Creative Writing at JSC

Undergraduate Poetry Contest -- Submit!

2012-01-21T07:23:00.000-08:00

The Poetry Society of New Hampshire offers contests for college student poets. This year's contest will be coordinated by Green Mountains Review contributor Jennifer Militello. Below is an overview; check the mains contest website for complete guidelines:

The Poetry Society of New Hampshire is launching a small format poetry book competition open to all college undergraduates. The winning poet will receive a $100 prize and a single copy of the winning book. The initial print run will be a minimum of one hundred copies. The contest will be judged by a poet who is not a member of the society. There is no entry fee. Publication rights will revert to the author upon publication. Poems will not be returned. Please submit 12 to 20 pages of poetry with no identifying information via snail mail to:

Coordinator, Jennifer Militello
River Valley Community College
One College Drive
Claremont, NH 03743

Postmark deadline is January 30th. Please include a separate page with a brief bio, your complete contact information, a suggested title for your collection, a list of poems in your submission, and the name of the college you are attending. The winner will be announced in the spring. [email Jennifer]

"Can Creative Writing Be Taught?"

2012-01-15T16:09:00.000-08:00

Anis Shivani, a contributor to Green Mountains Review and writing here for the Huffington Post, explores the question of "Can Creative Writing Be Taught? Therapy for the Disaffected Masses":

Yes, of course, creative writing can be taught, and it is very successfully taught. It might be the most successful humanities enterprise in the American university, if success is to be measured by stated goals. As for "improvement," yes to that too, if by "improvement" we mean internalizing the principles of creative writing. Dramatic and measurable improvement are not only possible but happen all the time.

Now, having gotten the provocative answer out of the way, let me be clear. Creative writing is not literary writing as has been understood for all of the history of writing. Creative writing is a subset of therapy, with the same essential modalities -- except, like everything else in our culture, it comes in a stripped, dumbed down version that partakes little of the rigors of psychotherapy. More appropriately, we might call it the Oprahfied mindset that penetrates workshop. Life lessons and living a more authentic life are always just beneath the surface of any workshop discussion.

New Yorker Fiction Podcast

2012-01-02T03:25:00.000-08:00

Want to hear Salmon Rushdie read Donald Barthelme? Or Antonya Nelson reading Mavis Gallant, or ZZ Packer reading Stuart Dybek, or Sam Lipsyte reading Thomas McGuane, or Daniel Alarcon reading Roberto Bolano, or A. M. Holmes reading Shirley Jackson?

The New Yorker's free Fiction podcast features these and dozens of other readings and discussions of short stories that have appeared in The New Yorker Magazine as chosen (and read) by short story writers currently featured in the magazine. These readings and discussions are moderated by The New Yorker's fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.

Some of the best stories written over the last half century, read and discussed by the best writers writing today . . . all for free.

Download this podcast here.

John Ashbery Reads from Notes from the Air

2011-12-30T05:53:00.000-08:00

Turkish Novelist Elif Shafak on Storytelling and the Politics of Fiction

2011-12-22T12:46:00.001-08:00

Rat King Press Reading at Lovin Cup on Dec. 12!

2011-12-06T04:16:00.000-08:00

Johnson's own indie publisher Rat King Press will present an evening of readings at the Lovin Cup Cafe on Monday, December 12 from 6:30 to 11:00pm. There will be several fiction readings, followed by an open mic (poetry, prose, ranting -- all are welcome).

Rat King Press is still considering fiction submissions for the reading, which can be sent to ratkingpress@gmail.com. This is a terrific opportunity for writers to share their work with a community of peers.

Rat King Press is also currently accepting submissions for their literary magazine The Rat Tail Detail, whose submission guidelines can be found here.

So come out and support Johnson's own independent publishers and writers!

WHAT: Rat King Press Reading
WHERE: The Lovin Cup Cafe
WHEN: Mon., Dec. 12, 6:30pm - 11:00pm

How to Write a Statement of Purpose for M.F.A in Creative Writing Programs

2011-11-22T19:17:00.000-08:00

Among the most daunting -- and critical -- tasks involved in applying for graduate creative writing programs is writing the dreaded Statement of Purpose, which serves as a cover letter and therefore your first impression to the strangers reviewing your (and often hundreds of others') application. Along with your writing sample, the Statement of Purpose is arguably the most important document.

Because the Statement of Purpose is often required to be one page or less, most applicants spend several weeks or even months crafting an effective SOP. The problem, however, is that hardly anyone can say what, exactly, makes an SOP effective. What should you include? What should you not include? How much personality ("flair") should there be, and what writerly ambitions or childhood trauma's are best left unmentioned?

Luckily, author and writing professor Cathy Day lays down some essential Do's and Don't's about writing the SOP. Any writer serious about applying to graduate creative writing programs will benefit from these tips -- provided, after all, by someone who reviews M.F.A. applications regularly.

So take note!

Come Celebrate Graduating B.F.A. Students Stephanie Girard and Dayton Shafer!

2011-11-13T05:30:00.000-08:00

Fall Authors Series Concludes with Two of JSC'S Own . . .

2011-11-06T19:13:00.000-08:00

This Thursday, November 10th, JSC proudly welcomes a visit by two of its own, authors Neil Shepard and Tony Whedon.

Even though both Shepard and Whedon recently retired from JSC's Department of Writing and Literature, both have been very busy. During their visit, they will be celebrating the release of two new books: Things to Pray for in Vermont by Tony Whedon and (T)ravel/Un(T)ravel by Neil Shepard (both released by Mid-List Press). Please come celebrate with them!

WHEN: Thursday, December 10 / 4:00 pm
WHERE: Stearns Performance Space

Tony Whedon is also the author of the excellent book of essays A Language Dark Enough (Mid-List, 2004), which, according to the publisher, "travels on four continents in search of a language that describes 'home.' From Port-au-Prince to Shanghai, from Ecuador's Andes to the Green Mountains of Vermont, many of those he meets—his students, colleagues, and fellow travelers—are displaced people, exiles in a global community." Whedon is also a pioneer of PoJazz, a lively performance-based fusion of poetry and jazz that has gained an enthusiastic following among his former students at JSC.

Read here Whedon's lovely essay "Kindred Spirits," featured in Hunger Mountain.

And here is Whedon's poem "Impermanence," published in Blackbird.

Neil Shepard is the author of three previous poetry collections with Mid-List, Scavenging the Country for a Heartbeat, I'm Here Because I Lost My Way, This Far from the Source--all of which, according to the publisher, "take readers on a journey across emotional as well as physical distances."

Shepard is the Founding Editor of JSC's acclaimed literary journal Green Mountains Review, which this spring will celebrate its first 25 years with an all-poetry anniversary issue.

Read here an interview with Neil Shepard featured in Hunger Mountain.

Here, courtesy of Mid-List Press, is an excerpt from Shepard's (T)ravel/Un(T)ravel:

AUBADE, WEST OF PARIS

(T)ravel/Un(T)ravel by Neil Shepard
(Mid-List Press, 2011)

(early spring)

throw open the doors --

almonds flowering
snow on trees, plums purpling
the black limbs of winter

flowering -- the ing is the thing
zing! -- dang if I ain't plain tame
this morning. I been dead
all winter, so tame is wild!
where I come from.

daffodils are yellow, not yellowed --
kids disappear in forsythia --
guardians on high alert, floating
over trees disguised as pink clouds --

throw open the doors! --

burble like a fool -- you've bungled enough
years -- burble, bungle, to hell
with the middle way, temper-
ance is our condition,
more than we admit -- not enough
heart epaulets -- not after thirty, no --

hereby decree all public men and women
shall sew hearts on sleeves or else --
shipped off to flower factories --

rough winds do shake
the darling buds -- how long
can these little courage-makers hang on?

Lydia Davis to Visit JSC on Halloween!

2011-10-23T11:47:00.000-07:00

Lydia Davis

The JSC Fall Authors Series continues!

On Monday, October 31, fiction writer and translator Lydia Davis will visit JSC to read from her work. Lydia Davis is the author the novel The End of the Story and the story collections Break It Down, Almost No Memory, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, and Varieties of Disturbance, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis was published in 2009 and, according to New Yorker book critic James Wood, "will in time be seen as one of the great, strange American literary contributions, distinct and crookedly personal, like the work of Flannery O'Connor, Donald Barthelme, or J. F. Powers."

Davis has received the MacArthur Foundation's "Genius Grant" for her fiction, and her accomplishments in translation are just as impressive. Not only has she translated recent editions of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, but she has been named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. Whoa.

WHEN: Monday, October 31 (5:30pm)
WHERE: Johnson State College / Stearns Performance Space

Free and open to the public!

More on Lydia Davis:

Read an interview with Lydia Davis from The Believer.

Listen to three audio interviews with Lydia Davis at KCRW's Bookworm:
in 1998 (discussing and reading from Almost No Memory);
in 2002 (discussing and reading from Samuel Johnson Is Indignant);
and in 2007 (discussing and reading from Varieties of Disturbance).

Read another interview with Lydia Davis by the National Book Foundation, conducted after she was selected as a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award.

And here is an interview with Davis at BOMB Magazine.

Read Davis's story "The Dreadful Mucamas" from the recent issue of Granta.

Read ten tiny stories by Davis, "Ten Stories from Flaubert," courtesy of The Paris Review.

Also from The Paris Review, here is Lydia Davis talking about translating the newest edition of Gustave Flaubert's novel of novels, Madame Bovary; and here is her follow-up.

And listen here to Davis's at-length discussion of translating Madame Bovary

PennSound presents here a trove of audio recordings of Lydia Davis's readings, interviews, and talks.

Read Davis's first-time translation of the Dutch (from The Mole and Other Very Short Animal Stories by A. L. Snijders) in Asymptote.

Finally, below is a video inspired by a single sentence by Lydia Davis:

Writers Sign a Letter in Support of the Occupy Wall Street Movement

2011-10-14T12:40:00.000-07:00

Check out Occupywriters.com for a list of (hundreds of?) writers who have signed a brief letter in support of the Occupy Wall Street Movement. The list includes, to name but a few, John D'Agata, Robert Boswell, Jennifer Egan, Brian Evenson, Vivian Gornick, Mary Karr, Sam Lypsite, Bill McKibben, Rick Moody, Ann Patchett, Benjamin Percy, D. A. Powell, Francine Prose, George Sanders, Luc Sante, and many, many others.

Is your favorite writer on this list? What does that mean? . . .

This Thursday at JSC: Poets David Lehman and Anna Maria Hong

2011-10-11T13:00:00.000-07:00

The Johnson State College Authors Series is pleased host an evening of poetry with writers David Lehman and Anna Maria Hong this Thursday, Oct. 13, at 5:30 pm in the Stearns Performance Space. This event is free and open to the public.

The Death of Literature?

2011-10-09T06:30:00.000-07:00

Over at Lapham's Quarterly, Curtis White explores how the divergence between literature as art and literature as commodity has contributed to the imminent death of both:

As far as I’m concerned, the book business deserves to die if for no other reason than that its business model is something out of the 1930s: send a bunch of loser Willy Loman’s out as “reps,” people who don’t read and don’t understand the books they sell, and have them place the books on consignment, just as if they were old chairs that you were trying to unload at the local consignment store. As far as the bookstores were concerned, they were mostly purchasing decoration for their stores, so that it at least looked like a place to buy books. The few books that actually made money—celebrity memoirs, confessions of failed politicians, moronic self-help tomes, and jokey piss-jobs about not running with scissors—were profitably located on a few tables at the front of the store. Everything else was just ambience.

Bad as this was and remains, the really fatal flaw in this system is that it allows stores to buy new titles not with money but with the return of all the books you sent them months ago that they never sold, and never really had much interest in selling. How could they sell them? No one working in the store read books, and they were no more capable of recommending a challenging literary title than they were of shaping your investment portfolio or diagnosing a kidney complaint. Every few years in the ‘80s and ‘90s, B&N would take some sort of national warehouse purgative and back would come books you thought you’d sold months and years earlier. (I once watched in appalled amazement as two-hundred copies of a backlist title that had only sold maybe five-hundred to begin with was returned by Barnes and Noble five years after it was first released. I had to wonder, did we ever sell any copies of this book?) The best that most of our books could hope for was a short shelf life of four to six months, a single lonely spine out in an acre of shelves and books.

Now even that stupid and insidious racket seems to be failing.

With the death of each new generation of booksellers, each failed “business model,” the independent literary writer/poet/publisher wants to say, “Good riddance, they had it coming,” only to be mortified by how much worse the thing is that takes its place.¹ In ten years, for people raised by computers (and by that I mean everyone), buying a book will mean buying an ebook from Amazon, Google, or maybe Barnes and Noble, if it survives. I asked John O’Brien, the legendary publisher of Dalkey Archive Press, what he thought, and he said this:

The greatest threat to book publishing in the United States right now is Amazon. Through various spin-offs, they have become a publisher, and this means that they are moving towards becoming both a distributor of books and a publisher, and no book publisher will be able to compete. In the future (and I am sure this is the plan) Amazon wants to control all distribution and all publishing. This is a very scary prospect: that a single company will have such power to determine what will be published and on what terms. Once the ‘Amazon plan’ is realized, they will be able to charge whatever they want to charge and will of course be able to decide what the best-sellers will be. They will have gotten themselves into the position of making such decisions because they will be the only game in town.

Even a year ago, O’Brien would have sounded paranoid to most people, but then came this article in the August 17, 2011 edition of the New York Timesbusiness section,“Amazon Set to Publish Pop Author.”

Amazon moved aggressively Tuesday to fulfill its new ambition to publish books as well as sell them, announcing that it had signed Timothy Ferriss, the wildly popular self-help guru for young men.

Amazon has been publishing books for several years, but its efforts went up several notches in visibility when it brought in the longtime New York editor and agent Laurence Kirshbaum three months ago as head of Amazon Publishing.

To read the rest of White's article, click here . . .

Writers on Their Last Supper

2011-10-08T08:48:00.000-07:00

Check out the The New York Times Magazine "Food & Drink Issue," where Bill Buford writes about eating warm pig's blood:

"My task was to keep it moving with my hand. I stirred, and a hundred pieces of string thickened against my fingers. I stirred and stirred and seemed to become aware of everything at once. The blood up to my armpit, the smell of the animal, the low wheezes of its last breath, the clear winter light, the color of the sky, the dirt under my knees, the smoke from a fire that had been made to heat water in an old-fashioned cast-iron stove for cooking the boudin noir. That's what the blood was for, blood sausages that would be cooked to a weightless custard.

The strings dissolved, the blood was ready. A friend gave me a ladle, and I dipped into the bucket, and drank it, a little sloppily, aware that I now had a red moustache."

Also, lit blogger Maud Newton discusses rattlesnake:

"Many compare it with chicken, some say it's like alligator and campers in the Southwest, where it's most often eaten, call it desert whitefish. In fact, rattlesnake tastes, at least when breaded and fried, like a sinewy, half-starved tilapia."

And Leslie Robarge asks chefs and writers, "What Would You Order for Your Last Supper?" Here are a few of the responses:

"A piece of bluefin tuna sashimi, some Argentinian beef, chocolate from Bernachon in Lyon, half a dozen local oysters and clams. A P.B.R. in a can (for the clams and oysters), white and red burgundy wine with everything else."
DAVE PASTERNACK, chef and co-owner, Esca

"Cheeseburger with a fried egg. My wife's homemade chocolate- chip cookies. Copious amounts of red wine. Enjoyed in the company of family and friends and accompanied by the Grateful Dead played very loud."
WYLIE DUFRESNE, chef and co-owner, WD-50

"New England clam chowder from the Seafood Shoppe in Wainscott, N.Y.; foie gras with toast from La Grenouille; Nate 'n Al's hot dog; strip steak from SW Steakhouse; duck from the Four Seasons; fried chicken from The Dutch; corn on the cob, hearts of lettuce with Roquefort, onion rings, Bubby's cherry pie, the unbelievable grapefruit dessert from Boulud Sud."
NORA EPHRON, author

Swedish Poet Tomas Tranströmer Awarded Nobel Prize

2011-10-08T08:14:00.000-07:00

Tomas Tranströmer

The 2011 Nobel Prize for Literature went to Tomas Tranströmer, a Swedish poet who is credited as one of Sweden's most important post-World War II writers. Below, courtesy of Bookforum (and via the publishers New Directions) are three poems selected from Tranströmer's The Great Enigma:

Translated by Robin Fulton

Two Cities

Each on its side of a strait, two cities
the one blacked out, occupied by the enemy.
In the other the lamps are burning.
The bright shore hypnotizes the dark one.

I swim out in a trance
on the glittering dark waters.
A dull tuba-blast penetrates.
It’s a friend’s voice, take up your grave and walk.

The Light Streams In

Outside the window, the long beast of spring
the transparent dragon of sunlight
rushes past like an endless
suburban train—we never got a glimpse of its head.

The shoreline villas shuffle sideways
they are proud as crabs.
The sun makes the statues blink.

The raging sea of fire out in space
is transformed to a caress.
The countdown has begun.

Night Journey

Thronging under us. The trains.
Hotel Astoria trembles.
A glass of water at the bedside
shines in the tunnels.

He dreamt he was a prisoner on Svalbard.
The planet turned rumbling.
Glittering eyes walked over the ice fields.
The beauty of miracles existed.

Who Will Win the Next Nobel Prize in Literature?

2011-10-01T07:38:00.000-07:00

Syrian Poet Adonis, seen as a front-runner for the the next Nobel,
was also featured in the Fall 2010 issue of JSC's Green Mountains Review

The Los Angeles Times offers a guide to "Handicapping the Nobel Prize in Literature," providing odds and possible criteria for the next winner of what is unquestionably the highest literary honor in the world. Here are some of some of the L.A. Times' picks:

1. Adonis - 81 year-old Syrian poet.

2. Thomas Tranströmer: An 80-year-old Swedish poet, writer and translator. His poetry has been published in the U.S. by independent presses Greywolf and New Directions.

3. Thomas Pynchon: The 74-year-old American author was awarded the National Book Award in 1974 for his novel "Gravity's Rainbow," a book that failed to be awarded the Pulitzer in a judging controversy. Known as a major figure in postmodern American fiction, the famously reclusive Pynchon mixes sometimes grim, sometimes slapstick humor with heady concepts and rocket science. His other works include "Mason & Dixon," "V.," "Against the Day," "Inherent Vice" and "The Crying of Lot 49."

4-5. Assia Djebar: The 75-year-old Algerian native was an activist for Algerian independence and remains a strong feminist advocate. She has moved between Algeria and France, taking academic appointments in both countries, and in the last decade has been on the faculty at New York University in the U.S. In 2005, she was named the first North African member of the French Academy. She has written more than a dozen novels in French; translations include "Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade" (1993), "So Vast the Prison" (1999) and "The Tongue's Blood Does Not Run Dry" (2010).

4-5. Péter Nádas: Nadas, who will turn 69 on Oct. 14, is a Hungarian novelist and essayist who has lived in Germany. In early years, when he was working as a journalist and some of his work was held under ban, secret police offered to approve a travel application he'd made if he became an informant; he declined. Nádas' novel "A Book of Memories," published in English in 1997, was hailed by Susan Sontag as postwar Europe's greatest novel. His next novel, "Parallel Stories," which clocks in at more than 1,000 pages, will be published in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in late October.

6. Ko Un: The 78-year-old Korean poet spent 10 years as a Buddhist monk, although The Nation notes that he was also a "drunkard, teacher, political activist." In the '70s and '80s he was imprisoned for his activism against South Korea's military regime. He is said by some to be Korea's greatest living poet. He has written many works; "Ten Thousand Lives" and "Songs for Tomorrow," published by Green Integer Press, are among those that appear in English.

7-8. Haruki Murakami: The 62-year-old Japanese author published his first novel in 1979; he is one of Japan's favorite living writers. Considered a significant postmodernist, he has won a number of major international writing awards, including the Kafka Prize from the Czech Republic, Israel's Jerusalem Prize, Japan's Asahi Prize and the Frank O'Connor Short Story Prize from Ireland. His novels include "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World," "Kafka on the Shore" and the memoir "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running." His new book, the 1,000-plus-page "1Q84," will be published in the U.S. in October.

7-8. Les Murray: Australian poet, critic, translator and editor Les Murray will turn 73 on Oct. 17. Considered a leading poet of the Commonwealth, he has sometimes taken critical and political positions that go against the grain. He has won major international poetry prizes, including the European Petrarch Prize, the T.S. Eliot Award and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. His recent works include the poetry collections "Taller When Prone," "The Biplane Houses," and "Killing the Black Dog: A Memoir of Depression," all published in the U.S. by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

9. Mircea Cărtărescu: The 55-year-old Romanian poet is considered one of that country's leading literary figures. He writes and teaches in Bucharest and is a member of the European Cultural Parliament. He has published many books but just a few have found a home in the U.S. His short-story collection "Nostalgia" was published in the U.S. by New Directions in 2005; another collection, and a poetry trilogy, "Blinding (Orbitor)" will be published by Archipelago in 2012.

Time permitting between now and the Nobel, [The Los Angeles Times will] get to those farther down on the list, including the eight writers tied for 10th place: Antonio Lobo Antunes, John Banville, Don Delillo, Cormac McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, K. Satchidanandan and Colm Toibin.

What about the rest of you? Who's your choice for the next Nobel?

JSC Authors Series Returns!

2011-09-30T11:44:00.000-07:00

Burlington Book Festival: 9/23 - 9/25

2011-09-20T19:47:00.000-07:00

The 7th Annual Burlington Book Festival takes place this coming Friday, Saturday, and Sunday throughout downtown Burlington. This celebration of writing and writers will feature readings, signings, workshops, panels, music, and more. The event is free and will feature readings and talks by writers such as the recently appointed U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine, as well as Yannick Murphy, Elinor Lipman, David Macaulay, children's author Tanya Lee Stone, and many others.

Below, PBS talks with Philip Levine in August, shortly after his appointment as the new U.S. Poet Laureate.

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

Things We Never Told You: Ode to a Bookstore Death

2011-09-20T19:33:00.000-07:00

"Happy Endings": Stephen Colbert on Plot

2011-09-18T10:08:00.000-07:00

The Colbert Report

Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

The Word - Happy Endings

www.colbertnation.com

Colbert Report Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

Video Archive

Gallery of Antique Typewriters

2011-09-14T20:00:00.000-07:00

Check out Slate.com's "Fantastic Typing Machines," a "gallery of old typewriters that look more like sewing machines, phonographs, and torture devices."

Writers Look Back on 9/11

2011-09-10T05:52:00.000-07:00

In its piece "Introducing 9/11 Stories," U.K.'s The Guardian asked six writers to reflect back on the changes and conflict that have occurred in the last ten years since 9/11. The Guardian's selection of writers is especially remarkable for its global diversity: The series kicks off with the short story "Temple of Tears" by the brilliant and funny Geoff Dyer, and also includes work by Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsti, Nigerian novelist Helon Habila, Moroccan-born novelist Laila Lalami, British-American fiction writer Rob Magnuson Smith, and British fiction writer Will Self.

Magic Trip

2011-09-10T05:05:00.000-07:00

From the Magic Trip official movie site:

"In 1964, Ken Kesey, the famed author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, set off on a legendary, LSD-fuelled cross-country road trip to the New York World’s Fair. He was joined by “The Merry Band of Pranksters,” a renegade group of counterculture truth-seekers, including Neal Cassady, the American icon immortalized in Kerouac’s On the Road, and the driver and painter of the psychedelic Magic Bus. Kesey and the Pranksters intended to make a documentary about their trip, shooting footage on 16MM, but the film was never finished and the footage has remained virtually unseen. With MAGIC TRIP, Gibney and Ellwood were given unprecedented access to this raw footage by the Kesey family. They worked with the Film Foundation, HISTORY and the UCLA Film Archives to restore over 100 hours of film and audiotape, and have shaped an invaluable document of this extraordinary piece of American history."

Agatha Christie on a Surf Board, Jack Kerouac Playing Football . . .

2011-09-06T18:39:00.000-07:00

"Jack Kerouac, high school football star, scoring a touchdown"

Check out the "Strangely Intriguing Photos of Famous Authors Playing Sports" over at Flavorwire.

100 Greatest Nonfiction Books Ever...?

2011-06-17T11:23:00.000-07:00

The British Museum Reading Room

The U.K.'s Guardian just released their editors' list of the best 100 nonfiction books ever. They've broken the list down into multiple categories (Art, Biography, Culture, Environment, History, Journalism, Literature, Mathematics (only one book in this category), Memoir, Philosophy, etc.).

What books are missing from this list?

Interview with George Saunders

2011-06-14T05:55:00.000-07:00

The folks over at BOMBblog (the blog site for BOMB Magazine) recently posted this two-part interview with fiction writer George Saunders, who will visit JSC in April of 2012 to read from his work. In the interview, conducted by Patrick Darcey, Saunders discusses "growth as a writer, the place of the writing workshop (including a visit from a drunken Hemingway), and whether man can ever experience true happiness without an icicle impaling him through the head."

Below is an excerpt from the interview that was also reprinted in the new issue of Harper's Magazine.

PD You mentioned earlier about things you keep attempting to do, to see that you can’t do them, though feel compelled to keep trying. And I doubt you’re alone. Are there specific instances of this that loom large?

GS Well, it’s funny—you sent me this question yesterday and I’ve been wrestling with it ever since. It isn’t the case that I have this 300-page sincere novel off to the side. Rather, I think it’s more of a tendency I have to swerve away from certain material or ideas or notions, year after year, and then occasionally look back at the body of work that’s built up, and think: Huh, you still haven’t started on the Big Stuff yet. (I feel especially remiss when I think in terms of scale: where is my epic? Why all of this obsessing on small canvases? This is probably the expected midlife crisis for someone who learned early that if my writing was going to have any power, I was going to have to radically concern myself with the lapidary.) Now, in some cases, this swerving is a good thing. I don’t know how many times I’ve thought: “You know, what I’d like to do, is write a really big book about some really big city, and my themes would be, just, you know everything, and my main idea stylistically would be, uh, like: All is Allowed!” That has the feeling of something that, in order to avoid becoming a sinkhole, might benefit from a little more, uh. . . .specificity.

But let me tell you a little anecdote, and with apologies, because I’ve been telling this one on the road a bit lately—but it’s somehow central (in a way I haven’t quite figured out yet) to this whole issue for me.

A few years ago I was cutting through Rockefeller Center, and I glanced up and found myself in front of that really nice chocolate shop down there—can’t remember the name of it. But it was early December and they had the window all X-mas-tricked-out, and I got this involuntary thrill of the exact variety I used to get as a kid when I realized X-mas vacation was looming: kind of this presents-are-coming, freedom-is-approaching, life-is-so-beautiful leaping of the heart that felt both totally familiar and entirely fresh. It was corny, it was all Currier & Ives—but the feeling was as real as the pigeons over there on Fifth or that scrap of paper right there, you know? Just a little split-second thrill, really, with that kind of associated imagistic mind-nostalgia burst (pinesmellgoldenpapercookiesnowman) that, again, is as real as more familiar mind-states, like, say, anxiety, or dizziness. So as I was walking away I thought, as us writers are wont to do: “Hey, I wonder if I could use that in a story?” I felt that, yes, I probably could use it—that is, I could probably find a way to generate some text that would convey that sense, make it real, or some pleasure-giving exaggerated version of it—and that was exciting. But then I felt this blowback sense of discomfort, almost dread, that had to do with this feeling of: Well, O.K. butthen what? Or, put more precisely: I was feeling a little insecure with the notion of letting that moment of positive energy just stand there, without some sort of ironic caveat. My first instinct, having written this little vignette (middle-aged man has a mini-burst of happiness), would be, you know, to make an icicle come down and impale him through the head. Or, maybe if I could locate him in some ironic place (a theme park, say (!)) I’d be able to “get away with it.” Which was weird: Dickens would have let it stand. Ditto Tolstoy. If they had to complicate it (i.e., show that this feeling might have repercussions, or might be just part of who this man was, i.e., was not him in his totality) they would have had have the confidence to wait a few hundred pages to do so.

So I’ve seen doing a lot of thinking about that: why do I always feel the need for what we might call the obligatory-edgy.

Now, this gets complicated. Because I first discovered the obligatory-edgy (and the happy effect it had on the energy of my prose) when my work was dying of complete boredom for want of it. So excising this thing (if it is, in fact, “a thing”), at least in theory, can feel like a step backwards. (And I’ve done this a few times over the years, in individual stories that then didn’t fly, at which time I learned the whole lesson over again—I remember one in particular, set in an Episcopal church, that included all sorts of straightforward, precisely rendered, internal monologue bits that represented exactly the theological questions that were tormenting me at the time, and this story was a very nice, sincere, smiling bird, sans wings.)

So edginess can be a way of introducing energy, and/or an appropriate overtone of skepticism, a way of enlarging the frame, of accounting for the complications of real life. Are there fields of beautiful tulips in the world, through which two well-matched lovers stroll? You bet. But is the world an endless sequence of such fields? Ha. So, to underscore this, maybe we have a crop-duster fly over the tulip-field, and the pilot is listening to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

In terms of the above (Rockefeller Center) example, that falling icicle has the effect of saying: yes, well, this dude is happy, but there are others out there who are not, and this kind of “I am happy, therefore life must be good and fair” mentality that he is enjoying is not without consequences for the rest of the world, etc., etc., and furthermore, his feeling of happiness is not permanent, since, for example, any minute now something bad might—oops. Icicle. That is, there’s a reason to have that icicle come down through that guy’s head, and that’s to puncture his smugness. (Although that can devolve into, God help us, Moral Fiction—preachy, joyless, over-determined, unhinged from the very real pleasures of living.) But I think one of the problems with the obligatory-edgy is that it is a little impatient: it fails to account for the fact that this is an individual guy, not an emblem of something—there’s time and space in his life for him to be a lot of things. So maybe, today, he’s happy. . .

Also, the obligatory edgy component can also be just that: obligatory, i.e., a tic.

Sometimes when I read new fiction, I feel that the writers of it, myself included, have a somewhat dysfunctional relationship with our own culture. I don’t mean we disapprove of it. I mean that we have absorbed so much habitual disapproval of it that we are no longer able to see it, and therefore are unable to disapprove of it properly. How can you disapprove (or approve) of something you no longer see? If your palette of possible modes of representation has been habitually narrowed and restricted (to the edgy, the snarky, the hip, etc., etc.), if that palette has been shorn of, say, the spiritual, the ineffable, the earnest, the mysterious—of awe, wonder, humility, the truly unanswerable questions—then there isn’t much hope of any real newness there. Are the very real pleasures of being an American in 2011 underrepresented in our fiction? Are the very real terrors of living in other, less functional cultures, adequately taken into account when we critique our own? If America is sick, what is the exact nature of the illness? Beyond that, are we taking as much pleasure in the sensual as we should be: in, for example, the weird ways our towns and cities have accreted, the endless interesting American geographies (a line of U-Hauls 20 feet away from the pioneer graveyard, etc., etc)? Is there joy enough in what we’re doing, because God knows, life is short, and if we don’t learn, by the end, to regard all of this mess with joy, it seems to me we haven’t done our work properly.

Well, speaking of things “devolving,” this is now devolving into the literary equivalent of some middle-aged uncle at a party, ranting about how disappointing all of Creation has become, just in the last few years, especially that a-hole down at the parking garage. And I really don’t mean the above to be anything more than a representation of the kinds of swamp I find myself wallowing in, in order to keep my writing interesting, to me and hopefully to others—more of a gut-check than a manifesto.

And of course, in the end, all of the talk notwithstanding, you go in there and write the scene, and if the icicle version is more interesting than the sincere non-icicle version, you better go with it. Our hero strides away from the Rockefeller Center chocolate shop, visions of sugar-plums dancing in his head—and then you, the writer, look to see where that earlier-mentioned Frisbee is coming from, and do your best to catch it.

Read the rest of the interview here. . . .

Man Enough?

2011-05-31T06:43:00.000-07:00

Esquire Magazine presented this month "The 75 Books Every Man Should Read:
An unranked, incomplete, utterly biased list of the greatest works of literature ever published" -- by men, that is; only one book on this list is by a woman (Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find). See the entire list here.

How many have you read?

What books are missing from this list?

Also check out Esquire's other "Man" lists:

The Authors Every Man Must Know

10 Essential Books to Read Before You Die

75 Movies Every Man Should See

The Albums Every Man Should Own

75 Things to Do Before You Die

Esquire's 70 Greatest Sentences

"The Case—Please Hear Me Out—Against the Em Dash: Modern prose doesn't need anymore —seriously."

2011-05-30T07:11:00.000-07:00

Over at Slate.com, Noreen Malone calls the by-writers-beloved and famously overused m-dash into question, attempting to hammer down some sharper parameters of usage:

Emily Dickinson

According to the Associated Press Stylebook—Slate's bible for all things punctuation- and grammar-related—there are two main prose uses—the abrupt change and the series within a phrase—for the em dash. The guide does not explicitly say that writers can use the dash in lieu of properly crafting sentences, or instead of a comma or a parenthetical or a colon—and yet in practical usage, we do. A lot—or so I have observed lately. America's finest prose—in blogs, magazines, newspapers, or novels—is littered with so many dashes among the dots it's as if the language is signaling distress in Morse code.

What's the matter with an em dash or two, you ask?—or so I like to imagine. What's not to like about a sentence that explores in full all the punctuational options—sometimes a dash, sometimes an ellipsis, sometimes a nice semicolon at just the right moment—in order to seem more complex and syntactically interesting, to reach its full potential? Doesn't a dash—if done right—let the writer maintain an elegant, sinewy flow to her sentences?

Nope—or that's my take, anyway. Now, I'm the first to admit—before you Google and shame me with a thousand examples in the comments—that I'm no saint when it comes to the em dash. I never met a sentence I didn't want to make just a bit longer—and so the dash is my embarrassing best friend. When the New York Times' associate managing editor for standards—Philip B. Corbett, for the record—wrote a blog post scolding Times writers for overusing the dash (as many as five dashes snuck their way into a single 3.5-paragraph story on A1, to his horror), an old friend from my college newspaper emailed it to me. "Reminded me of our battles over long dashes," he wrote—and, to tell the truth, I wasn't on the anti-dash side back then. But as I've read and written more in the ensuing years, my reliance on the dash has come to feel like a pack-a-day cigarette habit—I know it makes me look and sound and feel terrible—and so I'm trying to quit.

The problem with the dash—as you may have noticed!—is that it discourages truly efficient writing. It also—and this might be its worst sin—disrupts the flow of a sentence. Don't you find it annoying—and you can tell me if you do, I won't be hurt—when a writer inserts a thought into the midst of another one that's not yet complete? Strunk and White—who must always be mentioned in articles such as this one—counsel against overusing the dash as well: "Use a dash only when a more common mark of punctuation seems inadequate." Who are we, we modern writers, to pass judgment—and with such shocking frequency—on these more simple forms of punctuation—the workmanlike comma, the stalwart colon, the taken-for-granted period? (One colleague—arguing strenuously that certain occasions call for the dash instead of other punctuation, for purposes of tone—told me he thinks of the parenthesis as a whisper, and the dash as a way of calling attention to a phrase. As for what I think of his observation—well, consider how I have chosen to offset it.)

. . . To read the rest of this article, click here.

Nancy Mitchell Wins Pushcart Prize

2011-05-06T19:11:00.000-07:00

NANCY MITCHELL WINS PUSHCART PRIZE, SELECTED FROM JOHNSON STATE COLLEGE’S JOURNAL, GREEN MOUNTAINS REVIEW

Poet Nancy Mitchell, who visited JSC in the fall of 2010, was awarded a Pushcart Prize for her poem "Grace Notes," which appeared in Green Mountains Review.

Mitchell’s poem will be included in The Pushcart Prize XXVI: Best of the Small Presses (2012). The Pushcart Prize recognizes excellence in writing, in addition to editing and publishing by small presses nationwide. An anthology that is published every year, The Pushcart Prize: Best of Small Presses is frequently used at many colleges and universities as a creative writing textbook. In addition to having her worked honored and published, Nancy Mitchell will be appointed to the editorial board for all future editions.

Mitchell teaches Creative Writing at Salisbury University in Maryland. She is the author of two books of poems The Near Surround (2002) and Grief Hut (2009). Her poems have appeared in Agni, Poetry Daily, Salt Hill Journal, Great River Review, and elsewhere.

Professor Elizabeth Powell, Editor of Green Mountains Review, notes: “We are delighted and grateful for this recognition of excellence. Nancy Mitchell is a poet of our times, working at the height of her imaginative and technical powers. We are both proud and lucky to publish her work.” Professor Jacob White, also an Editor at Green Mountains Review, adds: “It is especially gratifying to see a poet recognized for work that is so humble yet so deeply inhabited, so honest.”

Literary Magazine Reviews: Part 2

2011-05-05T09:46:00.000-07:00

Below is Part 2 of our literary magazine review series, provided as way to help writers find the right place to submit their work. The reviews below come from student writers in Jacob White's Thursday night Fiction Workshop.

The Indiana Review

Reviewed by Jasmine Ohadi

The Indiana Review publishes fiction, poetry, and prose. They focus on rich imagery, mystery, and most of the works published are a bit dark and edgy. They have many down to earth pieces, knitted with solid juxtaposition that is alluring. The work is formatted artistically; this literary journal is focused on a younger audience; it is contemporary, free style, less conservative form of writing. It has a sense of House of Leaves aura and it works well altogether; each piece is a part of the whole, carefully designed to create that aura. Naturally, judges for some of Indiana’s contests are Stuart Dybek, Samantha Lan Chang, and Natasha Tretheway.

“Obit” by Ted Sanders beautifully is placed close to the middle of the book. It is also formatted with small margins, taking the shape of a glass at the beginning of the page. It works because it begins with: “The boy who falls asleep to the story of bear will grow old and wordlessly die. In the end, he will die across his pancakes,”—juxtaposition—“coughing up blood in a restaurant in a distant town, blood freckling the arms and throat of his latest wife, the table, the dark stone floor, where bright ice and dark water from his spilled glass will also fall.” This all is knitted carefully in elegant symmetry. This story follows this omniscient voice and changes it margins, sometimes closing into two, and merging together as the story progresses and climaxes. It is a prose and a fiction. Each sentence is beautiful, example: “The man believed at that moment that he would remember this sight of her: the sun across her skin, falling between her just-open lips where a fine mindless shape was curling, her skin lit and blooming, her carved arms raised around her head like a harp’s arms, as if the delicate gesture unfolding through them were being sung wordlessly”—many words are repetitive like ‘wordlessly’—“into sight in her face. The woman will survive this understanding.”

A story that perceives the mystery well, by pace and unfolding, and generates the reader’s treasure for their words and gestures is “Railway Killers” by Anthony Farrington. He does this by creating a murder story and a mysterious 1^st person narrator. The suspense and drama is played by this man’s personality: “I took little stock in rumors. Each murder was an unknowable story; each story had numerous victims. For example, it was rumored that my ex-wife was in love again. Fact: there is nothing new here. Fingers twirl…..rumor had it, someone wanted to murder me. Fact is, it’s a funny story.” The narrator reveals his mystery elegantly, taking time, until it is revealed that he may in fact be the murder himself, but the reader still doesn’t know that: “We are all failures at love, but not at falling in love. Assasins and victims. I like certain words. Quagmire. But if you get stuck in them, my suggestion is this: hold completely still. There are no heros here. No crime fighters…you’ll never escape. And the more you struggle, the more you’ll sink. But even under the most incriminating stares of everyone you meet, the rumors—“You’re guilty. Guilty.”—remember, you have the right to remain silent.” This narrator is obviously in a conflict with himself during the story, and it is not resolved which makes it even more appealing. The format of this story is also artistic. For example:

“(((((((((wish))))))))))

I want to come

under the cover of darkness.

I’ll be your accomplice

an accessory to whatever crime

And the sound of it—wish—hitting me in waves and waves.

Rumor: Dee loves me.

Rumor: I destroyed their marriage.

Rumor: my ex-wife is taking antidepressants.

Rumor: my children don’t want to live with me anymore.

Notre Dame Review

Reviewed by Micheala Smith

If I had to take a guess at what the editors at Notre Dame Review are looking for in their fiction submissions I would say they are submissions that work to provide a high quality literary presence. These are works that are highly controlled. The editors are also looking for stories that haven’t been told before. The pieces I read were unique I haven’t read stories that had a similar story line or even a similar theme. They are looking for work that is free of cliques in the language of the actual story. The beginnings of the story are strong and clear. The endings knew how to wrap the story up without presenting it as a package. The characters are developed with a clear sense of who they are. The details draw you in to the worlds being presented. The editors are searching for something they haven't seen on their desk eighty times over. I would suggest submitting here if you think your work in unique, highly defined within the world, and well controlled.

Black Warrior Review

Reviewed by Andrew Coffey

Black Warrior Review is a magazine that publishes very enticing and engaging fiction, but the stories are usually more on the darker side of things. I read the short story “We All Go Through It” by Jamey Bradbury. This story used third person omniscience to take on the perspectives of a classroom of children. In the story, a classmate disappears from the class and they are never told why, and everything goes on as normal. The children walk by the missing child’s house every day and see the car in the driveway and begin to question what happened to him. The children also start to note suspicious behavior from their teacher as the year progresses, as she no longer notices the notes being passed, but just stares at the chid’s empty desk. The only empty desk in the classroom. Soon thereafter, a new kid moves into the seat in class, but the teacher still stares at the desk like it’s empty. Since it’s from a child’s perspective, the story incorporated immersive lines like ‘Jimmy said the smell on her breath was gin, whatever that was.’ In the end, the teacher ends up getting replaced, and the new teacher does nothing relatively similar to their old teacher, and the children are just expected to move on with the unfamiliar like it’s not there. The children end up taking out their frustrations on the new kid out at recess as they all begin to throw rocks and lunch-boxes at the boy and tell him to not come back. One of the best lines is in relation to the first toss, “no one threw it; we all threw it.”

I read another interesting prose story called “Mule Hour” by Terrance Hayes. One of the most impelling lines in the story is “Ma and me ride a blue mule until its dumb heart gives out. She grips its tail and I its ears and we drag it to the side of the road like a bag of garbage on trash day, its muscles soft as cushion and its bones soft too like coil gone lazy in a couch, and we leave it burning with all the humanity fire strips away.” I think that about sums it up. Dark, but engaging, vivid and concrete fiction that ‘grabs you by the lapels’ right from the beginning.

Epoch

Reviewed by Liz Spier

Epoch boasts a handful of short fiction that continues in the way of expanding the boundaries of the short story, as well as expressing new ideas. Many reviews for the magazine call it “some of the best short fiction,” and a “journal that has earned its way into the importance of literary history.”

Epoch proclaims itself as an “eclectic collection of short fiction” and goes on to say that they do not publish criticism or reviews of fiction to keep the magazine clean and imaginative.

When reviewing the editorial staff of the magazine, the reader may find that they have a preference for the odd, for the experimentation with syntax and language, and are looking for the story to linger in your mind for hours. Many of the short stories published are vignettes, or slice of life stories, in which the characters may not progress very far, or, if they do, progress in a manner that almost seems like digression. I can honestly say that each piece was interesting and full of delightful language and vocabulary, but the majority left the reader mildly sad, or at least with a depressing calm.

The Southern Review
Reviewed by Chelsea Sicely

            Upon reading “Overpass,” my first impression was that The Southern Review was “southern” in value. Because the short story mentions god and the belief (and even though it did seem a little more “raw” and less “sophisticated”), I had the impression that every story would be southern-inspired (such as gumbo, fried chicken and church).
            I then read the submission directly after that. A short poem titled “My wife and I learn to accept our clutter.” This poem was about a couple who were messy, but content with that life.
            The poem snuffed my first assumption. Quickly browsing through the rest of the book, I found it was a mixture of short stories, poems, art, and “reflective” essays? Curiosity got the better of me and I googled it. Taken from their page, “About us”: “The Southern Review publishes fiction, poetry, critical essays, interviews, book reviews, and excerpts from novels in progress, with emphasis on contemporary literature in the United States and abroad.”
            I didn’t see any interviews and was surprised that they published “book reviews”; I imagine every issue is different and does not have the same number of poems, or novels, per each publication.

Bat City Review

Reviewed by Taylor Shaw

Bat City Review seems to have a wide variety of fiction pieces. There does not seem to be a specific style that draws the attention of the Editors of this particular magazine, or form. The two pieces I read from the magazine were both approximately page and a half, first-person narratives that showed two different looks into the human psyche. The first, “The Engagement,” is about a man who spends his life selling woman’s wear out of his own shop, hates it (for a reason he himself cannot explain), and ends up torching his shop out of frustration with it. The next, “Hollow Bones” is about a man constructing a bird skeleton out of a bio book for a medical degree while his girlfriend is upstairs painting nudes. He contemplates flight, the physiology of the birds, and connects it to his own relationship. But at a quick glance, there are also third-person narratives of much larger length that, at a quick glance, offer different sets of characters and dynamics than the ones I read. Their only requirement, based off of their submission guidelines and they want their submissions to make them ecstatic to read their work and they want quality writing, which seems extremely apparent through the diverse lengths and styles that I looked at by skimming through the journal.

Alaska Quarterly Review

Reviewed by Justin Little

The first article I read in the AQR was a non-fiction piece named “The Last Time,” by Margaret MacInnis. This was a very serious story for Ms. MacInnis, who recorded her memories of her parent’s divorce in those pages. The story’s uniqueness comes from its chapter structure; each chapter details a memory of the last time she shared some experience with her father, whether it is overhearing both sides of an argument or being threatened with a smack across the face. As one might guess, the father really was a terrible husband and parent all-around, unable to even articulate why he did not get along with Margaret’s mother. Despite all his wickedness, though, he comes off as a pathetic and distressingly human individual, and Margaret cannot help but show sympathy for him. Like many stories, its villain carries its narrative, and the terrible father is serviceable in this regard. Saying the abusive parent is a cliché only cements how depressingly common such people can be.

The other story I chose to study, “Box of Light” by Warren Slessinger, is similarly depressing. This purely fictional account also details a divorce, but this time it is from the man’s perspective. This man has a sympathetic reason for his breakup, though; he is simply so traumatized by his time spent as a soldier that he is incapable of forming a mundane romantic relationship. He currently works in a cubicle for some generic white-collar company, which he considers his “box of light” because it gives him clear objectives, gives his post-army life some meaning. He also was an accomplice in a cold-blooded murder, but that’s neither here nor there. The story ends with the man unable to sleep, fantasizing about enemy combatants bringing a siege to his house just so he could be back in combat, where he belongs. The story of a broken, shell-shocked soldier is at least as old as All Quiet on the Western Front, and “Box of Light” does very little to bring anything new to the table.

In all, the feeling I get reading the AQR is a feeling of dead seriousness. The Alaska Quarterly Review has no room for jokes among its thought-provoking articles. Of course, there are a few duds among its bleak fiction, but sometimes magazines have “off” issues.

Literary Magazine Reviews: Part 1

2011-05-02T13:05:00.000-07:00

As JSC Creative Writing students rewrite and revise the short stories, poems, and essays they've been working on all year, some are beginning to think about sending their work out to literary journals for possible publication.

The world of literary journals is a vast one (you'll find a fairly comprehensive list of the literary journals out there, with links to their sites, on NewPages.com). Yet, as a way to help connect writers with journals that fit them best, this blog will begin to feature a multi-part series of literary journal reviews by current JSC writers.

The first batch, below, comes from students in Jacob White's Monday night fiction workshop.

The Iowa Review

Reviewed by Victoria Von Hessert

The first story I read from this publication, “In the Dark” by Tricia Springstubb, was the 2009 winner of The Iowa Review fiction award. It is something of a coming-of-age story in which the narrator recounts her love affair with a boy headed off to college, her alcoholic, but well-intentioned if out-of-touch father, and the night wanderings of her mother. Her mother spends her evenings exploring the homes of her neighbors, only to be confronted one night by the wife of a policeman carrying his gun. We never really find out for sure if it is the narrator’s mother whom the wife shoots at (and misses) but the “prowler’s” night activity ceases after the encounter. Ultimately, the narrator loses her virginity to Dave, her father to cirrhosis, and her mother to heart disease, but it is her relationship to her mother that she adheres to and tries to reclaim at the end.

The second story, “The McGugle Account” by Sharma Shields, recounts the narrator’s work at a PR firm and her brief love affair with an unusual coworker, a Cyclops. He is a lover of Proust, whom she pretends to have read but hasn’t. Ultimately, he is fired for murdering the entire McGugle clan, clients of the firm, and eating them. The narrator later receives a crate full of Proust with a note that provides her with an enduring insight into her own self, both the lies she tells and her goodness.

Based on these two stories, I would say The Iowa Review is primarily a publisher of “serious” fiction, although certainly open to the slightly offbeat, as evidenced by the Cyclops story. I don’t think I’d call this experimental in any way, but really more of an openness to publishing authors who explore some deeper issues of human nature with slightly unconventional stories or characters.

Gulf Coast
Reviewed by Andrew Ledbetter

I read fiction pieces from Gulf Coast journal of literature and fine arts. This included three works by one author, that I guess could be considered flash fiction, but as they shared similar themes and were focused on daily family life with a new child, they seemed almost like chapters than individual stories. They mirrored Abbott Awaits by Chris Bachelder, but were much simpler. These were written by Christopher Merkner, and their length did not exceed two pages each. I found another flash fiction piece just after that was even shorter, and it was merely about taking a drug I believe and walking around town. There is a relationship depicted in this short work, but it is only barely exposed to the reader. The piece has moments of stream of consciousness, but because of its length does not really capture anything except the blur of moving around a town.

I also read a story called “The Naked Hours,” which was like twelve pages long. This is a story of a brother and sister, who are not blood related, but despite that get into a sexual relationship. This helped me better understand what the editors might be looking for. The literary journal is mostly compiled of poetry, but in all the fiction I found a similar theme. Relationships seem to be their point of interest; because there is something complex in relationships that are hard to define, yet when done well can captivate readers. Most people have relationships at some point that are weird or complex, and this is what can be exciting about reading about them. The reader can draw from personal experiences to feel more a part in the story than just a reader. It is a puzzle of how morals and conventions fit together to form either a love story, but in these cases it ranges on experiences of sexuality.

This literary journal publishes realistic fiction, meaning not sci-fi, or horror, but stories of realistic relationships.

Glimmer Train Stories

Reviewed by Crysty Boucher

The first story I read was “Silenced Voiced: Liu Xiaobo” by Sara Whyatt. This was a non-fiction story which begins with a Czech playwright and the former president of his country trying to deliver a letter to the embassy in China and not succeeding. He is trying to free a fellow writer and anti-communist activist. The story continues with the history of both of the playwrights and their political connection and goals. To finish, the story gives an address which readers can write to in order to help try and free Liu Xiaobo.

The second piece I skimmed through only, as it turned out to be another non-fiction article. It was called “Interview with Nam Le” by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais. It was specifically what the title claimed: an interview with the award-winning writer Nam Le concerning his literary works.

The third story I chose was a first person limited point of view story called “The Grief Ministry” by Matthew Salesses. This story concerns a man, Carl, who, after the loss of his wife and daughter, created a church program called the Grief Ministry. He is praying for guidance when his next door neighbor, Ed, someone who has helped him through the grieving process, informs him that Ed’s wife, Gertie is dying of cancer. When she dies, Carl tries to use Ministry protocol to help Ed and finds that it isn’t helping. Ed drives a car through Carl’s living room instead. When Carl finds Ed, Ed is digging in the front yard, intent on burying Gertie, instead of having the funeral his daughter had planned out. The daughter and father grief in the front yard after a fight concerning the wife; they ignore Carl as he tries to get an answer as to whether Ed drove his car through the living room. Finally, Carl goes home, realizing that his work with the Ministry hadn’t been the selfless helping of people through the years which he always thought it was. It was his way of saying “Look at me. My family died. Pay attention to me.” He climbs into Ed’s car and drives it further into the living room.

Glimmer Train appears to be a literary magazine which accepts well-written stories of fiction, stories of non-fiction, and articles concerning writers. It feels like this journal would appeal to writers and readers who are interested in emotional stories, but also readers and writers who are interested in their peers in the literary world. I would need to read more stories to understand fully what the direction is that this journal favors; however, I get the feeling that it is a magazine which is on “the cutting edge” of writing, with an eclectic sampling of many styles and even genres.

The Southern Review

Reviewed by Doug Bliss

I read the summer 2010 issue of The Southern Review, specifically three fiction pieces: “The Singers,” by Rick Bass; “Miss Indian Chicago,” by Susan Power; and “Koi,” by Edward Falco. All three authors are previously published and established—Rick Bass, in particular, is well known and widely published. The Bass and Power stories were solidly conventional in their construction, the Falco piece was short and lyrical. To summarize:

“The Singers” is excerpted from Nashville Chrome. The excerpt—told in third person limited, past tense—takes place during lunchtime at a rural sawmill. The sawmill’s owner insists that the saw blades be sharpened and tuned every day after lunch. He uses his children, who have the gift of perfect pitch, to determine whether or not a blade is properly tuned by listening for a particular frequency as the blade is spun on an arbor.

“Miss Indian Chicago” is a short story told in first person, past tense. The story follows Jude Reynolds, a teenage Potawatomi girl in 1971 Chicago, as she attends ceremonial Native American dance competitions in a quest to seduce young braves and “…screw herself Indian.” Jude, the product of a white father and an Indian mother, is confused about her identity and her mother, who “…slept herself white.” The story outlines several failed seductions and ends with Jude coming to terms with her heritage.

“Koi” is a super-short story—almost a still life—of a blue heron catching a koi from a backyard pond as an old woman watches from her wheelchair. The episode presents an opportunity for reflection on her late husband and their life together, ending with the heron flying off with the fish.

My sense of the “editorial personality” of The Southern Review is one of semi-conventionality. The stories, even though one is excerpted and one is wicked short, seem to have beginning, middle, and end. They are structured in a way that I can understand and am comfortable with—I don’t detect any attempt to have a “conversation” with any cutting edge component of the literary world—which suits me just fine.

Mid-American Review

Reviewed by Steph Girard

The Mid-American Review is the sort of literary Journal that seems to be “Happy-go-lucky,” with a mix of a darker image hidden. I loved it. What that means is that the fiction stories in it are nothing like I’ve ever read before, and it actually surprises me that stories like these actually got published. They are not genre fiction, and are very short. Roughly being about four to ten pages each. One of the stories is about a man who joins a place called the “Ministry of Laughter” and what that is, is a place where all jokes are created. Outside sources, who are known as storytellers, get captured to work for the ministry. People who work here have to destroy all connections to their previous life, (a letter is sent to the family stating that the new worker died in a factory fire and no body was found) and give their full attention to their new jobs. The story is richly filled with details, and leaves the reader curious about where the story is going to take them next. I recommend submitting to this review if one, you are not a genre fiction writer, and two, have writing with a darker undertone blended into it.

The Gettysburg Review

Reviewed by Nicole Dumaine

The Gettysburg Review is a journal that appears to focus in on poetry, essays, and novella. There is only one short story, a novella, which counts in at fifty-four pages. The novella, “Summer Avenue” is in first person point of view about owning a trailer park around Memphis: “My granddad started this trailer part sixty years ago, and for a while it was a classy place” (521 Schottenfeld). The story talks about how “I” took over the place, what it has become, and what it hopefully will be like under his ownership. The poems throughout this journal focus in on the quirky thoughts of characters: “At forty, I peel away the first layer/ of bark where gray and kidney-bean red rings/ of my addictions move like inner tubes down a conveyor/belt. I strip off the next layer and hold it to the light” (530 “How about Daphne”). Another peculiar concern of the character comes from the poem “You can never step into the same aubade”: “There’s a spot behind where I stand/wanting a cigarette, to roll tobacco in paper/ and light it with a wooden math / a I did a century ago / three or four times a day, / where if you kneel and lick dew / from grass, it tastes / sweet, like the inside wrapper / from a Tootsie Pop” (584).

Black Warrior Review

Reviewed by Benjamin Algar

Philip Tate’s story “Dam,” featured in the Black Warrior Review Spring/Summer 2011 )issue, deals with the mysteries of a dirty, muddy river that claims innocent victims of drowning every year. The protagonist in Tate’s story is a misunderstood boy named Boyd; the antagonists are a group of four girls who are swimming in the grimy river. Boyd tries to impress the girls by proving to them that he knows who they all are, that he has a new scooter on top of the hill, and that he can swim even with his jeans still on. Boyd is presented in a lowbrow fashion, his grammar is flawed and his cognitive response to insults is pathetic. We watch as the girls humiliate Boyd for being pathetically moronic, and perverted. They call him names, which he resents, but seems to absorb as if he’s been used to it. Towards the ending of the story Body has visions of both saving the girls from the drowning, and watching them being picked out of the water after having drowned. The story ends with the girls speeding by while he’s riding his scooter, and after the dust cloud from the girl’s car settles Boyd envisions swimming in the grimy water, swimming elegantly like the girls had just ten minutes earlier.

Tate writes with a lot of very poetic and lyrical descriptions. He is very in tune with nature, the nature of the environment and the nature of teenagers. The stories narrative is develops nicely inside of the grounding specifics of the natural habitat that the teenagers inhabit (i.e. the river bank and the tall elm tree.) The editorial staff seems to enjoy a plot that involves a strong sense of realism, specific and lyrical descriptions, and quick plot development. The lyrical style that Tate’s story uses is so well done; the specifics are repeated in order to remind the reader of the world’s legitimacy. Again, it seems like, in my opinion, that the Black Warrior Review editorial staff prefers highly lyrical, yet grounded works of fiction, which, in the case of Tate’s story, sheds light on issues that are prevalent for our generation.

Aaron Kunin”s “Cumulative portrait. Or overdrawn characters. Or buyer’s remorse,” is a highly lyrical, Dybekian story that reuses the term “some” when describing a stereotype of people that are likely to do as Kunin suggests. Kunin’s work of fiction fails to stand alone as a work of fiction. Basically Kunin makes authoritatively specific and in-depth assumptions about a group of individuals that he is stereotyping. In every paragraph, there are thirty-six in all, Kunin describes the affect that money has on a certain demographic of money spenders, savers, or stealers. It’s all very funny and somewhat lighthearted, yet, again, it is not fiction. Some paragraphs consisted of a single sentence, while other paragraphs consist of three or four. It varies on how specific Kunin wants to be. On the whole, Kunin’s work of fiction seems to be acting like a work of nonfiction, an observational piece, grounded in specifics and lyricized or meant to be sung.

This selection confuses me the most, out of the entire short fiction feature in this literary magazine. It doesn’t involve conflict; it tells and does not show, there’s not complex plot or dynamic characters. The people involved are casted as shadows from the beginning and tend to, throughout the story, build up a stereotype that Kunin is shooting for. This tells me that the Black Warrior Review editorial staff looks for works that challenge the art of fiction, that contain highly lyricized works of fiction, and that work well because of the author’s tonal personality and great syntax.

Epoch

Reviewed by Liz Glasser

The literary magazine I read is called Epoch and it is published three times a year by Cornell University. This magazine seems to focus more on the fiction pieces with eight pieces of fiction, one essay and three pieces of poetry. The pieces were on average about twenty pages long. However, one was three pages and the longest was twenty-six pages. So they don’t seem to care about length but more about the quality. . I read through some of the magazine’s fiction pieces and noticed that all of them were regular fiction pieces, there were no fantasy pieces or anything that couldn’t have been believable in real life. So if you write fiction pieces where nothing crazy happens and that could be just another day in the life piece, Epoch is the magazine for you to submit to.

The Paris Review

Reviewed by Lit Tyler

The Paris Review was founded in Paris, in the 1950's, by American expatriates, with what was felt by the editors to be a rather daring goal: to publish moving and relevant contemporary fiction and poetry in a climate that was less than enthusiastic about such things. In the course of the past 1/2 century, the Paris Review (now headquartered in New York) has stayed at least true enough to this mission to have published original fiction by Jack Kerouac, Dennis Johnson, Joseph Heller, and David Foster Wallace, to name a few. (The magazine also scores some heavy-hitters for its interviews).

The three stories and one interview that I read from the Fall 2010 issue very much seemed consistent with the Paris Review editorial self image. The stories are (mostly) tightly written and deal with material of contemporary interest: a marriage imploding under the weight of its own baggage, a hapless junkie and his ambitions, and a playful fictionalization of a great author's life. And, surprisingly, I found the interview, especially, (subject: the mesmerizingly pretentious Michel Houellebecq) to be a very strange and interesting read.

"Art of Fiction #206"

An interview with Michel Houellebecq, a provocative and controversial French novelist whose first novel, Whatever (1994), depicting the "crushingly boring lives of two computer programmers", inspired the movement known as "depressionism." Houellebecq is every bit the French contrarian, sparring playfully (but bitingly) with his interviewer as he chain smokes cigarettes unceasingly (the author is reportedly in the middle of an attempt to cut down to four packs a day). The topics discussed range from a discussion of the author's work, which is influenced by Romanticism and Science Fiction and seeks to capture contemporary truth in an intense and beautiful fashion, to the author's acrimonious relationship with the French literary establishment, to punk rock, to the unique challenges of contemporary life. An intriguing portrait of a rude and interesting man.

"Virgin"

By April Ayers Lawson. A young man in a deeply unsatisfying marriage attends a fundraising party with his wife. Wandering through the halls of the mansion, the man encounters his hostess, with whom he begins an affair.

"Ten Stories from Flaubert"

American author and notorious Francophile Lydia Davis has apparently taken it upon herself to fictionalize a journal belonging to Gustave Flaubert. The journal is organized into 10 very short stories which have probably been scrupulously researched and tend to be primarily anecdotal in nature.

“The Worm in Philly"

By Sam Lipsyte. Tells the tale of a cash hungry junkie who arrives at the fantastic idea of writing a children's book about a famous boxer in order to generate cash. When his plans don't quite pan out as expected, the junkie finds himself caught in an uncomfortable misunderstanding with his supplier.

Sycamore Review
Reviewed by Katrina Aligata

In “Bomb” by Laura van den Berg, in the Sycamore Review, a lady is sharing a cab ride with her ex-husband. They both came from the lawyer’s office. She is going to meet up with her lover at Regent’s Park and he is taking the day off. They are stopped in traffic near an office building. A police officer comes and tells them that there might be something in the building, but they don’t know. The lady starts to have a panic attack and tries to get out of the car. She sticks her head out the window and asks the cop if there is something wrong in the building. And that is the end of the story. In other story “A Story for Mr. Pena” by Diana Lopez, a female middle school teacher is telling of her unpopularity with her fellow colleagues and teachers. She says they never invite her to go drink margaritas with them and they never remember her name. And the kids that she teaches are bored with her style and teaching plan. It seems like she can’t get a break anywhere. But she becomes a hero in the end when a big storm approaches and she has to get all the kids back inside. One girl didn’t hear her instructions and was too close to the tree, but when the limbs have reached the ground she crawls out of them unscathed. She’s taken inside with scratches and no other serious injury.

It feels like this journal publishes a kind of real life story. Both stories felt like they were from a real person’s life, like the events in each story could, or did, actually happen. And as far as the editorial personality, I feel that it is looking for a story that involves real life events and stories that could be believable. I feel like the editorial personality would be that it wants the readers to be engaged and connected with the stories they read in the journal.

Get your Poetry Fix in Montpelior This Friday!

2011-04-21T06:30:00.000-07:00

In celebration of National Poetry Month, Vermont College of Fine Arts will be hosting a reading on Friday, April 22, 4-6 p.m.

Readings by Vermont poets Dave Cavanagh, Kerrin McCadden, Baron Wormser and Montpelier High Schools poets Maggie Kinzel and Sandra Markowitz will be included. The reading is from 4:00-5:00, in the College Hall Chapel, and it will be followed by a reception/meet-the-author session in the Wood Art Gallery with food and beverages; the VCFA bookstore will also be open during this time and author books available.

David Cavanagh’s books of poetry include The Middleman (2003) and Falling Body (2009), both published by Salmon Poetry of Ireland. His poems have also appeared in chapbooks, anthologies, and journals in Canada, Ireland, the U.K., and the U.S. He lives in Burlington and works for Johnson State College as an associate dean with the External Degree Program.

Maggie Kinzel is an artist, musician, writer, performer, and Boston-bound high school senior. Published poet in "Young Writers Anthology 2", "American Library of Poetry--The Gold Edition", and member of Hungry Rat Revue. She runs her own business for portrait photography and lives in a caffeine buzzed world of bright colors and biggest city dreams. She likes to focus on extensive imagery of the untouched, and she currently obsesses over vertebrae and the layers to the sky.

Sandra Markowitz has been writing poems since she was eight, and is now a senior at Montpelier High School. She went to The New England Young Writers' Conference at Bread Loaf, and also enjoys drawing, reading, and cooking dumplings.

Kerrin McCadden’s poems have recently appeared or will soon in American Poetry Review, Failbetter, Hunger Mountain, RATTLE, Poet Lore, Pank and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the 2010 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize and a semi-finalist for the "Discovery"/Boston Review 2010 Poetry Contest, the 2010 Ralph Nading Hill Award and the 2009 RATTLE Poetry Prize. She teaches creative writing and literature at Montpelier High School and is on the poetry faculty at The New England Young Writers' Conference at Bread Loaf. She lives in Plainfield, Vermont.

Baron Wormser is the author of eleven books including The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid and co-author of two books about teaching poetry. His most recent volume of poetry, Impenitent Notes, was published in March 2011. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 2000 to 2005 he served as poet laureate of Maine.

Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet Coming to JSC!

2011-04-17T10:11:00.000-07:00

THURSDAY, APRIL 21:

NATASHA TRETHEWEY

(5:30pm, Stearns Space)

Poet Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000), Bellocq's Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), and Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), for which she was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of a book of creative non-fiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (Georgia, 2010).

Her first poetry collection, Domestic Work (Graywolf Press, 2000), won the inaugural 1999 Cave Canem poetry prize (selected by Rita Dove), a 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her second collection, Bellocq's Ophelia, received the 2003 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize, was a finalist for both the Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin and Lenore Marshall prizes, and was named a 2003 Notable Book by the American Library Association. Her work has appeared in several volumes of Best American Poetry, and in journals such as Agni, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and The Southern Review, among others. She received a B.A. in English from the University of Georgia, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Hollins University, and an M.F.A in poetry from the University of Massachusetts. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Trethewey is also the recipient of the 2008 Mississippi Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts and was named the 2008 Georgia Woman of the Year. In 2009 she was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers and she was the James Weldon Johnson Fellow in African American Studies at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. During the 2005-2006 academic year she was Lehman Brady Joint Chair Professor of Documentary and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Her fourth collection of poetry, Thrall, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Fall 2012. This year she will be inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

Watch a video of Natasha Trethewey's reading at Emory University on May 8, 2007 in honor of her Pulitzer Prize.

See photos from the May 8 dinner and reading:
http://www.creativewriting.emory.edu/faculty/tretheweyeventphotos.html
http://www.creativewriting.emory.edu/faculty/tretheweyeventphotos2.html
http://www.creativewriting.emory.edu/faculty/tretheweyeventphotos3.html

Interviews on NPR's Fresh Air with Terri Gross:

July 16, 2007: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12003278

January 20, 2009: Natasha Trethewey was featured in a special Inauguration Day edition of National Public Radio's "Fresh Air." Trethewey, who attended the inauguration, talks with host Terri Gross about the significance of the day for the country's -- and her own -- racial history, and reads "My Mother Dreams Another Country" from her Pulitzer-Prize winning collection, Native Guard, and recites Langston Hughes' powerful verse, "I, Too, Sing America. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99474984

Watch two videos of Natasha Trethewey reading her poetry:
"Theories of Time and Space"
"Elegy for the Native Guards"

PoJazz Returns to JSC This Tuesday!

2011-04-11T05:41:00.000-07:00

Johnson State College's PoJazz poetry/jazz fusion project puts on its last performance of the season in the Stearns Performance Space this Tuesday, April 12 at 9:00 pm.

We encourage poets and prose writers to bring their own work and read with us.

PoJazzers believe that jazz, especially the blues, tells stories and that poetry, at its lyrical best, is never far from music and dance. In each performance, poets read from their own written work while musicians interweave riffs that erupt from both the rhythms of a poetic line and the musical phrase.

If you'd like more info about our group, check us out on line at:

Johnson State College: Writing and Literature/PoJazz

Kaitlyn Greenidge on Autobiographical Fiction and New Novel

2011-04-06T11:40:00.000-07:00

In the new issue of Talking Writing, fiction writer Kaitlyn Greenidge, who visited JSC in March, talks in her essay "Something Prickly and Strange" about the ways in which autobiography interact with the writing of fiction. She discusses at great length, too, her new novel, about an African American family who move from Boston to the Berkshires to take part in an experiment whereby they raise a chimpanzee with their own children. Kaitlyn read an excerpt from this novel when she visited JSC, an altered version of which will appear in the spring issue of Green Mountains Review.

Here is an excerpt from Kaitlyn's essay:

When I first began writing, it was for a reason I think a lot of younger people start writing: revenge. Wanting to set the record straight.

Although I’ve never written a story based strictly on a memory, my earliest pieces were inspired by times in my life when I felt that an emotional justice had not been served or an emotional truth had been ignored. I wrote to feel justified as a person—as someone with valid feelings and opinions, someone whose observations and understanding of the world were real and credible.

In the long run, revenge can be a severely limiting motivation. I remember trying to start a novel in high school and worrying that I would soon run out of autobiographical material. I couldn’t conceive of writing a main character or narrator who didn’t have my same thoughts and feelings and family background.

As I became more practiced at writing—and especially as I read more—I found that when I read fiction I perceived as coming from that desire for reckoning, it left me dissatisfied. The work might be spirited and energetic, but I ended up feeling emotionally exhausted and embarrassed—for myself and for the writer.

Read the rest of "Something Prickly and Strange" here . . .

Also, read the companion essay written by Kaitlyn's sister, acclaimed playwright Kirsten Greenidge, "Something Wonderfully Dionysian."

Flash Fiction Contests!

2011-04-02T15:46:00.000-07:00

If you've taken any creative writing workshops at JSC, chances are that you have lying around somewhere a notebook or two full of writing exercises. Some of these exercises may have turned into full-length stories or poems, while others sit waiting to be rediscovered.

One very satisfying way to put these exercises to use is to try to turn them into short short fiction (or "flash fiction") -- stories ranging from 100 to 1,000 words. The fun thing about writing short shorts is to discover how narrative redefines itself under compression, or dissolves altogether, allowing the writer to explore more associative or lyric modes that at times approach poetry. Part of the power of such pieces lies in their strangeness and suggestive power.

So try to put together two or three short shorts to submit to one of the following flash fiction contests, which are posted at NewPages.com. Next to each link is the submission fee and deadline:

Our Stories. Flash Fiction. $10. 1/16 - 4/15 (annual)

American Short Fiction. Short Shorts. $15. 2/15 - 5/1 (annual)

Glimmer Train. Very Short Fiction. $15. 5/1 - 5/31 (annual)

WOW! Women On Writing. Flash Fiction. $10. 5/31 (annual)

Indiana Review. Prose Poem, Short Short. $15. 6/15

Literal Latte. Short Short. $10. 6/30 (annual)

Glimmer Train. Very Short Fiction. $15. 7/1 - 7/31 (annual)

Gemini Magazine. Flash Fiction. $4. 8/31/10

Gulf Coast. Prose Poetry, Short Story, Micro-Essay. $15 (postal), $18 (online). 8/31 (annual)

NANO Fiction. Prose Poetry, Flash Fiction, Micro Essay. $15. 8/31/10

WOW! Women On Writing. Flash Fiction. $10. 8/31 (annual)

Southeast Missouri State University Press. Short Story, Flash Fiction. $15. 10/1 (annual)

CutBank. Prose Poetry, Flash Fiction. $9. 10/1 - 11/1/11

River Styx. Micro-fiction. $20. 12/31 (annual)

In addition to these contests, there are a number of print and online literary journals that feature or even specialize in short short prose pieces -- all of which you can learn about and find links to on NewPages.com:

Bateau / Black Warrior Review / Brevity (nonfiction) / BULL: Men's Fiction / Burnside Review / Caketrain / Curly Red Stories / CutBank / failbetter.com / Fiction Fix / Glossolalia / Green Silk Journal / Harpur Palate / Hobart / matchbook.com / Mud Luscious Press / NANO Fiction / New York Tyrant / New Ohio Review / New Orleans Review / New South / Ninth Letter / Noon / PANK / Passages North / Phoebe / Quarterly West / Quick Fiction / Sentence (prose poetry) / Sleepingfish / SmokeLong Quarterly / Southeast Review / South Loop (nonfiction) / storySouth.com / subTropics / Unsaid

2 JSC students Receive Writing Fellowships at Vermont Studio Center!

2011-03-29T06:45:00.000-07:00

Ashley McCauliff

(Photo by Jessica Lafflin)

Dayton Shafer

(Photo by Jessica Lafflin)

From Basement Medicine:

Ashley McCauliff and Dayton Shafer, two seniors in the B.F.A. Creative Writing program, have been awarded a two-week fellowship in the Vermont Studio Center, which they will begin at the end of the semester.

This fellowship, which is offered only at Johnson State College and is highly sought after, is offered yearly to two senior students from the Creative Writing program and includes free housing and meals during their stay. The idea, as Assistant Professor of Writing and Literature Jacob White sees it, is to provide the two students a period of time where they can solely focus on their writing as he believes writing requires a level of “habit and rhythm and repetition” to excel. . . .

Read the rest of the article at Basement Medicine, here . . .

Kaitlyn Greenidge and Student Fiction Reading

2011-03-25T05:42:00.000-07:00

On March 21, JSC hosted a night of lively, powerful fiction with visiting author Kaitlyn Greenidge and three JSC fiction students: Stephanie Girard, Lit Tyler, and Deirdre Walsh.

Kaitlyn Greenidge, reading an excerpt from her

novel-in-progress. Her work has appeared or is

forthcoming in American Short Fiction, The Believer,

Afrobeat Journal, and Canteen Magazine.

Deirdre Walsh

Stephanie Girard

Lit Tyler

Submit to Susquehanna Review

2011-03-22T13:08:00.000-07:00

Call for Submissions

Susquehanna Review, the national undergraduate journal of Susquehanna University, is open for submissions! We accept entries in fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry from students across the country. Send us your best stories, your quirkiest characters, details that pierce, writing innovative and brave. We are looking for fresh language that excites us, both as readers and as writers, honed in on the depth and variety of human experience.

Also art—so if you photograph, sketch, pointilate, paint (or are swooned by a peer who does)—that too we court.

We are excited to announce that two contributors (one poetry and one prose) will be awarded the annual Gary Fincke Creative Writing Prize, which includes a $100 award. All chosen works will appear in both our print journal and our new online journal. Please read our guidelines and submit by March 25^that: http://susquehannareview.com/submissions.html

Please email any questions to sureview@susqu.edu. We are happy to answer.

Fiction Writer Kaitlyn Greenidge to Read with JSC Students Monday, 3/21!

2011-03-17T08:58:00.000-07:00

Kaitlyn Greenidge currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. A 2010 graduate of Hunter College's MFA program, she has been the recipient of a Hertog Fellowship, the Bernard Cohen Short Story Prize, and a fellowship at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, The Believer, Canteen Magazine, and Afrobeat Journal

Kaitlyn will read from her work on Monday, March 21 at 5:30pm in JSC's Stearns Performance Space. She will be joined by three other JSC fiction students -- Deirdre Walsh, Stephanie Girard, and Lit Tyler -- who will read from their fiction preceding Kaitlyn's own reading.

WHEN: Monday, March 21, 5:30 p.m.

WHERE: Stearns Performance Space

JSC Reading Series Continues! . . .

2011-03-05T17:15:00.000-08:00

MONDAY, MARCH 14:

CHRIS BACHELDER

(5:30pm, Stearns Space

Chris Bachelder is the author of the two satirical novels U.S.! and Bear v. Shark, as well as the new novel Abbott Awaits. He has also written the e-novel Lessons in Virtual Tour Photography. He grew up in Virginia and now teaches in the writing program at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he lives with his wife and two daughters.

His essay "The Dead Chipmunk: An Interrogation Into the Mechanisms of Jokes" appears in a recent issue of The Believer Magazine.

Also, listen to Bechelder talk with NPR back in 2006 about his second book, U.S.!: A Novel, a wildly funny satire about muck-raker Upton Sinclair. (You can listen to Bachelder reading from that novel here.)

You can read additional interviews with Chris Bachelder at Oxford Magazine, Subtropics, and Bookslut. Also, check out his short story "Gatsby's Hydroplane."

Here is how Louisiana State University Press describes Bachelder's newest novel, Abbott Awaits:

"A quiet tour de force, Chris Bachelder’s Abbott Awaits transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary, startlingly depicting the intense and poignant challenges of a vulnerable, imaginative father as he lives his everyday American existence.

"In Abbott we see a modern-day Sisyphus: he is the exhausted father of a lively two-year-old, the ruminative husband of a pregnant insomniac, and the confused owner of a terrified dog. Confronted by a flooded basement, a broken refrigerator, a urine-soaked carpet, and a literal snake in the woodpile, Abbott endures the beauty and hopelessness of each moment, often while contemplating evolutionary history, altruism, or the passage of time.

"An expectant father and university teacher on summer break, Abbott tackles the agonizing chores of each day, laboring for peace in his household and struggling to keep his daughter clean and happy, all while staving off a fear of failure as a parent, and even as a human being. As he cleans car seats, forgets to apply sun block, clips his dog’s nails, dresses his daughter out of season, and makes unsuccessful furniture-buying trips with his wife, his mind plays out an unrelenting series of paradoxical reflections. Abbott’s pensive self-doubt comes to a head one day in late June as he cleans vomited raspberries out of his daughter’s car seat and realizes: 'the following propositions are both true: (a) Abbott would not, given the opportunity, change one significant element of his life, but (B) Abbott cannot stand his life.'

"Composed of small moments of domestic wonder and terror, Abbott Awaits is a charming story of misadventure, anxiety, and the every- day battles and triumphs of parenthood."

Courtesy of the Louisiana State University Press Spring 2011 catalog

Bring it!: The JSC Writing Slam Returns!

2011-03-04T12:08:00.000-08:00

Writing Advice From Robert McCrum at The Guardian

2011-02-23T17:04:00.000-08:00

D. H. Lawrence

In a recent article in The Guardian, "A Lesson In Teaching Writing," Robert McCrumb provides some terrifically austere, old-school models for beginning writers: "I'm agnostic about the benefits of creative-writing classes, but would-be fictioneers could do worse than emulate the greats."

McCrumb goes on to lay out the below -- "some passages I'd refer to by way of illustrating some technical lessons":

1. The introduction of a fictional landscape

How to bring up the curtain on a narrative setting. Two classic passages:

- The first chapter of Hardy's The Return of the Native
- The opening of EM Forster's A Passage To India

2. Narrative economy

How to get a story going and introduce your protagonists with maximum speed and efficiency, while developing the plot and establishing character and motivation:

- The opening chapter of Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon
- The opening pages of DH Lawrence's Women in Love
- The first two pages of Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

3. The joy of dialogue

How to convey character and situation in fictional speech:

- Almost any passage from Beckett's Waiting for Godot
- Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

4. The magic of tone

How to make your voice heard on the page, to mesmerise the reader:

- Lorrie Moore's story "Vissi D'arte" (actually, almost anything by Lorrie Moore illustrates this)
- JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye
- Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

5. Pace

How to get started, at top speed:

- Act I of Macbeth
- Virginia Woolf's Orlando
- Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island

6. Impact

How to grab the reader's attention and hold it by the scruff of the neck:

- Graham Greene's "The Destructors"
- Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song
- Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses

7. The only rule is that there are no rules

How to defy gravity in prose and still come out a winner:

- Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy
- Melville's Moby Dick
- Samuel Richardson's Clarissa.

Geof Hewitt Brings His Slam Poetry to JSC

2011-02-21T02:23:00.000-08:00

On February 15, Vermont's own slam poet extraordinaire, Geof Hewitt, stopped by JSC to provide a "reading" of his poetry -- but of course it wasn't just a "reading": Geof emphasizes a dramatic recitation style that engages and excites his audience, making for a much more intimate experience. After his reading, Geof provided an extensive slam poetry workshop for JSC students aimed at helping them write and present their work in ways that had powerful effect on the audience.

Geof Hewitt is the author of The Perfect Heart: Selected and New Poems, Just Words, Only What's Imagined, Hewitt's Guide to Slam Poetry and Poetry Slam, and other books.

Big thanks to JSC Creative Writing student Nichole Dumaine for the photos below . . .

Submit to The Gihon River Review!

2011-02-16T11:30:00.000-08:00

Gihon River Review Has a Brand New Soul

-dig it-

The Gihon River Review is a literary magazine produced by the BFA Creative Writing program at Johnson State College. The magazine is currently seeking poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction pieces. They continually accept and read manuscripts from September to May. Poetry submissions may only contain five poems, and Fiction/Nonfiction submissions have a limit of twenty five pages. If interested, please send your work along with a cover letter and SASE to:

The Gihon River Review

Johnson State College

337 College Hill Road

Johnson, Vermont 05656

grr@jsc.edu

Please also mention directly in your cover letter if you would like for your manuscripts to be returned to you. If published, contributors receive a complimentary copy of the magazine. Otherwise, you may become a member of the journal's mailing list for an easy payment of $5 per magazine.

The Kenyon Review Short Fiction Contest!

2011-02-09T18:38:00.000-08:00

Submissions Accepted Through February 28th!

The Kenyon Review is currently accepting submissions for its 2011 Short Fiction Contest. KR is grateful to Amazon.com for their generous support of this contest. KR will accept electronic submissions February 1st through February 28th, 2011, through the Short Fiction Contest page of the KR website. Ron Carlson will be the final judge. The winning story will be published in The Kenyon Review, and the author will receive a scholarship to the 2011 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, June 18-25th, in Gambier, Ohio. (Scholarship covers tuition, room and board expenses.) There is no entry fee for submission. Please direct questions to kenyonreview@kenyon.edu.

Full contest details:

Submission Guidelines

Writers must 30 years of age or younger at the time of submission.

Stories must be no more than 1200 words in length.

One submission per entrant.

Please do not simultaneously submit your contest entry to another magazine or contest.

The submissions link will be active February 1st to February 28th. All work must be submitted through our electronic system. We cannot accept paper submissions.

Winners will be announced in the late spring. You will receive an e-mail notifying you of any decisions regarding your work.

For submissions, we accept the following file formats only:

.PDF (Adobe Acrobat)
.DOC (Microsoft Word)
.RTF (Rich Text Format)
.TXT (Microsoft Wordpad and Notepad, Apple TextEdit

As a special gift, all entrants will be mailed a free chapbook that collects the winning stories from the first three years of the contest.

Click here to enter the submissions site

The final judge will be Ron Carlson, celebrated author of four novels and five short story collections, including most recently The Signal (Viking, 2009), Five Skies (Viking, 2007), and A Kind of Flying (W.W. Norton 2003). His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and other journals, as well as The Best American Short Stories, The O’Henry Prize Series, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and dozens of other anthologies. Among his awards are a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a National Society of Arts and Letters Literature Award.

JSC Reading Series Continues! . . .

2011-02-06T12:39:00.000-08:00

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 9:

MAJOR JACKSON

(5:30pm, Stearns Space)

Major Jackson is the author of three collections of poetry: Hoops (Norton, 2006), finalist for an NAACP Image Award; Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia, 2002), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award; and Holding Company (W.W. Norton, 2010). He is a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Major Jackson is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He serves as the Poetry Editor of the Harvard Review.

Below are the remaining events scheduled for the 2011 Spring Reading Series. All events will take place in the Stearns Student Center Performance Space and are FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC:

2/9/11 (Wednesday): Major Jackson, poet (5:30pm)

2/16/11 (Wednesday): Geoff Hewitt, slam poet (5:30pm);

Slam Workshop to follow.

3/9/11 (Wednesday): JSC Student Poetry Slam (8:30pm)

3/14/11 (Monday): Chris Bachelder, fiction writer (5:30pm)

3/21/11 (Monday): Kaitlyn Greenidge w/ JSC Students

(fiction) (5:30pm)

4/21/11 (Thursday): Natasha Trethewey, poet (5:30pm)

Contacts: Jacob White Jacob.White@jsc.edu
Elizabeth Powell Elizabeth.Powell@jsc.edu

Glimmer Train Short Story Contest for New Writers

2011-02-05T10:50:00.000-08:00

Glimmer Train Stories awards thousands of dollars in prizes throughout the year in its long-running series of writing contests. Many writers have begun successful careers as winners or finalists in these contests, and at the very least these contests provide an opportunity to publish your work in a highly visible, widely read magazine.

The current contest is The Short Story Award for New Writers, the guidelines of which are below:

We are interested in reading your original, unpublished stories!

We don't publish stories for children, I'm sorry.
Multiple submissions are fine. You can send more than one submission per competition, if you like, or submit the same story for different categories, if it qualifies.
When we accept a story for publication, we are purchasing first-publication rights. (Once we've published your story, you are free to, for instance, include it in your own collection.)

To make a submission: Please send your work via our new online submission procedure.
It's easy, will save you postage and paper, and is much easier on the environment.
Just click here to go to the Online Submissions page to get started.

Dates: The category will be open to submissions for one full month, from the first day through
midnight (Pacific time) of the last day of the month. Results will be posted at www.glimmertrain.org.

February. Results will be posted on April 30.
May. Results will be posted on July 31.
August. Results will be posted on October 30.
November. Results will be posted on January 31.

Reading fee:

$15 per story.

Prizes:

1st place wins $1,200, publication in Glimmer Train Stories, and 20 copies of that issue.
2nd-place: $500
3rd-place:$300

Other considerations:

Open only to writers whose fiction has not been presented in a print publication with a circulation over 5,000. (Entries, of course, must be unpublished.)
Most submissions to this category run 3,000 to 6,000 words, but can go up to 12,000 words.

I suspect that more than a few editors fail to read beyond the first paragraph of stories sent them by unknown writers. Not so with the editors of Glimmer Train--they seek out new voices in fiction and provide them with valuable exposure. Shortly after my work appeared in Glimmer Train, a collection of my short stories was accepted for publication. --George Makana Clark

The Pinch Writing Contest Open

2011-01-30T10:30:00.000-08:00

Win Free Fellowship to Vermont Studio Center!

2011-01-29T12:47:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year again when JSC Writing and Literature students with 60 or more credits can apply for a free two week fellowship to Vermont Studio Center to work on their creative writing project. Residencies are typically in May and include room, board, a studio to write in, free workshops and manuscript consultation, and attendance at lectures, art openings, and readings.

To apply, send a letter of application, a project proposal to work on at the residency, a copy of your JSC transcript, and a five page writing sample in any genre to : Professor Elizabeth Powell, Department of Writing and Literature, LLC 320, Johnson State College, Johnson , Vermont 05656. Phone (802) 635-1342. No email applications, please.

Applications due on Thursday, February 17, 2011.

Rick Bass to Read at Sterling College (FREE!)

2011-01-27T06:09:00.000-08:00

The big-hearted and widely revered fiction and nonfiction writer Rick Bass will stop by Sterling College to read from his recent book of nonfiction, Why I Came West, a finalist for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award. This reading will be FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

WHEN: February 14, 2011 (6:30pm)
WHERE: Simpson Hall, Sterling Campus, Craftsbury, Vermont

Bass is the author of twenty-four books of fiction and nonfiction, including the The Watch, The Hermit's Story, Winter: Notes from Montaina, The Book of the Yaak, The Lost Grizzlies, and most recently Nashville Chrome. He has received the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for The Watch, the James Jones Fellowship Award, multiple Pushcart Prizes, and the O. Henry Award.

Here is an interview with BookPage wherein Bass discusses how he combines literary art with vigorous environmental activism.

2011 Spring Reading Series!

2011-01-25T05:59:00.001-08:00

JSC's 2011 Spring Reading Series is here!

JSC is proud to host the following author events, all of which will take place in the Stearns Student Center Performance Space. All readings are FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC:

1/31/11 (Monday): Josip Novakovich, fiction writer (5:30pm)

2/9/11 (Wednesday):   Major Jackson, poet (5:30pm)
2/16/11 (Wednesday): Geoff Hewitt, slam poet (5:30pm);
                                         Slam Workshop to follow.
3/9/11 (Wednesday): JSC Student Poetry Slam (8:30pm)
3/14/11 (Monday):   Chris Bachelder, fiction writer (5:30pm)
3/21/11 (Monday):   Kaitlyn Greenidge w/ JSC Students
                                        (fiction) (5:30pm)
4/21/11 (Thursday):   Natasha Trethewey, poet (5:30pm)

Contacts:  Jacob White Jacob.White@jsc.edu
               Elizabeth Powell Elizabeth.Powell@jsc.edu

MONDAY, JANUARY 31:

JOSIP NOVAKOVICH

(5:30pm, Stearns Space)

Josip Novakovich

Josip Novakovich is a celebrated Croation American fiction writer. He is the recipient of many awards, including the Whiting Writer's Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and an American Book Award, among others. His works include one novel (April Fool's Day), three short story collections (Yolk, Salvation and Other Disasters, Infidelities: Stories of War and Lust), two collections of essays (Apricots from Chernobyl, Plum Brandy: Croatian Journey) and an instructional book on the craft of writing fiction (Fiction Writer's Workshop).

Moreover, Novakovich is a longtime friend of the Johnson State College community. He has served as a guest fiction editor for JSC's literary journal, Green Mountains Review, and his highly regarded instructional book on the craft of writing fiction, Fiction Writer's Workshop, has become a foundational text for creative writing students at JSC. So it is especially exciting that his reading will serve as one of the spring's first Creative Audience events.

Undergraduate Creative Writing Conference

2011-01-23T07:29:00.000-08:00

Boldface is a summer conference for emerging writers put on by the undergraduate literary journal at the University of Houston, Glass Mountain.

The conference began in 2009 and was a huge success and, by all accounts, fun (see pictures here). A creative writing conference can prove particularly valuable for student writers who want to advance their writing skills as well as prepare for graduate school and/or commercial publication. Meeting other writers is simply a good thing.

Below is information about the 2011 conference (May 23-38, University of Houston). Here is how the boldface website describes the conference:

. . . Held in the MD Anderson Library on the University of Houston campus, the bold|face writer’s conference allows the emerging writer the intense studio focus necessary to develop their craft. Lasting five full days, participants can look forward to daily workshops, craft talks, and complementary breakfasts and lunches.

Led by the MFA and PhD candidates of the prestigious University of Houston creative writing program, this year, participants will also be able to sign up for individual feedback sessions from these established working writers:

Dr. David Maclean, creative nonfiction
Author of the memoir, The Answer to the Riddle is Me, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin/Harcourt 2011.

Dr. Darin Ciccotelli, poetry
Published in The Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review among others and a recipient of the James A. Michener Fellowship, an Inprint/C. Glen Cambor Fellowship, an inaugural Houston Writing Fellowship, and several Pushcart Prize nominations.

Dr. Aaron Reynolds, fiction
His stories and essays have appeared in Willow Springs, Third Coast, Sonora Review, Laurel Review, and Gulf Coast. He has also been awarded Donald Barthelme Memorial Fellowships in both fiction and non-fiction at the University of Houston, where he recently received his PhD and continues to teach creative writing full time.

$100 Early bird registration deadline: March 5
$125 regular registration: May 5

2010 Fall Reading Series Recap . . .

2011-01-18T06:51:00.000-08:00

During the fall of 2010, the creative writing community at JSC kicked off the Fall Reading Series with two intimate visits by renowned poets Carl Phillips (September) and Nancy Mitchell (October), both of whom often stepped out from behind their mesmerizing poetry to talk openly and frankly about the lives from which such poetry springs -- lives at times comical (Phillips described becoming trapped on his own roof after an ill-advised attempt at home repair) and harrowing (Mitchell spoke candidly about her son's consuming drug addiction and how it generated much of the emotional energy in her newest book, Grief Hut).

October: The JSC students who participated in the fall 2010 Poetry Slam did not so much step out from behind their words as blast through them. This was high-contact writing at its best, featuring not only slam poetry but works of flash fiction and flash essay.

Ashley McCauliff, Winner, Fall 2010 JSC Poetry Slam

Doug Bliss

Jasmine Ohadi

In late October, creative nonfiction guru Michael Steinberg delivered his craft talk entitled "Memory, Fact, Imagination, Research: Memoir's Hybrid Personality," which pushed for a new definition of this often indefinable, "mongrel" form, specifically addressing the uncomfortable "truth in memoir" controversy and the uncomfortable yet necessary alliance between imagination and fact.

Michael Steinberg

Michael Steinberg and JSC Creative Nonfiction writer Todd Loskutoff

JSC Creative Writing students strike a pose: (left to right) Taylor Shaw,

Todd Loskutoff, Elizabeth Glasser, and Stephanie Girard

In November, acclaimed fiction writer Antonya Nelson was this season's keynote visiting author, providing as well a Creative Audience event for first-year students. She wowed a big crowd by reading the first chapter of her new novel, Bound.

Before her reading, Ms. Nelson visited Professor Jacob White's Introduction to Creative Writing class to discuss the unlikely sources of fiction. Much of that conversation can be found here in the Fall 2010 Issue 5 of JSC's campus newspaper Basement Medicine.

Antonya Nelson

Finally, we capped off the 2010 Fall Reading Series by celebrating the work of JSC's own creative writing community. These readers included Rose Nash (fiction), Ann Turkle (poetry), Alison Moncrief (poetry), Jacob White (fiction), Elizabeth Powell (poetry), and JSC President Barbara Murphy (poetry). What a cornucopia of voices!

JSC Fall Reading Series!

2010-08-27T15:08:00.000-07:00

JSC is proud to host readings this fall by four highly acclaimed writers:

9/2/10:   Carl Phillips, poet (Stearns Cinema, 5:30pm)
10/21/10: Nancy Mitchell, poet (Stearns Performance Space, TBA)
10/27/10: Michael Steinberg, creative essayist (Stearns Center Performance Space, 6:00pm)
11/16/10: Antonya Nelson, novelist and short story writer (Stearns Center Performance Space, 5:30pm)

Contacts:  Jacob White Jacob.White@jsc.edu
                 Elizabeth Powell Elizabeth.Powell@jsc.edu

Carl Phillips is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Double Shadow (2011) and Speak Low (2010), a National Book Award Finalist; Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006 (2007); and Riding Westward (2006). His collection The Rest of Love (2004) won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

His other books include: Rock Harbor (2002); The Tether (2001), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Pastoral (2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; From the Devotions (1998), finalist for the National Book Award; Cortége (1995), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and In the Blood (1992), winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize.

His work has been anthologized in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry (2003), Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology (2002), Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (1988), Contemporary American Poetry (2001), and The Vintage Book of African American Poetry (2000). His poems have also been chosen eight times for the annual Best American Poetry series.

Phillips is also the author of a book of prose, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Art and Life of Poetry (2004), and the translator of Sophocles’s Philoctetes (2003).

His honors include the 2006 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pushcart Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress.

According to the Judges' Citation for the 1998 National Book Awards, "Carl Phillips' passionate and lyrical poems read like prayers, with a prayer's hesitations, its desire to be utterly accurate, its occasional flowing outbursts."

Phillips is Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the Creative Writing Program. He was elected an Academy Chancellor in 2006.

Nancy Mitchell is the author of two volumes of poetry, The Near Surround (Four Way Books, 2002) and Grief Hut (Cervena Barva Press, 2009), and her poems have appeared in Agni, Poetry Daily, Salt Hill Journal, Great River Review, and in the current issue of Johnson State College's Green Mountains Review, and are anthologized in Last Call by Sarabande Books, 1997. Her poems and a teaching exercises on Sound are anthologized in The Working Poet, Autumn House Press, 2009. She has received an Artist in the Schools grant for Virginia, and residency fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (in Amherst, VA and in Auvillar, France), and from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Mitchell teaches in the English Department at Salisbury University, Maryland, and has taught in the Stonecoast MFA program in Maine. She resides in Salisbury, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, with her husband John Ebert, a filmmaker

Michael Steinberg is a writer, editor, and teacher. His memoir, Still Pitching, was chosen by ForeWord Magazine as the 2003 Independent Press Memoir/Autobiography of the Year. The Association of American University Presses also chose the book for inclusion on its 2004 list of "Books Selected for School Libraries.” And the Melton Center for Jewish Studies selected it for inclusion in "The American Jewish Story in Print," a national on-line directory.

Other books include, Peninsula: Essays and Memoirs From Michigan--a finalist for the 2000 Foreword Magazine Independent Press Anthology of the Year, and for the 2000 Great Lakes Book Sellers Award; The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, currently in its fifth edition; Those Who Do, Can: Teachers Writing, Writers Teaching--the latter two with Robert Root Jr.; and, The Writer's Way: A Process-to-Product Approach to Writing, with Clinton S. Burhans, Jr. He also collaborated with Bob Baldori on I'm Almost Famous, a stage play that was produced in 1984 at the Apollo Theater in Chicago.

Steinberg's personal essays and memoirs have been published in many literary journals and widely anthologized, and his work has won several national awards--including the Missouri Review Editor's Prize, the National Harness Racing Writers of America Feature Writing Award, and a Roberts Writing Award. A half-dozen pieces have been cited as "Notable Essays" in the Best American Essays, and Best American Sports Writing annual anthologies. Five others have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Steinberg is the founding editor (1999) of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, an award-winning journal of literary nonfiction. Fourth Genre is one of three literary journals that exclusively publish works of creative nonfiction.

Antonya Nelson is the author of six short story collections, including Nothing Right and Female Trouble, and the four novels Talking in Bed, Nobody’s Girl, Living to Tell, and, most recently, Bound, which received a glowing review in The New York Times). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of the 2003 Rea Award for Short Fiction, as well as NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, as well as in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. She lives in Telluride, Colorado, Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Houston, Texas.