summer 2011

What I’m enjoying…

• GRANTA: The Magazine of New Writing: ISSUE #15: THE F WORD

A. S. BYATT, RACHEL CUSK, EDWIDGE DANTICAT, LOUISE ERDRICH, LYDIA DAVIS, TEA OBREHT, FRANCINE PROSE, HELEN SIMPSON, EUDORA WELTY, and more…

• SUMMER @ HUNGER MOUNTAIN:

For the last couple of months at Hunger Mountain, Claire Guyton, former Art +Life editor, and I have been working together to expand that section of the journal into The Writing Life.

Here’s what’s up and coming at

THE WRITING LIFE:

1) ANOTHER LOOSE SALLY - Hunger Mountain’s blog about writers and writing anchored by Claire Guyton (check in every Thursday!)

~june 16: The Catch / june 9: Shape is the Thing / june 3: Envisioning Concrete Pianos /may 26: New Writing Rule

2) AUTHOR VISITS  - interviews with the Hunger Mountain contributors

3) CRAFT SHORTS & ESSAYS - large and small doses of craft (online submissions for both forms now open)

~first short: On Endings: 11 Strategies by David Jauss

~May essay: Conjuring the Magic of Story by Stephanie Friedman

4) LISTS: LITERARY & LAUNDRY - coming soon - postcards from the organizational side of the writing brain

5) WRITER, INC., debuting in September, memos from the business of the writer’s life 

6) REVIEWS GONE SIDEWAYS - coming soon – anything but your mother’s reviews.

Check us out here

and

stay tuned!

• winter @ HUNGER MOUNTAIN

Miciah Bay Gault, Managing Editor of Hunger Mountain, was inspired by a note George Saunders wrote on one of her stories to discover what was “unique and iconic” to her. In her engaging Editor’s Note to Hunger Mountain 15, she describes Ray Bradbury’s “writing practice of word association, in which he scribbled long lists of nouns.” It was a practice he did quickly and without thinking. From Bradbury:

I leave you now at the bottom of your own stair, at half past midnight, with a pad, a pen, and a list to be made. Conjure the nouns, alert the secret self, taste the darkness. Your own THING stands waiting ‘way up there in the attic shadows. If you speak softly, and write any old word that wants to jump out of your nerves onto the page…Your Thing at the top of the stairs in your own private night…may well come down.

In Hunger Mountain 15, Miciah brilliantly invited 21 writers (Michael Martone and Paul Lisicky among them) to share their lists, their “raw bits of writing, meant to invite the Thing down.” While you’re waiting for your copy to arrive, I invite you to leave your own list in the comments below. I’ll start us off…

[Hunger Mountain 15: The Thing at the Top of the Stairs. And I haven't even mentioned the fiction or the photography.]

 

AND DON’T MISS Robin MacArthur’s essay, “Abandoned Landscapes.” She wrote:

I was born amidst three hundred acres of land in Southern Vermont that my family has owned for three generations, on a road that carries my name. I grew up throwing hay bales, tapping sugar maples, building forts in the woods… This landscape is how I know the world and myself in it, and, undeniably, part of who I am.

Robin’s essay discusses the fiction of Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. It’s one of the best essays on landscape I’ve ever read. Order a copy of Hunger Mountain today and let me know what you think. In my next post, yet another reason to order a copy of this issue of Hunger Mountain.

I’ll close with Robin’s words:

Our obsessions are the keys to our art; if we pay enough attention to them, we will find ourselves on the road to originality, resonance, truth.

• MAY:

Inch. Do you know this tiny journal? I discovered it at AWP. Small. Gray. Thin. Tiny poems. Tiny fiction. A single issue costs $1. Bull City Press publishes 4 issues a year. Ross White is the Editor, and guess what? Robin Black is the Fiction Editor. I didn’t even know that.

Winter 2011: Issue 15: Fiction this issue by Andrew Scott. Poetry by Jasmine V. Bailey and Mike Puican.

• FEBRUARY:

One I’d heard of before. Three I hadn’t. Some were free at AWP; some were not. In each one, I found something that made me glad I’d lugged it home–either connecting with the words of writers I didn’t know or finding new poems and stories by writers I did. Two of these journals have stunning covers that will make me incapable of putting them in the recycling bin even after I need the space for new ones. So two I will send to a friend. Two I will take to the local high school library. Here are some highlights from the four literary journals I brought home from Washington a few weeks ago:

Rock & Sling–a journal of witness. Published twice a year by Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. Volume Six. Issue One. Winter 2011.

“Chalkboard” by Jeremy Clive Huggins:

I was in the 10th grade when it first registered: I will be someone else some day…Two decades later, I fail to remember that I will be someone else, not just some day, but next year, next week, next day, next anything.

“Mud Flats” by Ray Amorosi:

Clams hiss through pin holes a few feet down.

Poetry. A publication of the Poetry Foundation. Volume 197. Number 3. December 2010. The Q & A issue. Cover art by Sam Martine. “Faces (detail), 1997.

Charles Baxter on his poem “Some Instances” is asked if poetry is an escape from narration: “My answer is a respectful “No”…Like many fiction writers, I began my writing life as a poet, and what I sometimes miss in my own fiction is the high-velocity association of ideas and events and imagery that poetry makes possible.”

Jane Hirshfield on her poem “Sentencings” is asked about the image of “putting arms into woolen coat sleeves”: “I might, I suppose, have written a different poem, about my late sister’s coats. They are lovely. But I wrote this.”

Arroyo. Department of English, California State University, East Bay. Hayward, California. Volume 2. Spring 2010. Cover art by Jonathan Viner.

Dorothy Allison interviewed by Jacqueline Doyle. 15 pages.

Life goes so fast and we lose so much. We can barely even hang on to memory. But if you’ve got a story, a stunned moment story, that moment lives forever.

Ecotone–reimagining place. Department of Creative Writing and The Publishing Laboratory at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. 10. The sex and death issue.”Ecotone and the University of North Carolina Wilmington are proud to print this entire issue on 100 percent postconsumer fiber paper certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.”

Benjamin Percy on James Salter’s “Akhnilo”:

Suspense is the engine that drags a story forward…They [my students] misunderstand suspense, believing that it hinges exclusively on plot points, rather than on human urgency.

This story is a case study on the mystery outside the character and the urgency within…the true pull of the story comes from the desire the man feels, the desire we feel alongside him…

I support literary journals. Support art–any way you can.

 

• Contrary to the reports, literary journals alive and well. These photos from AWP 2011:
• Hobart rocks out with gifts: the silver flask and the accordian-style story, “Diner,” by Mary Miller, who I met at AWP, came with my subscription. The matches Ipicked up in Washington at the conference.
  • from”Diner”: “He watches the couple walk into the diner and sit in a booth by the window.”

• Fall
  • The Southeast Review Vol. 28 #2
    • Jessica Pitchford interviews Connie May Fowler about her new novel How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly
      • “…somewhere along the way, I made a major decision that made the novel work. That changed everything and gave me a shape, and it was then that I began to understand how she would fly.”
• Summer
  • Just received the Spring Issue of Quick Fiction
    • J. A. Tyler, “The Mountain Lion”
      • “Always there, the things I want to clean up, to turn back out of my head once they are in there, these pictures.”
  • Mid-American Review Volume XXX: Kimberly Davis wins the 2009-2010 James Wright Poetry Awardfor her wonderful poem,”Alchemy”
    • “I would like to have a catalog of what/each day is worth…”
  • Upstreet number six
    • Fiction: David Jauss, “Depositions”
      • “I’m pretty sure I heard the shot that killed her…”
    • Interview: Vivian Dorsel talks with Sue William Silverman
      • “…sometimes I have little scraps of paper with notes on them, but nothing as formal as a journal or a notebook.”
  • Gargoyle #56
    • Fiction: Abby Frucht, “Old Inn Door”
      • “…Grandma’s peanut-headed fingers staging a food fight with frozen peas, yelling in hilarious peasant voices…”
• May 30
  • One Story, #136, Smith Henderson’s “Number Stations”
    • “Only seven, the girl already did not forgive herself her own crooked features and was certain that her destiny was to ride an ostrich or griffin or rainbow to her true self, who was beautiful and free. Goldsmith’s mother always chided her nonsense, said that the true self was the one you were every day and no other. There was no secret self waiting for you somewhere. You were you. That was it.”
• April 10
  • One Story, #134, Susanna Daniel’s “Stiltsville“ 
    • “…the heat and humidity coated the little woes like soot: it was too much.”
• Spring
  

• Santa Monica Review Spring 2010: Fiction: Diane Lefer, “The Tangerine Quandary”
  • “‘Are you all right?’ says the woman in the seat beside her, and Liza can’t make out whether she’s expressing concern or passing judgment.”

• Agni Number 71:
  • Nonfiction: Lynne Sharon Schwartz, “The Piano”
    • “I can’t remember whether it was their idea or if I asked for it…”
  • Interview: Chard deNiord interviews Donald Hall
    • “So my fifties were a glorious time, and I don’t think I felt the shortening of the future yet.”

2009

• Winter
  • Hunger Mountain #14 Journeys
    • Fiction: Robin Black, “A Country Where You Once Lived”
      • “There was only his Zoe, sixteen years old and sorry, really, really sorry, for what she had done.”
  • The Georgia ReviewWinter 2009
    • Essay: Martha G. Wiseman, “In Rehearsal”
      • “Memory–its tricks, its darts and dashes, its mechanisms now so controversially theorized, the whole circus of its roving spotlights, its shadows and shrouds–may simply be a name for the ongoing process of revising the self.”
    • Fiction: Robin Black, “Tableau Vivant”
      • “Jean had spent a lifetime trying to be inconspicuous, appreciating that nature had given her a head start.”
• July 30
  • One Story, #123, Caedra Scott-Flaherty, “Rocky Point, Mexico”
    • “The turbulence on the flight from New York City to Tucson had been so awful that the suited up church-going man next to me had set down his bible and opened up the safety manual.”