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


bird cage image


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."

Sort-of Prose Poems
By Nicholas Ripatrazone

"James Harms offers a contemplative effort in a lean essay that turns the prose poem discussion in a noteworthy direction..."

Poetry 2.0
By Marcelle Heath

"Setting aside, for now, its ideological nomenclature, its appeal lies in the interpretative dynamic between text and image..."

Greetings from Knockout
By Brett Ortler

"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..."

Bon Voyage
By Marcelle Heath

"I imagine party-goers huddled around a fire pit as they share stories about stalking a would-be lover..."

In Brief: The Appeal of Brevity
By Nicholas Ripatrazone

"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..."

Some Thoughts on Poetry
By Ben Leubner

"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..."

Avian Arts: The LBJ
By Nicholas Ripatrazone

"While literary niches often result in suffocation, eighty pages of plaid, The LBJ’s aviary focus proves malleable enough..."

The 7th Annual New Orleans Bookfair
By Kenneth Harshbarger

“'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 cover

New England Review volume 30 number 3, Middlebury College; Editor: Stephen Donadio; Published: Middlebury, VT; Est: 1978. http://www.nereview.com/


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NEWSREEL

Joseph Brodsky's literary executor launches new poetry magazine: Little Star

New lit mag: Artifice

New indie publishing wiki is launched by Dave Housley and Roxane Gay

CLMP's Lit Mag Adoption Program for Creative Writing Students

Upcoming Creative Nonfiction redesign

Galley Cat says Rick Moody's Twitter story generates Twitter backlash

"Fictionaut and the Future of the Literary Journal" at Galleycat

More editors leave Granta after magazine "restructuring"

Trailer for Colson Whitehead's short story "The Comedian" from Electric Literature #2

McSweeney's offers preview of their upcoming newspaper issue, the SF Panorama

On the lit blog Bookish Us: “Why Don’t Aspiring Writers Read More Literary Magazines”

PAST NEWSREEL...


EVENTS

Opium magazine Literary Death Match: NYC, San Fran, Denver, Beijing, etc [ongoing series]

One Story cocktail hour at Pianos, New York City [ongoing series]

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