Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction published online regularly features insightful craft essays with each issue. With the emphasis on “brief” (under 750 words) nonfiction, the essays allow authors more word count to explore aspects of writing. The May 2014 issue includes “Can You Hear Me Now? How Reading Our Writing Aloud Informs Audiences and Ourselves” by Kate Carroll de Gutes, “The Editor at the Breakfast Table” by Charles J. Shields – a perspective on the need for writers to both seek and be receptive to feedback, and “The Nose Knows: How Smells Can Connect Us to the Past and Lead Us to the Page” by Jeremy B. Jones, in which he explores “how our awareness of the undeniable connection between scent and the past helps us to come upon essays. How might our noses get us to the page?”

As a national, nonprofit HIV/AIDS magazine, the mission of Art & Understanding is to collect, archive, publish and distribute the growing body of art, activism, and current events emanating from the AIDS pandemic. It was created for the HIV-affected community. The editors are interested in publishing articles about AIDS-related advocacy, treatment and care, community-based organizations and campaigns, and artists and creative writers responding to the pandemic. The editors are looking for writers of all serostatuses to help use showcase a wide range of perspectives about living with HIV/AIDS. A&U publishes feature articles, viewpoint/essays, reviews, and literary submissions – poetry, fiction, drama, creative nonfiction, as well as visual works. For more information, visit the A&U submissions guidelines page.

August’s Broadsided Press collaboration, “Dear Atom Bomb,” features a poem by Catherine Pierce and art by Ira Joel Haber:

“. . . In Science class movies, you puffed men like microwaved marshmallows, raked blood from their insides, and always I could feel your heat like a massive cloak around my shoulders.”

Edited by Elizabeth Bradfield, Sean Hill, Gabrielle Bates, Alexandra Teague, and Lori Zimmermann, Broadsided has been putting literature in the streets since 2005. Each month, a new broadside is posted both on the website and around the nation.

Writing is chosen through submissions sent to Broadsided. Artists allied with Broadsided are emailed the selected writing. They then “dibs” on what resonates for them and respond visually – sometimes more than one artist will respond offering a selection of broadsides.

Broadsided Vectors can download the poem in full color or black and white and poster it around town, campus, wherever! Become a Broadsided Vector today!

The Carnegie Corporation of New York/New York Times I Love My Librarian Award encourages library users to recognize the accomplishments of exceptional public, school, and college librarians. Administered by the American Library Association, with support from Carnegie Corporation of New York and the New York Times Company, the program seeks nominations that describe how a librarian is improving the lives of people in a school, campus, or community.

Up to ten winners will be selected to receive a $5,000 cash award, a plaque, and a $500 travel stipend to attend an awards reception in New York hosted by the New York Times.

Each nominee must be a librarian with a master’s degree from an ALA-accredited program in library and information studies or a master’s degree with a specialty in school library media from an educational unit accredited by the National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education. Nominees must currently be working in the United States in a public library, a library at an accredited two- or four-year college or university, or at an accredited K-12 school.

Nominators of public librarians must be public library users. Nominators of librarians in college, community college, or university libraries must be users of those libraries (e.g., students, faculty, or staff members). Nominators of school library media specialists must be library users (e.g., students, teachers, school administrators or staff members, or parents or caregivers of children at schools where the school library media specialist works).

Nominations will run through September 12, 2014.

No kidding. New Balance has announced a line of shoes called the “Authors Collection,” with color schemes inspired by American novelists and their works. Reminiscent of old hardback book covers, the styles are “earthy” in their color schemes. Almost more fun than the shoes is reading the comments on this new line from Twitter feeds:

JamesAllder: “I guess these shoes are designed for writers. On behalf of all writers, may I just say that we write in our socks. Thanks for thinking of us, though.”

aarontpratt: “Nothing quite says ‘I’m a casual yet cultured 30- or 40-something male’ like these. Reading Hemingway while grilling steaks, etc.”

JenHoward “Kickin’ it with Papa.” & “This is why we need English majors!”

Created by the artists of Dorothy, The Book Map is an artistic rendition of a street map made up from the titles of over 600 books from the history of English Literature. The Map includes classics such as Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, Bleak House, Vanity Fair and Wuthering Heights as well as 20th and 21st Century works such as The Waste Land, To the Lighthouse, Animal Farm, Slaughterhouse 5, The Catcher in the Rye, The Wasp Factory, Norwegian Wood and The Road.

The Map, which is loosely based on a turn of the century London street map also includes fictional areas dedicated to the works of Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Tolkien, Harry Potter and a children’s literature district featuring such classics as The Railway Children, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Where the Wild Things Are. There’s an A-Z key at the base of the Map listing all the books featured along with the author’s name and the date first published.

“Strange and Wondrous Pairings” is the feature section of The Georgia Review‘s most recent issue. The five included essays “all raise questions,” writes Editor Stephen Corey, “very different questions—about the people or characters they bring together in quite unexpected ways. These works were not commissioned; they appeared by chance during the past two years and built for us, unbeknownst to their authors, a distinctive community.”

Martha G. Wiseman’s “Dr. No Meets J. Robert Oppenheimer”
Corey writes, “Wiseman revisits this movie villain and this real-life celebrity scientist while looking through the prism of her father, the actor Joseph Wiseman, who played the two in film and on stage, respectively. She also looks through in the other direction, seeing her father as he was reflected in the roles he played—and didn’t play—and herself as she was influenced by, and influenced, this man of many faces, an actor of sufficient repute in the early 1960s that the director of Dr. No ‘needed someone with a name, a presence,’ to counterbalance that newcomer, Sean Connery.”

Brandon R. Schrand’s “Finding Emily & Elizabeth”
Corey writes, “Schrand received from a neighbor the gift of a 1944 edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems . . . when he first sat down to peruse this particualr volume he immediately discovered, taped over one of the poems and surrounded by handwritten notations, a photograph of a teenage girl named Elizabeth who appeared to be dead . . . his Dickinson collection proved to be filled with many other annotations, all apparently by the young Elizabeth’s mother, and so his sought-after education becomes a doubling of his original intention.”

Albert Goldbarth’s “Two Characters in Search of an Essay”
Corey asks, “Who else would ferret out, and then present with wild and beautiful prose, the vital connections between John Keats and Clyde Tombaugh (the young man who discovered the now-maligned Pluto), and—remember, this is Albert Goldbarth—would also teach us countless other remarkable things along the way?”

Marianne Boruch’s “Pilgrimage”
Corey writes, “Boruch’s ‘Pilgrimage’ takes us, as no other tour guides have ever done, to and through the homes of Keats (on the Isle of Wight) and a seminal American poet, Theodore Roethke (in Saginaw, Michigan).

Brian Doyle’s “Sam & Louis”
Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson had a single face-to-face meeting, “but one whose substance went unreported.” Corey writes, “Doyle, an aficionado of both men’s work, asks ‘But what did they say?’—and proceeds to reconstitute what was very likely several hours of the most scintillating talk in history.”

Amy Stolls. Photo by Carrie Holbo

Amy Stolls, author of the Palms to the Ground and The Ninth Wife, former literature professor at American University, and environmental journalist covering the Exxon Valdez oil spill, has been appointed Director of Literature of the National Endowment for the Arts. Stolls has served as acting director since May 2013, and has been with the NEA literature office since 1998.

Stolls says of her appointment: “To be part of the literary community—that passionate, wonderful lot of writers, teachers, publishers, editors, presenters, librarians, translators, and more who work tirelessly on behalf of books and reading—is an honor. To be in a position to help this community is a gift. I have always believed deeply in the NEA’s mission; I look forward to carrying out that mission as best I can in my new role.”

Read more on NEA News.

In the Fall 2014 issue of Willow Springs, Elizabeth Kemper French and Joseph Salvatore have a conversation (from March 2013) with Andre Dubus III, author of New York Times bestsellers House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and Townie. The interview is lengthy and worth every word.

It begins with conversation about the digital age, which Dubus detests. “I don’t like modern life,” he says, “with these gadgets.” And although his publisher made him get a Facebook page, he doesn’t plan to ever update it (though points out that there is nothing wrong with others doing so). “It’s a philosophical turning-away-from, and a temperamental turning-away-from,” he says. “The older I get, the more simplicity I want. I don’t think these things have helped us. I think they’ve made us little rats, made us pay attention to little, stupid shit.”

And because the writing process is different for everyone, Dubus must write by longhand, not putting on the computer until it is completed: “I need the physical intimacy of flesh, blood, bone, wood, paper. It helps me enter the character.” He goes on to explain the necessity for him to slow down when writing, as writing longhand forces you to do:

“There’s a great line from Goethe: ‘Do not hurry. Do not rest.’ Some people say, ‘I need the computer, because my ideas are so fast.’ I say, ‘Ideas? I don’t trust ideas. Ideas are just ideas.’ I trust the other stuff. I love the line from Flannery O’Connor, from Mystery and Manners: ‘There’s a certain grain of stupidity the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and that’s the quality of having to stare.’ …”

It’s a quality interview, both entertaining and insightful. It’s worth every one of the almost 30 pages it takes up of the journal.

“No Typos Hear!” is how Pat Stone titles the editor’s note for the current issue of GreenPrints. He announces that for almost two decades, Ricki and Michael Cochran have been proofreaders for this magazine. As they know have a lot going in their lives, including seven grandchildren, they are officially stepping down; this was their last issue. As such, Stone puts forth his sincere thanks and states that the first who finds a proofing error (beyond the obvious one in the title) in this issue will receive a free one-year subscription to the magazine.

Thomas Elias Weatherly, born in Scottsboro, Alabama in 1942, passed away July 15, 2014. Poet Burt Kimmelman tells of Weatherly as “a brilliant, eclectic poet, the craft and reach of his poetry astonishing. He was a member of the inaugural poetry workshop at St. Mark’s, under the tutelage of Joel Oppenheimer, and the second cook at the Lions Head when all manner of writer and poet could be found sucking up the nectar there. No degrees post the U.S. Marine Corps Tom was, among other things, the resident bibliophile at the Strand Bookstore in later years, before leaving NYC to return ‘home’ to the South. He taught variously at a number of colleges and universities, from time to time, and with Ted Wilentz edited what at the time was a game-changing anthology of contemporary African American poetry, titled Natural Process (Hill & Wang, 1971) His own poetry was also not only eclectic but game-changing as well.”

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The Center for Media & Social Impact has created numerous documents, codes, and teaching materials related to issues of fair use in the arts, including documentary, journalism, online video, visual arts, library science, poetry, dance, archiving, open courseware, and video. The publication Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry, among many other publications, is available free online or as a PDF download. “This code of best practices helps poets understand when they and others have the right to excerpt, quote and use copyrighted material in poetry. To create this code, poets came together to articulate their common expectations.”

Teaching materials include fair use scenarios, fair use language for course syllabi, teaching fair use for media literacy education, and examples of successful fair use in documentary filmmaking.

I love those little “Free Little Libraries” I see in people’s neighborhoods. If you don’t know what these are (yet), it’s a structure of some kind where people can put books to give them away for free and others can take books for free – or borrow them to read and return with no system for checking in and out. I first saw one while visiting New Orleans and was happy to leave behind the book I had brought to read on the plane. Again, at a conference in Madison, Wisconsin, there was one in the neighborhood nearby the hotel where I was staying. I walked past it each morning, and though I didn’t have any books to give away that time, I made some folded blank books and left them behind to share with others. In my own neighborhood, I want to try a free library, but unfortunately, where we live – so close to a bar district – our own yard, fence, neighborhood signs – are often the target of post-2 a.m. revelers. Alas, I’ve been hesitant to build and put out something that would make such a tempting target. However, I am impressed with and admire those who can do this, which is why I was so upset to read about the plight of Spencer Collins whose free little library was shut down by the due to an ordinance that prohibits free-standing structures on people’s properties in Leawood County, Missouri. After petitioning the council, Spencer will be able to have his library back. Although the article says “temporarily” (ending October 20), I would hope that this becomes something the county, and any others like it with such ordinances, will look to make a permanent exception. For as often as I am distraught and depressed by the news that surrounds us every day, it only takes something like this for me to feel hope. Cheers to Spencer and all the other Free Little Library Curator!

United Nations declared July 12, 2013 Malala Day to honor the fifteen-year-old education rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Malala Yousafzai. Every Day is Malala Day is a photography picture book created by Rosemary McCarny, leader of the Plan International Canada Team. The images are of young women from around the globe, each either labeled by country on the page or in the photo credits in the back. The text comes from letters written to Malala from youth around the world, and famously begins: “Dear Malala – We have never met before, but I feel like I know you. I have never seen you before, but I’ve heard your voice. To girls like me, you are a leader who encourages us. And you are a friend.” A video of the letters that inspired the book can be seen here.

The book is designated by the publisher for ages 5-8, which I would say is in regards to presentation and language reading level. The text discusses the shooting, how bullets are used to “silence girls” but that they are not the only means: early marriage, poverty, discrimination, violence are all named in the book, each with its own symbolic photographic subject. The full color photography on each page is rich – visually and culturally. The compositions are simple, but the message and emotional impact of each is strong.

The book ends, of course, with words of hope, courage, and empowerment. Also included in the book is an excerpt from the speech Malala gave on July 12 to the UN. I think it would be great to share this with young children, since the message is one that should begin at an early age for all if there is going to be any hope of changing attitudes across cultures.

The book was published by Second Story Press in conjunction with McCarny and Plan International, a charity organization started in 1937 to end global poverty. Because I Am A Girl is Plan’s global initiative to end gender inequliaty, promote girls’ rights and lift young girls out of poverty. October 11, 2012 marked the first international Day of the Girl which continues its campaign to ensure girls around the globe receive a minimum of nine years of quality education.

In the Ottawa Poetry Newsletter feature On Writing #33, Marthe Reed comments on the changing landscape and environmental destruction of the birdfoot delta of the Louisiana coastline. Reed, who spent just over a decade in south Lousiana before moving to Syracuse, speaks to the impact we, including herself, have on the natural world around us. She confronts this in a form of “documentary poetry,” which she says: “allows me, an outsider, to write my way into this beautiful, vanishing world without anger, without falling prey to the temptation to preach. Documentary poetics allows grief into the poem without bathos or sentimentality or feigned authority.” Her poem in image “wasted” appears in the column, including painstakingly detailed tracing of the landscape in which to embed her text. Lines like “fecal coliform (sewage),” “chlorine, metal complexing agents,” and “ammonia 17B-estradiol” seep out into the waterway space on the page, just as in real life. The combination of her personal narrative, environmental research, and this resulting work have a lasting impact on the reader, just as I’m sure she hopes to do, answering her own question: “Is it possible to bring urgency to the back page news item, the flickering story on the nightly news?”

In the editor’s note of the latest issue of Pleiades, Wayne Miller announces that this will be his last issue with the journal. He will be teaching in the fall at the University of Colorado Denver and work on the staff of Copper Nickel. “I’m very grateful to the many extraordinary authors I’ve had the privilege to publish over the last twelve years,” he writes, “and I’m indebted to the wonderful editors I’ve worked with…” Phong Nguyen and Kathryn Nuernberger will be in charge of most managerial items. “I have no doubt Pleiades will continue to be a vibrant and important voice in the world of contemporary literature under their stewardship, and I feel privileged to have played a role in the journal’s history and development during my time here,” he said.

Awesome Tapes from Africa is exactly as it proclaims. Ethnomusicologist and DJ Brian Shimkovitz curates this collection of hundreds of cassette tape recordings from various regions of Africa dating back to the 70s. Shimkovitz recently contributed a mix-tape of popular 50s Egyptian music for New Directions Books in celebration of the US release of Stealth by Sonallah Ibrahim, Egyptian activist and novelist.

Motion collage artist and poet Nathaniel Whitcomb had already created a mini-animated trailer to celebrate the book: “Inspired by vintage View Masters, Whitcomb flips through photos taken by Don Church of 1950s Cairo to let the viewer ‘peek in with care’ to Ibrahim’s childhood world. Accompanying the animation is music by the great 20th century Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum.”

New Directions also interviewed Shimovitz about his work with Awesome Tapes from Africa, his creation of a mix tape ins
pired by Stealth, and the future new label created for ATFA.

Paul Nelson writes: It is almost August once again and this means POSTCARDS!

The August Poetry Postcard Fest is an exercise in responding to other poets. You write a poem a day for the month of August, write it directly onto a postcard and send it to the next name on your list. When you receive a postcard poem from someone, the idea is that the next poem you send out will be a response to the poem you just received, even though it will be sent to a different person. Ideally you will write 31 new poems and receive 31 postcard poems from all over the place.

To participate, send your name, mailing address, and email to [email protected]. Use the word “postcard” in the subject line.

Again, one long list will go out this year this year instead of individual lists of 32 names. You can send postcard poems to the 31 names below your name, please do not use this list for advertising or for any other purpose than postcard poems. DO NOT SPAM THE LIST.

I [Paul] will send out the list twice. Our international participants often require an earlier start due to longer delivery times, so I will send the incomplete list out on July 16th and the final version around July 26th. The 26th is the cut off date, I will not be adding any more names to the list after that, the list sent out on the 26th will be the final list for this year. Really. I’ll be out of the U.S. myself. Please be sure to send in your information before that. I will email the list to the participants in a google document as well as in the body of the email.

If you know anyone who would like to participate, feel free to forward them this message! Hope you enjoy the Poetry Postcard Fest!

Directions:

On or about Sunday, July 27th, look at the list to see the three people listed below your name. Write them each an original poem on a postcard, put their address on the card and affix the necessary postage. $1.15 for international cards leaving the U.S. Consider scanning your cards or photographing them to document each poem/card before you send them out. Do not recycle old poems for this. Do not compose a long poem in advance and cut it up into hunks for this. It is an experiment in composing in the moment and your poem has an audience of one. This is designed in part as a conversation.

(If you are near the bottom of the list, send a card to anyone below you then start again at the top.) Ideally, you would write 3 different short poems — remember they are being composed on a postcard and please keep your handwriting clear. If your handwriting is lousy, typing the poems is ok. If you have folks outside your own country on your list, you can start sending poems early…)

Write about something that relates to your sense of “place” however you interpret that, something about how you relate to the postcard image, what you see out the window, what you’re reading, a dream you had that morning, or an image from it, etc. Like “real” postcards, get to something of the “here and now” when you write. Present tense is preferred… Do write original poems for the project. Taking old poems and using them is not what we have in mind. You may want to use epigraphs. One participant last year used his daily I Ching divination to inform his poems.

This is also an experiment in community consciousness. Try to respond to cards that you get with subject, image or any kind of link if possible. Often newsworthy events happen in August. How would our community respond? Letting a card that you receive linger for a while before you respond to the next person on your list is the preferred method. When you go to your mail box each day, put the bills aside, read the poems you get and think about them as you compose to the next person on your list.

A GREAT story about one man’s conversion from being a postcard CHEATER is here: http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2010/08/sending-postcards-to-strangers.html

A workshop handout for the poetry postcard writing exercise is here: http://paulenelson.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Postcard-Exercise.pdf

You may also view that handout at this link: http://paulenelson.com/workshops/poetry-postcard-exercise/

Monsterama is an Atlanta convention that celebrates the fantastic in film, literature, and art. It takes place from August 1-3, 2014. The convention will feature celebrity, artist, and author guests, screenings, programming on film, literature, and art, as well as other fan related events and panels.

From Running Press, Tequlia Mockinbird should be every readers compendium volume! Author Tim Ferdale “Broadway actor, word nerd, and cocktail enthusiast” (and author of the YA comic novel Better Nate Than Ever) offers readers/drinkers 65 literary themed recipes along with commentary on the source novels, drinking games, food recipes, and illustrations.

A few examples: One Flew Over the Cosmo’s Nest; Rye and Prejudice; The Cooler Purple; Frangelico and Zooey; A Midsummer Night’s Beam; The Old Man and the Seagram’s; The Sound and the Slurry – and I could go on! The book is divided into sections Drinks for Dames and Gulps for Guys (why the gender divide, I don’t know – I found BOTH lists appealing!), and Bevies for Book Clubs, Refreshments for Recovering Readers, Bar Bites for Book Hounds, and Games for Geeks (with games for Drinking All by Your Lonesome as well as Drinking with Friends).

I’m only sorry I didn’t have this book when I was in grad school – it would have made all those novel-a-week classes a lot more fun! A definite must have for literary lovers, a great gift for bookies on your list, and required reading for anyone heading off to English grad programs this fall!

And to look forward to: Federle’s Hickory Daiquiri Dock is due out December 2014. Nursery rhymes made even more fun? Who knew!

Get the latest issue of Iron Horse Literary Review, then read Anne Valente’s fiction piece “Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down,” and be rewarded with both the excellent prose and the interview with her that follows. Valente discusses her inspiration for the piece: “This story did develop from so many recent news stories about school shootings, as well as the difficult of even imagining the pain for everyone involved. From the remove of watching on television or reading the newspaper, I felt overwhelmed but also guilty for feeling this, as if I had no right. After the Sandy Hook shooting in particular, I couldn’t stop thinking about the unbearable weight of that kind of grief and where that pressure can even go. From there emerged the image of a sorrow-turned-to-fire, of grief having no outlet but to burn everything down.”

More generally, you also learn about Valente, that she has always wanted to be a writer, and if she wasn’t a writer, according to the career aptitude test in her high school, she’d be a tree surgeon: “In retrospect, this doesn’t seem to far off the mark; when I’m not writing, I’m usually outside or wanting to be outside.” Currently, she is working on a full-length novel that grew out of this published story as well as a collection of short stories about the city of St. Louis.

Right from the front cover (her passport) of the new issue of Brick, you can tell that this issue means to celebrate Mavis Gallant. And as you open the issue, you get a quote from her before you delve into the issue itself: “I have lived in writing, like a spoonful of water in a river.”

It starts with a short piece by the editors that discusses “Working with Mavis Gallant” as in 2007, they published an interview with her, conducted in French and then translated. Gallant called many times to make corrections and work on editing the interview, eventually relinquishing the care of the work to Tara Quinn. “There would be no more auspicious a start to life at Brick than to be show by Mavis Gallant how to edit an interview,” Quinn and Nadia Szilvassy write. “The experience informed how we edited all interviews in issues to come. The voice had to come through wit ha force equal to that of Mavis on that first phone call. We’d all do well to keep listening.”

The issue continues with four more pieces “For Mavis Gallant” from Michael Helm, Francine Prose, Alison Harris, and Michael Ondaatje.