burnished gold. Take for example the opening lyric “Trochilidae.” The poem compares a diminished girl to a tiny fragile bird who comes to “bring fire to the world.”
One of my favorite poems in the collection is “Watershed,” a metaphysical poem about the flow of life and time. This prose poem tumbles forth in a rush of figurative language describing the flow of water, which is “fragrant as a season, forthright as a calendar.” Paul has the ideal sense of an ending, landing her poems neither too definitively, nor too ambiguously. In “Looking Back,” a poem about doubt and written in a series of couplets that capture paradoxes and contradictions, she writes, “We thought we came for one thing / but really came for another.” The lyric ends, “And that thing we would have died for? / We’ll not die for it again.” These are poems of wise beauty. Wade in them.
Scrimshaw by Maggie Paul. Hummingbird Press, 2020.
Reviewer bio: Lynn Levin’s most recent book is the poetry collection The Minor Virtues (Ragged Sky, 2020).
Guest Post by David Armand
My kids’ last day of school was on Friday, March 13, four weeks ago today. They left class that afternoon not knowing that they wouldn’t be seeing their friends or teachers again for who knows how long. They seem worried sometimes, confused. So am I. But we’ve finally been able to settle into somewhat of a routine here at home: we made a vegetable garden in the backyard last week, bought some baby chickens and built a brooder for them. It gives everyone something to do.
And I like to spend the first hour or so of each morning—when it’s still dark outside and quiet—reading before everyone else wakes up. I’ve always done this, but now the act seems more meditative, more important than it ever has before.
You see, the day after the schools closed and I went to working remotely from home, I picked up Stephen King’s The Stand from my bookshelf. It’s an old copy and the dust jacket is torn off, tucked between the yellowed pages as a bookmark, but still I’ve been reading it every day since all this started.
It’s a long novel, just over eight-hundred pages, and I’ve spent this last month reading it for what is now the third time (I read the unabridged version, which is over a thousand pages long, in 1998; then I read it again about fifteen years later).
But now, on this third read, it seems more poignant than ever: not necessarily because it’s about a plague that wipes out most of the human population, but more because it’s a novel about the inherent sense of hope that people tend to have, about the faith we place in the goodness of others—even in the darkest of times. Which is something to remember now more than ever.
The Stand by Stephen King. Anchor, 1978.
Reviewer bio: David Armand’s latest novel, The Lord’s Acre, is forthcoming this fall from Texas Review Press.
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Guest Post by RS Deeren
John Freeman’s Dictionary of the Undoing, a collection of twenty-six alphabetical short essays, is a reclamation project, collating a “lexicon of engagement and meaning” for progressive political protest. Freeman sees language as “the one tool being vandalized before our very eyes” in the news, on social media, and in public spheres. Starting with “Agitate” and charging through words like “Citizen” and “Hope,” Freeman highlights the ways in which the meanings of single words have been split, twisted, or ignored until they are either used against us, like in the section “Police,” or until they lose much of their power, a notion present in the section “Vote.” Of particularly high import in a book filled with immediacy, are the sections on “I” and “You.”
In “I,” Freeman tackles the internet as used today: to promote and protect an image of ourselves, to ensconce the self, through algorithms and polishing of persona. The phone resembles a mirror and our capacity for seeing the world beyond the mirror, of hearing voices outside the echo chamber, has severely limited our compassion for one another. Freeman argues that this curation of the individual “I” keeps us from becoming a much more powerful “we” capable of bringing about social change. This pitting of my “I” against your “I”, keeps us fighting among ourselves and not against the powerful and wealthy who benefit from our infighting.
In “You,” the penultimate call-to-kindness, Freeman directs a challenge plainly to You, dear reader, to engage in “one act of resistance in the form of love . . . without restriction.” Freeman echoes the “I” section here, stating that to connect through kindness is a tangible act of resistance against a society that sells us an idea of the “I” who stands on their own.
Dictionary of the Undoing by John Freeman. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, November 2019.
Reviewer bio: RS Deeren received his BA from Saginaw Valley State University, his MFA from Columbia College Chicago, and is a PhD candidate at UW- Milwaukee. You can read his creative work at www.rsdeeren.com.
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New on Terrain.org: fiction by Kelly K. Ferguson; nonfiction by Kristen Munson, Désirée Zamorano, Julian Hoffman, John T. Price, and Naomi Cohn; and poetry by William Woolfitt, Jon Davis, Cynthia Neely, John Saad, Jen Karetnick, Cate Lycurgus, Jennifer Bullis, and Cameron McGill.
Deadline: June 1, 2020
Feeling quarantined and alone? Come connect with us! We are an annual online lit mag looking to publish beautiful works of micro-fiction, short poems, and flash nonfiction for issue iii. We are especially interested in works grappling with the challenges of our current times. Navigate to our website, www.thetinyjournal.org, for submission details.
The 18th annual edition of Mom Egg Review is here, with the theme of “Home.” Back in 2019, we conceived of an issue on the subject. Now, as we shelter in place, we experience new relationships with our dwellings. Is a home a place, a feeling, a center, a community? Mom Egg Review writers explore “Home” through the lens of motherhood.
Deadline: Rolling
Jay Lit Review call for critiques, commentary, research, essays, and translations. Fields of interest: African (youth) literature and literacy; African (youth) culture and language studies; African language education; feminist/gender, post/decolonial, reader-response, linguistic, comparative, etc. analysis; translation into/from African languages; related areas of study. Topics: African youths, youth culture and literature; reflections on teaching African languages; multilingualism in Africa, linguistics, related subjects. Educators, academics and translators invited to showcase knowledge and skills in their professional field. Postgrad essays on a variety of African youth concerns will be considered. Double-blind peer review. Visit africanyouthliterature.art.blog/the-jay-lit-review for more info. Email [email protected].
Featuring new fiction from Timothy Kenny and poetry from Francesca Gargallo (translated from the Spanish by Dana Delibovi), Carol V. Davis, Robert L. Penick, Débora Benacot (translated from the Spanish by Margaret Young), Eric Stiefel, Trina Gaynon, Stan Sanvel Rubin, and Gail Peck. Cover photograph from Brooklyn by Solomon Laker. More info at the Apple Valley Review website.
Due to the ongoing crisis, literary magazine Hypertext Magazine has decided to waive normal submission fees for the foreseeable future. If you would like to help out their independent magazine during this time, please do consider making a donation. Editorial staff do not know who donates to the journal, so donations do no affect editorial decisions. They are open to submissions through June 1.
Hypertext Magazine has been publishing short stories, essays, poetry, and interviews in print and online since 2010. Earlier this month, they published two interviews. One with Kelly Fordon and another with Sahar Mustafah.
The latest issue of American Poetry Journal features work by Terrance Hayes, Philip Metres, Adriana E. Ramírez, Jenn Givhan, Trace DePass, John Sibley Williams, Cassidy McFadzean, Darby Lyons, and more.
Journal of African Youth Literature issue 2 call for submissions of creative writing and artworks open now. Poetry, fiction, visual stories, plays, essays. Artworks of all kinds, including front cover. Criteria: Must be created by, about and/or for African youths (15-35 years). ‘African’ definition is, generally, born-in-Africa and of African heritage. Includes the diaspora, and not related to race or colour. Our mission is ‘Preserving African Youth Identities’ through creative expression. Visit africanyouthliterature.art.blog for more info. Email [email protected]. See issue 1 at bit.ly/2SxiOI8.
There is no shortage of creativity in the Spring 2020 issue of Black Warrior Review. Paging through the issue, readers eyes are drawn to the variety of forms and use of images within the pages.
Amy Lee Scott’s “Field Guide to a Common Pregnancy: Notes on Loss and Growth” include field drawings by the author. Each section is introduced to a drawing of a different plant or fruit.
In “the magpie poem,” Jasmine Khaliq’s words come in small spurts across the poem’s seven pages.
“Composite Material // Spirit Willin” by Cherise Morris includes images—snapshots, Instagram posts, slideshow images from news articles, a photo of a framed photo. It’s so visually compelling, it’s difficult to skip by it.
This issue’s featured chapbook—Translator of Soliloquies: Fugues in the Key of Dissociation by Seo-Young Chu is also creatively formatted, each section broken up by a heading, a nice treat at the end of the issue.
If you want to take in some writing that’s out of the box alongside traditional forms, this refreshing issue of Black Warrior Review is a good place to start.
Magazine Review by Katy Haas
With the weather warming up, I see new green sprouting in my backyard daily. This seems like a good time to focus on poems about flowers found in the Spring 2020 issue of Colorado Review.
In “Bloom,” Emily Van Kley’s speaker talks to the forsythia plant “beside the house.” Together, they move through the seasons: gray in winter, blooming in summer just for the blooms to quickly disappear into leaves. Van Kley’s images are beautiful and strong with lines that really pulled at me, like “The sadness that carries / my thoughts close to its chest / will unpack it’s summer / wardrobe,” and “Soon the last rains // will poor themselves down / storm sewers’ gullets.”
Leah Tieger also writes of flowers in “Five Sunflowers,” which are a gift from “the man who loves me.” The flowers “turn the room from real / to magazine, so picture my life perpetually happy.” The flowers urge the speaker to be grateful, “if not for your presence, / at least for the hands that brought you.” The piece feels warm and loving, the same “brilliant / and saturated” yellow of the flowers.
Welcome in spring and some much needed color with these poems from Colorado Review.
Magazine Review by Katy Haas
A big fan of graphic novels (and nonfiction and poetry), I’m always thrilled when a literary magazine releases an issue featuring graphic work. World Literature Today’s Spring 2020 issue features a selection of graphic nonfiction by seven artists.
Each piece brings something different to the table. The art styles are all vastly different and each focuses on something unique: politics, history, art, ego, love.
My favorite of these is “Shadow Portrait” by Rachel Ang. Ang’s art is calming and enjoyable to look at, muted tones splayed across the page. She writes of love and ego, the ways in which we see ourselves in art, in stories, in the people we love.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is an excerpt from Guantanamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Notorious Prison by Sarah Mirk, illustrated by Omar Khouri. Unlike Ang’s calming tones, this excerpt uses bold lines and an orange color scheme which ramps up the feeling of anxiety the story produces. I’m a little disappointed at the length of the excerpt—the four pages we’re given leave on a cliffhanger that left me wanting more, though I suppose that just highlights the writer’s and artist’s skill.
This selection of graphic nonfiction has a little bit of something for everyone, and each artist/writer utilizes their craft impressively. This issue of World Literature Today is a real treat to read.
Guest Post by Alicia Wilcox
Adam Grant’s Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World gave me a powerful new outlook on not only my abilities, but my untapped potential. Grant explains how big thinkers are not just the ones with big ideas, but the ones that take action. Reading this has not only changed the way I think, but the way I act. This book has helped me challenge the norm and foster innovative ideas, as well as getting others to believe in those ideas too.
Surprisingly, risk taking can make your career less fragile. Grant dives into the art of taking risks and challenging the status quo, giving a conclusive guide on transparently communicating and ensuring trust from others along the way. He busts the myths that hold us back from success and goes deep into the paradox: the ones who suffer most within a system are the least likely to challenge it. You can have talent and work ethic, but you have to be original for your ideas to win. How do we create original ideas? Grant shares his secrets on how to defeat perfectionism and produce a large volume of ideas to not only be seen by others, but also utilized for the better.
Originals is a five-star read, giving readers a sturdy foundation for how to embrace change and achieve success in a multitude entirely divergent atmospheres.
Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant. Penguin Random House, February 2017.
Reviewer bio: Alicia Wilcox’s work has most recently been published in The Health Journal, The Dewdrop Weekly and is sold in stores across Manhattan.
Buy this book through our affiliate Bookshop.org.
Besides being both an online and print literary magazine, Carve also offers online writing classes and online workshops. Did you know that?
They currently offer two writing classes on the Wet Ink platform: Short Story Writing: Fundamentals and Short Story Writing Techniques. Theses classes both run five weeks and are held multiple times during the year.
Fundamentals consists of five lessons: Character & Plot, Point of View, Dialogue, Inner Monologue, and Description.
Techniques consists of five lessons: Use of Senses, Imagery, Metaphors & Similes, Rhythm & Pacing, and Threading.
Their Online Writing Workshop is devoted to editing for short stories or essays. This is a 10-week course where you get one-on-one attention from a Carve editor. Their next workshops start on June 1 and September 14.
Guest Post by S.B. Julian
Recently I moved into a new apartment building for people age 55-plus: the generations that grew up with books, not digitalia. Their schooling emphasized reading, which means the building’s shared library is a serendipitous treasure trove.
Why is it that a book you find by chance is often more pleasurable than an equally worthy book you specially ordered? Some delightful chance findings: Continue reading “Lock-Down Pleasures in Recent Reading”
Guest Post by Lily Anna Erb
Carmen Maria Machado creates a dark, dreamlike landscape in her experimental memoir, In The Dream House. Her story of queer domestic abuse, written as a collection of short vignettes, begins as a fairy tale. There’s a monster lurking somewhere, and the desire to sniff out the boogeyman makes you forget you’re even turning pages. Machado’s addition of fairy tale citations adds a semi-lighthearted and humorous touch to an otherwise darker narrative. Machado’s fairy tale monster takes the form of the woman who lives in the “dream house.”
Machado creates a fascinating practice in self-analysis and reader involvement by using all three modes of perspective. She utilizes third person to explain an airy concept, second person to tell the lurid contents of her tale, and first person to speak directly to the reader. The most frequently utilized perspective is the second person, where Machado seems to rip her hand through the spine of the book to touch the reader. Perhaps the most nerve-wracking example of this technique is the section titled “Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure” where the reader is given multiple choices of action which all lead to the same abusive conclusion.
No matter how fascinating a world Machado can craft, it doesn’t save her from unnecessary pedanticism. The form of the book, utilizing “The Dream House as . . .” before every vignette quickly loses its original charm. The book seems to drag on unnecessarily long. Once the story loses its driving force of conflict, the reader is ready for it to end. However, these small annoyances did not totally hinder my consumption of Machado’s work. In The Dream House is full of minefields that you don’t expect. By the end of the book, the reader cheers on Machado as she recovers from her time in the “dream house.”
In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. Graywolf Press, November 2019.
Reviewer bio: Originally from New York, Lily Anna Erb is a sophomore studying poetry at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Buy this book through our affiliate Bookshop.org.
Online literary magazine Memoir Magazine has extended the deadline for its first-ever book contest to April 30. The Memoir Prize is dedicated to memoirs and creative nonfiction of book-length works of exceptional merit. They have three categories: published, self-published, and unpublished. The grand prize winner receives $2,000. The fee to enter is $95. Results to be announced in June.
The National Writers Project Radio recently posted a podcast version of their interview and discussion with Richard Koch and Elizabeth Dutro who have both recently authored books in regards to teaching in an age of stress and trauma. The interview was conducted on February 18, 2020.
Richard Koch, now retired, is a former English professor from the University of Iowa and Adrian College (my alma mater), and is the author of The Mindful Writing Workshop: Teaching in the Age of Stress and Trauma. Elizabeth Dutro is a professor and chair of Literacy Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of The Vulnerable Heart of Literacy: Centering Trauma as Powerful Pedagogy.
” . . . the space we’re in with all these proliferated programs around trauma and that they can be one more way that certain children are marginalized in school, seen as damaged rather than full of knowledge that should count in schools . . .”
NWP Radio is also offering a free download of The Mindful Writing Workshop on their site. Do check out the full discussion. It’s an interesting conversation on education, children, and teaching and definitely worth a listen to in these stressful times.
Guest Post by Bill Cushing
Retiring in mid-February, I foresaw a sedentary future. However, this virus has taken even that to unexpected heights. With my time in isolation (so to speak; I have a family), I’ve been able to read Moses, a fictional narrative based on the biblical figure’s life by Anthony Burgess.
While most know Burgess for Clockwork Orange, that’s hardly his best. He is the primary reason I pursued an MFA after a 15-year absence from school.
Now I recall why I love (and envy) his writing so much. Moses is a bit closer to two of his earlier works: Napoleon Symphony, where he presents his interpretation of the diminutive conqueror’s life while dividing the book into four sections attempting to replicate the pacing of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, and Man of Nazareth, a look at the life of Jesus as narrated by a Greek merchant returning from business in Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion.
Moses strikes out on its own in several ways, beginning with its structure. A narrative in verse. it reminds the reader of the Greek epic poems. It humanizes its characters—even Ramses. Moses himself suffers from a speech impediment. This is not unexpected for readers familiar with Burgess; most of his characters with outward defects tend to be the only complete person: recall the grotesque minister defending Alex in Clockwork Orange or the narrator’s disfigured sister in Earthly Powers.
But, like all things coming from Burgess, there are lessons to derive from this one. Issues such as free will, individual responsibility, and respect for simply stated (not grandiose and intricate) law are chief among those. This may be one of the easiest books from Burgess to read although I’d still recommend having a dictionary handy since the linguistic “tricks” found in his diction are always entertaining.
Moses: a narrative by Anthony Burgess. Dempsey & Squires, 1976.
Reviewer bio: Bill Cushing writes and facilitates a writing group for 9 Bridges. His poetry collection, A Former Life, was released last year by Finishing Line Press.
Guest Post by Katy Scrogin
Sheltering in place has provided the perfect opportunity to dive into Edoardo Albinati’s The Catholic School, a thorough exploration of the author’s coming of age in a particular Roman neighborhood in the 1970s. More than simple description or reminiscence, the book is propelled by a comprehensive search for explanations—specifically, regarding a gruesome crime committed by a few of the quarter’s well-heeled young inhabitants. The story is itself an unsparing quest to understand the conditions and sentiments and reigning assumptions that made such a thing even conceivable.
This is no straightforward mystery or crime novel, and indeed, readers not fond of philosophical or sociocultural speculation will probably not enjoy what for this reader amounts to delicious intellectual revelry. But if the lengthy and incisive discourses on bourgeois morality and hypocrisy, the nature of violence, the troubling and troubled realities of masculinity, the strange arena that is the family, or religion and politics in Italy, aren’t your bag, all is not lost! The 1200-plus-page behemoth can most certainly be incorporated into that weight-training routine you have time to take up now that we’re all stuck inside.
The Catholic School by Edoardo Albinati. Macmillan, August 2019.
Reviewer bio: Katy Scrogin’s most recent online work is featured at The Book Smuggler’s Den and The Bookends Review. She can also be found at katyscrogin.wordpress.com.
Buy this book through our affiliate Bookshop.org.
