Edited by Chris Agee and Cathal Ó Searcaigh, the newest issue of Irish Pages (v8 n 2) is a tribute in memory of Seamus Heaney. The journal includes: four poems by Heaney; Sven Birkerts and Helen Vendler on the man and the poet; a suite of obituaries and global reminiscences by leading poets and writers in Ireland, Britain and the United States; new poems by Kerry Hardie, Michael Coady, Paddy Bushe, Kathleen Jamie, Katie Donovan, Seán Lysaght, Damian Smyth, Ignatius McGovern, John F. Deane, Franics Harvey, Michael Longley, Alan Gillis, Moya Cannon and Harry Clifton; President Michael D. Higgins on John Hewitt & Richard Murphy on poetry and terror; new writing in Irish from Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Cathal O Searcaigh and others; and Seamus Justin Heaney 1939-2013 a unique photographic portfolio by Bobbie Hanvey.

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

First place: Eva Lomski [pictured], of Melbourne, Australia, wins $1500 for “The Things We Build.” Her story will be published in Issue 96 of Glimmer Train Stories.

Second place: Francisco Delgado, of Forest Hills, NY, wins $500 for “International Politics.” His story will also be published in an upcoming issue, increasing his prize to $700.

Third place: Chris Santiago, of Pasadena, CA, wins $300 for “Flyover Country.”

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

Deadline coming up for the Glimmer Train Fiction Open: January 2
Glimmer Train hosts this competition twice a year, and first place is $2500 plus publication in the journal. This category has been won by both beginning and veteran writers – all are welcome! There are no theme restrictions. Word count generally ranges from 2000 – 8000, though up to 20,000 is fine. Click here for complete guidelines.

Sheboygan, Wisconsin is known to us Michganders as the place that breaks the winter storms for us before they head across Lake Michigan to our western shores. Which makes the Stoneboat fundraiser one that truly earns my respect for those kuh-ray-zee editors: On New Year’s Day, they will be participating in the Polar Bear Plunge. For those of you in warmer climates who may not be aware of what this entails – imagine filling your bathtub with ice water, strip down to next to nothing… Enough said, right? Feeling the chill already?

The folks at Stoneboat will be plunging into frigid Lake Michigan, or at least going in as deep as their fundraising demands. Which is where you come in: The more money Stoneboat raises before the January 1 plunge, the further they will submerge themselves into the water. Here’s their formula of how much and how deep they’ll go:

$50 knees
$100 mid-thighs
$150 hips
$200 belly buttons
$250 chests
$300 shoulders

In addition, while they’ll take donations in any amount, they are offering the following premiums to donors:

$10 a handmade Stoneboat bookmark
$20 a Stoneboat t-shirt
$50 a one-year subscription to Stoneboat and a poem of your choice (the first 10 lines, or the whole poem if it is 10 lines or less) will be read in the water/at the event*

The asterisk, fairly enough, ensures that no one succumb to hypothermia: “*We will try to read as many poems in the water as possible, and we’ll ensure that all selections are read at the event.”

So if you’re still looking for a post-holiday gift for someone, I’d say the subscription and having the poem read (and recorded) at this event would be a great way to head on in to 2015. Get those Stoneboaters up to their shoulders; really, I think this is one freeze they’d appreciate!

Disability and Poetry is the topic of discussion in the Poetry December 2014 feature “Exchange.” Writers Jennifer Bartlett, John Lee Clark, Jim Ferris, and Jillian Weise share views on writing disability, publishing, accessibility, and form and embodiment. There are some startlingly hard-hitting statments, such as Bartlett’s “I have resisted the term ‘identity poet’ when considering my own work; therefore, my biggest challenge is to address my cerebral palsy without poetics and other identities taking a ‘back seat’ in the process.” And later, “I think publishing in poetry is inherently biased; it always will be.”

Or how about Ferris’s “Disability is dangerous. We represent danger to the normate world, and rightly so. Disabled people live closer to the edge. We are more vulnerable, or perhaps it is that we show our human vulnerability without being able to hide it in the ways that nondisabled people can hide and deny the vulnerability that is an essential part of being human.”

The exchange is hard core honest (editors and publishers should be reading this), as well as enlightening for all (including literary event planners). The Exchange is available full-text online here.

Melissa R. Sipin, winner of the 2013 Glimmer Train Fiction Open, offers a craft essay in the Glimmer Train Bulletin #95 entitled “To My Unknown Daughter: On the Inheritance of Writing.” Sipin writes raw what so many writers struggle through in coming to their craft – their work – of writing, “I know, if you are anything like me, you will fight with society like a lover. In your writing, your art, you will need to expose its unwillingness to witness its oppression, its loneliness, its refusal to see truth and its addiction to shadows. And if you are anything like me, the world outside, which is both beautiful and not, both loving and not, both happy and sad, will force you to be sensitive to its pangs and joys, allowing you to think-feel. What is to think-feel?” And then later answers with, “This sensitivity, this ability to think-feel is what makes us writers, the kind of writers with the disposition to know and feel the most extreme states of the human condition (birth, love, and death). And it is because of this that we enter into these liminal spaces alone. We suffer these extreme states to know what loneliness feels like, what sadness, happiness, trauma, and hope are, both in body, mind, and spirit.”

The Glimmer Train Bulletin is a free monthly that features craft essays from writers published in recent issues of Glimmer Train Stories. Also included in #95 are essays by Selena Anderson (“Want”), George Saunders (“On the Preconceptual World”), and Rowena Macdonald (“Writing Dialogue”). Read them all here.

Meat for Tea editor Elizabeth MacDuffie has dedicated the opening pages of the most recent issue (v8 n3) in memory of Jim Foley.

MacDuffe writes, “I remember him thusly: Jim came into the [UMass] grad English program a few years after I did. He was in the MFA program and I was in the Ph.D. program, but his was a pleasant presence in the hallways, and we discussed lesson plans and teaching ideas on a number of occasions. I knew him to be a thoughtful, caring, teacher and a smiling, kind, person. I was more of a friend of friend to him . . . Still, I knew him well enough to admire his courageous actions and to be devastated by his violent, untimely death. I can only imagine the pain his family is enduring and I humbly hope that giving them an issue of the magazine celebrating the man he was helps ease their pain in some small way.”

Writers contributing to the memorial include Molly Crabapple, Samantha Wood, Cathy K. Schlund-Vials, Connolly Ryan Tracy Cummings, Tom Kealey, and Kristin Bock.

Amsterdam-based Versal literary journal went on “intermission” last year, which Editor Megan Garr soundly defends does not mean the publication is dead. To the contrary, Versal is achieving goals they had set for their downtime (though selling out the back issues is still on the To Do List – which you all could help with!). In a bold step forward and away from their past, Versal has started a super cool new venture: Verso / live jour- nal which “renders the literary journal in live form.” Each curated edition will feature one editor and one writer, and a selection of artists and thinkers in various forms: interviews, essays, slideshows, film, sound, and more. Each live issue is themed and edited: 1.1 “Hold Your Tongue” ed. Megan Garr; 1.2 “A Good Road to Follow” ed. Daniel J. Cecil; 1.3 “Chain Gang” ed. Anna Arov; 1.4 “Bad Dog” ed. Jane Lewty. Such a cool idea, but no surprise coming from Versal!

The newest issue of The Hudson Review (Autumn 2014) is their New Writers Issue and features essays by Mara Naselli, James Santel, fiction by Asako Serizawa, Edward Porter, Lauren Schenkman, and poetry by Cally Conan-Davies, William Louis-Dreyfus, Trent Busch, Katherine Robinson, Guillermo Bleichmar, Anne Nance, and Susan de Sola. Some of the works can be read in full on the journal’s website.

Talking Writing welcomes writer and teacher Wm. Anthony Connolly to its staff as the new reading series editor. “He’ll scan the world of small-press print literary work for great pieces to republish in Talking Writing,” write the editors on the blog. Starting with the current issue, there will be several selections in each issue. The current issue, Fall 2014 “Money,” features a book excerpt by William Least Heat-Moon of Writing Blue Highways and a prose poem excerpt by Kim Triedman from Hadestown.

The Fall 2014 issue of New Ohio Review includes the feature “Poems and Literal Truth” with essays from Lawrence Raab (“Should Poems Tell the Truth?” [pictured]), Daisy Fried (“Truthless Demands”), Adrienne Su (“Where Are You Really Writing From? Reading and Writing Place and Experience”), Louise Glück (“A Brief Response” which begins “Frankly, I have no idea why this should be any sort of problem.”), Carl Dennis (“Telling the Truth in Poetry”), Kim Addonizio (“Pants on Fire”), and Michael Ryan (in which Ryan shares his experience reading through poems for Iowa Review – one of which came in with the title “Father”).

The newest issue of The Denver Quarterly (49.1 2014) includes a special feature of work by a selection of Native American writers to mark the 150th anniversary of the infamous Sand Creek Massacre (Laird Hunt, Editor). Editors Billy J. Stratton and Eleni Sikelianos write, “The words that make up this special feature are indeed limited, and as we look through the contents we wonder how to best honor the dead of Sand Creek and their living descendants. Yet we did not request that contributors send work specifically about Sand Creek. Some of the writers in this feature are working directly with history and some are not, but in all lives the desire to ‘write back’ and share story and song.”

Although the fall edition of Poetica: Contemporary Jewish Writing is already sold out, readers can still get a copy of the publication’s special fall 2014 Holocaust Edition. Fiction and poetry from writers included in this edition: Sally Albiso, Fred Amram, Helen Eisen, Joy Gaines-Friedler, Barbara Goldberg, Miriam Green (Israel), Sarah Katz, Marta Kosály, Bem Le Hunte (Australia), Jesse Morales, Drew Nacht, Baruch November, Nina Pick, Michael Robinson, Sophie Soil (Canada), Tamara Tabel, Tim Stobierski, Israel Zoberman, with cover art by Ron Weijers and inside art by Selma Waldman and Harriet Caldwell. The publication is 70 pages, perfect bound.

Revealing the interiority of a character in a way that feels natural, yet resonates powerfully within a reader is one of the most difficult tasks of the fiction writer. Considering how powerful that emotional connection between reader and character can prove to be, and how empty a story can feel without it, it’s vital that the writer bridge the distance between reader and character in ways that are subtle rather than clumsy.

But how does one accomplish it?

John Thornton Williams goes on to explain in his November Glimmer Train Newsletter bulletin Indirection of Image.

Other craft essays include:

Aurelie Sheehan: My City (or, On the Idea of Making It My Own)

Peter Turchi: Puzzle and Mystery

Greg Schreur: The Creative Process: A Diuretic Metaphor

Issue #16 / Fall 2014 of New Ohio Review features the 2014 Contest Winners as selected by Aimee Bender for Fiction and Alan Shapiro for Poetry:

Fiction Prizes

1st – Robert Glick: “The Undersized Negative”
2nd – Joseph Scapellato: “Small Boy”

Poetry Prizes

1st – Stephanie Horvath: “So That is What I Am,” “CadesCove Water Wheel,” and “Medicine”
2nd – Jennifer Perrine: “A Theory of Violence” and “Embarrassment: from baraço (halter)”

The most recent issue of Pulp Literature (#4 Autumn 2014) features the story “Soldier, Wake” by Susanna Kearsley followed by an interview in which Kearsely comments: “My books are a marketing department’s nightmare, really, because they don’t fit tidily into any genre . . . But usually I simply tell people I write stories about present-day people who are dealing with mysteries that come from the past, with dual plot lines that weave a historical tale with a modern one.” Kearsely goes on to discuss “Soldier, Wake,” her first zombie story, why she thinks readers are drawn to the mystical, and using her international travel as research for her writing

The Bitter Oleander‘s latest issue contains a special feature on Lara Gularte which includes a bio, interview, and selection of her poetry. Born in 1947 and raised in San Jose, California, Gularte has a unique family history as well as an accomplished self history. In the interview, she speaks much to how her experiences growing up influenced her life as a writer: “I remember having an active imagination that grew greater due to my isolation and no other children to socialize with. . . . I was so used to amusing myself and spending time with adults, grade school was a formidable experience. However, my love of reading stories never waned.” By high school, she was interested in “Beat Poets” and had the opportunity to buy a book of poetry from and meet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. She participated in demonstrations and was part of the counter culture movement. More influences include working in human services, participating in a group called “Waverly Writers,” attending Community of Writers Squaw Valley Workshop, and going to the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal.

In response to the question in which Gularte admits is “very thought provoking and not easy to answer”—”Your poems are enriched by an imagism . . . and a solitude that summons both the natural world and the consciousness that helps complete your oneness with it . . . How do you manage to keep it awake inside yourself?”—Gularte writes, “I look at writing poetry as mining, going into my unconscious to draw out what is there and make sense of it . . . I can enter the unconscious easily at any time. However, I must be quiet and not have busy activities to do. From my unconscious I retrieve images. I am a visual person and find putting images to words is satisfying for me. Before I write a poem I retrieve many images from my unconscious and describe these images on paper. I then put the images together to make some kind of sense. I never know what will come of it. I arrange words with a result that usually surprises me. I like to be surprised.”

Here’s a sample of some of her work. The poem is titled “Cassandra Visits the Azores”:

She roams the stone islands,
sees the future through basaltic rock-
flowings, wrinkled crevasses, hardened fluids.

Her milky eyes never shut.
She wears a necklace of black stones,
these stones she throws in the sea,
and fishing boats, surface.

The folding and unfolding
of what she sees turns her inward,
sand and tears stream down her face.

The sky of wayward gray slides like lava,
light changing,
changing moments.

Water spills over the caldera.

Because of her large success with her creative nonfiction title Wild, Cheryl Strayed is greatly known in the writing world, and in the latest print issue of Booth, Ashley Petry talks with her “about telling hard truths, making pacts with your readers, and of course writing like a motherfucker.”

In the interview, Strayed talks a lot about how it is to share truth in writing and the challenges that come along with it: “I always say, if you’re going to show anyone’s ass, it had better be your own. Memoir writing is about the journey of the self. It’s about saying, this is my subjective view of this experience, and that gives you an enormous amount of power. You get to say what’s true; you’re the god of that world. So I belive in searching my soul to tell the necessary truths, and sometimes that involves other people, but I always try to do it with a sense of compassion.”

In response to a question about what she gains from writing about difficult experiences, Strayed conveys that writing is her own kind of therapy: “I’ve been able to forgive and understand and accept many of the hardest things in my life via my writing. The fictional character in Torch who is the stepfather, Bruce, is based loosely on my own stepfather. There was no way I could get inside the consciousness of Bruce without loving Bruce, forgiving Bruce, and understanding why he did what he did. Once I did that, I understood why my stepfather did what he did, and it wasn’t about not loving me; it was about his own survival. Being able to step back from my own life by going deep into the life of literature has been healing over and over again. There’s this strange dichotomy where you have to go deeper into your life while also stepping back from it so that you can craft it into a book or an essay.”

The conversation wraps up with a thought from Strayed about the debate on if you need to live in NYC or have an MFA in order to be a writer: “I think that whole thing is so unbelievably ridiculous . . . What I say is, do the same thing as a writer that you do as a human, to seek out the people who inspire you, who comfort you, who challenge you, who enlighten you, who will offer you shelter when you need it and a push out the door when you need it. I root for real life.”

“The Newman Prize for Chinese Literature is awarded biennially in recognition of outstanding achievement in prose or poetry that best captures the human condition, and is conferred solely on the basis of literary merit.” The winner for 2013 is Yang Mu, and the recent issue of Chinese Literature Today includes a special feature on the writer, including poetry by Yang Mu and an interview.

Here is a short bio from Chinese Literature Today, and you can read a few of his poems on their website: Yang Mu was born in 1940 in the small coastal city of Huilan in east Taiwan as Ching-hsien Wang 珙씀獻. He received his BA in English from Tunghai University in Taiwan, his MFA from the University of Iowa, and his PhD in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley. He has taught at many universities in North America, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, but he spent most of his academic career at the University of Washington, Seattle. He has also served in important administrative positions, including the founding dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Dong Hwa University in his hometown of Hualian and the founding director of the Institute of Literature and Philosophy at Academia Sinica, the premiere national research institution in Taiwan. He currently holds an endowed chair at Dong Hwa.

Yang Mu has been writing poetry continuously for sixty years. The longevity of his career is matched by his extraordinary creativity, which has exerted a transformative influence on Taiwanese poetry in general from the 1950s to the present. His poetry assimilates the best that the Chinese and the Western traditions have to offer, deftly blending classicism and surrealism, romanticism and modernism. His poetry may be lyrical or dramatic, contemplative or defiant, elegiac or erotic. In an age when poetry is indisputably considered to be minority literature, Yang Mu enjoys enduring popularity among readers of several generations. His accomplishments beyond the realm of poetry are demonstrable in prose, literary criticism, scholarship on classical Chinese poetry, comparative literature, and editing, as well as the translation of poetry.

Yang Mu has been married to Ying-ying Hsia for thirty-five years; they have a son, Bruce. The couple now lives in Taiwan most of the year, dividing their time between Hualian and Taipei.

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

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

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

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

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

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