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, 2/2 [TBA]

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat."

Luna Digest, 1/26 [TBA]

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat."

Luna Digest, 1/19 [TBA]

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat."

Luna Digest, 1/12 [TBA]

"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat."

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

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."

Big World: An Interview with Mary Miller
By Travis Kurowski

"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..."

Interview with Don Bogen, Cincinnati Review
By Greg Weiss

"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..."

Briar-Rose Redux: New Novella at Anderbo
By Marcelle Heath

"Kayla Soyer-Stein recreates the wonderful magic and sense of the uncanny that fairy tales offer..."

Ipso-Flipso: An Interview with Charles P. Ries and Folded Word Press
By Marcelle Heath

"Recently I won a best humorous poem competition, and it appears I have a knack for healthy self-ridicule..."

The Open Destiny: An Interview with Andrew Porter
By Travis Kurowski

"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..."

Permafrost: Virtues of Writing for Writers
By Sam Ruddick

"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..."

Description of a Struggle: The History of The Prague Revue
By Stephan Delbos

"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..."

Monsters You Should Look Out For: Volunteering at 826
By Alison Campbell

"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...'"

Excerpt from Best of Creative Nonfiction Vol. II: Figurines
By Emily Bernard

"There are two wooden figures on my husband’s desk. Figurines. They are meant to resemble humans, black humans. African-Americans..."

MORE ARCHIVES

Ipso-Flipso

January 30, 2009

By Marcelle Heath

Charles P. Ries's two poems "Killing Season" and "Sex for Liver" are featured in the recent issue of Shape of a Box, a YouTube literary magazine from Folded Word Press. The following is an interview with Ries and Jessie Carty, editor of Folded Word Press and Shape of a Box, about mink farmers, Greek sex bandits, and Googling anti-depressants.

Luna Park : Charles, In the "Killing Season," the speaker's status of conscientious objector to the Vietnam War comes under scrutiny because of his profession as a mink farmer and is accused of being a "Natural Born Killer." The speaker of "Sex for Liver" mourns the loss of intimacy after his lover goes on anti-depressants (wonderfully named "sex bandits") who turn their world "Ipso-Flipso." I thought Daniel Shapiro's reading captured the droll tone in your work. There's an underlying sweetness and nostalgia to the narrator's stories, which the images of lovable minks hunting (in "Killing Season") and cartoon drawings (in "Sex for Liver") supports. How would you describe your poetry? Can you discuss the collaboration with Jessie for Shape of a Box? What is it like to hear other people read your work?

Charles Ries: My poetry is generally a collision of secular experience meeting the sublime. Taking something very common and finding one of its hidden meanings. Recently I won a best humorous poem competition, and it appears I have a knack for healthy self-ridicule. My use of humor and common vernacular is intentional. I have written poetry that is purely word and/or image driven, but most of my work is very narrative. I want people to immediately understand my metaphors, and be able to walk with me through the poem.

I have heard only a few people read my poems out loud and the reader that Jessie selected did a great job. I’d like to think this is because they are not too hidden or obscure, so a good reader will do a good job reading my poems. A number of writers I know (but who I have not met or talked to), thought it was me reading the poems, and commented, “You did such a great job.” Originally I was going to send Jessie a CD of me reading both poems, but I wanted to see what could be done with just the poems suggesting the creative process. This is my first experience with YouTube and with creating a moving image alongside my words. So this was quite delightful.

Finally, let me say that I did grow up on a mink farm in Wisconsin, and I did become the “chief executioner” at age 14; pretty good food for poetic reflection. And if you have friends who are taking anti-depressants (and don’t we all), I am sure they will be pleased to tell of their battle with the “Greek Sex Bandits."

LP: Jessie, How did Shape of a Box come about? Can you discuss the process of choosing the images for Charles's poetry? The images recall boys' adventure stories from the fifties, incorporating text, photography, and drawings that are absent of the romantic longing but not dispassionate. Is there a dominant aesthetic that you are interested in exploring, or does the work itself determine your choices?

Jessie Carty: All through 2008, I knew I wanted to start a small press. I first launched Folded Word Press as my masthead and primary website, but I was undecided about what publishing project I wanted to do first. I decided I would publish a literary magazine, but what could I do that would be different? I had become a fan of YouTube back in the fall of 2007, and I found that there are quite a few writers on YouTube. It was like a light bulb went off over my head: Why not start a literary magazine on YouTube? So far, I appear to be the only one.

Each video I make is unique. I don't feel I am working towards any particular aesthetic. When I am reading submissions, I am first looking for good writing. When I begin to put together a video, I try to think what would best represent this particular piece. It may mean that there are no images involved and that the video will just be someone reading the piece in question. When I accept work, I also ask for input from the writer, and in one case the author made their own video.

Finding the images for Charles's poems was challenging, because, at least in part, I don't choose the work I publish based on its ability to be documented in film and image. For "Killing Season," I first went in search of the mink. I have several websites bookmarked that I start from, however, if I am unable to find anything on those sites, then I have to hit Google pretty hard for image searches. My favorite sites are Flickr and Wikipedia Commons, where you can verify copyrights and find photos and images that are in the public domain. Once I had several images of the mink, I just got a feel for how the poem was going to be represented. It is like building a poem with images. You start with an image, then the others take shape around that central image.

Locating images for "Sex for Liver" was even more difficult. I had the idea to run the names of the drugs across the screen, and that idea helped pull me towards images that were, in a way, tongue-in-cheek. Or perhaps you could say I wanted images that would balance the playful yet intelligent tone that runs throughout Charles's work.

[Above picture is a photo of Charles Ries.]