NewPages Blog

New Letters Editor Robert Stewart asks “Does art do much good?”

In his Editor’s Note, “Making What Matters,” Stewart shares, “In my home city recently, a 10-year-old girl named Machole and a 6-year-old girl named Angel, in separate events, were shot dead by gunfire. Machole was in her own living room when someone in a car shot several times into her house; Angel was walking out the door of a convenience store with her father. Other children continue to suffer abuse and violence, yes, but these two events, nine days apart, have caused many people here to examine the kind of landscape—city and country—we have shaped for our children.”

Go to the National Art Education Association News page on any given day, and you’ll see comment after comment from leaders across the nation proclaiming the importance of the arts in education, of turning and keeping the A in STEM for STEAM. It’s not a new struggle among cultures, among communiites, as Stewart notes the Trappist monk Thomas Merton “in a 1962 letter, where he confessed to being disheartened by evil in the world, despite his own writings and art. ‘Tell me,’ Merton wrote to his friend, “am I wasting my time?'”

It’s a question and concern that pervades and surfaces, resurfaces, confronts and confounds wirters, artists, educators, politician and policy makers. While Stewart answers the question in his commentary, an answer found through reading the works of authors in the journal and concluding on the worth and value of their efforts. A worth and value we need to retain and remind others of every chance we get.

In addition to the cover image, the Winter 2014 issue of The Georgia Review features what Editor Stephen Corey rightly refers to as “the striking art portfolio by Mequitta Ahuja” and notes this is the publication’s “second-ever multi-panel foldout.” This is both a generous and gorgeous dedication to artwork for journal readers to enjoy. Corey also footnotes the artwork introduction with this: “Mequitta Ahuja’s Automythography marks The Georgia Review‘s first collaborative project with the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art Galleries. Sponsored by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, Ahuja will be in residence at the school from late January to early February 2015, and an exhibit of her work will be on display at the Dodd Galleries.”

Nerve Lantern: Axon of Performance Literature is a truly unique publication. Published by Pyriform Press and edited by Ellen Redbird, Nerve Lantern is “a journal of experimental performance texts and texts about performance, supporting a range of forms, including poets’ theatre and page-as-stage.” Some examples from Winter 2014 Issue 7: “Un/Conventional Chorus: A Spoken Choral Work for Ten Voices” by Mary Burger & Yedda Morrison; “A Song about the Moon in the Middle of the Night” by Hannah Rodabaugh; “Xylene Radiator Anxiety Mask: Experimental Sonnet Map for Five Voices” by Gary Sloboda; “Pig of Angels of the Americlypse: An anti-masque for four players” by Rodrigo Toscano.

Submissions for the publication are open, but the editorial advice is to understand why you want to be a part of the Nerve Lantern community and what you feel “akin” to or what “new” you will add to it before submitting. The community can be better understood not just by reading past issues of the publication, but viewing one of the many performance videos shot during the publication’s performance venue: “An Afternoon of Sparking Poetry.” The most recent of these have been hosted by the Medicine Show Theatre in New York.

Redbird offers further “Thoughts to Nerve Lantern Newcomers” on the submissions page, asking questions to have writers consider the performance aspects of their work, not only how it might be performed “on stage” but also on the page. A helpful guide for readers and writers alike to help in our understanding and appreciation for this literary form.

Kudos to Ellen Redbird and contributors to Nerve Lantern for providing, not just a place for this genre, but a community in which it can be fostered.

Modern short fiction highlights the newest issue of Chinese Literature Today (v4 n2). Four award-winning authors were selected to exemplify what editors note is a revival of the short form in Chinese literature: Ai Wei, Fan Xiaoqing, Dong Xi, and Li Shijiang. “Our selection covers different generations of contemporary Chinese writers, both male and female writers, and a wide spectrum of literary styles. The selected stories are some of the most representative pieces that showcase short fiction’s efficacy in re-narrating history and memory, capturing immediate social changes, and aestheticizing fragmented individual experiences.”

Mediterraneans is the subject of The Massachusetts Review special issue for Winter 2014. In their introduction, Editors Anna Botta and Michel Moushabeck write of history of the area, of the many cultures that crisscrossed this busy commerce route, and of the language developed to be shared among them, called lingua franca.

“Another name for this Mediterranean vernacular was sabir,” say Botta and Moushabeck, “a noun that derives from the Latin root sapere, ‘to know.’ This special issue brings into conversation the different dialects, languages, vernaculars of the Mediterranean in order to create a sabir of poetic, fictive, and artistic imagination displaying the plurality of Mediterranean identities. The texts included in the pages that follow do not pretend ‘to know’ the Med, instead they trace the filigree of a sabir which can tell us only indirectly and vaguely what Mediterranean identity is.”

The full text of the introduction can be read on the TMR website along with several works from the issue.

Natural Bridge Fall 2014 (#32) includes a special selection of veterans-themed poetry and fiction. Guest Editor John Dalton writes that though the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are said to be ending, “These wars, it turns out, have their own afterlife. Perhaps no one understand this better than the men and women who’ve returned to us as veterans.”

Dalton hopes that this feature will help others better understand the “strangeness” in the role of military service: “to be asked to travel across the world and fight and kill and die in a culture you only partially understand, and perhaps a stranger thing to come home and figure out who you are and just what your service has meant.” It is a conundrum with which we all continue to struggle, and for which we continue to turn to writing to help us navigate as individuals and as a society.

Writers featured for this selection: Marilyn Johnston, Wendy Dunmeyer, John Twobey, Jack Vian, Ty Burson, Nandini Dhar, and Arthur Davis.

Skin is the special focus of The Chattahoochee Review Fall/Winter 2014 double issue. Editor Anna Schachner writes that the call for submissions encouraged “literal and figurative explorations of the theme,” and that “the editorial staff couldn’t have predicted the original and varied responses” they would receive.

As with themed calls, there is both the promise and the dread that metaphor will take over, as the editors discovered, “There was race and disease and facade and sexuality and transformation and embodiment and disguise, among others. Who can fight metaphor? So we joined it, ultimately identifying three metaphors that would help us organize, even reinforce, the great work in the issue: Surface, Selves, and Symbiosis.”

Additionally, in her own exploration of the topic, Schachner focused on the idea of where skin and language meet: tattoo. Taking this connection further to the literal tattoo, Schachner interviews Eva Talmadge, co-author of The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide. The interview can also be found on The Hooch, TCR’s news and events page.

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.