Happy Holidays, Everyone!

The HFR blog will be taking a hiatus until after the new year. In the meantime, enjoy the poem below from issue #47.

From us to you: hopes for a wonderful holiday season and a new year filled with health, happiness and creativity!

As I Rewind
by Anna Journey

The hands of the golden oak clock spin
the wrong way on the wall of my childhood

house as I rewind the Christmas video. It’s over
twenty years ago. My young mother’s head

—sped up—jerks on the screen. Brunette
in a blue velour day robe. Rewound

her coffee mug fills a dark inch
each time she sips. The Maine Coon uncurls

from our peach couch, leaps to the window
in reverse. My grandfather’s scarred thumb

nudges into view—only once—and I pause
that second. Black shadow: he’s behind

the camera. He can’t stop
focusing the lens on me. I sit at the green wire

feet of the plastic tree. I smooth shut
the wrapping paper, re-secret the objects, seal

all the ripped seams. The stripes of winter
sun—rewound—run eastward,

and the smoke from my grandfather’s cigar
ciphers back into leaves.

News Around the Net

The people at The Orwell Prize have been publishing entries from George Orwell's diary 70 years to the day that he wrote them, a project that started in 2008 and will run until 2012, Orwell's 1942.

Read about Google's absurd new word database, which has been estimated to contain 500 billion words.

Here's a list from the Huffington Post of the 17 most important books of poetry released in the fall of 2010.

In better poetry news, a 99-year-old lady fell in her tub and couldn't get up for twenty-two hours, which she spent reciting poetry. Poetry saves, people!

Have you seen the new issue of Mcsweeney's? It's a head. And a box. But mostly a head. I think someone's out of ideas after the Panorama.

Laura Miller examines why so many people seem to love such bad writing. I think it's probably because there are explosions in those books. I always say all good art involves an explosion.

Timothy Archibald is Awesome

We knew photographer Timothy Archibald was amazing back when his photographs appeared in HFR #45. Now The New York Times and TIME Magazine are on board, covering photos from the same series where Timothy and his autistic son Elijah have conversations about, with, and through the images.

Feature Shoot has a fantastic interview with Timothy on its blog, too. "[Eli] saw the world differently than I did, was in it in a way that was curious to me. Those differences are the things that made me want to explore him, or more accurately, to explore “the me and him relationship”, with the camera."

Hear even more from Timothy on his blog.

Treat Yourself or a Friend This Holiday Season!

There's no better gift for a writer friend (or for yourself!) this holiday season than a registration to the 2011 Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference, hosted by The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing (the home of HFR). Spend four inspiring days with some of the nation's finest writers and teachers of poetry, fiction and nonfiction (Tony Hoagland, Andrea Barrett, David Shields, C. Dale Young and many more!).

Register between now and January 1 and receive a special gift from us: a free copy of Word of Mouth: Conversations with Visiting Writers on Their Craft, our brand new 220-page book of insight and advice.

The conference will take place March 3-6 on the Arizona State University Tempe campus. Discounts are available for Piper Friends, ASU faculty, staff and students, ASU MFA alumni and Arizona teachers.

Click HERE for details and to register.
Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference
March 3-6, 2011
ASU Tempe campus

News Around the Net

A lot of authors are about to become much more depressed about how little their book is selling. At least they'll all look better than my BookScan sales data.

I set up this post last week, but there are a ton more up. Here's The Millions's A Year In Reading series. Now there are parts featuring Aimee Bender and Margaret Atwood.

The world's most expensive book was sold on Tuesday for $10 million. I wonder what the e-book price is for it.

Are you ready for something that will be slightly better than, but mostly the same as, the iPad? The iPad 2 will be shipped from factories in China in February. Get excited, people.

Brave New World was removed from the curriculum at a Seattle high school because of its depictions of Native Americans. A mom says she had to put the book down several times while reading because it was so hurtful. The lesson, kids? Stop reading. It makes your parents mad.

Student protesters in London used books as shields against policemen.

Scribbles from WALTIC: The Words (Part 2)

Ming Holden
From my notebook: things I heard people say
Bilgii University, Istanbul, Turkey
September 2010

______________________________

“Why should writers be in prison? In other words, who is afraid of literature?”

“Publishing is one part stock exchange and one part cathedral. My friend swears publishing has lost the cathedral part.”

“But for Jules Verne we would never have walked on the moon, perhaps. We can’t help but end up at Star Trek, where we walk into a room and all information is available in an instant. How do we get there and still have all our rights?”

“Perhaps a death sentence on literature has accompanied it since it began.”

“I lived in Italy for a while. No one there thinks ideals can actually be achieved.”

“I can tell you what Swedes would have done: they would have been offended, been quiet about it, then gone home and told everybody what pricks the English were.”

“Literature is now part of the entertainment industry.”

“Languages respond to the universe.”

“Macbeth couldn’t be performed in Iran because the king dies onstage.”

“American books are cheap, and they can even be good—some of them. But we need Norwegian books for Norwegian society. About issues that impact Norway, not California and New York.”

“[Translation as] something that belongs to the spiritual sphere, something you do for your own soul and those of others…'Really?' is the reaction. 'You enjoy your work? And you admit it? Work isn't supposed to be fun. That's why you're paid for it.’ I think this attitude might have Christian origins...”

“I was beautiful and I was slender in 1968, and this is what I wrote.”

“If one is on the outskirts, one might as well dwell on the outskirts.”

“Women from Iran told me we have one big state and in every household different little states.”

“Exile can be positive. It can give you a new language, a new perspective…I write in the language of exile, which reminds me of exile…writing is a thing of beauty, Swedish an instrument of communication.”

“No human beings can be separated from the universe. Human language activity…is at the same time a human matter and a cosmic one.”

“But before I go into my cloud—into garden of cloud, I mean--”

“In the coming century 60-90% of the world’s languages will become extinct…serious enough to make a political concept of linguistic imperialism look like a platitude.”

“The horizon is not wholly blank.”

“We all have to get together and put all our rights in a big basket and function as a collective.”

“The literature planet is..a self-rotation that does not depend wholly on the cosmic revolution.”

“In Iranian, sex is referred to as everything from ‘to do the damned thing’ to ‘to give.’”

“The world is a place where many things meet each other…On the other side of huge change is an ever-present, never-changing truth. What new birth is coming? What new birth?”

“Between the early 30s and now, 60% of the Turkish language was lost.”

“The gulls lost their ocean. They cry out.”

“And underneath that story, there was another.”

“So now back to the original question: are we using the right words, or are we using them correctly?”

“It’s egotistical, in fact, not to work for [a just society]. We cannot be happy and secure in an unhappy and insecure world.”

“Language does not only promote survival, it promotes the dignity of survival.”

*
Ming was one of the few Americans and the youngest presenter at the second-ever convention of the Writers and Literary Translators International Congress (WALTIC) in Istanbul in September 2010 (the first was in 2008 in Stockholm, where she fangirled Philip Pullman so hard he ran away from her). She presented in the "Freedom of Expression" bracket in the "stories" category to an audience that included Maureen Freely, Orhan Pamuk's literary translator, and the secretary of International PEN and the exiled President of China's Independent PEN. Ming spoke of her experience in Mongolia working with PEN International and Freedom to Write in order to assist exiled Chinese Inner Mongolian dissident Tumen Ulzii Bayunmend. What follows are quotes she heard during the conference and scribbled in her notebook.

Scribbles from WALTIC: The Experience (Part 1)

On Dissociating; or, A Two-Day Literary Conference
Ming was one of the few Americans and the youngest presenter at the second-ever convention of the Writers and Literary Translators International Congress (WALTIC) in Istanbul in September 2010 (the first was in 2008 in Stockholm, where she fangirled Philip Pullman so hard he ran away from her). She presented in the "Freedom of Expression" bracket in the "stories" category to an audience that included Maureen Freely, Orhan Pamuk's literary translator, and the secretary of International PEN and the exiled President of China's Independent PEN. Ming spoke of her experience in Mongolia working with PEN International and Freedom to Write in order to assist exiled Chinese Inner Mongolian dissident Tumen Ulzii Bayunmend. What follows are off-kilter poet-thoughts she had during the conference and scribbled in her notebook.

The most hopeless act of Course is telling the story. I’ll fashion something else out of you.

Juris, the man who takes me as his guest to the reception at the Swedish Institute in Istanbul, knows Syktyvkar is on the European side of the Urals when I say that’s where I lived. He knows Manchurian is part of the Altaic language family. In my placelessly and reasonlessly desperate daydream X and I barely make it to the inside of his hotel room before tearing each others’ clothes off.

Kitties in the compound, and a slightly bored waitstaff. Juris nods when I say I grew up on a zebra farm. Ming holden, he says simply. As in, it follows.
I used to be Sweden's cultural attache, he says, but I stopped because it occupies your brains. As in, no room for writing. (I was going to write “infecting” or “invading.”)

I have had problems like that, he says.
What, like being the toastmaster (I wrote “postmaster” just now)? I ask.
I have no problems with my voice, he says.

A toddler in a pink dress toddles in back of/behind the woman in purple who holds a thank you cheat sheet and announces thank yous on behalf of the Swedish Institute. Toddler girl's underwear-butt, showing through her dress, makes me happy as she toddles. When does that become a bad idea? “Think of it as a recovery from a broken leg,” someone told me; when the poison rises in my blood I think to nail him to the wall electronically. At the end of my speech, let me go back in time, says the woman in purple.

I thought we were at a WALTIC event, but there are no WALTIC people and she hasn't mentioned WALTIC. Are we at a reception for WALTIC? I finally ask Juris. No, he says, it is a reception for this, the new building. That is why we are here. Instead of “dear X” why don't I just write “dear pervasive self-hatred that kept me sick as a black-slimed, malnourished thing crawling feebly across the creekbed.” That'd do it. The building goes down for six stories, we just can't see them from outside.

Ovid died in 18AD, forced out because of erotic poetry, says one of the exiled panelists. When I asked her how she was so sure of god when there is such pain she said, how could you care for someone in pain if everything were perfect all the time? She was a librarian in Iran. For six months strangers gave me shelter, she said, two nights here, two nights there. My cousin, a boy, died of cold in a flood on a mountain en route to Turkey from Iran. How could a boy die so easily? People die like fleas. I decided to write down my own experience of flight. How do we integrate perversion? Asks another presenter.

A boy at a hostel watches a girl head out of the room with a speck of blood on her pants. On the Bosphorous, after walking downhill in the sunlight with a her to where they could see the river, south of Taksim Square, her huge lips and perfect skin and how wide her lips were, her long tangled braid, the twelve black pantsuits she bought, the shuttle ride beforehand, and search for her cigarette in between, her semester at the Sorbonne and the one time she used the walking home service since she lived too close to a dark alley for comfort and the person who walked her home was this inert girl, the act of writing as one of compassion, empathy, witness, of selecting things by seeing them, an act of creating a world. I confide in a gentle woman on a boat on the river Bosphorous that night that the only thing wrong was my thoughts. Oh no, she said, your thoughts are the most wonderful thing because only you can express them. You’re the only one who was there, who is here.

4pm napping hour I checked the other five bunk beds for sleepers. Voices through the window in the overcast, the window that shows the dome across the street and the large metal screens in the alley if you crane your neck, swift clicking of the fan as it made its revolutions, and during one of the most important and compelling seminars, the one with the three exiled women, one of whom has been imprisoned four years by the time she was my age, and I’d been unable to think, only to feel a physical want, tired and mottled and missed entire minutes stuck for some reason on hypothetical fucking. Memories are a transcript of wonder, a record of beauty only you keep. You are witness to them, sentry of them, barefoot up the concrete hostel stairs.

Me and a fellow hostel resident, a German, go out after I shower and put on clothes. When the content of the moment leads to overwhelmed emotion, the brain will float, it will autopilot. My first night in Istanbul, we go to the grand bazaar. I am the only conference goer at a youth hostel; the rest are in fancy hotels on the square. I am one of the Americans, this I know if only for the narcissism bleeding into the ink. This one, he says, pointing to a white plate. We eat here, in front of the stall. That's an interesting cultural practice, he says. Squeezing lemon on yourself. I squint in the seafood stand light. A man made pomegranate juice in front of us and it purses my entire mouth. You are tired from all the learning, he says. I nod.

*
MING HOLDEN served in the Mongolian Writers Union as their International Relations Adviser during her year as a Henry Luce Scholar in Mongolia, collaborating with The Asia Foundation on literary translations and working towards the formation of a Mongolia PEN Center. While an undergraduate at Brown University (’07) she co-founded and served as Editor-in-Chief of the Brown Literary Review. Ming’s poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism, and literary translations have appeared in Caper Journal, Cerise Press, The Best American Poetry Blog, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Huffington Post, InAsia, InTheFray, Molotov Cocktail, Peaches and Bats, The Poker, Poets & Artists, Prospect, the Santa Ynez Valley Journal, the Santa Barbara Independent, Slice Magazine’s blog, and others. She recently taught a cross-genre workshop at the Richard Hugo House. Ming has done international nonprofit work in Russia (at the Silver Taiga Sustainable Forestry Foundation); Ecuador (at the CEMOPLAF family planning clinic); Bolivia (at the Rio Beni Health Project); Mongolia (at The Asia Foundation); and also in New York (at Archipelago Books) and California (at People Helping People).

Contributor Spotlight: Patricia Lockwood

The Making Of the Making Of a Poem about Islands

which is

Regarding the Poem Called, "The Too-Long Grass, the Silverback, the Legendary Pockets of Naked Crusoe" [in issue #47, just released!]

and

Which Contains the Following Suppositions:

That Crusoe himself is an island. That any animal on an island is an island, and the hair of him is his grasses. That the grasses of an island learn both their greenness and their ripple from the sea; that the grasses also drown and they learned this from the sea. That Friday is an island, with all the minutes of the day licking its square shores. That Friday is an island made of island. That the minds that consider “The Island” are islands.

Exploring the Island of My Obsession with Islands

Why be obsessed with islands? I was born in America as a baby colonialist, made of the land and myself the land, with grasses growing on me, with all the animals of the world roaming me, for I was hospitable to them, with animals parting the grasses of me, with breadfruit whatever breadfruit is growing thick and ripe on me, with ships sailing to me, with ships bound for other places going aground on me, with the water surrounding me, with Wallace Stevens vacationing on me, with Wallace Stevens angry that Hemingway is also here, how can there be enough room for them both, and Hemingway is hunting all the animals, oh no, with a palm rising up in the middle of my mind. How will I escape the island finally, and what larger island will I sail back to. Will I build a raft from the trees of me. Will I have lived on the goats of me all those many years. Will goat mostly make up my body then. Will I lie on my back on the raft that I made, all the goat that makes me up sizzling even in its afterlife on logs.

Test Questions:

Is this an addiction? Is an addiction to islands genetic, does it run in the family of man?

YES NO

Is the background of a poem about islands yet another poem about islands?

YES NO

And the final question, for one million points:

Still Writing about Islands They Ask?

Not for 431 days, sometimes at night I sweat
isolate sweatdrops and on Wednesdays I go
to a group and hold hands and make jokes
about how no man is, and then make another
joke about how puns are the “lowest form,”
and we all imagine a legless joke first crawling
up on shore, shore, and too late! we all ache
for our islands. I went to an island finally

and I could not tell where it started. I thought
I would feel a click in my feet, or a ribbon
breaking across my chest, I thought the breeze
on the beaches would be doors slamming shut
behind me, I thought as soon as I stepped
on the island a new kind of finch would be born
inside me, a finch that could happen nowhere
else, I thought I’d at last be biodiverse, I thought
the improbable cure would be somewhere

in my treetops, I thought I would feel ships sailing
to me and I thought my largest lived-on landmass
would be named after a woman, but none of that
happened and I was the same. I was so disappointed
I barfed—I thought barfing would feel different
too, like evacuating maybe for a hurricane, but no,
it was just plain barfing, and I collapsed on the yellow

sand and cried and the absence of an island was in
my stomach and “August 1st: Me tummy hurts,”
this must be what plagued Mr. Darwin, I thought,
and the light of knowledge shone so hard that baby
sea turtles crawled toward it, and of course
the gulls swooped down and killed them, and I
felt alone at last and miles from any one or where.
*

Patricia Lockwood's poems "have gonna appeared" in Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, VQR, Rattle, Poetry, American Letters & Commentary, and elsewhere. She blogs [hilariously: Beth's addition] at http://emperoroficecreamcakes.blogspot.com/.

News Around the Net

It's award season. Here's the one you've been waiting for: Rowan Somerville won the bad sex in fiction award. Alastair Campbell was disqualified for wanting to win.

Who wants to see a Pynchon novel on the big screen?

The e-book revolution is gaining steam!

Instead of picking just one here, I'm just going to link you to The Millions home site so you can check out their entire A Year in Reading series.

Here are some pornstars reading poetry by Dora Malech. Warning: they're better readers than me. They seem comfortable and don't stutter like idiots.

No one likes the National Book Awards.

Calls For Submissions

Seeking Poems and Essays About Widows
Seeking women's poems and short personal essays about experiences of widowhood (de facto or de jure), for an anthology. We are a published poet/editor and a scientist/professor of neurolinguistics, both widowed. The Widow's Handbook will include writing about bereavement (sudden or following an illness/ long vigil), mourning rituals, grieving, other people's responses, coping strategies, spiritual resources, supportive people in the author's life (or lack thereof), evolving social life (isolation, work, friends, dating), and rebuilding (including but not limited to finding a new love or focus). Some of the writers whose work we know we'd like to include are already published widely, but the book will also give less-known poets an opportunity to be read on this challenging topic. We hope to send out a book proposal next year. Once we have chosen the work to be included, the manuscript will be submitted to trade publishers. Deadline: June 30, 2011. Please send submissions with a stamped SASE for reply to: The Widow's Handbook, 1427 Commonwealth Ave. #401, Brighton, MA 02135.


Stymie Magazine Seeks Baseball Themed Submissions
Stymie Magazine, a journal of sport & literature, is seeking submissions for their upcoming 2011 issues including a baseball themed Spring/Summer edition as well as for its website. Past contributors and those slated to appear in the near future include: Kevin Wilson, Daniel Orozco, Brian Oliu, Greg Gerke, Ben Loory and many others. We are currently reading submissions, our complete guidelines can be found here.

Platte Valley Review Seeking Submissions
Platte Valley Review will publish a special issue for Spring 2011. The theme, Forces of Nature, should be interpreted as contributor wishes. Poetry, Prose, Creative Non-Fiction, Environmental and Critical Essays, Photography, or Artwork, relevant to Forces of Nature are welcome as general submissions. Please submit in only one of the following ways. 1. Mail submissions labeled by genre to: Platte Valley Review / English Department, 202A TMHL / University of Nebraska at Kearney / 905 W 25th Street / Kearney, NE 68849-1322 / 2. An online Submission Program can be found here. Deadline for this edition is December 15, 2010.

Rainbow Crow Press To Put Together Fairy Tale Poetry Anthology
Rainbow Crow Press is currently seeking finely crafted, imaginative poems for an anthology of poetry based on traditional fairy tales. Submit up to 6 poems to RainbowCrowPress@gmail.com with "Submission (Poet's last name)" as the subject. We will ask for selected poems to be sent to us in an RTF attachment, but we will not be opening attachments during the selection process. Deadline January 1, 2011.

Call for Submissions: Western Humanities Review
Call for Submissions for a Special **Adaptations** Issue of WHR (Spring 2011) ::: the editors invite submissions that exemplify or address the phenomenon of ADAPTATION. Fiction, poetry and criticism are all welcome, as well as writing in hybrid genres that combine or adapt more traditional forms. edited by Lance Olsen // Scott Black // Craig Dworkin // Paisley Rekdal /// Submission Period: January 1, 2011 through March 15, 2011 (postmark date). Guidelines: If one long prosaic piece (essays, fiction, etc.), no more than 25 pages; If poems or shorter pieces, up to 5 pieces (totaling not more than 25 pages) /// Everything should be in a format that can be printed in WHR's standard journal format (black and white), and should be sent via regular mail. /// Send questions to: (replace(at) with @)/// Submit your Adaptations to (please do not forget to mark as for the "Adaptations Issue"): Western Humanities Review / ADAPTATIONS ISSUE / c/o dawn lonsinger / University of Utah English Dept. / 255 S. Central Campus Dr., LNCO 3500 / Salt Lake City, UT 841112