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At the NewPages Blog readers and writers can catch up with their favorite literary and alternative magazines, independent and university presses, creative writing programs, and writing and literary events. Find new books, new issue announcements, contest winners, and so much more!

Are Lesbians Going Extinct? Part Two

Trivia: Voices of Feminism 11, edited by Lise Weil and Betsy Warland, is the magazine’s longest issue published to date and the second in a two-part series featuring writers responding — in prose and poetry — to the question “Are Lesbians Going Extinct?”.

Contributors include Sima Rabinowitz, Verena Stefan, Kate Clinton, Lauren Crux, Sarah Schulman, Susan Hawthorne, Arleen Paré, Renate Stendhal, Urvashi Vaid, Erin Graham, Bev Jo, Christine Stark, Elana Dykewomon, Sharanpal Ruprai, Elizabeth X, Lyn Davis, Monica Meneghetti, Betsy Warland, Lise Weil, Harriet Ellenberger, and Michèle Causse.

Editor-in-chief Lisa Weil will be stepping down with this issue and the magazine is in search of new leadership. Information about the changeover and contacting the publication is available at the close of Weil’s editorial.

Tribute to Ai

The most recent issue of Cimarron Review is a tribute to the poet Ai (1947 – 2010). Nonfiction includes works by Lisa Lewis, Guest Editor whose work “Ai in Oklahoma” opens the issue, Dagoberto Gilb (“Poet Ai” available online), Clay Matthews, Chip Livingston, Rigoberto González, and Janet Varnum’s interview with Ai. Works of poetry include authors Yun WangMonique S. Ferrell, Labecca Jones, Jeff Simpson, Kimiko Hahn (“Theft” available online), Samantha Thornhill, Patricia Smith (“The Day Before What Could be the Day” available online),Cyrus Cassells, Ralph Burns, Oliver de la Paz, and Marilyn Chin (“Naked I Come, Naked I Go” available online). Cover image by Christopher Felver – “The Poet Ai at the Los Angeles Book Fair.”

Narrative Poetry Contest Winners

Narrative Magazine Second Annual Poetry Contest Winners

First Place: Kate Waldman
Second Place: Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
Third Place: Ezra Dan Feldman

Finalists:
Mermer Blakeslee
Laton Carter
Katharine Coles
Maria Hummel
Gray Jacobik
Jenifer Browne Lawrence
Lynn Melnick
Steve Price
Marsha Rabe
Christie Towers

The Narrative Magazine Fall 2010 Story Contest is still open to fiction and nonfiction. All entries will be considered for publication. Deadline: November 30, at midnight, Pacific standard time.

Remembering Bill Bauer

The latest edition of Fiddlehead (Autumn 2010) includes “Remembering Bill Bauer (1932 – 2010)” an editorial by Brian Bartlett. Bill Bauer had been Co-Editor, Assistant Poetry Editor, and Poetry Editor for nearly ten years, then Fiction Co-Editor for two years, and published two full-length collections of poetry with Fiddlehead Poetry Books, along with several other collections of poetry and short stories. Bill Bauer was lost to his battle with cancer in June of 2010.

The editorial is followed by several of Bauer’s poems, including one previously unpublished work.

Some Advice on ePublishing

Previously mentioned in a post on the C4 Fiction Anthology, this online “bonus” published by the editors of C4 provides some honest insight on publishing and distributing an e-book: Publishers Lie and Other Lessons Learned from Publishing “The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology”. It’s the kind of advice people look for.

CV2 Celebrates 35 Years

Canadian poetry lit mag Contemporary Verse 2 is celebrating 35 years of publishing. The newest issue (Summer 2010) is the first of two issues looking back over these three and a half decades – starting with “The Early Years” – the first ten years of the journal’s history. Included is an interview with Robert Enright, “CVII’s first book review editor and one of its founding staff,” and “some of the archival materials still in CVII’s posession, including originals of the late bpNichol – editorial reports and the one poem published by CVII.”

CVII is also planning a number of celebratory events and a coast to coast reading tour. Check their website for more information.

Barns + Poetry + Art = Cool Stuff

Artist Bill Dunlap was selected recently to do a series of murals on barns across Maryland. Each mural will be a text and image piece featuring poetry. The project is organized by the University of Maryland Art Gallery in College Park, and is called “Poetic Aesthetic in Rural Maryland.”

Why barns and why poetry? Dunlap writes on his blog, “I think it’s because they go so well together. This is a chance to bring art out of galleries and urban settings and put it in rural areas where it is rarely seen. And those kinds of peaceful settings are perfect places to take in a bit of poetry as well.”

Dunlap has completed the first mural on a barn near Gaithersburg, MD. The barn is owned by a company of glass blowers called The Art of Fire. The painting is 10 ft tall and about 43 ft long and features the poem “Lost” by David Wagoner.

Dunlap plans to complete five more murals throughout 2011.

ALA Stonewall Book Award

The first and most enduring award for GLBT books is the Stonewall Book Awards, sponsored by the American Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table. Since Isabel Miller’s Patience and Sarah received the first award in 1971, many other books have been honored for exceptional merit relating to the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered experience.

A Richard Wilbur Symposium

Field‘s Fall 2010 issue features a symposium on the work of Richard Wilbur, including his poem “The Beautiful Changes,” with essays by Bruce Weigl, Annie Finch, Steve Friebert and Stuart Friebert, DeSales Harrison, David Young, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Carole Simmons Oles, and Stephen Tapscott.

Soft Skull Press Closes New York

“Soft Skull Press, the indie publisher that was rescued from financial ruin when it was acquired by the Berkeley-based publisher Counterpoint in 2007, became a West Coast outfit on Friday after 17 years in New York with the closing of its office in the Flatiron District. Both of its full-time staffers, editorial director Denise Oswald and associate editor Anne Horowitz, were laid off, and titles that were already in the pipeline have been reassigned to editors at Counterpoint…” Read the rest on The New York Observer Media Mobster.

New Lit on the Block :: and/or

Editor-in-Chief Damian W. Hey, Art Editor George Kayaian, Literary Editor Tracy Kline, and Managing Editor Mike Russo are the working force behind and/or, a PDF (Issue) and print journal “for creative experimental writing and/or innovative graphic art.”

Hey writes in the editorial for the first issue: “What is experimental to one person may be old hat to another. In general, we have sought to include works that represent as broad an experimental spectrum as possible. We have given preference to those works that provoke the reader or the viewer to question some aspect of tradition, convention, or expectation. We have looked for writing that teaches the reader how to read it, and art that teaches the viewer how to view it. And, in our evaluation of submitted work, we were not beyond the occasional outburst of: we know the good stuff when we see it!”

The first 100+ page issue of and/or features works by Carol Agee, Tanner Almon, George Anderson, Michael Andreoni, Jenn Blair, Ric Carfagna, James Carpenter, Brian Cogan, Kirk Curnutt, Nicole Dahlke, Arkava Das, Tray Drumhann, Joseph Farley, Adam Field, Howie Good, Thomas Gough, Aimee Herman, Jared Joseph, Mark L.O. Kempf, Ron. Lavalette, Donal Mahoney, Ricky Massengale, RC Miller, Antoine Monmarche, Kyle Muntz, Christina Murphy, Matt Parsons, Dawn Pendergast, Michael Lee Rattigan, Francis Raven, Mary Rogers-Grantham, Christine Salek, Chad Scheel, James Short, Bruce Stater and Lori Connerly, Felino A. Soriano, Orchid Tierney, David Tomaloff, Echezona Udeze, Justin Varner, and Christopher Woods.

The journal seeks submissions from writers and/or other sorts of artists whose work openly challenges the boundaries (mimetic, aesthetic, symbolic, cultural, political, philosophical, economic, spiritual, etc.) of literary and/or artistic expression. The deadline for Volume 2 is March 1, 2011.

On Teaching and Pain

“What teacher has not felt this pain—the pain of the audible yawn from the kid in the back row just as you launch into the lesson you worked on for an hour and a half—or worse, the lesson you spent only ten minutes preparing and are now feeling vulnerable about? This is not acute pain, not the pain of discovering that a student has craftily plagiarized an essay for your class, or reading a mean-spirited comment on a course evaluation, or being insulted to your face. This is the low-grade fever, the chronic hypertension of teaching, the apathy, dismissiveness, and dehumanization I suspect are part of most teachers’ everyday lives.”

From Strange Flowers and Gubbinals: On Teaching and Pain by Frank Kovarik

Read the rest – it does offer hope.

C4’s Best of the Web Fiction Anthology

Chamber Four Fiction Anthology: Outstanding Stories from the Web 2009/2010 is available for free download (PDF and mulit-eReader formats) and includes 25 stories chosen by C4 editors for their “availability online and that hard-to-define but unmistakable hallmark of quality.” Full table of contents and author bios, as well as bonus content (interviews with Angie Lee, Roy Giles, Andy Henion, Scott Cheshire, and “Publishers Lie and Other Things We Learned From Publishing ‘The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology’”) is available on C4’s Anthology page.

Authors whose works were chosen for the C4 Anthology: Andrea Uptmor, Angie Lee, Scott Cheshire, Alanna Peterson, Eric Freeze, Steve Almond, Sarah Salway, Svetlana Lavochkina, Valerie O’Riordan, L.E. Miller, B.J. Hollars, C. Dale Young, Andy Henion, Aaron Block, Steve Frederick, Trevor J. Houser, Roy Giles, Emily Ruskovich, David Peak, Castle Freeman, Jr., Ron MacLean, Corey Campbell, Taryn Bowey, Michael Mejia, William Pierce.

Arkansas Review – August 2010

Formerly the Kansas Quarterly, this issue of the Arkansas Review features two essays, a memoir, a poem, one short story, and numerous reviews. I like the narrow double column format (found most commonly these days in newspapers and The New Yorker), which makes the analytical essays (“Ain’t No Burnin’ Hell: Southern Religion and the Devil’s Music” by Adam Gussow and “Farmers and Fastballs: The Culture of Baseball in Depression Era Northeast Arkansas” by Paul Edwards) highly readable. These essays are intelligent and informative, but not stuffy or opaque. Continue reading “Arkansas Review – August 2010”

Borderlands – Spring/Summer 2010

The “borderlands” concept has never been more accurate. Along with a more general selection of more than 20 poets, this issue features a special section of “translingual poets,” defined as writers who “create in a language other than the one they were born into.” Editor Liliana Valenzuela praises the fine work of the translators whose work appears here alongside the originals and notes that many are gifted poets themselves. This issue also includes wonderful artwork by Liliana Wilson, terrific images with surreal elements, but wholly “real” human aspects that render the work both familiar and wondrous in the magical (but not silly or childish) sense of the word. Continue reading “Borderlands – Spring/Summer 2010”

Cream City Review – Spring 2010

Sarah Legow’s cover art for the latest 245 page volume of Cream City Review depicts ordinary objects inside eggshells. One shell holds sand. Another holds fur. Others hold clock gears, cigarette butts, shells, and twine. It’s oddly perfect for the issue, as Cream City is crammed with strange, good pieces that give magic-realistic tinges to ordinary and gritty subjects. Continue reading “Cream City Review – Spring 2010”

Descant – 2010

In “The Last Jesus I Know Of – ” a nonfiction piece from Descant’s “Writers in Prison” issue – Stephen Reid writes “amongst living books, the shape of your world can shift a thousand times, one for each title, or be changed forever in a single page. In its own way, the prison library is more dangerous than the big yard.” Continue reading “Descant – 2010”

Forklift, Ohio – Fall 2009

It sounds huge – Forklift. It’s subtitled as if the description was written after a night of heavy drinking – A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety. It’s quirky – for example, section titles from the TOC: A Precaution in Planting; Fresh from the Nursery; Animals in the Garden; Sprinkling vs. Watering; and so forth. It looks fun, with whacky illustrations and graphics. It feels small – Forklift fits in one palm. It’s all of these things. And none of them. And you should take it seriously, even if it does its level best to dissuade you from doing so, at least at first glance. Continue reading “Forklift, Ohio – Fall 2009”

Main Street Rag – Summer 2010

This issue is consistent with Main Street’s approach both to the mag and its chapbook series, direct, approachable poems and stories composed of casual diction, conversational tones, and familiar imagery. This issue features an interview with Main Street chapbook author Richard Allen Tyler, along with the work of 28 poets and a half-dozen fiction writers. The work of four photographers rounds out the issue. I liked, in particular, “A Pike’s Peak Spring” from M. Scott Douglass, clouds and snow gathered on and around railroad tracks captured at a moment of altering textures, depicted expertly in the photograph. Continue reading “Main Street Rag – Summer 2010”

Nimrod International Journal – Fall/Winter 2010

Nimrod’s eagerly anticipated annual awards issue features prize winners, finalists, semi-finalists, and honorable mentions in the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry and Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction: Terry Blackhawk, Shannon Robinson, Harry Bauld, Lydia Kann, Dan Kelty, Deborah DeNicola, Morris Collins, Sue Pace, Jude Nutter, Francine Marie Tolf, Ed Frankel, William Pitt Root, Laura LeCorgne, Andrea L. Watson, Usha Akella, Mark Wagenaar, Kate Fetherston, and Pamela Davis. Their work is accompanied by poems and stories by several dozen other poets and prose writers, including the amazingly prolific poet Linda Pastan, widely published poet Richard Terrill, and several fine translations of poetry originally published in Turkish and German. Continue reading “Nimrod International Journal – Fall/Winter 2010”

Phoebe – Fall 2010

When I received phoebe, I was struck by the name. Phoebe was one of the Titan gods and for some time was in control of the Delphic Oracle. She’s been called Goddess of Wise Counsel, Thoughtful Replies, and Snappy Answers. What a great name for a journal! I though with glee. I began reading with an earnest hopefulness that phoebe would turn out to be wise, intelligent, and quirky. Was she ever! Continue reading “Phoebe – Fall 2010”

Santa Monica Review – Fall 2010

This issue of the Santa Monica Review features eleven stories introduced by a brief excerpt from each of the contributors (“Ab Intra”). The journal’s website describes its contents as fiction and nonfiction, though there is no genre classification in the TOC or the pages of the magazine. I’m tempted to refer to every entry simply as a “story” (real or imagined), though some pieces clearly do read more like fictive creations and others like “lived tales,” beginning with the opening piece in the issue, “Expert Opinion,” by Michelle Latiolais, a story about suicide, medical malpractice, and the fatal consequences of “adverse” reactions to commonly prescribed drugs. Continue reading “Santa Monica Review – Fall 2010”

The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review – Number 20

The magazine’s contest winner Dean Rader is joined by two dozen poets and a marvelous “Crossover” feature, “Book Sculptures” by Samantha Y. Huang, photo reproductions of exactly what the title of her work denotes, pages, spines, covers, words/text the stuff of three dimensional “ideas.” Poems in this issue, like Huang’s book sculptures, aim to reshape the way we think about spaces, places, and the capacity of language to capture unique angles. Continue reading “The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review – Number 20”

Sycamore Review – Summer/Fall 2010

Amber Albrecht’s intricately composed, enticing drawings, more than two-dozen of which appear in the magazine as well as on the front and back covers, are representative of the work in this issue. You want to look more closely, find out more, figure out why a tree is sprouting from the back of a dress or from the chimney of a house. These images and perspectives are hard to classify. They’re not whimsical or playful so much as intensely of-the-moment, heightened in a familiar, but somewhat mysterious manner. They seduce with a kind of welcoming strangeness, a dress that looks like an egg from which the figure is hatched, a patch of ground that resembles a flying carpet, and titles like “People Who Are Not Like Us,” a short story by Brock Clarke. The opening of the story, too, captures the spirit of magazine as a whole: “Rupert goes first. Rupert’s real name is Shamequa, but we call her Rupert because one of the things we do is give black women the names of white men.” An irresistibly original beginning. Continue reading “Sycamore Review – Summer/Fall 2010”

Essay: Reine Dugas Bouton “My Inner Latina”

“I’m a mix, a Mediterranean cocktail of sorts, like many people in New Orleans. My dad’s French and Italian; my mom’s Spanish with a touch of Welsh. The closest link I have to my ethnicity is my cousin in Los Angeles. Lisa is proud of her Latina heritage — she lives it. She spends time with her boisterous, voluble, in-your-face, never boring family; they dance at parties, make tamales for the holidays, speak in English with Spanish words sprinkled like bits of jalapeño into a salsa verde. Proud of who she is, Lisa’s got a spicy personality and speaks rapid fire.”

Excerpt from “My Inner Latina: Dancing toward a lost heritage” by Reine Dugas Bouto, published online in Etude: New Voices in Literary Nonfiction.

Censorship in Iran Publishing

“Figures from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance show that the country has some 7,000 publishing firms. Take just two of these companies – one of them says it has about 70 novels and short story collections currently pending approval from the censors. The other says it has had between 50 and 70 books awaiting review at any one time for the past two years.

“Censors…go through already published works as well as the never-ending flow of new ones, checking line by line to see whether they were compatible with the “core Islamic values” the new administration wanted to assert.

“In practice, though, the censors only look at literature, books on art, and works on literary criticism and theory, which account for about 40 per cent of all books published in Iran.”

Books Stuck in Iran’s Censorship Quagmire
By Omid Nikfarjam; source: Institute for War & Peace Reporting (IWPR)

Los Angeles Review on What Editors Have Read Too Much Of

The Los Angeles Review has posted “Freele Pesters: Installment 3” – notes from the third week of their fiction workshop. This one includes Fiction Editor Stefanie Freele Pesters in conversation with Nancy Boutin, Prose Editor, and Joe Ponepinto, Book Review Editor, answering the question: “What styles or techniques (prose) have you read too much of? not enough of?”

Also included is Heather Freese (Contributor – “The Popular Girls’ Guide To Sticking It To Your Friends” LAR Issue 6) answering the question: “Should a reader have to ‘understand’ a story?” as well as other questions on issues of style and technique (including the use of second person).

Week Two focused on “Narrative Tension and Anticipation in the Short Story” and Week One on “The Importance of Beginnings” – both of which can be found in the Archives.

Franzen Fans

The newest issue of College Literature (General Issue 37.4 / Fall 2010) includes the essay “Assessing the Promise of Jonathan Franzan’s First Three Novels: A Rejection of ‘Refuge'” by Ty Hawkins (Ph. D., Saint Louis University). Frazen’s works cited in the essay: The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, The Corrections, “Mr. Difficult” and “A Word About This Book,” both from How to Be Alone: Essays.

Adam Gussow and Blues English

Adam Gussow: Ole Miss English prof by day, blues man by – well – day also: “I’ve always had a dual interests between the blues and literature,” Gussow said. “I treat blues lyrics like lyric poetry. I try to keep a balance situated between performance and critique.” Gussow’s solo album, Kick and Stomp, has just been released.

The Healing Muse – Content of Common Experience

In the Editor’s Note for the Fall 2010 issue of The Healing Muse, Deirdre Neilen writes, “Our lives have their own unique roads to travel, but when the detour called Illness enters, we soon learn we have joined, willingly or unwillingly, a very large community with a language and a culture of its own that demands our attention and commitment…we become adept negotiators of hospital mores and insurance protocols, of treatment modalities and drug therapies; the mildest among us morph into warrior-advocates for our loved ones; we stand shoulder to shoulder with our nurses and physicians, our therapists, and our own research. And we write about the bartering, the begging, the rage; we’re not too proud to pray, to swear, to do whatever it takes to get a cure, an extension, a hope. We suffer – either as the person who is ill or as one who witnesses and cares for that one.

“Yet all this suffering somehow does not destroy us; we endure, and we incorporate it into the life we are trying to save, to maintain, to extend…”

And so begins this issue of The Healing Muse in recognition of its content, and the content of each and every issue. Hard core. Truthful. Honest. And recognizable, ‘relatable’ to so many of us.

New Letters – Fat America Thin Literary Art

In “Grounded: An Editor’s Note” (full text online) in the newest edition of New Letters (v76, n4), Robert Stewart says, “As America gets fatter, it seems to want its art to become weightless.”

Ouch. But true. Read on.

“Kindle-like products seem fine enough, but marketing has induced many people I know into feeling guilty for continuing to prefer regular books and journals. I believe that physical matter in literary art, as in the universe, cannot be destroyed. One must know how, and sometimes where, to look. My institution’s library just celebrated the installation of a book ‘robot’ — sealed up, like Poe’s Fortunato, in a cave-like room—where the library will seclude a promised 80 percent of its books and print journals, accessible for request but not for browsing. We can browse cataloguing-in data; but books and journals on shelves, in aisles, belong to the physical world, due for a change. The library has its reasons, as a friend points out, trying to fulfill contradictory missions: to provide access and also preserve the materials. Articles and chapters on library reserve for student reading now must be digitized; so none of my own students need get up and actually enter the library. This weightlessness, I admit, weighs on me…”

And there’s more. Read the rest here.

NewPages Literary Magazine Reviews Posted

Check out the latest great post of NewPages Literary Magazine Reviews, including both new and established publications in print:

Annalemma
Chinese Literature Today
Crazyhorse
Fourteen Hills
The Meadow
Minnetonka Review
Natural Bridge
Paterson Literary Review
Salt Hill
Santa Clara Review
Santa Fe Literary Review
The Seattle Review
Yellow Medicine Review

If you are interested in writing literary magazine reviews for NewPages, visit the Reviewer Guidelines.

The AGNI Portfolio of African Fiction

Coedited by E. C. Osondu and William Pierce, the AGNI Portfolio of African Fiction is a landmark gathering of stories from Djibouti, Nigeria, Uganda, South Africa, the Gambia, and elsewhere. “The AGNI Portfolio of African Fiction creates an unexpected portrait of the African continent—political, sexual, religious, commercial, and literary — by writers such as Abdourahman A. Waberi, Henrietta Rose-Innes, Helon Habila, Doreen Baingana, Chuma Nwokolo, Jr., and Monica Arac de Nyeko.” The portfolio will connect AGNI’s two venues this fall: half of the stories appearing in AGNI 72 (now available for purchase), and half available full text at AGNI Online.

Poets on Family Incarnations

Guernica November 2010 includes “Deepening into Humanness” – guest Editor Emily Fragos introduces six poets who write about family incarnations — Matthew Zapruder, Cynthia Cruz, Gabriel Fried, Mark Wunderlich, Lynn Melnick, and Jennifer Franklin.

“The poets I have chosen as Guernica’s November guest poetry editor use ‘family’ in a variety of ways. But they all make the personal universal and the intimate a revelation, and they do this without self-pity or sentimentality. I was drawn by the deepening into humanness in each poem—lucid yet somehow mysterious—yet these poets did not try to be mysterious, which would have come across as pretentious and dishonest.”

Creative Nonfiction Mentoring Program Classes

As part of their Mentoring Program, Creative Nonfiction will be offering two 10-week course taught by Anjali Sachdeva:

Basics in a Nutshell will introduce writers to the basics of creative nonfiction, exploring both the techniques used to gather information and the literary skills needed to turn bare facts into personal and compelling essays.

Writing the Personal Essay takes a close look at the writing and research skills needed to write a memoir or personal essay and refines them over the course of 10 weeks.

A complete outline of course content is available online. Registration is limited to 12 students each.

Narrative Spring 2010 Story Contest Winners

The Narrative Spring 2010 Story Contest Winners‘ stories are now available to read online. Winners and finalists:

FIRST PLACE ($3,250)
Scott Tucker, “I Would Be Happy to Leave This Asylum”

SECOND PLACE ($1,500)
Peter Grimes, “Victoria”

THIRD PLACE ($750)
Megan Mayhew Bergman, “Birds of a Lesser Paradise”

TEN FINALISTS ($100 each)
Elizabeth Benedict
Mary Costello
Marta Evans
Katherine Jaeger
Elias Lindert
Alexander Maksik
Jerry Mathes II
E. V. Slate
Lynn Stegner
Lori Tobias