News Around the Net

This is worth it just for the picture. For a second, I thought it was Hemingway before I decided the picture looked too new, then saw the hundred other Hemingways around him.

I feel like literary awards season just ended, but it's starting up again. Here's the long list for the 2010 Booker. I haven't read any of them, but I'm sure they're wonderful.

Who knew a Great Gatsby video game would suck? You know, other than everyone.

How old is the novel really? Could be much, much older than we think.

While we're on the subject of ignoring wills, a bunch more Kafka manuscripts will be released, even though he stated in his will to have his work destroyed.

Russian youth poetry club or Russian militant training ground? Or both. You decide.

Finally, here are some fake, literary missed connections posted on Craigslist, then reposted on a blog with actual, real responses. Fun for everyone.

Have a great weekend, all.

Save the Gulf Coast by Reading Gulf Coast

A few weeks ago, we featured Poets for Living Waters as our Website of the Week because of how excited we were about writers doing something to contribute to the relief effort in the gulf following the massive BP oil spill. Now Gulf Coast - the literary journal published out of the University of Houston - is doing their part to make a positive contribution. Starting now, Gulf Coast will be donating all subscription proceeds above production costs (they say it'll be about $6 of the $16 it costs to subscribe) to Gulf Restoration Network, an organization that is "committed to uniting and empowering people to protect and restore the natural resources of the Gulf Region for future generations."

And if good will isn't enough of an incentive for you, Gulf Coast has upped the ante and will include a free back issue for all new and renewing susbcribers. Head over to Gulf Coast's Subscription Page and enter in the donation code "GLF" into the coupon code box to get your free back issue. It's a triple win: YOU get a subscription to one of the best literary journals in the country + a copy of one of their previous issues + the feeling of knowing you are doing something to help out with the relief effort. Who could say no to that?

Book Review: Stepping Through Moons by Toni L. Wilkes

Stepping Through Moons by Toni L. Wilkes, Finishing Line Press, 2010. Review by Debrah Lechner.

Toni L. Wilkes is at her best when describing the briefest moment, the bright sliver of an unforgettable sensation that lingers in both body and mind and pulls toward it both the past and future. The balanced stanzas that characterize her poetry are easy to relax into, and invite contemplation. This is poetry that is a a great satisfaction to read aloud.

The signature poem that names the book demonstrates this quality:

Summers ago when we first began

stepping through moons by the sea,

a harbor bell would thump against itself,

complaining, god, that moon is bright tonight.

This is love poetry, not merely of an individual, but of the moment. The poem "Stepping Through Moons" concludes, in part, like this:

turtle, rhino, frog─talismans, proof

that we’ve known the moon, owned
her phases, lived on a bluff of summer

There are abundant quotable lines in Wilkes’s poetry that celebrate the pleasure of an ephermeral moment. Reading one of her poems can be such a moment.

The book Stepping through Moons has been nominated for the California Book Award and the PEN USA Literary Award. The poem "Once Again," which appears in this collection, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Prior to relocating to Northern California, Toni L. Wilkes was a freelance screenwriter and fulltime story editor for feature film director Peter Hyams in Los Angeles. She has conducted creative writing seminars for “Celebrate the Gift” on the campuses of Chapman University and Purdue University. Her work appears or is forthcoming in California Quarterly, Confrontation, Cream City Review, Folio, GW Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Healing Muse, In Posse Review, Iodine Poetry Journal, Pinyon, Poetry East, Roanoke Review, Rosebud, Southern Humanities Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Touch: The Journal of Healing, The Texas Review and other noted journals. She lives with her husband in Santa Rosa, California where they own a financial planning practice.

Read more about Toni L. Wilkes and connect with her through Facebook. You can also purchase a limited edition of Stepping Through Moons through the author by email.

News Around the Net

A 10 year old with cerebral palsy wins a poetry award. This is the coolest thing ever. I think you should probably read it.

Amazon gets the exclusive rights to sell Updike, Nabakov, Mailer and Roth ebooks. I really hope this isn't the beginning of a trend for this squabble between Amazon and Apple and everyone else. If there's one thing that will ruin ebooks, it's this hording of books for one device or another. Sigh.

On basically the opposite side of the spectrum from the ebook hording situation: NPR's pro-libraries argument. Sharing books! Imagine that!

I know what you're thinking. We haven't had a bad poetry link up here in such a long time. Well, here's a compendium of awful Twitter poetry. Apparently not everyone on Twitter is a literary genius. I believe Alanis said it best, you live, you learn. Yes. That just happened.

"Oh yeah, remember that time your poetry was accepted into The Paris Review? Yeah. That was cool, right? Pretty awesome all around, I'd say. Well, we changed our minds." New editor of The Paris Review, Lorin Stein, sent emails to at least three poets who had been accepted by previous editors to let them know they were no longer a part of the magazine. Cold.

Salman Rushdie is writing a memoir about the time he spent in hiding from the fatwa issued against him after Satanic Verses. Yes, I would read this.

Here's a list of 11 literary holidays that I knew nothing about. This week has been Hemingway week and I didn't even know it! Damn!

This Week in Literary History: Don't Fear the Reaper

July 18 is the birthday of the man who single-handedly kept Wild Turkey whiskey in business from the 1960's onward, Dr. Gonzo himself, Hunter S. Thompson. The creator of "gonzo" journalism - a subjective journalistic style where the reporter is part of the story he/she is reporting on - HST was most famous for his first-hand account of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang and his coverage of the Mint 400 race in the desert just outside Las Vegas, which became the setting for his best known work, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Of course, the book is less about the race itself and more about the constant drug intake and reflections on American counterculture, but now we're just splitting hairs. Unfortunately, Dr. Gonzo killed himself back in 2006 in his home in Woody Creek, CO. Four days before he died he wrote a suicide note titled, "Football Season is Over," which, morbid as it sounds, is one of my favorite things he ever wrote: "No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun — for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt."

Speaking of influential American writers who have killed themselves with a shotgun, July 21 is the birthday of the grandfather of "modern decadence," Ernest "Papa" Hemingway. In 1964, Hunter S. Thompson visited Ketchum, ID - where Hemingway shot himself - and wrote the essay, "What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum" about the months leading up to Hemingway's death. Thompson was a big fan of Hemingway (he used to type out Hemingway's novels on his typewriter, word for word, just because he "[liked] to get the feel of how it is to write those words"), and in his essay he makes a sort of odd premonition about his own future: "He was an old, sick, and very troubled man, and the illusion of peace and contentment was not enough for him—not even when his friends came up from Cuba and played bullfight with him in the Tram. So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun."

On a lighter birthday note, June 21 is also the birthday of Tess Gallagher, poet, teacher and wife of the late Raymond Carver. Back in the Spring of 1989, HFR published two of Carver's previously unpublished poems and an introduction by Gallagher. Two years later, in issue 9, we published three of her poems (one of which is available online). Then, ten years later, we published 6 stories transcribed by Gallagher from an Irish painter named Josie Gray, who originally spoke the stories "with the same passion some men court beautiful women or bet on horses."

Just incase you haven't gotten enough "death" for your day, check out Conjunctions issue 51, titled "The Death Issue." It's definitely a good one. Featuring work from big names like Tom Robbins, Joyce Carol Oates and John Ashbery, I'm pretty sure you can get your fix plus some. Check out Conjunctions online, where you can read through the archives and subscribe to future issues.

The Quiet Hell

Susanna Daniel has looked into my writer's soul and written about it in her essay, "What Took You So Long? The Quiet Hell of 10 Years of Novel Writing" at Slate.com. It's no fun to go through a "quiet hell," but it's a little bit easier when someone else acknowledges it. Three years after my MFA degree, I'm still painstakingly making my way through the second draft of my "novel." I still need to, apparently, put quotes around the word. When will I feel like a real writer? When will I ever finish this thing? When will my teaching and editing jobs stop taking up so much of my time? When will I stop making excuses and just get the thing done already?

Susanna Daniel has given me hope. Not only did she finally finish her novel Stiltsville, not only did she get it published, but I read an excerpt of it in One Story, and it's good. Like, really good. And now she's written this little gem:

"Writing is hard—writers say this all the time, and I think probably only other writers believe it. But it's not nearly as hard, in my experience, as not writing."

I'm going to put this up on my wall. Tattoo it somewhere noticeable. Make t-shirts. Cross-stitch it onto a nice wall hanging. You know, propagate it through any number of projects that will keep me from working on my novel. (Just kidding, I think!) If you're at all frustrated with a writing project, check out her essay. And then get back to work.

Jobs!

Assistant Professor of English (Creative Writing) Requisition Number 06737
Tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of English (Creative Writing), entry-level (no more than four years of full-time post-doctoral teaching experience at the time of appointment), beginning August 2011. "Specializing in creative writing: fiction, with ability to teach fiction writing at beginning and advanced levels as well as introductory multi-genre courses. Ability to teach creative nonfiction, screenwriting, or playwriting is desirable." Duties and Responsibilities: Minimum Qualifications: MFA or Ph.D. and teaching experience required. Preferred Qualifications: Record of publication in fiction strongly preferred. Special Instructions to Applicants: Application deadline is October 15, 2010. Please submit letter of application, CV, and writing sample (Document 1). Please provide three references and their email addresses. Please visit the Bucknell English Department on the web at http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/english.

Visiting Faculty in English
The University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana announces an opening for an one-year, full-time, Visiting Professor in English, beginning August 16th, 2010. The candidate must be able to teach undergraduate Creative Writing and Composition courses. Additional course assignments may include general education literature courses. The course load for this position is 4/4. The candidate should be familiar with using technology in the composition classroom and conversant with the mission and values of the University of Saint Francis. Requirements: MFA or Ph.D. preferred, ABD will be considered, and evidence of successful teaching. Interested applicants should submit letter of application, curriculum vitae, transcripts, names, and contact information for at least three professional references by email to searchcommittee(at)sf.edu
(replace (at) with @) or by mail to the address below. Official transcripts will be required upon hire. Applications will be reviewed as received. Search Committee (Position Title) / University of Saint Francis / 2701 Spring Street / Fort Wayne, IN 46808.

The Sixth Annual Printers' Ball

Visiting Chicago has been on my "to-do" list since the first time I saw Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but never has it seemed more tempting than when I read about this year's Printers' Ball taking place on July 30 at Columbia College Chicago.

The Printers' Ball is a FREE evening of live readings, performances, music and various printing demonstrations. There are tons of free lit mags, books and broadsides for the taking, and the first 500 guests in the door get a limited edition Printers' Ball Busy Beavers button.

This year's theme is "Print loves Digital," a theme hoping to "demonstrate how print and digital media can complement one another." There are tons of exhibits and events helping to promote the co-habitation of print and digital media, including Mark Jeffrey and Judd Morrissey's "The Procession" and Chris Hershey Van Horn's "Text Object".

All in all, it should be a fun night of awesome writing blended with incredible audio and video productions, along with a bunch of freebies and some beer and refreshments. I'm pretty jealous.

Find out all the info you need on the Poetry Foundation's website, here.

Book Review: The Butterfly Collector by Fred McGavran

Review of The Butterfly Collector stories, by Fred McGavran, Black Lawrence Press, 2009. By Debrah Lechner.

Fred McGavran is a hard writer to categorize.

Reviewers often focus upon his fiction that revolves around law and justice, or the lack of it. He has been compared to John Grisham, for good reason, because McGavran is also a lawyer, like Grisham, and is similarly adept at convincingly relaying the details of the legal world. He is arguably better at characterization than Grisham, however, and I would gladly follow the character of the lawyer Harris Scintilton into a novel, or several of them.

We meet Harris in two stories in this volume. In the first encounter, "A Gracious Voice," he is older, calm, soft-spoken, trusted, analytical, cynical, manipulative and selfish. He exploits the fears of a dying judge. In the second encounter, The Forgiveness of Edwin Watkins, he is a young, idealistic lawyer who unexpectedly succeeds in freeing his suffering client through the mercy of a dying judge who finds his heart─albeit in a hat box. It appears the character of Harris Scintilton has been ruined, but there is hope for redemption. The last line reads that Scintilton will remember “. . . the strange acts of grace that sometimes proceeded from the dying and from the mouth of God.”

Fred McGavran has a love of the grotesque, as already seen. His strews body parts through his fiction. He meditates on infirmity, dementia and death. He includes generally unwelcome supernatural intervention. This leads some critics to characterize him as a horror writer. Well, Fred McGavran’s horror exhibits an unusual but effective component of compassion, and his compassion is redolent with irony, wry wit, and not a little slapstick.

I see McGavran as a humorist. I will go so far as to compare him to David Sedaris, though they have nothing in common with the exception that they have both written very funny Christmas stories. David Sedaris’ Six to "Eight Black Men" is read aloud annually during my Christmas celebration, and now so will McGavran’s "The Annunciation of Charles Spears."

In that story, an angel in a raincoat who reeks of alcohol and tobacco, who has been hitting the sauce for unspecified millenia, stumbles into a Christmas pageant enacted by kindergartners. They’re lacking angels, so he reveals his dirty and matted wings and volunteers to help out.

The congregation is not amused, but I sure was. The grandmother of one child upbraids the hapless rector, then said to the angel:

“And that was the worst Magnificat I ever heard!”
“Guess you had to be there, lady,” the Angel replied.

There is a colorful palette of genres to choose from in this volume by McGavran. If you’re a fan of all of them, Christmas is coming early.

Fred McGavran graduated from Kenyon College and Harvard Law School. A practicing attorney, he is a candidate for ordination as a deacon in the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Ohio. The Ohio Arts Council awarded him a $10,000 Individual Achievement Award in 2009 for his story "The Reincarnation of Horlach Spenser," which the Harvard Review is publishing. He won the 2008 St. Lawrence Prize for The Butterfly Collector. McGavran won the 2007 Writers Digest Short Story Contest in the horror category, the 2004 John Reid/Tom Howard Contest, the 2003 Raymond Carver Award from Humboldt State University, and has placed in a number of other literary and screenwriting contests. His stories have appeared in Pearl Magazine, Rosebud, Gray's Sporting Journal, Dreams & Visions, Storyglossia.com, Short Story International, and other literary magazines and e-zines.

Read "Watching Time," another award-winning 2004 short story by Fred McGavran.
Purchase The Butterfly Collector for your personal library.