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The Antigonish Review Summer 2014 issue features a memorial section to Alistair MacLeod, including a tribute by Associate Editor Sheldon Currie, “Alistair Macleod – Memories in a Window” by Randall Maggs, “The Splendid Man from Dunvegan” by Reynold Stone, and three poems by MacLeod from previous issue of The Antigonish Review.

The most recent issue of Tin House (v16 n1), themed “Tribes,” features an essay in the Readable Feast section by Roxane Gay, “The Island We Are: At Home with Food.” The quote line the magazine chose was “When you are overweight in a Haitian family, your body is a family concern.” That caught my interest (well, and of course, it’s Roxane Gay for cripes sake), but what stuck with me throughout her piece was the repetition of ‘loving, and loving hard’:

“We talk about our lives. We debate and try to solve the world’s problems. We are a holy space. We love each other hard.”

Following the “overweight” quote, Gay writes: “Everyone – siblings, parents, aunts, uncles, grandmotehrs, cousins – has an opinion, judgement, or counsel. They mean well. We love hard, and that love is inescapable.”

“They want to help. I accept this, or I try to.”

“As I eat the foods of my childhood prepared by my own hand, I am filled with longing, as well as a quiet anger that has risen from hard love and good intentions.”

Her writing is a mirror of that: subtle, persistent in keeping you reading, and hard hitting in its meaning, which isn’t at all sneaky. It’s there throughout, and you can’t help but to keep reading it, wanting to be a part of it, loving it.

Now in its third volume, The Masters Review is a collection of ten stories from students in graduate-level creative writing programs across the country (MFA, MA, PhD). Selected by such well-known authors as Lauren Groff (Volume I), AM Homes (Volume II), previously featured authors have gone on to publish novels, short story collections, and win awards, including a Nelson Algren Award finalist, an Academy of American Poets Prize winner, and a Fulbright Fellow. Many have gone on to continue their publishing in literary journals nation wide.

Volume III, with stories selected by Lev Grossman, New York Times bestselling author and Times book critic, includes Drew Ciccolo (Rutgers-Newark University College; MFA), Amanda Pauley (Hollins University; MFA), Eric Howerton (University of Houston; PhD), Maya Perez (Michener Center for Writer; MFA), Shane R. Collins (Stonecoast University of Southern Maine; MFA), Courtney Kersten (University of Idaho; MFA), Meng Jin (Hunter College; MFA), Joe Worthen (University of North Carolina Wilmington; MFA), Andrew MacDonald (University of Massachusetts Amherst; MFA), Dana Xin (University of Montana; MFA).

In addition to its annual anthology, The Masters Review also accepts submissions year round for its regular online feature New Voices. This is open to any new or emerging author who was not published a work of fiction or narrative nonfiction of novel length. Fiction or narrative nonfiction up to 5000 words accepted for New Voices pays .10/word up to $200 with no submission fee.

New England Review poetry editor C. Dale Young will be leaving the publication’s masthead after the next issue (35.3), closing out nineteen years with NER. That issue, the editors promise, will be a memorable one in honor of Young’s legacy.

Joining the publication in her new role as international correspondent is Ellen Hinsey, based in Paris since 1987. Hinsey will be “looking to make connections between authors and translators, editors and readers. She keeps her ear to the ground and her eye on the bigger picture.”

And behind the scenes, Middlebury College has had great success in establishing an Editor’s Fund in honor of Stephen Donadio’s twenty years as editor. The fund will help to offset annual expenses.

Carve Magazine takes the “Classy” award for their treatment of works their own editors have rejected. REJECT! is a regular feature in the Carve Premium Edition (lots of free content online, but some is only in the paid-for premium edition – a move that seems quite fair, actually, so don’t kvetch). In it, the publication features an author whose work Carve readers had previously rejected but was selected for publication elsewhere.

Their reason for doing this beyond an exercise in pure humility? To show how NORMAL rejection is, how editors preferences can indeed be “subjective and varied,” and to actually encourage writers to keep trying if they want to be successful.

The latest issue features feedback the Carve reading committee had provided to author Lynn Levin, her response to the feedback, and an excerpt of her story, “A Visit to the Old House,” which was subsequently published in Rathalla Review, Spring 2014. The notes include when the story was rejected and whether or not the author had revised the piece.

I applaud Carve for providing such a constructively cool feature in their publication. So often, rejections leave writers disheartened and bitter toward the very community in which they wish to participate. This approach provides a unique perspective from the editors and publishers that is both humbling as well as encouraging, upping the conversation from ranting to professional.

Thanks, Carve, for keeping it classy!

According to writer Amina Gautier in the September Glimmer Train Bulletin (#92):

Revision is the kick in the pants that propels the writer out of complacence, jars him from the euphoria that tends to come when he thinks he’s completed something. Revision is the inevitable and necessary faceoff between one’s lazy writer self who defends the good enough draft, “This sentence / passage / description / scene / character is fine the way it is” and one’s higher writing self who argues, “Yes, it’s good enough and it says what I want, but does it say it in the right way? Does it say it in the best way”

Read the whole craft essay here: Joy of Revision (yes, Joy!).

The most recent issue of The Hudson Review (Summer 2014) features three stories by Alexander Pushkin from a new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The stories, “The Blizzard,” “The Staionmaster,” and “The Young Lady Peasant,” are three of the five Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin (1830), Pushkin’s first finished prose works. Pevear notes these stories were written in “an extraordinarily productive period for Pushkin, when a quarantine confined him for two months to his estate in Boldino. He ascribed the authorship to a rather simple country gentleman, Ivan Petrovich Belkin, who, in a brief introduction, is said to have written them down from the account of local inhabitants.” The works were first “considered mere anecdotes,” but have since been recognized as “unsurpassed” narrative constructions “in the whole range of Russian literature,” according to D.S. Mirsky, Pushkin biographer.

Thanks to Rattle, “poetry is back in the news” with their online feature Poets Respond. While the editors of Rattle believe that “real poetry is timeless,” there is great opportunity to respond and participate in the conversation of current events that does need to be given a more immediate space. To resolve this, Rattle now publishes poetic responses every Sunday to a public event that has occurred with the last week.

In addition to the written work, Rattle also includes an audio of the poet reading for most of the poems. Some recent features: Mark Smith-Soto “Streamers” – in response to birds in California being ignited in flight by solar panels; Sonia Greenfield “Corpse Flower” – In Memoriam James Foley; Gabrielle Bates “Of the Lamp” – For Robin Williams; Jason McCall “Roll Call for Michael Brown”; Marjorie Lotfi Gill “Picture of Girl and Small Boy (Burij, Gaza).”

Selected poets receive $25. Submissions must be received before Friday midnight.

The Conium Review has recently undergone some major changes – not only skin deep, but beneath the surface as well. In addition to their new website (some bugs still being worked out), the publication will now publish fiction only and will begin featuring flash fiction online. Conium will still publish in print, moving from biannaul to annual, but with the unique twist that they will publish two editions of their annual: a standard edition and a collector’s edition, which they claim will be “the coolest book you own.”