NewPages Blog

In a creative introduction to the nonfiction feature in New Madrid, Editors Lisa Luton and Elena Passarello address the ongoing debate in nonfiction writing—how far from the truth can a writer wander.

The introduction is a dialogue between two characters, Memoir and Essay. At first the two argue. Essay argues that “essayists try to create a new, fully realized contract with each piece of writing, one that is grounded and centered in art rather than proving anything. The trying is what turns us on, and hopefully what turns readers on. Why put art first? Because art is greater than fact.” To which Memoir says, “I think we are the purveyors of the existing, deeper truths of the world. We are not here to make art out of facts, but to find an portray the art that is already there.”

However, as they carry on, they realize that they have a lot in common with each other and that “Maybe nonfiction is about both the trying and the answering, and, just like with a painting, it is the audience’s interpretation of the art that makes the true meaning.” Essay goes on to say that “the greatest thing we can learn from all these submissions is that we nonfictioneers might have core values that go in opposite directions, but there’s enough room under this genre umbrella for all of us.”

This nonfiction feature in New Madrid includes both essays and memoirs—and pieces that perhaps can’t be defined one way or the other. Writers featured include Kim Trevathan, Kirby Wright, Matthew Gavin Frank, Sean Christopher Lewis, Frankie Finley, Briandaniel Oglesby, Sara B. Levi, Vincent Scarpa, Daniel Aristi, John Proctor, Tom Elliot, and Alison Stine.

The Chicago School of Poetics offers online and F2F workshops for writers who “feel the need for more specialized instruction” beyond the traditional academic program.

Currently offered is a master class workshop with poet Ron Silliman: “’What does not change / is the will to change’ : Embracing transformation in writing poetry”. The one-day (Oct. 20) workshop will run for three hours (1-4pm) in an online, video-conferenced classroom and is limited to ten students.

In addition to this master class and weekly salons, online classes offered include Poetics (I, II, & III), Documentary Poetics, Risk: Writing at the Edge, Erasure to Automatism, The Poetry of Cubism, Queer Poetics, Working Poets, Personal Archeology, Publishing, The Poem as Remix, Visual Poetry, and Hybrid Texts.

In the current issue of Denver Quarterly, Editor Bin Ramke announces the issue as his last as editor. After serving for seventeen years, he expresses his gratitude for the writers over the years.

“It can be an enormous amount of work to publish a literary journal four times per year,” he says in his editor’s note, “but when that work is shared it can also be a joy, and it was. I trust that joy will be part of Laird Hunt’s experience as he negotiates the burdens and opportunities of editorship, and I know he will renew the energy of the Denver Quarterly as he guides it toward and past its fiftieth year.”

The new issue of Illuminations marks the first issue for new Editor Meg Scott Copses. “In this first year as new editor,” she says, “there are many moments of blinking cursors, and quite a few question marks penciled in as my editorial team has worked to launch a new website and boost subscriptions and general readership for Illuminations. The component that remains more certain, that feels right, is the poetry itself, and the integrity of the poets who craft the lines that get sent my way. It has been such a sincere pleasure to read and correspond with this year’s contributing writers.”

And with a new editor comes changes to the way the magazine is run. Traditionally, the magazine has “published all work by a single author on adjacent pages.” With this issue, the poems are organized loosely into five larger themes or groupings: Speak, Season, Desire, Portrait, and Place. “A photograph by Lisa Scott Jones introduces each section,” says Scott Copses, “and while the photograph isn’t meant to represent anything literal about the poems in that section, I hope contributing writers will enjoy considering her photography alongside their own work. I hope also that the new arrangement fosters a conversation between poems and poets. My assistant editor and I have so enjoyed the many moments of resonance we discovered in arranging the magazine this way.”

Verse Wisconsin announces, in their most recent issue, that it will be the last summer issue printed. Starting in 2013 they will move to a biannual cycle, to be published in fall and spring. “This change will allow us to pay some attention to our press, Cowfeather, not to mention enjoy a few more summer evenings with our families and friends,” say Co-Editors Sarah Busse and Wendy Vardaman. “As much as we’re looking forward to publishing a few more books each year, we will miss sending out this gift of verse and voice to you each midsummer.”

They say that this last issue focuses on community, saying that they imagine that the poems “form their own sort of community of voices, which will thread its way through your summer days.” An online version of this issue features “brief essays by poets describing their various communities and community-oriented projects” as well as poems excerpted from the 2013 Wisconsin Poets’ Calendar, published by the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, “an organization that exists primarily to create community among poets across the state.”

Green Mountains Review celebrates its 25th anniversary with a retrospective poetry issue. The issue not only includes poetry from the past 25 years but also commentary from more than half of the writers about what inspired their work and how the response to it had changed over time.

“How enlivening, enlightening (and exhausting!) to read back through almost 50 issues of Green Mountains Review in search of the best poems, interviews, and essays on poetry to be published in the past quarter-century,” says Senior Editor Neil Shepard. “And then came the difficult task: to pick and choose among the thousands of texts the 100-plus I could truly not resist, those pieces gathered here in GMR’s 25th Anniversary Retrospective issue.”

“Reading back through a quarter-century’s worth of literature,” he says, “I admire both the poems that shape, challenge, or unsettle their time, as well as the poems that assimilate, distill, and crystallize the experiments of the past; I hope they’re all brilliantly on display in GMR’s 25th Retrospective Anniversary on poetry.”

Included in this issue is poetry from David Wojahn, David St. John, David Mura, Larry Levis, Mark Doty, Molly Peacock, H.L. Hix, Dara Wier, G.C. Waldrep, Russell Edson, Peter Johnson, Paul Hoover, Quan Barry, Barbara Hamby, Laura Kasischke, Sherman Alexie, Melissa Stein, Robert Hill Long, and many more.

Sundress Publications has opened submissions the seventh volume of the Best of the Net Anthology: “The internet continues to be a rapidly evolving medium for the distribution of new and innovative literature, and the Best of the Net Anthology aims to nurture the relationship between writers and the web. In our first six years of existence, the anthology has published distinguished writers such as Claudia Emerson, B.H. Fairchild, Ron Carlson, Dorianne Laux, and Jill McCorkle alongside numerous new and emerging writers from around the world.”

Submissions must come from the editor of the publication (journal, chapbook, online press, etc), or, if the work is self-published, it must be sent by the author. Submissions must be sent by September 30th, 2012.

Full submission guidelines can be found here.

Sundress Publications also announced that this year will mark the first year they will also be publishing an e-book (completely free) of the anthology as a compendium to the online anthology.

[Artwork: Cover image for the 2011 Best of the Net online publication by Rhonda Lott.]

A new biannual online magazine, Ostrich Review, publishes poetry, fiction, and art. Editor Nayelly Barrios says that the name of the magazine actually came from a vote on the font, which is Sans Ostrich. “But we also happen to like burying our heads in the sand,” she says. Along with Co-Editor Benjamin Sutton, she says they “want to be a part of the literary tradition. Our mission is to publish work that shakes us.”

Barrios says that in Ostrich Review, readers can expect to find “not necessarily backs turned against expectation, but an attempt to display work reaching for the unexpected. We don’t have a specific aesthetic. We don’t want to have one specific aesthetic or style. We deliver diversity (which is evident in our inaugural issue). We deliver the good stuff. No, the amazing stuff.”

The first issue features poetry from Carmen Gimenez-Smith, Carolina Ebeid, Carolyn Hembree, G.C. Waldrep, Jaswinder Bolina, and Rodney Gomez; fiction from Brian Allen Carr, and Patricia O’Donnell; and art from Andrew Spear and Roymieco A. Carter.

Ostrich Review accepts submissions through Submittable year-round; there are no submission deadlines.

Add some art to your day! Omnidawn Publishing has posted a series of images Visual Poetry: Andrea Baker. The work is excerpted from The Incredibly True Adventures of Me, Baker’s 150-page manuscript made from cutouts and paper packing tape.

In the most recent issue of Our Stories, an online magazine that gives personalized feedback for each submission received, Editor-in-Chief Alexix E. Santi announces big changes in the way the magazine is run. He said that they will no longer publish “a finite cache of authors on a quarterly basis after the summer 2012 issue.” He said that the last issue will be the one for the already collected pieces for the Flash Fiction contest.

He goes on to explain their new approach: “In the fall of 2012 we will begin our new business model which will be the publishing of revised short stories that we have worked on in a souped up new website. Everyone who does a workshop with us at Our Stories (no matter the length of that workshop) will have one of their short stories published by our staff. We will publish one of the final drafts (if the workshop has more than one story) and a PDF version of the first draft that had our edits in the manuscript, you’ve seen these PDF versions before and there is a fancy YouTube video here that shows you how we go about editing a manuscript. So, we’re still publishing short stories but we’re trying to find a more direct way to show you the readers what we do. You, the readers will have the opportunity to see not only the final edited manuscript but we will be publishing the initial feedback that we gave to the writer as a marked up PDF. While this brings up moral / litjournal / hyperventilating / rheumatic fever thoughts in my mind of a pay-to-play scenario at Our Stories, I believe it is more of our true business model.”

Justin Brouckaert, one of the newer magazine reviewers for NewPages, just had his first piece of fiction published in Thrice Magazine–which can be purchased as a print copy or downloaded as a PDF, e-book, or Kindle file for free–titled “What is Hell, if not a Hard Candy.” He also had a one-sentence story called “She Gets Starry Eyed When We Make Love” published on MonkeyBicycle in June. 

From the University of Houston and the Downtown Natural Science Creative Writing Club comes a new biannual online magazine–available in PDF, EPUB, or Kindle formats–Dark Matter: a journal for speculative literature. The magazine features poetry, fiction, essays, and “musings.” Managing Editor Bradley Earle Hoge says that readers can expect to find “an eclectic mix of provocative, insightful, and sublime thoughts and ideas expressed through poetry, fiction, and essays. They will not find science fiction, horror, or fantasy, though elements of these genres will certainly be incorporated into the work published in Dark Matter. Pieces in Dark Matter will use metaphor to describe our connection to the natural world, to explore interpretation of experience, and to search for meaning.”

Hoge explains that the name of the magazine is inspired by both definitions of “dark matter”: “unknown particles suggested by the Standard Model to explain observations of gravity which cannot be accounted for by observable matter and energy” and “a reference to the thoughts and ideas that ferment inside a human brain before they emerge through spoken or written words.” The title then, he says, is meant to “reflect emphasis of the unknown in both scientific inquiry and creative writing.”

Alongside Hoge will be Advisory and Contributing Editors Robin Davidson and Lisa Morano and University of Houston student editors. “Our goal,” says Hoge, “is to make Dark Matter a relevant contributor to the ever adaptive landscape of modern poetry and fiction.” He said they started the magazine to provide a place for literary speculative writing “that uses natural metaphor and allusion without resorting to the mystical.” Dark Matter,” he says, “will use cosmological, evolutionary, quantum mechanical and traditional natural metaphor to elicit literary thought and infuse modern ideas into poetry and prose.”

The first issue features fiction from J. J. Anselmi, Allie Marini Batts, Robert Boucheron, Olive Mullett, Valery V. Pertrovskiy, Jordan A. Rothacker, Patty Somlo, and L. E. Sullivan; poetry from Victoria Chadwick, Nicholas Cittadino, William Doreski, Billie Duncan, Susan Gundlach, Tim Kahl, Anne King, Mira Martin-Parker, Mira Martin-Parker, Ed Meek, Robin Amelia Morris, Ben Nash, Liam Pezzano, Rhonda Poynter, Erik Rice, Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb, Carol Smallwood, Claude Clayton Smith, Carolyn Steinhoff, and Frank Symons; and essays from Vincent Caruso and Darren Taggart.

Dark Matter will accept submissions year-round through Submittable. Hoge says they will also consider e-mail submissions to the managing editor but not through traditional post.

The newest issue of 5×5 announces upcoming changes to the magazine. Poetry Editor Jory Mickelson writes, “Perhaps it would be best to say that our next theme for 5×5 is ‘Under Construction.’ While this isn’t the actual theme, it’s definitely a signpost for the changes we are making to our literary magazine.”

The founder and Editor-in-Chief Bradley Wonder will be resigning and “handing off the reigns of 5×5 so that it can continue to grow,” says Mickelson. Mickelson and Sonya Dunning will stay with 5×5. Wonder writes, “for me, as well as 5×5, I feel like this is a step forward. Time for a new chapter in my life, and a lot of great changes for 5×5.”

Among those changes is a transition to a quarterly online-only magazine in an attempt to reach a larger audience. Each year, they plan to publish a “Best of 5×5” in print. The current issue will be the last print quarterly. However, current subscribers will be added to the list to receive the first copy of the “Best of” issue.

This issue, themed “Backwards,” is actually backwards. The front cover is on the “back” where the content begins. “This issue’s all backwards,” says Wonder. “But within each spread, you’ll still read left to right, top to bottom. Although you may have fun reading some of the stories backwards.” It includes work from Stephanie Papa, Leonard Kogan, Joanne Mallari, Lily Cao, Shabnam Nadiya, Melissa McElhose, Richard Marx Weinraub, Willy Conley, Therin Johns, Peter Cooley, Evvan Burke, Catherine Doucette, Ariane Sanford, and Jess Feldman.

NewPages reviewer Sean Stewart’s short story “The Boat” was recently published on Subtle Fiction. Four of his prose poems appeared in the most recent issue of Avatar Review, and two of his prose poems appeared in the new issue of Umbrella Factory.