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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!

The Return to Safekeeping

Guest Post by Christine Noelle

Months into the pandemic, I found myself longing for “the good ‘ol days” when it felt safe to travel, and I could focus long enough to immerse myself in a story. Once I read a book nonstop, cover-to-cover during a flight from New York to Seattle. If I read the book again, could it bring back a feeling of normal, when COVID-19 made our daily lives feel so foreign? I pulled the book from my shelf and, to my surprise, I liked that the word safe was in its title.

Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life by Abigail Thomas is a groundbreaking collage-style memoir containing elegantly written vignettes that seem unrelated, but build to a beautiful, meaningful whole. Thomas offers an intimate unfolding of pivotal moments that shaped her life: pregnancy at 18, joys and fears of being a single mother of three by age 26, love and frustration within her marriages, and the tragic death of her second husband. Readers of Safekeeping will bear witness to the art of sensory perspective: the before, the during, and the here-and-now, as told through stories that are poetic, visceral, and universal. The normal of life we all know.

Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life by Abigail Thomas. Penguin Random House, April 2001.

Christine Noelle is a writer and marketing consultant living in the San Francisco Bay area. She is a traveler and lover of trees. http://www.christinenoelle.com

Buy this book through our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Terrain.org – May 2020

See what was published in May at Terrain.org. Poetry by Charlotte Pence, Michael Daley, Maryann Corbett, Lois P. Jones, Elizabeth Jacobson, Traci Brimhall, Sharon Dolin, Beth Paulson, Alison Hawthorne Deming, and Dennis Held; nonfiction by Andrew Furman and Gretchen VanWormer; and fiction by Amy Barker.

Pembroke Magazine – No. 52

The latest issue of Pembroke Magazine contains poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction by emerging and established authors from the US and abroad. A young mother struggling to nurse trades notes with a gorilla; a Midwesterner finds a bathing suit in a sock drawer that whisks his mind back to a Grecian beach; a woman desperately seeks to return to her home at the edge of the world; a man takes a manic road trip with his schizophrenic uncle; a couple in a gated community is saddled with the job of maintaining an exalted lawn; a woman flees a California wildfire for a holy site near Albuquerque; and much more. Cover art by Margie Labadie.

Program :: MA in Creative Writing at University of South Alabama

Earn your MA with an emphasis in Creative Writing in the vibrant city of Mobile, near some of our country’s best beaches. Tuition waivers and assistantships are available as are additional scholarships for excellence and summer creative writing projects. Home of the Stokes Center for Creative Writing. Full-time students can finish the program in four semesters. Students can also enroll part time and/or complete the degree through evening coursework. For more information, visit our website: www.southalabama.edu/colleges/artsandsci/english/.

The Lake – June 2020

The Lake‘s June issue features Sheila Bender, Phillip Henry Christopher, Robert Eccleston, Edilson Ferreira, Mercedes Lawry, Bruce Morton, David Olson, Carolyn Oulton, J. R. Solonche, Hana Yun-Stevens, Nwuguru Chidiebere Sullivan, Tanner. Reviews of Matthew Caley’s Trawlerman’s Turquoise and The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry.

Sync Audio YA for Summer

Once again, Sync Audiobooks is offering a free summer audiobook program for teens (13+) – and perhaps some adults too! SYNC 2020 is utilizing Sora, a student reading app available for free download from OverDrive. Each week Sync shares two YA titles that can be downloaded with no expiration. After the week, the titles are no longer available to download, but previous titles with descriptions remain available on the site.

It’s already Week 5 of the program, but there are seven more weeks remaining. Previous titles include Monday’s Not Coming by Tiffany D. Jackson, The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater, Secret Soldiers by Paul B. Janeczko, Picture Us in the Light by Kelly Loy Gilbert, Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (stupendously performed!), Stalking Jack the Ripper by Kerri Maniscalco, Sisters Matsumoto by Philip Kan Gotanda, and Disappeared by Francisco X. Stork.

All you have to do to access the titles is register your email address. I’ve done so for the past two years and never receive any related junk mail or other solicitations, so this is an great program for teens and adults alike!

Reading “Insomnia in Moonlight” by Alice Friman

Gettysburg Review - Autumn 2019Guest Post by Emily Lowe

Alice Friman’s “Insomnia in Moonlight” in The Gettysburg Review Fall 2019 is a moving poem that grapples with a popular theme within this issue: death. Friman handles the topic delicately, with humor, and with heft. The poem is broken into four irregular stanzas beginning with the dead waking in the night, making noise. This stanza read with immediate intrigue through the life Friman breathed into death about a speaker who cannot sleep because the dead are alive in their thoughts. It suggests playfulness, too, written with a lighter tone than often associated with death and mourning.

Friman then equates the dead to the sun, something bright and fixed, and the speaker to the changeable moon, “she wears my child face—round, / sunburnt, and pensive.” The final lines in the poem are the most striking, offering up the speaker’s recount of a total eclipse where the moon tried to “blot out the sun.” It felt like a reflection of their desire to hold death in their hands and make sense of it, but the speaker admits that the moon fails in its attempt to resist permanence, to resist, as Friman puts so eloquently in her final two lines: “geometric progression, the unerasable / dead, and everything else I don’t understand.”

Reviewer bio: Emily Lowe is an MFA candidate in Nonfiction at the University of North Carolina Wilmington where she is also a fiction editor for Ecotone literary magazine.

Find New Favorites in The Malahat Review

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

The cover of the latest issue of The Malahat Review is a calming scene: a full moon framed by powerlines over a pastel sky. It invites readers to pick it up and open it to discover what’s inside. I had found two new favorites in the pages: “Nice Girl” by Hollie Adams and “A High Frequency Words List” by Matthew Gwathmey.

In “Nice Girl,” Adams’s speaker likens herself to a mall who would “never automatically / open the doors even though / there’d be a sign saying / Automatic Doors.” She admits she’d keep them locked because she’s “evil / even though in real life / I’m always doing nice things.” This poem is a fun exploration of one’s inner self and the intentions behind actions. There’s a sense of humor in this piece even as it leads to introspection, an enjoyable aspect.

Gwathmey’s poem is in four sections, each one a list of words picked from the Fry and the Dolch sight word lists, used in children’s vocabulary development. This piece is just four paragraphs listing off words, a cool form of recycling.

There is plenty more poetry and prose to find inside this issue of The Malahat Review. Grab a copy to find your own favorites.

Life in Lockdown: Re-Reading Woolf’s The Mark on the Wall

Guest Post by M.G Noles

The Mark on the Wall is a brief tale in which Virginia Woolf describes a winter evening at home in the English countryside during WWI. She, like her fellow Britons, are under lockdown because of the war. Frankly, she has nothing but time on her hands, and she is so lonely that all she has to do with her time is gaze at a mark upon a wall.

The curious mark is the platform which allows her to ponder, not only the mark, but her life, her surroundings, and that pesky mark she cannot be bothered to walk across the room to identify. Could it be a nail? Perhaps a bit of gravy? She doesn’t know. So, she allows her mind to fly off in a thousand different meditations on life and death, on what it all means, on her place in the scheme of it all.

Woolf wrote this story in 1917 while the world was falling apart around her. She endured nightly air-raids, rockets blaring, shots fired across the channel. And, so, she used her writing as a way to escape it all.

The contemplation of a mark upon a wall seemed absurd to me when I read it years ago. But, now, having been a shut-in for these many weeks due to Covid-19, I find myself (like Woolf did) gazing at simple things around the house—toothpaste tubes, detergent boxes, and soup cans—and then my mind goes flying away. Life feels so foreign when shut indoors.

Woolf writes that life to her at that time felt like “being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—landing at the other end without a single hair pin in one’s hair!”

That is exactly how I feel right now, too, that life is all of a sudden a bizarre affair in which we are utterly out of control, “with one’s hair flying back like the tail of a race horse.” And, heaven knows where on earth we will land.

The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf. 1917.

Reviewer bio: M.G Noles is a freelance writer and history buff.

Nonlinear Exploration of Life

Guest Post by Karen J. Weyant

Sue William Silverman’s life is hanging by a thread.

Or, at least that may be the initial reaction a reader may get from Silverman’s latest collection, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences. The title itself suggests that Silverman’s book is a catalog of death-defying experiences and yes, there are somber essays that explore her survival as a sexual assault victim and her hypochondriac ventures into the medical world. But other essays are more lighthearted, such as the one piece where, as a middle-aged narrator, she tells about her adventures at an Adam Lambert conference.

In essence, Silverman’s book is a nonlinear exploration of her life arranged into three sections adapted from the Three Fates of Greek Mythology: Clotho (the spinner) Lachesis (the measurer), and Atropos (the cutter). Sometimes, her essays tell stories in the traditional narrative form, while others use more experimental styles. However, read together, this collection is more than just about surviving death: it’s really about having hope and resilience in life.

How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences by Sue William Silverman. University of Nebraska Press, March 2020.

Reviewer bio: Karen J. Weyant‘s essays have been published in BioStories, Briar Cliff Review, Carbon Culture Review, Crab Creek Review, Coal Hill Review, Lake Effect and Waccamaw. She is an Associate Professor of English at Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York.

Buy this book through our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Goldmine of Wisdom

Guest Post by Bright Heaven’s

Have you ever wondered to yourself (like I did): how do the world’s great entrepreneurs and innovators come up with such unique and brilliant ideas for their businesses? Then this book, The Idea Hunter, a very recent read of mine, is what I will recommend for you.

Ideas rule the world. In fact, the global space runs on an idea cum knowledge economy. It is on this premise that the book was written and it serves to bust the myth that brilliant, earth-shaping, and career-boosting ideas come from brilliant minds. Rather, it seeks to reveal that breakaway ideas come to those who are in the habit of looking for them all the time. These people are referred to as Idea Hunters.

In this book, I learned about how and what it takes for people to create a superb idea that leads to the creation of a successful innovation through the description of the characteristics and behaviors of several successful idea hunters. The Idea Hunter informs and unearths the habits shared by many great innovators and inventors of the past century. From very popular innovators such as Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs etc., to less popular names such as Jack Hughes, Paul Romer, Jim Koch, Greg brown Jay Hooley, Michael D White etc., readers get a raw perception into how they developed their ideas and the steps they took to bring them into reality. What I find most interesting is how several top global brand/companies such as Apple, Walt Disney, Gore-tex, Elixir Strings, and Boston Beer, among others, came into being through a simple albeit conscious act—the serious business of Idea Hunting.

This is quite an average volume consisting of six chapters, and I can tell you that each of the chapters is a goldmine deposited with wisdom on how to generate and actualize ideas.

The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make them Happen by Andy Boynton, Bill Fischer, William Bole. Wiley, April 2011.

Reviewer bio: Bright Heaven’s is an educator, a writer, poet, author, public speaker, information scientist, and a budding musician from Nigeria. He has publications in the Korea-Nigeria Anthology and several Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) literary journals. Find him at: https://bright-heavens.site.live.

Buy this book through our affiliate Bookshop.org.

The Malahat Review – Spring 2020

Our spring issue showcases the 2020 Open Season Award winners: Joshua Whitehead (cnf), Patrick Grace (poetry), and Ajith Thangavelautham (fiction). Also featured: Manahil Bandukwala, Ayaz Pirani, Christine Wu, Rob Taylor, Edward Carson, Matthew Gwathmey, Tania De Rozario, Hollie Adams, Emi Kodama, Bradley Peters, Kevin Shaw, Emma Wunsch, Glen Downie, and more.

The Gettysburg Review – 33.4

The Autumn issue of The Gettysburg Review is out. The issue features paintings by Jared Small, fiction by Jennifer Anne Moses, Jared Hanson, Darrell Kinsey, and Sean Bernard; essays by Andrew Cohen, K. Robert Schaeffer, and Christopher Wall; poetry by Jill McDonough, Max Seifert, K. A. Hays, Albert Goldbarth, Mary B. Moore, R. T. Smith, Jill Bialosky, Katharine Whitcomb, Corey Marks, Kimberly Johnson, Margaret Ray, Danusha Laméris, Linda Pastan, Christopher Bakken, Christopher Howell, and Margaret Gibson.

Carve Magazine – Spring 2020

This issue includes short stories by and interviews with Ashley Hand, Chris Vanjonack, Reece McCormack, and David J. Wingrave; poetry by Kimberly Thornton, Andrew Szilvasy, Bruce Lowry, Ryan Meyer, and Jose Hernandez Diaz; and nofiction by Gregg Williard and Greg Oldfield. Read more at the Carve website.

The Baltimore Review – Spring 2020

The Spring issue of The Baltimore Review features poems, fiction, and creative nonfiction by: John Blair, Shevaun Brannigan, Naomi Cohn, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Katherine Gekker, Matthew Henry, R. Dean Johnson, Yume Kitasei, Andrew Kozma, Avra Margariti, Rita Mookerjee, Glen Pourciau, Ellen Skirvin, David Urbina, and M. Drew Williams.

The Adroit Journal – May 2020

The May 2020 issue is here with poetry by Jenny George, Arthur Sze, Jessica Abughattas, Melissa Crowe, Jamaica Baldwin, C.X. Hua, Kara van de Graaf, Hala Alyan, Mark Wunderlich, Raymond Antrobus, Stephanie Chang, and more; prose by Scott Broker, Alyssa Proujansky, Maura Pellettieri, and Mina Hamedi, with a prose feature by Dima Alzayat. See what else the issue has in store for you at The Adroit Journal website.

James Braun Brings Readers Back to Winter

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

Everything is green and warm outside my window right now, but James Braun takes readers back to winter in his story “The Salt Man” from the Spring 2020 issue of Zone 3.

The story centers on two young sisters mid-winter. They are sent outside to wait for the salt man to come salt their roads before they’re allowed to play outside their yard. This is a dark piece. Poverty hangs heavy over the story. What once was green and beautiful has been covered by rocks. They have no heat in the house. Their neighbor loses fingers to frostbite. A woman cries on a couch while they go door to door asking if they can shovel driveways for cash to pay for a doctor bill. And the person they’re told will bring them a level of safety—the salt man—ends up being a source of danger in himself.

I enjoyed Braun’s writing style. There’s a level of flippancy with all the characters who view their lifestyle as ordinary. The story is short but holds a lot inside it. We’re able to discern as much meaning in what isn’t said as in what is clearly stated. And even though it is warm enough that I have my window open, a warm breeze blowing into my living room as I write this, Braun’s writing still makes a reader feel that inescapable cold of winter.

Resources for Young Writers

Among the many wonderful resources NewPages offers to readers and writers is our Young Writers Guide to Publications, which features publications by and for young readers, and our Young Writers Guide to Contests, which includes carefully vetted legitimate contests. These are open-access ad-free guides that I personally curate out of my commitment to supporting young readers and writers as well as parents and teachers.

Despite the pandemic which surrounds us, great efforts are still going on to create opportunities and provide motivation and encouragement for young writers. I recently heard from Sophia Hanson, who is one of three founders of the National Youth Foundation. This Pennsylvania-based non-profit seeks to improve literacy and educate youth on topics related to social justice. Each year, they run two book competitions: Student Book Scholars – which involves players from the NFL, NBA, and MLB; and Amazing Women’s Edition – a national writing contest focused on gender equality. Past competition winners have been honored at the Smithsonian Museum as well as having their images included in a statue honoring the late Marian Spencer, who was the subject of the winning book.

I am so heartened to know that this kind of outreach to young writers persists through these difficult times. When I asked Sophia how this has impacted their work, she responded, “The global pandemic has more parents at home than ever. We have also seen a major increase in emails from parents about our contests and programs. We even had NBA and NFL players contact us to host a Bounce Back art contest to help kids process the pandemic. On the flip side of that, we had two writing workshop series planned in Philadelphia with two amazing women, and those are on hold.”

Still, like so many efforts, the National Youth Foundation will find ways to continue to engage young writers. Now more than ever, online resources like ours are here to help. If you have young people in your life or know of others who do, please tell them about NewPages Guides for young readers and writers!

David Chorlton Interviewed in The Bitter Oleander

The Spring 2020 Issue of The Bitter Oleander includes a special feature. Editor Paul B. Roth interviews poet David Chorlton. Readers can also find a selection from Chorlton’s Speech Scroll. Below, check out an excerpt from the interview and visit The Bitter Oleander website to get a taste of Speech Scroll.

PBR: In your Speech Scroll, a sampling of which follows this interview, you’ve put the urban and the desert world together so expertly over some 158 poems. Did this particular project start off with that in mind or was it just your current ongoing consciousness of where you were in that environment and who you are that brought it forth?

DC: . . . While there are the times I sit down to commit words to paper, the actual writing of poetry is never turned off. Without placing a title or thinking of a poem’s shape, I had an ongoing path to follow and that helped me shift a little in the way I see images come together. Thinking about the political happenings of our tumultuous time might become too consuming, and for some people it is. Others seem to remain oblivious to anything that goes on in that realm. Writing poetry, being the most natural form of communication for me, has been a good place in which to scatter comments and observations that, I hope, provoke more thought than argument. Life encompasses a wide range of pleasures and frustrations, comfort for the fortunate and responsibility toward those who are not, and so with the help of various bird and animal species, plus a view of the sunrise from our front door when I’m up early to see it I take, as I mentioned earlier, what is given, and transform it the best way I can.

Emi Nietfeld Investigates Her Past

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

Opening the Spring 2020 issue of Boulevard is the winner of the journal’s 2019 Nonfiction Contest for Emerging Writers: “My Mom Claims I Had a Drink with My Rapist. I Investigate.” by Emi Nietfeld.

In this piece, Nietfeld looks back to June 28, 2010 when she was raped while in Budapest and to the conversations she had with her mother immediately after and eight years later about the incident. This investigation focuses on the drink that Nietfeld did or didn’t have and the influence the drink had on her mother’s reaction to the rape.

Nietfeld breaks the piece up into sections, investigating in-person conversations, emails that were sent in 2010, and her old computer documents. After she presents the “evidence,” she breaks it down and discusses it. I found this approach to be interesting and impactful as she turns a critical eye on past conversations, her memory, and her relationship with her mother.

Not only is this piece a strong start to the issue, but it demonstrates why Nietfeld deserves to have won the Nonfiction Contest for Emerging Writers.

Feel the Pulse of LitMag

Guest Post by Jamie Tews

LitMag is a literary magazine published annually from New York City. The magazine’s pulse is found on page sixty-three with a quote from Aryeh Lev Stollman’s fiction piece “Dreams Emerging,” which states “true art is the condensation of ineffable yearning.” An ineffable yearning is a longing so strong it cannot be described; however, this issue’s work attempts description, and through writing, pieces of the unsaid become real. With fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and tributary letters, LitMag’s third issue holds work that embodies the condensation of ineffable yearning.

Meghan E. O’Toole’s fiction story “Abditory” carries the loudest pulse. It is a hazy and dreamlike exploration of how longing can manifest in dreams and become necessary for engaging with reality. O’Toole uses the image of milk to connect the main character’s past and present with their dream-images, and it is in the way the milk moves, the way it rises in the bedroom or pools on the road, that the story supplements the issue’s character of yearning. O’Toole’s story successfully employs elements of magical realism, which create a vivid sense of place that is consistent in every scene. I instantly believed in the fictional world she created, and this lack of hesitancy to trust and settle into the story’s place drew me back for a second and third read.

The magazine’s cohesion comes from every piece having its own sense of magnetism, and I read the magazine in one sitting. Each piece easily pulled me into the next, and it is for this ease and sense of connectivity that recommend LitMag.

Reviewer bio: Jamie is an MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina – Wilmington and holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from Indiana Wesleyan University. She has contributed work to Appalachian Voice, Appalachia Service Project, and has work forthcoming in the Chestnut Review.

August Poetry Postcard Festival

Considering all the cancelled or postponed or modified conferences and workshops, it’s comforting to know the August Poetry Postcard Festival is up and running this year just as it has been for the past twelve years!

The concept is simple: You sign up and your name is added to a group along with 31 others. Once the group is “full,” you each get the list with names and addresses of participants in your group. The week before August, you start writing and sending you postcards (so that the first one arrives around the first of August). You write one postcard per day and send it to the person listed after your name in the group. The next day, you write another poem and send it to the next person – and so on until you go through the list. One for each day.

The idea is spontaneous writing without editing, censoring, or revision. You can use the postcard as your prompt or not. Some people choose a theme to write on for the month. The postcards vary from store bought to homemade, contemporary to vintage. It’s really wide open to your creativity, imagination, and passion. Then, throughout the month of August, you will receive poems in the mail from the others in your group.

This year – the one change in the event has been year-round registration – so you can register now. Some participants have already started sending cards instead of waiting until August – in response to the pandemic – since we could all use a bit more poetry and a bit more connection in our daily lives. A few ambitious writers have already completed their 31 cards and have signed up for another group! The organizers welcome repeat participation.

This is a safe and fun way to connect, motivate your writing, and enjoy the wonderful gifts that others will send your way. Sign up today!

 

Sponsor Spotlight: Mom Egg Review

Mom Egg Review - Spring 2020

Mom Egg Review is an annual print journal focused on motherhood. Their issues featured varied voices at all career phases.

This year’s issue is on the theme of “Home,” an apt focus for all of us currently staying at home and practicing social distancing. It’s a nice reminder that we’re not alone. Like many other journals at the moment, the editors have put together a virtual reading for readers. “Voices from HOME” links to contributors inviting everyone into their homes as they explore the theme.

NewPages Book Stand – May 2020

We have a new Book Stand at NewPages. This month, find new and forthcoming book titles, including five featured books at our website.

Audubon’s Sparrow: A Biography-in-Poems by Juditha Dowd  is an indelible portrait of an American Woman in need of rediscovery. The biography-in-poems focuses on Lucy Blackwell and John James Audubon.

Gerry LaFemina’s Baby Steps in Doomsday Prepping pauses time, letting us examine the world with love and intelligence.

Back to the Wine Jug: A Comic Novel in Verse by Joe Taylor is a cross-genre title following Hades as he teleports to Birmingham, Alabama.

Frank Paino’s Obscura sheds light on the most obscure corners of history and human nature, a hagiography of unorthodox saints.

You’ve Got Something Coming by Jonathan Starke is the winner of the Black Heron Press Award for Social Fiction and follows a down-and-outer and his young daughter across the country.

You can learn more about each of these New & Noteworthy books at our website. Our featured titles can also be found at our our affiliate Bookshop.org. You can find out how to place your book in our New & Noteworthy section here: https://npofficespace.com/classified-advertising/new-title-issue-ad-reservation/.

Sponsor Spotlight: RHINO

RHINO publishes some of the best and most innovative poetry, short shorts, and translations in their annual issues. For their 2020 issue, the editors have organized an ongoing virtual reading event for the month of May. You still have some time to join in the fun, and you can learn more about these virtual readings here.

To learn more about the annual journal, visit their sponsored listing at NewPages.

Modern Espionage in Ancient Rome

Guest Post by Bill Cushing

Pulitzer Prize winner John Hersey is probably best known for his books dealing with China, where his father served as a missionary, but in The Conspiracy, he takes readers back to the first century AD and Nero’s imperial and mainly insanity-tinged reign.

Like the works of Robert Graves or Leon Uris, Hersey uses a historical backdrop to present a political thriller of the first order. Employing two main characters—Tigellinus, co-consul of the Praetorian guard, and Paenus, tribune of the Roman secret police, along with a series of memos, assorted notes, intercepted letters, and interrogation transcripts—the two members of Nero’s intelligence community try chasing leads concerning a potential assassination attempt against their emperor.

The primary suspects involved in this plan?

The philosopher Seneca and a cadre of poets, artists that Nero had earlier supported and entertained, are surveilled, bringing up images from the Oscar-winning film The Lives of Others.

However, as the layers of the plot open, it begins to reveal Nero’s descent into madness.

Soon, the reader begins to wonder if this is an actual investigation or a means to create a paper trail pointing to others in order to establish scapegoats while the members of Nero’s own security people become the real perpetrators.

One interesting aspect of this book is that it was released in 1972, when news and revelations of the Watergate incident dominated worldwide media and occupied American minds. Hersey’s story produced numerous parallels between the subterfuge and hidden messages of the novel with the events of those days. If readers want to make those connections or draw any parallels with current events is their choice, of course, but the fact that it’s possible only verifies what a relevant story Hersey concocted in any age when he conceived and delivered The Conspiracy.

The Conspiracy by John Hersey. 1972.

Reviewer bio: Bill Cushing writes and facilitates a writing group for 9 Bridges. His poetry collection, A Former Life, was released last year by Finishing Line Press.

Zone 3 – Spring 2020

The issue of Zone 3 includes poetry by Darius Atefat-Peckham, Colin Bailes, Brian Bender, Daniel Biegelson, Christopher Citro, Lynn Domina, Alexandria Hall, Lauren Hilger, Angie Macri, Martha McCollough, A. Molotkov, Kell Nelson, Amy Seifried, Pui Ying Wong, and more; fiction by James Braun, Janice Deal, Tammy Delatorre, Maura Stanton, and Terry Thomas; nonfiction by Rebecca McClanahan, Katherine Schaefer, and William Thompson, and art by Khari Turner.

The Chattahoochee Review – Spring 2020

In this issue, poetry by Ruth Bardon, Mirande Bissell, Darren Demaree, Eli Eliahu, Stuart Gunter, Marlon Hacla, Ted Kooser, Len Krisak, Komal Mathew, and more; stories by Margherita Arco, Erin Flanagan, and more; essays by George Choundas, and others; and art by Deedee Cheriel. This issue also features the 2020 Lamar York Prize Winners: Lisa Nikolidakis in Fiction & Rachel Toliver in Nonfiction.

The Bitter Oleander – Spring 2020

The Spring 2020 issue of The Bitter Oleander features the contemporary Arizona poet David Chorlton, interviewed by our editor and including a generous selection of poems from his forthcoming book, Speech Scrolls. The issue also presents translations from the fiction of Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen (Portugal); and poetry in translation by Paula Abramo (Mexico), Alberto Blanco (Mexico), Maritza Cino (Ecuador), Andre du Bouchet (France), and Elaine Vilar Madruga (Cuba).

AGNI – No 91

With AGNI #91 we welcome a roster of new editors. Collectively chosen work explores impending crises as well as acts of mitigating goodness; elegies marking losses sit side by side with expressions flashing pure surprise. Cover and portfolio artist Christopher Cozier captures the sly globalized vectors of use and misuse, tracing a long history forward to now. Poems by Sandra McPherson, Steven Sanchez, Emily Mohn-Slate, Colin Channer, and others offer the sensory grab of the immediate, as do stories by Shauna Mackay, David Crouse, and Aurko Maitra and essays by Debra Nystrom, Jiaming Tang, and Ann Hood.

AGNI Offers Something Special

AGNI is currently offering something really special for readers: the Virtual Launch of AGNI 91.

Here, the editors present videos from their contributors from all over the world and invite readers (or viewers!) to join the audience. All the pieces from the new Spring 2020 issue are available online, most of which have an accompanying video of the writer reading their work.

This is great not only for people who might not be able to spare extra cash to get their own copy (though if you can, please do consider it), but it’s also great for those of us who are having a hard time sitting down and concentrating on reading while we’re social distancing, and those who currently miss attending readings in person.

You can also learn more about the editors who have put this fantastic project together at the AGNI website.

I for one can’t wait to hit “play” and start hearing quality reading in my own home.

Visual Poetry by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

The Fall 2019 issue of Seneca Review includes four pieces by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram. These visual pieces draw in the eye with text boxes layered over one another, reminding me of a house of cards that’s fallen, the cards now strewn in overlapping angles. They’re all titled “World Map:” with a different year following the colon.

In these pieces, Bertram speaks about race and sexuality. The exploration of these themes comes in snippets that repeat and fade away like memories that resurface repeatedly: instant messenger conversations, conversations with her mother, antagonization on the basketball court.

Bertram uses the visuals in an inventive way that helps the poetry move along and creates a bigger impact for the message. I read the four pieces over and over, fully admiring the way in which they were presented.

Explore Your Wild at the Elk River Writers Workshop

2020 Elk River Writers Workshop FlierThe Elk River Writers Workshop embodies the idea that deep, communal experiences with the wild open the door to creativity. We bring together some of the most celebrated nature writers in the U.S. with students who are serious about fostering a connection with the environment in their writing, all under the big Montana skies. Rolling application deadline. Offering full refunds for coronavirus-related cancellations. elkriverwriters.org

View the full May eLitPak newsletter here.

2020 Chesapeake Writers’ Conference: Words. Water. Woods: Write on the River.

Spend the first week of summer on the St. Mary’s River! The 9th Annual Chesapeake Writers’ Conference offers an immersive experience featuring daily workshops with accomplished faculty in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and songwriting; a diverse schedule of craft talks, lectures, panels, and readings; a youth workshop for high school students; and a Teachers’ Seminar for educators. All levels welcome. www.smcm.edu/events/chesapeake-writers-conference/

**They are monitoring the current situation and are optimistic they will be able to host the June conference as planned. A final decision will be made this month.**

View the entire May eLitPak newsletter here.

A Call to Artful Rebellion

Guest Post by Erin H. Davis

A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South, edited by Filipino-American author Cinelle Barnes, showcases some of the brightest and most poignant work of southern writers of color. Published by Hub City Press located in Spartanburg, South Carolina, this anthology features authors from various backgrounds and ethnicities who, in the joyful spirit of Southern America, explain the idea of a “new” south, an ever-evolving triumph against traditional stereotypes and racial discrimination.

Barnes, anthology editor and author of memoir Monsoon Mansion and Malaya: Essays on Freedom states, “I decided that every one of my projects . . . would be an invitation for other people of color to come, to be visible, and to thrive here [The American South].” Her anthology certainly does just that, and she’s not afraid to let traditionally taboo subjects rise to the surface, bleed through the page, and strike the heart of the reader—independent of race or class.

For example, Soniah Kamal in “Face” explores her personal grief and the collective spirit of women of color as they experience the horrors of miscarriage and the social stigmas attached to the female body. In a similar vein, Devi S. Laskar’s “Duos” dives into the idea of living a dual life between dominant white culture and the culture of the home. She writes, in stunning prose, “Often, I smiled. I learned later that is what primates do when threatened: grin.”

A Measure of Belonging is a stark reminder that, behind the draping magnolias and weeping willows, the south has a loaded history, the effects of which still ripple through today’s society. Cinelle Barnes’ anthology is but one call to awareness, a call to artful rebellion.

A Measure of Belonging: Writers of Color on the New American South Edited by Cinelle Barnes. Hub City Press, October 2020.

Erin H. Davis is an MFA (fiction) graduate student at the College of Charleston. She was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina.

Sponsor Spotlight: Litowitz Creative Writing Graduate Program, MFA+MA

Northwestern University Litowitz MFA+MA logoThis new and distinctive program offers intimate classes; the opportunity to pursue both creative and critical writing; close mentorship by renowned faculty in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction; and three fully supported years in which to grow as writers and complete a book-length creative project. Our curriculum gives students time to deepen both their creative writing and their study of literature. Students will receive full financial support for three academic years and two summers. Both degrees—the MFA in Creative Writing and the MA in English—are awarded simultaneously at graduation.

Program faculty include Chris Abani, Eula Biss, Brian Bouldrey, John Bresland, Averill Curdy, Sheila Donohue, Stuart Dybek, Reginald Gibbons, Juan Martinez, Shauna Seliy, Natasha Trethewey, and Rachel Jamison Webster.

Sponsor Spotlight: University of New Hampshire MFA in Writing

University of New Hampshire logoThe MFA Program at the University of New Hampshire has a clear goal: to help you mold your gifts and passion for the art and to prepare you for the opportunities and demands that all writers will experience in a long career. What happens to you after you leave this program—how you will sustain yourself and your work—is one of our strongest concerns. This supportive community of students and faculty shares a belief that writing matters and that the best books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction are made out of both the creative imagination and rigorous work.

Focus on fiction, narrative nonfiction or poetry in our graduate M.F.A. program, which has launched the careers of hundreds of poets, novelists, storywriters, essayists and memoirists. What is notable is not just how hard students work on their own creative writing, but how much effort goes into their response to the work of their peers. Writers here care deeply about each other, and the production of honest work that captures life on the page.

Ekphrastic Poetry Bringing New Meaning & Depth

Guest Post by Madhuri Palaji

In the Dark, Soft Earth by Frank Watson is a book of poems about love, nature, spirituality, and dreams.

The specialty of the book is the amazing paintings from historic to contemporary presented in it. There are paintings done by Lenoir, Kandinsky, Dali, Somov, and many more. Some poems are inspired by these paintings, though not all.

Each poem is unique and deep. There is a beauty in the way the author has woven the words. I have seen most of the paintings in the book in some art books and exhibitions but when I look at these paintings after reading the poems, I feel like I’m seeing the painting for the first time. The author has brought a whole new meaning and depth to the art. It’s like the author has translated the painting and colors into words.

There is one poem named “Vanished” where the author says:

there was no fish
that day
but even worse
for the fisherman
there was no sea

This made my heart clench, literally. How true, given the kind of world we are living in right now; there is major destruction happening all around and we are left with too little to fix.

In The Dark, Soft Earth has many wonderful poems which I have read again and again because they make so much sense. The magic, love, pain, dreams and hope in the book give a whole new meaning to the way we look at life!

In the Dark, Soft Earth by Frank Watson. Independently Published, July 2020.

Reviewer Bio: Madhuri Palaji is a writer and book reviewer from India. Her book ‘Poems of The Clipped Nightingale’ is available on Kindle. Find her at http://www.theclippednightingale.com/

Seneca Review – Fall 2019

In this issue of Seneca Review you’ll find poems and essays by Carl Dennis, Donald Revell, Katrina Vandenberg, Adam Clay, Lyllian-Yvonne Bertram, Karen Brennan, James Longenbach, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Tyler Mills, Katharine Coles, Maya Pindyck, Emma Bolden, Geneviève Paiement, Timothy O’Keefe, and more.

Kenyon Review – May/June 2020

The May/June 2020 issue of the Kenyon Review features the sixth edition of “Nature’s Nature” includes twenty-nine new works by eighteen poets, selected by Poetry Editor David Baker. Featured contributors include Madhur Anand, Elizabeth Bradfield, Stephanie Burt, Stuart Dischell, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Paul Guest, Christian Gullette, Leslie Harrison, Didi Jackson, Devin Johnston, Joanna Klink, Phillis Levin, Leslie Adrienne Miller, Carol Muske-Dukes, Atsuro Riley, Nicole Stockburger, Hannah VanderHart, and Shelley Wong.

Boulevard – Spring 2020

In this issue of Boulevard the winning essay from the 2019 Nonfiction Contest by Emi Nietfeld. An interview featuring Téa Obreht. A new fiction piece by Joyce Carol Oates, and a story by Mary Troy. The winning poems from the 2019 Poetry Contest by A.D. Lauren-Abunassar. A collection translated by Yifei Wu of the initial days of the Wuhan quarantine.

A Quick Yet Powerful Read

Magazine Review by Katy Haas

In the Spring 2020 issue of Southern Humanities Review, Heather Corrigan Phillips dives into the use of language in “A Scattershot Approach.” Broken up into different sections, this piece looks at the idioms and metaphors relating to gunfire that English uses. Each section is a different phrase or word.

This nonfiction piece looks at a span of time immediately after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Her brother-in-law was a first responder at the school that day and we learn about him and the way his health and family were impacted. Phillips writes about this while living out of the country and learns more in spurts through Skype and phone calls, and readers subsequently learn about this in similar ways. Little bits of his story are revealed and then explorations of gun-adjacent language is placed in between.

Reading this really does bring to light the amount of idioms and metaphors that we use which relate back to guns, and this only scratches the surface. There are plenty more that weren’t included. We’re lead to question why this language is so prevalent while also seeing into the lives of humans who have gone through a traumatic event. Here is the perfect balance of fact and emotion, a quick yet powerful read.

Sponsor Spotlight: Cutthroat

Have you visited Cutthroat lately? They publish an online edition and an annual print anthology with high-quality poetry and prose with an edge.

They offer three awards every years: the Joy Harjo Poetry Award, the Rick DeMarinis Short Story Award, and the Barry Lopez Nonfiction Award which open for submissions in August.

Readers can look forward to Issue 25 which will drop sometime this month. You can learn more about Cutthroat and their past contributors at their listing on our website.

Jenni(f)fer Tamayo Answers “The Citizenship Question”

The Georgia Review - Spring 2020Magazine Review by Katy Haas

The Spring 2020 issue of The Georgia Review was released around the time U.S. citizens were receiving census information in the mail, and the work inside the issue relates back to this: the census and citizenship. Jenni(f)fer Tamayo’s “The Citizenship Question” is a stand-out among these.

The piece reimagines the Application for Naturalization, or the U.S. Citizenship Application. This piece spans three pages, and Tamayo rewrites the questions and options given. The first two pages are straight forward enough, with the third falling into a more chaotic format with text written upside down, overlapping other text, or fading away into blank space.

I always enjoy this type of writing that mixes the cold format of a form (Marissa Spear does something similar with her medical reports in “How Many Ways Can One Spell Hysteria?” found in Moonchild Magazine) and reworks it with heart, feeling, and poetry. It can be a bizarre feeling to see personal information about yourself reduced to a few lines and checkboxes in someone’s files, and Tamayo takes that information back, reclaims it as hers, and connects it back to her life and identity in an inventive and enjoyable read.

2020 Cherry Tree Young Writers’ Conference Moves Online

This year the Cherry Tree Young Writers’ Conference will be held online. With this change, the conference will still involve the same great faculty, craft discussions, readings, and literary camaraderie that the face-to-face conference promised.

The dates stay the same: July 15-18 with a similar schedule, and the price to participate has been discounted. Scholarships are still available.

Learn more about this year’s conference at The Rose O’Neill Literary House page on the Washington College website.

Documenting Awakening

Aimee Liu’s Glorious Boy opens in 1942 but begins in 1936 New York when Claire, aspiring anthropologist, meets Shep, a young British doctor being punished by exile.

They soon marry and depart to his duty station, Port Blair on the Andaman Island in the Bay of Bengal. The island serves as a penal colony for political prisoners. Once there, they hire eight-year-old Nalia to care for their mute son, Ty, the “glorious boy” of the title. Nalia possesses “an uncanny ability to intuit whatever Ty wanted or needed—as if the children had their own spiritual language.”

As British hold over the island falters, they hear more of Japan’s rallying cry of “Asia for Asians.” When Rangoon, a neighboring Burmese city, falls, civilians are ordered out of Port Blair with a single standing order: “No local borns or natives.” Because of the connection between Nalia and young Ty, Claire promises to find a means of getting Nalia off-island as soon as she can.

During the departure, however, an earthquake separates Claire from the rest of her family along with Nalia. Not long after, the island falls to the Japanese army as Nalia hides Ty among the tribes Claire began studying. Claire dedicates herself to retrieving her son. Meanwhile Ty becomes more a creature of the jungle than a child of the empire, seeming to straddle the “primitive” and “civilized.”

Glorious Boy documents the awakening of Claire as nations dive into World War II. She learns “that ambition is worthless unless it’s rooted in human understanding” and is astute enough to understand that “prosperity” is often aligned with, almost synonymous with “slavery,” that those who are politically powerful and connected find deference to their desires, and that “colonial rules [prove to be] a tyranny of injustice, not to mention ineptitude.”

Glorious Boy by Aimee Liu. Red Hen Press, May 2020.

Reviewer bio: Bill Cushing writes and facilitates a writing group for 9 Bridges. His poetry collection, A Former Life, was released last year by Finishing Line Press.

Buy this book through our affiliate Bookshop.org.

Only Nature Reveals Our True Colors

Guest Post by Helen Zapata

“. . . all natural objects make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence.”– Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

This is a powerful essay filled with complicated sentences that I had to read over and over again to make sense (and make some justice) to the real meaning behind Emerson’s Nature.

Emerson was in love with nature and for him, we need to truly look at it, observe it, respect it, and acknowledge that nature and humans are the same. Although at times this seemed a little too philosophical for me, I still felt related to this beautifully portrayed subject.

Through every stage that divides this book, Emerson describes nature as the only mirror in which humans should trust, the same one that represents our behavior, personal relationships, and the way we communicate with each other.

There is a chapter regarding language and its links to nature that reminds me of an Intro to Linguistics class, but with a little less theory and a lot more of spirituality. “Language” sums this essay perfectly and makes you really think about the way the earth gives us everything we need to exist, even in the early stages of our lives.

I guess by the time he wrote this essay, grammatical structure and syntax were different than they are now and that definitely adds another layer of complexity. But I also think that the way he built the relationship between men and nature couldn’t be phrased in any other manner.

Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Penguin Books, September 1995.

Reviewer bio: I’m Helen Zapata, a freelance copywriter and editor specialized in independent digital publications.

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Valley Voices – Spring 2020

Visit this special issue on Mississippi. Poetry by George Drew, Jerry W. Ward Jr., Diane Williams, Charle R. Braxton, Kalamu ya Salaam, Angela Ball, Annette C. Boehm, Allison Campbell, Kendall Dunkelberg, and more; articles by John J. Han, Junying Jia, William Ferris, and Cassie Osborne Jr.; nonfiction by Hermine Pinson, Joseph Holt, and Kevin Baggett; and interviews with George Drew and Bennie Mae Fortune Harper. Plus, six book reviews.