Barefoot Muse, Issue #5 Summer 2007

Brevity, Summer 2007

Cricket Online Review, May 2007

Ducts, Issue #19 Summer 2007

Stuart Dybek reads from and discusses his short-short story, “Voyeur of Rain,” featured in Indiana Review’s 29.1 summer issue. Listen at Under the Blue Light: The Indiana Review Weblog.

The Chattahoochee Review hosts podcasts from Georgia Perimeter College. A great variety of readings, interviews and lectures. Here’s just naming a few:

Mark Bixler Lecture – author of The Lost Boys of Sudan

Donald Bogle Lecture – two parts lecture by the award winning African-American film historian and media scholar discussing the history of African-Americans in the movies.

William Julius Wilson Lecture – the preeminent sociologist and former advisor to President Clinton discussing his book There Goes The Neighborhood, an examination of race and class issues in Chicago. November 2, 2006.

Leonard Susskind – The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design
Luis Alberto Urrea Interview
Elizabeth Cox Reading
Alistair MacLeod Reading
Several GPC faculty open mic readings

Failbetter 23, Spring 2007 is now available, featuring interviews, fiction, poetry and multimedia.

Boxcar Poetry with poetry, artwork, reviews & responses.

The Stickman Review, Volume 6 Number 1 – poetry and fiction.

42 Opus – new writing every few days – currently featuring poetry, fiction, non-fiction.

Born Magazine, May 2007, specializing in literary arts and interactive media.

Votes are now being counted (yes, there are places in this great nation of ours where votes really still do count) for storySouth Million Writer Award for Fiction 2007. The top ten online stories have been selected and readers will choose the winner. To read the top ten stories and cast you vote, as well as read more about the award and the Notable Stories 2006 from which they were selected, visit storySouth.

Voting will run through June 30, 2007.

Once a year, No Record publishes an anthology of short literary fiction by previously-unpublished writers. Last year’s anthology included 14 stories, which ranged between 500 and 11,000 words, and included work from a former Yale divinity professor, a 15 year-old high school student, an actor from Milwaukee, a congressional staff member, and a professional guitarist.

No Record Press is currently taking submissions for next year’s anthology, which they hope to publish in early 2008.

More info here: No Records Press Short Story Anthology Guidelines.

Hey. I was reading lit blogs and a hockey game broke out. The litboys are flailing away. (I think it’s mostly a litboy thing. Correct me if I’m wrong.) The fight is over something like this: These guys, Gessen and Roth from N+1 (a hefty print lit mag), think blogs suck. For the most part anyway. (Have I got that right?) Several blogger dudes have, for some reason, taken offense to this. And it goes on and on, linked through posts in various blogs. Like these things get to do in blogs. So if you feel like you’re missing out on all the fun, start here at Scott Esposito’s Conversational Reading. He’ll shoot you over to Dan Green’s The Reading Experience. Follow it further if your favorite part of a hockey game is when the gloves go flying and the punches are thrown.

“The next episode of The Million Poems Show is this Monday, March 26, at 6:30 p.m. at the Bowery Poetry Club (1st & Bowery, NYC). Buck Downs, author of Marijuana Soft Drink, Recreational Vehicle, and many other fundamentally unstoppably brilliant collections of poems, will be taking the stage. As will Nicole Renaud, the singer the New York Times describes as an “ethereal soprano,” and whom the New Yorker says “earns the overused descriptor ethereal.” Franklin Bruno sings the theme song, banters, collaborates, and if you’re good, he takes us out with a song. And as for me [Jordan Davis], I try to make it so you almost forget you’re at a poetry event. The Million Poems Show is free. What’s more, it coincides with happy hour — come by Monday, have a couple drinks. The words will do things you don’t see coming.”

Why Sexist Language Matters, by Sherryl Kleinman, AlterNet. “Gendered words and phrases like ‘you guys’ may seem small compared to issues like violence against women, but changing our language is an easy way to begin overcoming gender inequality.”

We’ve posted a new batch of lit mag reviews at NewPages.com. Reviews of Barrelhouse, Burnside Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Crazyhorse, Fairy Tale Review, Five Points, Georgia State University Review, Green Mountains Review, Hunger Mountain, The Literary Review, Natural Bridge, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, The Souther Review, and subTerrian. Some really good reading!

New Progressive Librarians Guild chapter at Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “The purpose of PLG is to foster discussion and action related to librarianship and social responsibility. We believe that the vital role of the library in a democratic society requires a politically and socially engaged profession.” Includes links to other chapters.

Open Letters: A Monthly Arts & Literature Review debuts with “among other things, a sharp, critical work by John Cotter on the reviews of Martin Amis’s “House of Meetings”; an involved examination of the writing of young first-time novelists; and our headliner, an unsparing assessment of ALL 20th literature by Steve Donoghue.”

Hearing Coleman Barks read at AWP Atlanta was the absolute highlight for me. I’ve read much of his translation of Rumi and only knew that of him. I was equally awed by his reading his own poetry that night – his non-Rumi poems. Not only is his delivery enough to carry you from the physical realm into the poetic ethereal, but his down-homey nature in his reading was like being wrapped in a cozy blanket on a cold winter’s eve. While reading, he would interject chuckles, amused by the memory of the line or the event therein reflected, and would add commentary, such as “This really happened,” as he talked the crowd of hundreds through his lines as though to a single friend over coffee. A smattering of his poetry with RealAudio recordings can be found on Courtland Review’s website. Coleman will be busy traveling this year, celebrating the 800th birthday of Rumi; if you’re lucky enough, you might be able to catch up with him.

Wheelhouse Magazine Online launches its debut issue, Vol. 1, with contributions from fiction writers Jim Ruland, Nahid Rachlin, Mimi Albert, Diane Lefer, Curtis Harnack, Lourdes Vasquez; poetry from Tung Hui Hu, Pat Falk, Natasha Saje, Marilyn Taylor, and Jared Carter; visual arts by Daniel Johnston, Tom Carey, and Marc Leuthold; essayists Steve Heller and Sheyene Foster Heller.

BENT PIN Quarterly, a new online journal is currently accepting poetry, essays, and flash fiction for its first issue, Spring 2007.

Poetry & Commitment by Adrienne Rich. Poets Against the War newsletter. “I’m both a poet and one of the ‘everybodies’ of my country. I live with manipulated fear, ignorance, cultural confusion and social antagonism huddling together on the faultline of an empire. I hope never to idealise poetry – it has suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry, anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong.”

To sing like a mockingbird: A conversation with Nathaniel Dorsky

Michelle Silva: First I want to ask about your recent book Devotional Cinema. I think it’s some of the most thoughtful and introspective writing on the human experience of cinema and the physical properties we share with the medium — such as our internal visual experience, metaphor, and the art of seeing. What’s great about the book is that it’s accessible to people who aren’t well versed in cinema, but who might be interested in a deeper understanding of their own senses.
Nathaniel Dorsky: The basic ideas for the book were originally formulated because I was hired to teach a course on avant-garde film at UC Berkeley for a semester. I didn’t want to teach a survey course on avant-garde cinema; I didn’t think I could do that with real enthusiasm, I thought it would be a little flat. I decided that what was most interesting to me about avant-garde film — or at least the avant-garde films that I found most interesting — was a search for a language which was purely a filmic language.

After reading the Webhost Study Group report prepared for us by some friends of my dad, and talking with advisors for and against our current situation, we have decided on a New Way Forward. The traffic to our site is too great for our current web host. So…

NewPages.com will be offline for a day or two near the 24th of December as we switch to a new web host. They say that’s the most we should be missing, but if it’s longer than that, keep trying & we’ll show back up. Those promises have been made.

NewPages receives a nice write-up and listing in the revamped “Online Poetry Resources” page on the website of the Academy of American Poets .

Novelist, Editor, Mother Balances the Writing Life. Robert Duffer interviews Gina Frangello, author of My Sister’s Continent, and Executive Editor of Other Voices magazine and its fiction book imprint OV Books.

Jason Boog asks Susan Henderson: “The art of writing is evolving as print publications struggle and blogs multiply like rabbits. Your career has crossed both these worlds in interesting ways. In your experience, what makes your web writing different from your paper writing? Any advice for new writers looking to write a blog or website?”

Kit Whitfield blogs from the UK on publishing “scams” and “fake publishing houses”, but the information is just as relevant in the US, as PublishAmerica is one company looked at. A big problem is that the majority of writers out there with their manuscript in one hand and their dreams of fame and riches in the other, will never read information such as this.

I’ve been doing a lot of research this month on indie publishers, and I’ve been finding a much larger number of companies that are will to help you “publish” your book than I realized existed. It is becoming a large marketplace, and there are fistsfull of cash to be extracted from naive authors.

So now we have some of the companies that will sell you the chance to win a meaningless book award (Yippie!) — that’s a whole ‘nuther scam to talk about someday — offering to help you “publish” your book with promises of promoting it to huge sales. Slick, ethics-free, websites make it all sound so simple.

1st Day of Christmas – Books for the Aspiring Writer Colleen Mondor has some interesting ideas. I especially like the idea of giving subscriptions to literary magazines. We have some great candidates for that at www.newpages.com/litmags.

More from Tayari Jones: “It has been carefully documented on this blog and on my own, that publishing houses often neglect to publicize the books that they have agreed to publish. It becomes pretty clear to an author that she is going to have to get out there and hustle if she wants her book to reach readers, reviewers, prize committees, etc. Many articles have been written by editors and publicists urging more authors to get out there and HUSTLE.

I’ve done it. I’ll admit it. Many authors of literary fiction feel demeaned by the dirty-hands work of hawking their book. And, though we seldom admit it, it is also pretty depressing work. Literary fiction does not exactly lend itself to the same techniques that work well for urban lit, romance, and mystery novels. One writer friend of mine told me of her dismay at sitting at a book festival next to a romance author who had brought along a troupe of bare-chested policemen to draw attention to her steamy novel.”