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Each issue of Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review includes four writers responding to a set of four questions on a select topic. The Fall 2018 issue features Kwame Dawes, BK Fischer, Tara Betts and Nikita Gill answering questions about the pressure for poets to act as their own publicists, the new media sense of ‘community’ and its effect on writing, the impact of ‘instant’ publishing (posting) on the writing and revising process, and how social media has changed how we define poems, poetry, and even writers.

The Fall/Winter 2018 issue of The Chattahoochee Review is themed on “Lost & Found.” Editor Anna Schachner [pictured] writes in the editorial: “In many ways, this issue’s special focus of ‘Lost and Found’ is an homage to the writing process itself – the many slivers of ourselves we concede when we write and  the inevitable discovery via writing. That emphatic ‘and’ is important because it suggests an organic progression: that to lose something is to also create space to find something else, not just in writing, but in our thoughts, our expectations, our relationships. So many of the submissions we received seemed to concur, as did so many of the pieces ultimately chosen and featured herein.”

Contributors include Cooper Casale, Margaret Diehl, John Hart, Lindsay Stuart Hill, Raina Joines, Timothy Krcmarik, David Rock, Sophia Stid, Brian Phillip Whalen, Jennifer Wheelock, Erica S. Arkin, John Brandon, Kieran Wray Kramer, Michele Ruby, Kevin Wilson, Ginger Eager, Jennifer Key, Caitlin McGill, Marilyn F. Moriarty, Raul Palma, and Rachel H. Palmer.

An online journal “dedicated to short fiction,” Fiction Southeast features a monthly series of articles under the label of “Suggestions & Advice for Writers.” Recent essays include “On Writing” by Devin Matthews, “Death of the Short Story” by G. D. McFegridge, “I Denigrate Myself” by Evan Dunsky, “A Time for Fantasy” by Abagail Becastro [pictured], and “On The Artistic Temperament and a Writer’s Need for Privacy” by Pamelyn Casto.

Fiction Southeast essays/articles section also includes Writers Talking About Writing, which features author interviews, “The Story Behind the Story” and “Why I Write.” Other sections are Conference/Residency Spotlight, Developing a Writing Life, Editing/Publishing, Fiction & Culture, Reading Lists, Reviews, and the most unique essay grouping: Storytelling in Contemporary Video Games.

A lot going on for writers in this publication!

Based on Editor Victor David Sandiego’s intro commentary, it sounds like the Winter 2018 issue of Subprimal will be its last: “. . . this is the final issue of Subprimal Poetry Art/Music, at least for a while. I have decided to take a hiatus from publishing Subprimal for 2019, and – with truth to be told – perhaps forever. It’s been a lot of fun during the last five years connecting with so many wonderful authors and artists, but I want to spend more time concentrating on my own work.”

If you’ve not given this publication a look, do it now while you can. The time and effort put into visual and audio is astonishing. Not only do authors read their own works, but Sandiego creates musical compositions to accompany them. It’s one of the most unique publications I’ve experienced in my time with NewPages. While I’m sorry to see Subprimal cease, I wish Victor the best and look forward to seeing where his creative energies lead him!

In addition to the print annual, Mom Egg Review, offering “the best literary writing about mothers and motherhood,” also offers readers MER VOX, an online quarterly of creative writing, interviews, craft essays and more that focus on “motherhood and on the life experiences of women.” The December 2018 installment, Silver Linings, is one I think we can all appreciate, as Editors Jennifer Martelli and Cindy Veach introduce it:

“Since the 2016 election, the news has been mostly terrible. Both online and offline we have been barraged 24/7 by an overwhelming level of toxicity. We’d like to offer our readers a respite, however brief. For our December folio, we’re featuring poems that celebrate silver linings wherever they may be found: in those we love, in nature, in literature, in sisterhood, in memory.”

Featured poets include: Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Jen Karetnick, Allia Abdullah-Matta, Catherine Esposito Prescott, Radhiyah Ayobami, Julia Lisella, and Keisha Molby-Baez.

About Place Journal Editors Lauren Camp and Melissa Tuckey write in their introduction to the October 2018 issue themed “Root and Resistance”:

“As artists and writers, part of our task is to pay attention to and distill what is happening around us. In witnessing, we’re called to both lift what is beautiful and name what is unjust, to reclaim language from the powerful and give it back its humanity. For this issue, we were interested in works that get at the root of our current political disaster. We also wanted work that explored and reveled in our sources of support, interconnection, solace, and strength. We wanted work that could be useful to those of us engaged in this challenge who, on many days, feel exhausted, overwhelmed and disheartened. We wanted work that would challenge us to learn from perspectives outside of our own, that would help us understand history and how we arrived at this moment.”

Ultimately, they write, “The work we have received reminds us that we all need to nurture ourselves as much as we need to resist the threats to our culture. We need to hold to our strong communities, and also build new ones. Part of our efforts must be a turning back to ancestry and history, to see the germ of a struggle and the start of our futures. We need to look to the past to find the roots of the efforts to amend the present.”

A good way to start the new year.

“Alabama for Beginners,” Jean Ryan’s featured essay in a recent issue of bioStories caught my attention; as the editor describes it, “a love letter to her new home and the unexpected welcome she has found there.”

Ryan moved from San Francisco to Lilian, Alabama where she hopes her “modest savings will last longer” and she and her wife will “unearth the gay community—there must be one, some brave little enclave waiting for reinforcements.” But then, “On deeper reflection,” she continues, “maybe there is no enclave here, no separate community at all. Maybe these pockets are going the way of gay bars, no longer needed in this age of sexual fluidity, borders and labels all slipping away—now there’s a happy thought.” (I’m hoping those happy thoughts with you!)

As I age, I also consider other places to resettle, and for anyone who is contemplating a move, this essay of discovering a new place – especially one so different in so many ways – was a nudge of encouragement. Learning the people, the places, the flora and the fauna, and, most essentially, the rediscovery of your own being amid a new environment:

“Each morning my wife and I have coffee on the back patio and watch the sun come up through the pines. As we often come out before dawn, I sweep a flashlight beam across the cement, making sure we don’t step on something that, like us, is not looking for any trouble, just a place to call home. The other day I saw a black wasp fly out of a small hole in the frame of my deck chair, reminding me of the swallows next door that made a nest in the open sewer pipe of the home under construction. You can find at least three wide-eyed frogs perched inside my hose reel box any time you lift the lid. Not for a minute does even the smallest crevice go to waste. There is panic in the air, the hum of a million creatures trying to stay alive.”

bioStories is an online pubiication of nonfiction that publishes a new feature every week then collects them into two semiannual issues.

The Greensboro Review Editor Terry L. Kennedy writes in his introduction to issue #104 about trying to determine what makes “a good story” and the idea of creating a checklist for submissions:

“A checklist for ‘a good story’ might make my editorial deliberations easier, but it wouldn’t be good for my staff or for the magazine. And I’m not so sure readers really want exact restrictions on a story, not anymore. What if a story has a memorable setting but there’s no plot, nothing happens? A la Seinfeld. Where does that leave us? There are too many intangible aspects with which to blur the lines. . . I guess what I’m working my way around to is this: it’s not that I’m incapable of creating a checklist as that I don’t really believe, in my editorial heart of hearts, that I should. In the end, the best stories might just be the ones that do the things we thing a short story writer shouldn’t attempt. But by doing them well, they win our hearts and make us shout, ‘This one; this is the one!'”

With each new issue of its online poetry journal, Under a Warm Green Linden issues one of the poems as their featured broadside, signed by the author, available for purchase.

Regular readers know I’m a sucker for signed broadsides, and these are no exception. They are gorgeous, quality prints on solid stock and carefully packaged for secure shipping. I own every one in this series and FULL DISCLOSURE: I have paid for every one. This is NOT an ad, but an honest “I LOVE THESE and want to share this with you” post.

“Narcissus on the Hunt” by Rachel Bullis can be read here (Issue 6, Winter 2018), and was particularly striking to me as a teacher of mythology. I will definitely be sharing this one with my students.

The journal is free to read online; the broadsides cost $10 each or 3 for $25 with proceeds going to support Under a Warm Green Linden’s Green Mission reforestation efforts. To date, the publication has “planted 205 trees in collaboration with the Arbor Day Foundation and the National Forest Foundation.”

With each new quarterly issue, Asymptote online publication of poetry, fiction, drama, nonfiction, interviews, and translations offers “an educator’s guide for those wanting to teach pieces from that issue. Each guide offers a thematic breakdown of that issue’s content, relevant information about the context of various pieces, and possible discussion questions and exercises.”

The guides offer lesson plans on topics which incorporate the pieces from the issue, indicating appropriate learner level (middle school, high school, upper-level high school, college/undergraduate, etc.) as well as discipline when applicable (such as AP History, Beginner French Students).

Asymptote also invites educators to “Lend a Hand” assisting with pedagogy and feedback on the lessons provided.

It was a bit shocking to see a 2019 dated publication already, but it’s true: We’re there. 

2nd River View offers a selection of poetry online, some with author-recorded readings, as well as a current and full archive of their chapbook series. These chapbooks can be read online, downloaded in full-page PDF, or “Chap the Book,” which opens as a PDF in booklet form (for printing and saddle stitch fold/staple). What a great (FREE) resource for teachers! Things Impossible to Swallow by Pamela Garvey is their latest chapbook.

Here’s a sampling of some of the works from their Winter 2019 issue:

I want to stay in the house all day
and read poetry from a time
when people rowed out in little boats.

From “Accident” by Nancy Takacs

January sleek gray sky, the clouds diffuse
the sun to one dull eye, & my body quiet
with goat milk skin, makes a slim seed
in thin sheets and cotton bedspread.

From “On Sunday Morning, Church Bells” by J.J. Starr

. . . I wonder if
the evening stars will be

missing behind the clouds.
I want to tell the clouds
to be gone or to get out of the way.

I want to wrap my hands
around them so badly

without hurting them.

From “Behind the Clouds” by Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozábal
[pictured: portrait by Karen J. Harlow]

In her editorial to The Fiddlehead‘s Autumn 2018 issue, “Whatever We Need It To Be,” Creative Nonfiction Editor Alicia Elliott opens the publication’s first “all creative nonfiction issue” with a story about presenting on a panel with three other CNF writers. Asked the opening question: What is Creative Nonfiction?, “All four of us exchanged a look. I laughed nervously, as I tend to do when I’m not sure how to answer a question. The seconds passed.”

It’s not that they weren’t prepared for the question, Elliott explains, or hadn’t joked about the challenge of defining the form. “Unfortunately,” she tells readers, “I still don’t have a very good definition.”

But, like so many of us, she goes on to share, “Ever since I fell into Creative Nonfiction a few years ago, I’ve been enthralled by the genre’s possibility, its malleability, the way it requires you to push beyond what’s in front of you and see what’s hidden underneath.”

This all-CNF issue, with works chosen from over 600 submissions should indeed provide us all with a broadened understanding of CNF, as Elliott hopes, but at the same time, “ironically, will probably make defining CNF as gloriously fuzzy for you as it is for me. That’s okay, though. It’s part of the genre’s charm.”

Read the full essay here.

From Speer Morgan’s “Forward: Practical Living,” which opens the Fall 2018 (41.3) issue of The Missouri Review:

“Trends in international politics toward right-wing nationalism, racism in endlessly renewing guises, and the pursuit of material short-term gain regardless of what it does to the earth’s environment and national budgets: all these things make me wonder how well we remember our history beyond last year or even last month. The end of World War I led to an utterly changed, financially crippled world; World War II resulted in the physical destruction of much of Europe and between fifty and eighty million dead, only to be followed by a series of cold and hot wars arising partly from long-misguided imperial assumptions. This nation now has a president who among other things denies climate change, while the largest wildfire in California history burns along with sixteen others and the highest mountain in Sweden just lost its stature because it has melted so much this year.

“Current politics and culture wars are surely a passing phase, like the reign of the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. When Dorothy throws a bucket of water on her, the witch will surely melt. Surely. However, given how little we appear to remember about history, one wonders if we will have to go through some cataclysm before we go for our buckets.”

Read the full essay here.

Heading down its home stretch, Glimmer Train Bulletin continues to offer writers and readers the inside scoop from authors. December’s bulletin features “Go Small to Go Big” by Jane Delury [pictured], which advises writers who feel “overwhelmed with your novel or story draft” to set it aside and go back to basics: the sentence. And Matthew Vollmer’s essay, “The Literary Masquerade: Writing Stories Disguised As Other Forms of Writing,” encourages that “this interplay that results from a story and the particular form it appropriates can be exciting for both writer and reader.” 

Read both essay in full here, where you can also find a full archive of bulletin back issues.