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..."
 
 

The Ninth Letter is "I": A Review of Ninth Letter 4.2 (Fall 2007-08)
Britt Haraway

My sister, Marti, recently gave a somewhat mixed review of the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. One of the adjectives she picked was “strange.” Thank god for that word.

The folks at Ninth Letter make “strange” writing one of their primary goals, as the work they publish bends genre, both in forms that the pieces take and in the layout. A group of young graphic artists take control of the piece and seek to present it in a visually interesting way, but one that also captures some flavor of the writing. We can all understand why Kurowski’s essay on Basquiat is painted on wooden panels and photographed. When we read Dan Chabon’s “Patrick Lane, Flabbergasted,” we meet a young man who inhabits a house, indeed a world that needs a good rinsing off. That Chabon’s story is pasted on to photographs of funky bathroom whose calking is coming apart, and whose sockets trail dangerous looking wires…well, it all comes together. Photos of grungy, sparse tiling mirror Chabon’s sentences: “Parking meters along the block had been beheaded and were now just bare pipes sticking up out of the sidewalk.” An exciting yet thoughtful layout is the goal here. And at times, the marriage works.

The translation of “Butterfly” by Yan Lianke comes complete with subtle red graphics that are influenced by Asian landscape art, and since the natural world is so richly evoked by Lianke’s story, the choice is effective. Lianke’s world becomes a participant in the action of the story in a magical way not unlike the best of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s work: “Like worms on a clear day after rain, the iron wires at the foot of the wall were creeping toward the eaves. Even though there was no wind, the trees were shaking.” Along with natural world, the community and the members of the town become intimately involved in this drama between two families from two different classes. Indeed the interest in community is reminiscent of Lu Xun, whose literary prize Lianke has won. In the end though, the story keeps its heart, as our two main characters come to some larger understanding between themselves. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping have translated Lianke, and it seems like important work, and the artist in charge of the layout has presented it beautifully.

From what I hear, the artist gets a freehand at conceptualizing the story, without a lot of arm-twisting from the editors and the writer, herself. This often makes for the best kind of innovation, that, when successful, can make short fiction, non-fiction, and poetry exciting to read again.

When you page over to Eric Vrooman’s “Water Bill,” you want to read it. The piece, I think it is a story even though it doesn’t look like one, which is part of Ninth Letters’ charm, is on a plain blue background and looks like a water bill, and you remove it from the magazine by unfastening it from brackets. It may sound cumbersome, but since the Vrooman is making a story out of a real water bill, unfolding the piece literally puts you in the bill-opening mood. A main player here is a particularly invasive and bureaucratic water company that offers the warning that “the death or departure of a co-resident can result in depression and erratic water use.” Sentences like these give the bill a good deal of humor, and the formatting makes it look official, something the piece needs.

The magazine seems high on youth culture, which helps explain its willingness to take chances. The first two pieces have important references to videogames, and being just out of college. Later, we have non-fiction articles that explore potentially explosive topics, Brazilian bikini waxing and the vasectomy. Except for the occasional crotch joke, Matt Roberts and Kathleen Toomer explore these topics in a serious way, trying to find out the truth of their experience; Toomer wants us to be able to talk about the vagina, but more importantly, she wants to know what role glamour has in the lives of intelligent people. Roberts must deal with a concept he has managed to avoid thus far: finality.

I like the pursuit here; it’s audacious. At some point, though, we might ask why we are doing it. Flannery O’Connor once said something like a writer can do anything she can get away with, but no one has gotten away with very much. This premise is probably too conservative to bring up when talking about a magazine that is intentionally daring and youth driven. What O’Connor would want to know is, does the writing hold up even under the cold light of black lines on a white page? The beauty of great writing comes partly from its simplicity. You wouldn’t need an illustration of Chekhov’s Lapdog nor would you want one. In the end, each piece has to stand on its own merit, or even thoughtful graphics become so much truck.

In this issue, Bob Hicok’s poem “Punk, or a Mouthful of Sweat Glands” has the following lines: “Long live whatever werewolfing comes next!/ Something always comes next!/It’s in the womb right now!” Hicok means this as an observation but also a critique. When the youth owns the culture, especially its future, this can make for loads of energy and exuberence, but it can also bring an occasional lapse in wisdom. A couple of times reading the magazine, I felt a bit of lapse. Personally, I’ll trade a few of the no-shows in this issue for the wild successes that leave you saying both that “I’ve never seen that before” and that “I am better for having seen it.”

Writers, Ninth Letter is looking for your newest baby, a piece that doesn’t smell like old flowers. Readers you’ll be confronted with the latest topics and the inventive ways to work them, and all of this is brought to you in the latest font. It is the initial impact that is its charm: being excited to read a story again. My sister just looked over my shoulder and thumbed through the issue. Her overwhelmingly positive review: “Cool.”

Britt Harraway is a scholar, fiction writer, and he teaches at a nice looking abbey in France.

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/


Luna Digest on Fictionaut Blog every Tuesday:

Fictionaut Blog



The Mailbox:

Mail

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]

Have An Upcoming Lit Mag Event? Email: lunaparkreview@gmail.com

Luna Park is a proud member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses



 

York College of Pennsylvania

New Madrid

Hitotoki — A narrative map of the world