An online journal “dedicated to short fiction,” Fiction Southeast features a monthly series of articles under the label of “Suggestions & Advice for Writers.” Recent essays include “On Writing” by Devin Matthews, “Death of the Short Story” by G. D. McFegridge, “I Denigrate Myself” by Evan Dunsky, “A Time for Fantasy” by Abagail Becastro [pictured], and “On The Artistic Temperament and a Writer’s Need for Privacy” by Pamelyn Casto.

Fiction Southeast essays/articles section also includes Writers Talking About Writing, which features author interviews, “The Story Behind the Story” and “Why I Write.” Other sections are Conference/Residency Spotlight, Developing a Writing Life, Editing/Publishing, Fiction & Culture, Reading Lists, Reviews, and the most unique essay grouping: Storytelling in Contemporary Video Games.

A lot going on for writers in this publication!

Based on Editor Victor David Sandiego’s intro commentary, it sounds like the Winter 2018 issue of Subprimal will be its last: “. . . this is the final issue of Subprimal Poetry Art/Music, at least for a while. I have decided to take a hiatus from publishing Subprimal for 2019, and – with truth to be told – perhaps forever. It’s been a lot of fun during the last five years connecting with so many wonderful authors and artists, but I want to spend more time concentrating on my own work.”

If you’ve not given this publication a look, do it now while you can. The time and effort put into visual and audio is astonishing. Not only do authors read their own works, but Sandiego creates musical compositions to accompany them. It’s one of the most unique publications I’ve experienced in my time with NewPages. While I’m sorry to see Subprimal cease, I wish Victor the best and look forward to seeing where his creative energies lead him!

In addition to the print annual, Mom Egg Review, offering “the best literary writing about mothers and motherhood,” also offers readers MER VOX, an online quarterly of creative writing, interviews, craft essays and more that focus on “motherhood and on the life experiences of women.” The December 2018 installment, Silver Linings, is one I think we can all appreciate, as Editors Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach introduce it:

“Since the 2016 election, the news has been mostly terrible. Both online and offline we have been barraged 24/7 by an overwhelming level of toxicity. We’d like to offer our readers a respite, however brief. For our December folio, we’re featuring poems that celebrate silver linings wherever they may be found: in those we love, in nature, in literature, in sisterhood, in memory.”

Featured poets include: Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Jen Karetnick, Allia Abdullah-Matta, Catherine Esposito Prescott, Radhiyah Ayobami, Julia Lisella, and Keisha Molby-Baez.

About Place Journal Editors Lauren Camp and Melissa Tuckey write in their introduction to the October 2018 issue themed “Root and Resistance”:

“As artists and writers, part of our task is to pay attention to and distill what is happening around us. In witnessing, we’re called to both lift what is beautiful and name what is unjust, to reclaim language from the powerful and give it back its humanity. For this issue, we were interested in works that get at the root of our current political disaster. We also wanted work that explored and reveled in our sources of support, interconnection, solace, and strength. We wanted work that could be useful to those of us engaged in this challenge who, on many days, feel exhausted, overwhelmed and disheartened. We wanted work that would challenge us to learn from perspectives outside of our own, that would help us understand history and how we arrived at this moment.”

Ultimately, they write, “The work we have received reminds us that we all need to nurture ourselves as much as we need to resist the threats to our culture. We need to hold to our strong communities, and also build new ones. Part of our efforts must be a turning back to ancestry and history, to see the germ of a struggle and the start of our futures. We need to look to the past to find the roots of the efforts to amend the present.”

A good way to start the new year.

“Alabama for Beginners,” Jean Ryan’s featured essay in a recent issue of bioStories caught my attention; as the editor describes it, “a love letter to her new home and the unexpected welcome she has found there.”

Ryan moved from San Francisco to Lilian, Alabama where she hopes her “modest savings will last longer” and she and her wife will “unearth the gay community—there must be one, some brave little enclave waiting for reinforcements.” But then, “On deeper reflection,” she continues, “maybe there is no enclave here, no separate community at all. Maybe these pockets are going the way of gay bars, no longer needed in this age of sexual fluidity, borders and labels all slipping away—now there’s a happy thought.” (I’m hoping those happy thoughts with you!)

As I age, I also consider other places to resettle, and for anyone who is contemplating a move, this essay of discovering a new place – especially one so different in so many ways – was a nudge of encouragement. Learning the people, the places, the flora and the fauna, and, most essentially, the rediscovery of your own being amid a new environment:

“Each morning my wife and I have coffee on the back patio and watch the sun come up through the pines. As we often come out before dawn, I sweep a flashlight beam across the cement, making sure we don’t step on something that, like us, is not looking for any trouble, just a place to call home. The other day I saw a black wasp fly out of a small hole in the frame of my deck chair, reminding me of the swallows next door that made a nest in the open sewer pipe of the home under construction. You can find at least three wide-eyed frogs perched inside my hose reel box any time you lift the lid. Not for a minute does even the smallest crevice go to waste. There is panic in the air, the hum of a million creatures trying to stay alive.”

bioStories is an online pubiication of nonfiction that publishes a new feature every week then collects them into two semiannual issues.

The Greensboro Review Editor Terry L. Kennedy writes in his introduction to issue #104 about trying to determine what makes “a good story” and the idea of creating a checklist for submissions:

“A checklist for ‘a good story’ might make my editorial deliberations easier, but it wouldn’t be good for my staff or for the magazine. And I’m not so sure readers really want exact restrictions on a story, not anymore. What if a story has a memorable setting but there’s no plot, nothing happens? A la Seinfeld. Where does that leave us? There are too many intangible aspects with which to blur the lines. . . I guess what I’m working my way around to is this: it’s not that I’m incapable of creating a checklist as that I don’t really believe, in my editorial heart of hearts, that I should. In the end, the best stories might just be the ones that do the things we thing a short story writer shouldn’t attempt. But by doing them well, they win our hearts and make us shout, ‘This one; this is the one!'”

With each new issue of its online poetry journal, Under a Warm Green Linden issues one of the poems as their featured broadside, signed by the author, available for purchase.

Regular readers know I’m a sucker for signed broadsides, and these are no exception. They are gorgeous, quality prints on solid stock and carefully packaged for secure shipping. I own every one in this series and FULL DISCLOSURE: I have paid for every one. This is NOT an ad, but an honest “I LOVE THESE and want to share this with you” post.

“Narcissus on the Hunt” by Rachel Bullis can be read here (Issue 6, Winter 2018), and was particularly striking to me as a teacher of mythology. I will definitely be sharing this one with my students.

The journal is free to read online; the broadsides cost $10 each or 3 for $25 with proceeds going to support Under a Warm Green Linden’s Green Mission reforestation efforts. To date, the publication has “planted 205 trees in collaboration with the Arbor Day Foundation and the National Forest Foundation.”

With each new quarterly issue, Asymptote online publication of poetry, fiction, drama, nonfiction, interviews, and translations offers “an educator’s guide for those wanting to teach pieces from that issue. Each guide offers a thematic breakdown of that issue’s content, relevant information about the context of various pieces, and possible discussion questions and exercises.”

The guides offer lesson plans on topics which incorporate the pieces from the issue, indicating appropriate learner level (middle school, high school, upper-level high school, college/undergraduate, etc.) as well as discipline when applicable (such as AP History, Beginner French Students).

Asymptote also invites educators to “Lend a Hand” assisting with pedagogy and feedback on the lessons provided.

It was a bit shocking to see a 2019 dated publication already, but it’s true: We’re there. 

2nd River View offers a selection of poetry online, some with author-recorded readings, as well as a current and full archive of their chapbook series. These chapbooks can be read online, downloaded in full-page PDF, or “Chap the Book,” which opens as a PDF in booklet form (for printing and saddle stitch fold/staple). What a great (FREE) resource for teachers! Things Impossible to Swallow by Pamela Garvey is their latest chapbook.

Here’s a sampling of some of the works from their Winter 2019 issue:

I want to stay in the house all day
and read poetry from a time
when people rowed out in little boats.

From “Accident” by Nancy Takacs

January sleek gray sky, the clouds diffuse
the sun to one dull eye, & my body quiet
with goat milk skin, makes a slim seed
in thin sheets and cotton bedspread.

From “On Sunday Morning, Church Bells” by J.J. Starr

. . . I wonder if
the evening stars will be

missing behind the clouds.
I want to tell the clouds
to be gone or to get out of the way.

I want to wrap my hands
around them so badly

without hurting them.

From “Behind the Clouds” by Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal
[pictured: portrait by Karen J. Harlow]

In her editorial to The Fiddlehead‘s Autumn 2018 issue, “Whatever We Need It To Be,” Creative Nonfiction Editor Alicia Elliott opens the publication’s first “all creative nonfiction issue” with a story about presenting on a panel with three other CNF writers. Asked the opening question: What is Creative Nonfiction?, “All four of us exchanged a look. I laughed nervously, as I tend to do when I’m not sure how to answer a question. The seconds passed.”

It’s not that they weren’t prepared for the question, Elliott explains, or hadn’t joked about the challenge of defining the form. “Unfortunately,” she tells readers, “I still don’t have a very good definition.”

But, like so many of us, she goes on to share, “Ever since I fell into Creative Nonfiction a few years ago, I’ve been enthralled by the genre’s possibility, its malleability, the way it requires you to push beyond what’s in front of you and see what’s hidden underneath.”

This all-CNF issue, with works chosen from over 600 submissions should indeed provide us all with a broadened understanding of CNF, as Elliott hopes, but at the same time, “ironically, will probably make defining CNF as gloriously fuzzy for you as it is for me. That’s okay, though. It’s part of the genre’s charm.”

Read the full essay here.

From Speer Morgan’s “Forward: Practical Living,” which opens the Fall 2018 (41.3) issue of The Missouri Review:

“Trends in international politics toward right-wing nationalism, racism in endlessly renewing guises, and the pursuit of material short-term gain regardless of what it does to the earth’s environment and national budgets: all these things make me wonder how well we remember our history beyond last year or even last month. The end of World War I led to an utterly changed, financially crippled world; World War II resulted in the physical destruction of much of Europe and between fifty and eighty million dead, only to be followed by a series of cold and hot wars arising partly from long-misguided imperial assumptions. This nation now has a president who among other things denies climate change, while the largest wildfire in California history burns along with sixteen others and the highest mountain in Sweden just lost its stature because it has melted so much this year.

“Current politics and culture wars are surely a passing phase, like the reign of the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. When Dorothy throws a bucket of water on her, the witch will surely melt. Surely. However, given how little we appear to remember about history, one wonders if we will have to go through some cataclysm before we go for our buckets.”

Read the full essay here.

Heading down its home stretch, Glimmer Train Bulletin continues to offer writers and readers the inside scoop from authors. December’s bulletin features “Go Small to Go Big” by Jane Delury [pictured], which advises writers who feel “overwhelmed with your novel or story draft” to set it aside and go back to basics: the sentence. And Matthew Vollmer’s essay, “The Literary Masquerade: Writing Stories Disguised As Other Forms of Writing,” encourages that “this interplay that results from a story and the particular form it appropriates can be exciting for both writer and reader.” 

Read both essay in full here, where you can also find a full archive of bulletin back issues.

Until November 29, The Common Foundation is holding its annual Author Postcard Auction: “Bid for a chance to win a postcard from your favorite author, handwritten for you or a person of your choice. A wonderful keepsake, just in time for the holidays. Author postcards make great gifts! All proceeds will go toward The Common’s programs. These include publishing emerging writers, mentoring students in our Literary Publishing Internship program, and connecting with students around the world through The Common in the Classroom.”

Featured authors include: Aja Gabel, Aleksandar Hemon, Andre Aciman, Andrew Sean Greer, Anne Tyler, Ann Patchett, Caitlin Horrocks, Carmen Maria Machado, Claire Messud, David Sedaris, Elliot Ackerman, Esi Edugyan, Garth Risk Hallberg, George Saunders, Harlan Coben, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Lethem, Joseph O’Neill, Julie Orringer, Kelly Link, Kiese Laymon, Min Jin Lee, Nathan Englander, Nell Freudenberger, Rabih Alameddine, Rachel Kushner, Rebecca Makkai, Rivka Galchen, R.O. Kwon, Tommy Orange, Tom Nichols, and Viet Thanh Nguyen.

“Cadets are keen observers of social cues from their professors, retracting behind the protective formalities of rank at the first whiff of ‘agenda,’ regardless of its political stripe. It’s easy enough, and they have little social capital invested in the humanities. Nor do they know many people who do. . . . Unlike most of us, though, Cadets will flat-out ask in public how reading poems matters to future practitioners of their trade.

It’s a sincere question, a vital one. It belonged in the public sphere the first time I heard it in October 2016. . . . poetic speech can, at its thorniest, frame problems that cannot be reduced to partisan accolades, commodification, claptrap. It can render the crisp shadows of power under the thorns.

But this is work. Like most hard work, it is also humbling, if not downright humiliating.”

From “That Which is Difficult: Poetry at West Point” by Matt Salyer
Published in Plume: Online Poetry Magazine, Issue #87, November 2018

Bellevue Literary Review Editor-in-Chief Danielle Ofri welcome readers to the 35th issue with a newly redesigned journal, “a remarkable collaboration with students at the Parsons School of Design, under the direction of their teacher, the incomparable Minda Gralnek. The students were given free rein” to change the seventeen-year-old design that has been slowly morphing over the past few years: “. . . we moved from archival photos on the cover to contemporary art, in order to broaden our reach.”

Ofri assures readers that “it’s the literary content that really makes the journal, and we’d never conflate content with presentation. Cooks, though, know that food is always just that much tastier when you pull out the special-occasion china. So we offer up this first course to you, and hope that you find it savory – inside and out.”

This issues theme , “Dis/Placement,” brings together an introductory essay by Ha Jin, as well as new writing from Barron H. Lerner, Myra Shapiro, Hal Sirowitz, Sue Ellen Thompson, Eric Pankey, Dan Pope, Rachel Hadas, Prartho Sereno, and others, as well as cover art by Jonathan Allen.

BLR is looking for submission on the theme “A Good Life” – deadline January 1, 2019.

In his introduction the the Fall 2018 issue of Creative Nonfiction, Editor Lee Gutkind writes on the theme Risk as it relates to a writer’s life: “. . . although we may be safe from physical harm, all of us who write know that every hour we devote to our notepad or keyboard, every moment we stop and think and dwell on the thoughts and ideas that will, in one way or another, find life on a page or computer display, involves monumental risk.”

Read the full essay here.

“And the question is why are people so numb? I think they are awakening, and I’m very happy about that. But awakening has been so slow. And that’s the dark age. People are having a hard time gaining knowledge and wisdom. The educational systems are completely unreliable and full of land mines for most people. So, yes, it is a dark age, and you can only hope people will come out of it, but they have to turn off gadgets and start to talk to people. And the time is very short.”

From “A Conversation with Alice Walker” by Erik Gleibermann, World Literature Today, November-December 2018.

The issue also includes an excerpt from Walker’s “My 12-12-12” and a web exclusive interview “Translating Alice Walker: A Conversation with Manuel García Verdecia,” by Daniel Simon.

With its most recent edition, Black Warrior Review introduces the renaming of their online edition of the publication: Boyfriend Village.

The name comes a story written Zachary Doss, “The Village with All of the Boyfriends.” Zach was an editor with BWR  and beloved member of the literary community. He passed away in March 2018.

Brandi Wells writes, “Zach loved BWR before, during, and after he was editor there. It makes sense that he might be woven into the infrastructure in this way. I hope it is a space for weird voices and writers who are trying something new, something surprising.”

She offers readers this excerpt from Zach’s story: “The Village with All of the Boyfriends is where all of your boyfriends wind up eventually. You built this Village for them and they can’t leave and neither can you. You are not allowed inside, but you wait in the desert at the edge of town.”

Driftwood Press is kicking off their new Seminar Series with a five-week online Erasure Poetry Seminar lead by Jerrod Schwarz [pictured], instructor of creative writing at the University of Tampa. The seminar covers the history, practice, and importance of erasure poetry. The format is weekly video, writing prompts with feedback, a class-only Facebook group and YouTube channel. The course fee includes a copy of A Little White Shadow  by Mary Ruefle. Students will contribute to a Showcase Booklet which will be made available for free on Driftwood’s website and via their social media outlets.

Writers interested in attending the seminar must apply with writing sample and statement of interest no later than October 31. After selection, the course will run from November 12 – December 14.

Glimmer Train may be winding down, but its Bulletins with craft essays from writers continues a stongly as ever. The October 2018 installment features:

Writing Immigrant Stories by May-lee Chai [pictured]: “For American authors writing about a multicultural, globalized world, the issue of translation is unavoidable: what to put into English, what to leave in a mother tongue, and how to render the mixed-English that often is used in immigrant families.”

Novel and Story by William Luvaas: “For years, the novel was dominant, with its loud, broad-shouldered personality. Novel was so self-assured—something of a bully, really—while Story scurried about, mouse-like under the furniture, speaking in a whisper, fearing Novel would step on it. Then something unexpected happened.”

Tobias Wolff (from an interview by Travis Holland): “So when I would read a great story of Ray Carver’s, like ‘Errand’ or ‘Cathedral,’ my thought would be, ‘I want to write this well.’ Not write like him, because I knew I couldn’t. That was his world, his voice, all that.”

This and all previous bulletins are archived here.

“Literature is not efficient,” writes New England Review Editor Carolyn Kuebler in the Editor’s Note to V39 N3. “Reading it, writing it, and publishing it all require a seemingly unreasonable investment in time. Journals like ours take part in this economy of inefficiency by keeping our doors open to writing from everyone, everywhere.” She goes on to discuss the weight placed on editors to make selections from thousands of unsolicited submissions, which open publications with good reputations face.

“Because of this openness to new writing, we have to say ‘no’ far more often than we say ‘yes,’ which can give writers a kind of ‘who do they think they are’ feeling of resentment. It also sets literary editors up as gatekeepers, as if reading and evaluating manuscripts were in some way equivalent to being a bouncer at an exclusive nightclub or a troll under the bridge. To me, the problem with the image of a gatekeeper is that it implies that the lit mag is some steadfast entity that simply exists, and that editors are only blocking the way to it. But without the efforts of those same people who are reading the manuscripts, there would be no there there.”

Instead, Kuebler entreats readers (and writers) to consider “lit mags and their staff of editors and readers in terms of service,” with many of those working behind the scenes doing so for little or no pay, and putting “aside their own agendas and literary preferences, and often their own writing, in service of another’s.”

I get it. I hope others do, too. Thanks Carolyn – and countless other editors, readers, and all of those who give selflessly in the service of literature to make these publications ‘there.’

As always, Brevity’s craft essays cover a wide range of topics to interest any/every writer of “concise literary nonfiction,” and then some. The September 2018 installment features “Schizophrenia, Dandelions, Cookies, Floods and Scabs: Alternate Approaches” by Elizabeth Robinson; “Picturing the Hybrid Form” by Rebecca Fish Ewan [pictured], which offers readers “an illustrated crash course on graphic memoir”; and an exploration of “the interplay of language and visual arts” with Beth Kephart’s “Paynes Gray: When Watercolors Become Words.”