 |
CONTENTS
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:
We’d like to invite editors and writers to participate in our new series on issues and representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality in independent publishing. How do these issues affect you as an literary magazine editor interested in publishing underrepresented communities, or a writer who wants to challenge dominant notions of identity? What are your thoughts, concerns, ideas about how literary communities reinforce, respond to, and confront racism, classicism, sexism, and homophobia? Contact Marcelle Heath at lunaparkonline@gmail.com.
"Reading a literary journal is not like eating your vegetables. We’re not doing this so it can be preserved in a museum while people actually enjoy movies, television and video games."
—Eli Horowitz, McSweeney's
SERIES: Race, Class, Gender & Sexuality in Indie Publishing
Questions of Authenticity
By Michael Copperman
"The question of authenticity, then, especially authorial authority conferred on the basis of phenotype or racial background, is the wrong line of inquiry."
Community and the Body
By Sherisse Alvarez
"My work has appeared in various publications interested specifically in issues of identity. I still struggle at times with the notion of the “mainstream,” how my work relates or does not relate to the canon."
Jarrett Haley, BULL: Fiction for Thinking Men
"That I am not a sociologist or gender-studier by trade I should make clear to begin with."
I Don't Know How to Write About Race
By Roxane Gay
"This is only about race."
INTERVIEWS
Megan M. Garr, Versal [TBA]
Jarrett Haley, BULL: Fiction for Thinking Men
Laura van den Berg, Part II
Laura van den Berg, Part I
Allison Seay, The Greensboro Review
Mary Miller
Eilis O'Neal, Nimrod International
Erin Fitzgerald, Northville Review
Don Bogen, Cincinnati Review
Andrew Porter
Nam Le
Benjamin Percy
LUNA DIGEST
Luna Digest, 1/5
"One of the more interesting literary magazine discussions to come about in recent months has happened via email, twitter feeds, and blogs about Andrew Whitacre’s post titled “The End of the Small Print Journal. Please.” on the identity theory editors’ blog."
Luna Digest, 12/15
"The Atlantic Monthly decides not only to be the first magazine to sell single short stories for the Kindle, but they will also charge 4 times as much as One Story does for a single story. And One Story will actually print the story out and mail it to your house."
Luna Digest, 12/8
"Today’s the day The San Francisco Panorama from McSweeney’s hits the streets. The idea is to put out an exciting newspaper edition to show the power of the medium in a world of declining newspaper publishing incentives."
Luna Digest, 12/3
"For most people who read fiction and spend much time online, this won’t be news: Electric Literature recently twittered the entirety of Rick Moody’s story “Some Contemporary Characters” over three days with the assistance of several co-publishers, of which Luna Park was one."
Luna Digest, 11/24
"I’ve been stumbling across some great excerpts recently from David Shields’s upcoming book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto..."
Luna Digest, 11/17
"Just how much did Salman Rushdie have to do with Alex Clark’s resignation from Granta? (Nothing at all, according to him.)"
ARTICLES
There Is No Visible Circus
"Jennifer Atkinson's "A Leaf from the Book of Cities"— an ekphrastic poem written after Paul Klee's painting of the same name—caught my attention in the most recent issue of Cave Wall..."
Panorama Week Part 5: All the News
Panorama Week Part 4: The Comics
Panorama Week Part 3: Section One (or The News)
Panorama Week Part 2: The Book Review of the Future?
Panorama Week Part 1: Opening the Package
Teachers: Use Literary Magazines
By Nicholas Ripatrazone
"Before I go any further, I should admit that I could be doing a much better job in my financial support of literary magazines....but those who have worked in public education know the difficulties of working within community-voted budgets. Literary magazine subscriptions at the classroom level are an educational luxury, not a need. But that’s not a sufficient excuse."
Aiming High: The Impossible Ambitions of Versal
By Sam Ruddick
"I have no experience with gorilla suits or child soldiering, myself, but I think it’s reasonable to suspect that standing around in a gorilla suit is better than being coerced into shooting people, or getting shot at."
Espresso Book Machine
By Marcelle Heath
"On Demand Books's digital photocopier, book trimmer and binder, and desktop computer that can produce a trade paperback book in five to ten minutes."
Poets Publishing Poets: A Review of Cave Wall 5
By George Held
"When a young prize-winning poet decides to publish her own poetry journal, readers get to see how her taste compares to her talent."
I Don't Know How to Write About Race
By Roxane Gay
"This is only about race."
Interview with Former Greensboro Review Poetry Editor Alison Seay
By Jordan Elliott
"I don't know that it's a matter of being comfortable in our skin as much as it is our belief in the importance of the tangible book."
On Nimrod International: An Interview & Notes
By Jeffrey Tucker
"For poetry, we dislike poems that are actually more like journal entries rather than poems. For fiction, we see a lot of stories that are really just “talking heads,” stories in which people stand around and talk and yet nothing happens."
Dismissing Africa
By Greg Weiss
"One of the many risks of Witness, 'the magazine of the Black Mountain Institute,' presenting an issue dedicated to the theme of Dismissing Africa is that the very notion of dismissing 'Africa' already dismisses the individuals who live in Africa."
Poets and Prose: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Fiction Theory
By Nicholas Ripatrazone
"Robert Olen Butler is careful in his definition...he is not arguing that yearning is individual to the short short story form. Rather, yearning is endemic to fiction."
Literary Magazines in Peril?
By Travis Kurowski
"At least part of the problem is the usual one: All of these magazine have no doubt a vastly greater number of people desiring to be published in their pages than they have readers willing to financially support their endeavors."
Interview:
Erin Fitzgerald, Northville Review
By Marcelle Heath
"I like when someone's
very quietly or very openly fooling with an emotional
manipulation dial."
"While
my stories aren't autobiographical, I really do believe
in the whole write-what-you-know thing. One time I wrote
a story from the point of view of an old sick man and
it was just terrible. It was like really bad Carver. The
man sat around watching daytime television and eating
pie."
"James
Harms offers a contemplative effort in a lean essay that
turns the prose poem discussion in a noteworthy direction..."
"Setting
aside, for now, its ideological nomenclature, its appeal
lies in the interpretative dynamic between text and image..."
"We
started KO because we wanted to try something
that was different than we'd seen in other literary magazines,
both in terms of thematic slant and in terms of mission..."
"He
said that if he were asked to be poetry editor of a magazine,
he would aim for unity. I told him that was more or less
the exact opposite of what I wanted to do..."
"I
imagine party-goers huddled around a fire pit as they
share stories about stalking a would-be lover..."
"Contemporary
flash fiction has been slugged, whipped, and slapped:
dragged through the literary mud, pegged as incidental..."
"Kayla
Soyer-Stein recreates the wonderful magic and sense of
the uncanny that fairy tales offer..."
"Recently
I won a best humorous poem competition, and it appears
I have a knack for healthy self-ridicule..."
"I
think about that a lot—about the balance of light
and dark and about allowing my characters to have an open
destiny. I think that’s one of the most important
aspects of story writing..."
"It
calls itself the 'farthest north literary journal for
writing and the arts,' which sounded a bit suspicious
to me, so I did a little poking around to verify the assertion..."
"The
history of Poetry is a history of resistance
in all directions..."
"The
1990s was a wild, wonderful, idealistic decade in Prague.
Excellent exchange rates and the possibility of a relatively
uninhibited way of life lured expatriates in droves to
the Czech capital. In short, it was the perfect time for
the founding of a literary journal..."
"One
author climbs to the top of a tree trunk support beam
that’s part of the architecture of the writing space.
Another is balancing a couch cushion on his head and explaining
wog: a dog who uses a dog-sized wheel chair to get his
back end around San Francisco..."
"While
literary niches often result in suffocation, eighty pages
of plaid, The LBJ’s aviary focus proves
malleable enough..."
“'In
consideration of what looks like a total collapse of our
economic system,' he said, 'I thought the bookfair went
very well...'"
"There
are two wooden figures on my husband’s desk. Figurines.
They are meant to resemble humans, black humans. African-Americans..."
|
| |
|
Review
of Border Crossings Magazine
By Nigel Beale
 Whenever
I go to Europe I make a point of picking up a copy of
The
Economist at the airport and reading it from
cover-to-cover on the plane. I have to if I want to keep
up with my European brethren; they are more politically
attuned than I am. The Economist helps level
the field. I feel more intelligent after reading it, ready
for engagement.
Border
Crossings does something similar for the arts.
It is a comprehensive, informative, very well-written
quarterly magazine that, while focusing on the visual,
does so in the context of many genres of art, literature,
and film prevalent in today’s world. Issue
104, for example, features poetry, painting, photography,
zines, graphic novels, films, exhibitions, doodles, cartoons,
and books. All are fed, at least in this issue, into an
editorial artery of ‘words and pictures,’
which winds its way through 124 pages of interviews, columns,
reviews, profiles, and portfolios. The front cover, cut
from nice, thick stock, is filled in this case with a
suit top and tie, sketched in what looks like charcoal,
and emblazoned with bright orange titles.
Editor Meeka Walsh, and Robert Enright,
the founding editor and now editor-at-large, contribute
much to this award-winning magazine, now in its twenty-seventh
year. Walsh writes with the comfort and confidence of
someone who thoroughly understands both her craft and
her readership, much as Lewis Lapham knew Harper’s.
Her words shine with a limpid distinction that is particularly
impressive given how susceptible her subject matter is
to the opposite. Walsh’s writing is informative
without being pedantic, personal without being banal.
In issue 104, Walsh paints the plain Manitoba
landscape as backdrop to a discussion of Beyond Wilderness:
The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity and Contemporary
Art, a book that, with multiple voices of “quiet
courage,” addresses the singular central English
white male paradigm, within which the Group of Seven’s
paintings were exhibited at the National Gallery in Ottawa
and subsequently across Canada in 1995.
I quickly realize while reading that I
don’t want Walsh’s
essay to end; it’s that affecting. Not just
because of the way she pulls ready quotes from the likes
of Simon Shama, Thoreau, Rene Magritte, and John Berger,
but because of lyrical descriptions like this one of her
home province:
Aeons
ago, glaciers slid over the ground, raking and scouring
it. They left behind, as they melted, endless flat fields
covered in a thick layer of stubborn, unyielding soil,
peppered throughout by small boulders and rocks that
rise to the surface, heaved each spring by the annual
thaw.
Threaded as it is with insightful commentary
and enlightening quotation, Walsh’s writing alone
makes this magazine worth reading.
Robert Enright is renowned for his Border
Crossings interviews. He engages significant and
interesting artists with a disarming combination of erudition
and directness. For instance, with Leonard
Cohen he carries the interview from, “A.J.M.
Smith had a notion he called ‘eclectic detachment’
through which Canadian poets could choose the tradition
they wanted,” in one question to, “You mean
you couldn’t even get laid writing a poem?”
in the next.
In addition to the Cohen interview, which
is accompanied by a selection of Leonard’s “deadly
serious” doodles, there is another with Dutch-born
artist Marcel
van Eeden, who since 1993 has been creating a drawing
a day of events that occurred before November 22, 1965—his
date of birth. There is also a piece on using collage
as inspiration for film making, poetry that intersects
with science by a “remarkably gifted young poet”
named Michael Lista, crisp, bountifully illustrated profiles
of Guelph Ontario born cartoonist Seth, small prop/figurine
artist Diana Thorneycroft, poet/artist John Havelda; and
a slew of reviews at the back end, mostly of Canadian
and international exhibitions.
Other than the perhaps occasional overuse
of the word “compelling” and the odd overwritten
flourish, such as, “the instantaneity of limited
hope and certain disappointment,” this final section
exhibits the same winning formula characterizing the rest
of this excellent magazine: crystalline, informative prose,
charged with excitement from the art it so capably describes.
For the way it writes about and covers
today’s artistic spectrum, Border Crossings
deserves your attention. And next time I travel abroad,
The Economist will not be the only magazine I
pick up.
Motivated by an insane, deep-seated
love of books, Nigel Beale has, during the past several
years, traveled the globe interviewing an impressive selection
of award winning authors and accomplished booksellers,
publishers, collectors and book experts for a radio program
he hosts called The
Biblio File. He’s also snapped
a few photos of bookstores along the way. He blogs
at www.nigelbeale.com
where most interviews conducted for The Biblio File can
be found.
|
|
|
FEATURED
MAGAZINE / FEB 2010
New England Review volume 30 number 3, Middlebury College; Editor: Stephen Donadio; Published: Middlebury, VT; Est: 1978. http://www.nereview.com/
Luna Digest on Fictionaut Blog every Tuesday:
The Mailbox:
Luna
Park is a proud member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses
|
