Writing to Remember

The HFR staff will be taking a break from the blog until 2012, but we thought this lovely poem would be fantastic inspiration over this holiday time as you think of those you love and then spring into the new year full of hopeful and creative energy.
A very happy holiday season to you and yours!

The First Letter
by Clay Matthews

Some mornings all we really need is someone to talk to.
Some mornings silence. Some mornings biscuits and silverware.
I shake and the starlings fly away. I shake and think of you.
Here in East TN they’re calling for snow. We will always speak
of the weather. We people in the mountains. We moonshine.
Lips and assholes and white bread. We quilts coming apart
on cold winter nights. The city trucks drive by. Lights flash.
The power lines hover with promises. Neighbor black dog,
neighbor beagle, neighbor bad leg in the Cadillac, the wrap
he keeps there to stop fluid from building up. A good man,
he fed you once. We take the spoons up and we put them in
our mouths. I am writing to tell you about this place. I am writing
to remember. You were conceived here. You were motor oil
on hands and prayers and people’s shadows out waking long
across the back lot. You were afternoons and early evening.
The water as it filled up that back lot. On some days, you can hear
someone practicing a guitar. On some days, even the tulips bloom.
I have nothing to ask of you yet. I’m not even sure what I have
to say. The lovely parts of our days. The pizza parlors and pickup
trucks. It has been a while since I sat at the water’s edge alone,
among the wild roses, and stared into the deep where the large trout
swam, the carp, and dragonflies that floated away on the surface.
Above and below. You will come to understand in life the radio
static and stories of heaven and hell. In Missouri my uncle wears
a cowboy hat and preaches three days of the week. Fire and brimstone.
Turquoise and silver. What do we know inside, when we carry
so much there, what does the future hold, where do we put all this
belief? We race them cars. We grocery shop at the Food City. We with
the garden out back, and the memory of that garden now weeds
and rotten pumpkins lush in the better places of our hearts.
Blesséd roots. I come here from a long ways away. The return
will return. And the summer will burn your face. I have so much to tell you,
who are a part of me, who I don’t even know, ungendered, unbound,
free and floating in the belly of the woman I love. Let this be
a beginning. Let us talk more about this later. Right now a dog
is barking. The sun is moving through the clouds. Across the street
a car is rusting. We wait for something to happen.
We wither. We embrace. We turn, and we come up in shoots.

Press 53 Open Awards are, well, open!

Press 53 offers 5 categories (Poetry, Flash Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Shorty Story and Novella) with 3 winners in each. The judges are acclaimed industry professionals and the prizes include publication, etched glass awards and cash. Entries are to be submitted through the mail or Submishmash. More information on the Press 53 Open Awards can be found here. Get yourself entered!

Contributor Spotlight: Zana Previti

An inclination I was never able to explain: if I see a copy of a book I love on sale, I instinctively reach my hand out to take it off the shelf and buy it, even if I own multiple copies of that selfsame book at home. Today I almost bought two different editions of Cather’s The Song of the Lark for five dollars each. I quelled the impulse, but only because I am broke. If I had money, and lots of it, there's really no telling how many copies of the book I would own. Poor as I am, I think I'm near the vicinity of four or so. I keep tripping over copies of Love in the Time of Cholera (one is in Spanish, a language I spoke briefly and brokenly in college). I admit to owning seven different copies of Jane Eyre. I don't know how I have so many. They just accumulate. I never get rid of them, of course. I love them.

An inclination I was never able to explain: breaking things up into small chunks and arranging them into a sequence without any attempt at explicit transition. In the most recent HFR, #49, my short piece “Sasha” appears as a series of paragraph-long vignettes (miniature portraits?) of an imaginary physicist-cum-baby brother. Why did you do it this way? I ask myself sometimes, looking dismally down at a final draft. And probably, the answer is that I really, really love that white space, and the possibilities it creates. What happened in between? One of the best, most endearing love letters I have ever seen was scrawled, seriatim, on all fifty-two of a deck of cards. It was brilliant.

An inclination I was never able to explain: writing love letters to people I cannot know. Most of the stories I write – including “Sasha,”– end up, despite my intentions otherwise, taking on the intimate tone and language of love letters. Every day, there is some aspect of humanity that I fall in love with (though not necessarily that I respect or admire). I am in love with Ahab, and that he has bored little holes into the deck of The Pequod so that he can stand more securely. I am in love with the Great Grenouille, and his magnificent scent of smell. And in the course of life, I stumble upon images and things and moments that I fall terribly in love with: a gaggle of teenage girls studying high school chemistry in a local library, arguing about significant figures. A painfully alert German shepherd puppy, waiting for the woman he loves to buy her coffee and come back, already. Once, my father was driving his tractor in the field when he came across a deer who refused to be frightened away. He drove back and away, again and again, and each time he saw the deer, he raised his workgloved hand and said: “Hello.” I am in love with this, whatever it is. I am deeply in love with the fact that there are deep wide tunnels dug out under Wakahachie, Texas, waiting for the particle accelerator that will never be built. (Hell, let’s be frank: I love particle accelerators, period.) In my own writing, I suppose, and certainly in “Sasha,” I want to write down and preserve those parts of the earth that I have found extraordinary– either in possibility or in life – and create that sense of wonder and obsession for others.

An attempt at explanation: Perhaps all fiction is just that: the recounting of moments in which we fall, minutely or hugely, in love with our characters. And through our characters, ourselves, and what daily surrounds us.

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Zana Previti is earning her MFA at the University of California, Irvine, where she is at work on her first novel. Her work has been featured most recently in Ghost Ocean Magazine and The Los Angeles Review, and is forthcoming from The New England Review. Find stories online in Ghost Ocean Magazine, Issue 7:  and The Coachella Review, Spring 2011.

News Around the Net

Christopher Hitchens died today at 62.

How about a little bit of A Christmas Carol to rouse a little holiday spirit? Even better with Dickens's 200th birthday coming up in a couple of months. A recording of his great-granddaughter reading the Christmas classic for our entertainment.

Some offbeat gifts for the writers in our lives. Just in case you don't want to get them, you know, books. The bamboo keyboard is actually pretty cool (hint).

The Millions "Year in Reading" series continues to continue. Always worth checking out.

A 500 year old Latin poem (written by a woman) was just found in a 1561 edition of Chaucer in the rare books sections of the West Virginia University library. And the search is on for who this woman is.

Unusual Calls for Submissions

LQQK Magazine is a new science fiction magazine currently looking for new writers. We are interested in stories that speculate about the future of contemporary phenomena like social networking, mobile devices, filesharing, hacking, and online lifestyles. We are also interested in far-out, surrealist, or anarchic stories in general, with or without lulz. Full submission guidelines can be found here.

LPR Call for Submissions: Audacity Issue
Audacity defines the best and worst within us. It is boldness or daring, accompanied by confident or arrogant disregard for personal safety, conventional thought or other restrictions. It is also effrontery, insolence or shamelessness. Little Patuxent Review invites you to explore the various aspects of audacity for our Summer 2012 issue. Submit well-crafted poetry, prose, artwork or photography between December 1, 2011 and March 1, 2012 through our online submission system. See the guidelines on our website for details. Note: we consider artwork and photography on a rolling basis. Be bold, be daring. Be anything but boring. More here.

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS FOR A HOLIDAY ANTHOLOGY
Imagine your favorite holiday stories. Chances are good the protagonists are a man and a woman, possibly even with children. But where are the stories that feature men together, or women together, that will also warm our hearts at this special season? That’s where you come in. We’re collecting holiday stories for two anthologies, one featuring male protagonists/couples/families, the other featuring female protagonists/couples/families, and we’d like to hear from you! Your story should run between 2,000 and 4,000 words, contain no erotica, and be in a winter holiday setting. The only requirement is that it be historical fiction. We’re looking for tomorrow’s classics in time for next year’s holiday season! Pay will depend on securing a publisher and will be negotiated at that time for accepted stories. Deadline is June 15, 2012, but the earlier, the better. Send Word docs to Jeannette de Beauvoir E-mail: angevine(at)aya.yale.edu (replace (at) with @ in sending e-mail)

Kweli Journal, an online literary journal that celebrates the shared cultural experience of people of color, is currently seeking literature of occupation for its January 2012 social justice issue. The Occupy Movement is a national movement of men and women from all races, backgrounds, and religions with the shared goal of ending corporate greed from the wealthiest 1%. Kweli Journal invites submissions of short stories, poetry, and essays that bear witness to the day to day realities and frustrations of the 99%, poor working class and middle class folks living on the edge. Recent issues of Kweli have featured the work of Jennine Capó Crucet and Amaud Jamaul Johnson. Upcoming issues of the journal will feature Camille Dungy, Aaron Michael Morales and Neela Vaswani. Kweli will accept submissions for the Literature of Occupation Call from November 19, 2011 to January 7, 2012. Any submissions received after this deadline will not be considered and will be discarded. For prose submissions, submit one (1) short story or one (1) self-contained novel excerpt or creative non-fiction piece of no more than 7,000 words in one single file in doc., rtf, or .pdf format. For poetry submissions, submit up to three poems totaling no more than 6 pages in one single file in doc., rtf, or .pdf format. Submit your work here.

Contributor Spotlight: Lesley Wheeler

Dead Cats, Quince Jelly, and the Rolling Stones

All the synthesized sentiment at this time of year used to irritate me, but right now it’s too resonant, despite some intellectual resistance. That’s probably why I’m most struck, in this fall/winter issue of Hayden’s Ferry Review, by poems that riff on nostalgia. “I have this memory and it’s really poignant to me”: there’s a whole lyric subgenre that can be summed up this way. Elizabeth Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” for instance, or Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” and half the British Romantic canon.

Most of the poems in the new issue are not about memory; instead, there’s a lot of eros plus an assortment of meditations on apocalypse and other nightmare worlds. Joe Betz, however, is playing my song. Like Hayden, he remembers a parent. In “Portage, Indiana,” Betz describes “my mother…holding a cat and crying. / It thawed in the sink like a package of pulled pork left over from October.” I’m impressed that he’s written about a weeping mother AND someone’s dead pet without being the slightest bit mawkish. All the consonance in the second line I quoted is key—the p’s and k’s make the voice a little harsher, on the edge of wry. Betz sees how his mother’s failed resuscitation of the cryogenic kitty is nasty and crazy, and the speaker distances himself from it by emphasizing the act of remembering. He turns the temperature down without being ironic, though. If you loop back to the beginning you see his essential pose: “I want to say something profound / but have my fists deep in coat pockets and can’t make the appropriate gesture.” That is, I can’t or won’t tell you outright what this memory means but I can make you share my helpless sympathy.

The title of Taylor Mali’s memory poem tells you that his poignant recollection is more like Bishop’s: “The Moment I Looked Around the World and Realized it Was Not Me.” You are an I, / you are a Taylor, / you are one of them. The Jan Wagner poem translated by Chenxin Jiang, “Quince Pie,” is improvising on a similar tune. His emblems of memory are jars of quince jelly, still glowing in remembrance.

My “Concentric Grooves” (you knew I would get to my own memories eventually, didn’t you?) is most like the latter in its attempt to collapse time, to emphasize the persistence of what seems lost. My current writing project has me thinking about signals, communication, and reception, searching for metaphors that suggest how poems and readers interact. The sonnet in this issue is from a short series about listening to music as a teenager. Again, I suspect sound effects help, to whatever extent this poem succeeds; “Concentric Grooves” uses pararhyme but there’s lots of internal rhyme and alliteration too. I was aiming at the mind’s ear, wanting my words to catch there like a scrap of music. My memory-emblems are record albums. They work like Wagner’s quince jelly, preserving something ephemeral and then becoming delicious in their own right. Poems can be both records and talismans, too, although there’s no exact recipe for making the flavors work.

My family changed in 2011 and continues to change rapidly, which explains why I’m more vulnerable than usual to the manipulations of advertisers and bad Christmas carols. Poems such as Betz’s, though, are full of feeling, without being either heartwarming or freezer-burnt. And some bracing weather helps when you’re queasy from leftovers.
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Lesley Wheeler is the author of Heterotopia, Heathen, and other books; her poetry appears in journals such as Slate, Poetry, and 32 Poems. She recently returned from a Fulbright Fellowship in Wellington, New Zealand to Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, where she is the Henry S. Fox Professor of English. She blogs on poetry and community at http://thecavethehive.wordpress.com/.

News Around the Net

Linking to The Millions main page here to check out the entirely of their Year In Reading series (so far).

The 2011 Bad Sex in Fiction Award goes to... David Guterson (and an appropriate name, sans second T) for his recasting of the Oedipus myth. Congrats! I know you're very proud.

Amazon is attempting to lure authors into publishing their books 90 days early exclusively on the Kindle. With money.

Looks like a series of Watchmen prequel episodes are coming out. Alan Moore will not be involved. And I guess I'll just leave it at that.

A great essay here about all the "Best Of" lists we're overwhelmed with (especially this time of year), and how we measure literary excellence.

Contributor Spotlight: John A. Nieves

John A. Nieves has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: Indiana Review, Southern Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, New York Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Valparaiso Poetry Review and Cincinnati Review. He won the 2011 Indiana Review Poetry Prize and the 2010 Southeast Review AWP Short Poetry contest. He received his M.A. in Creative Writing from USF in 2006. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Missouri. His poem, “One Booth Over,” appears in HFR #49.

Culture as Curio Cabinet

I noticed shortly after having my poem, “One Booth Over,” accepted for HFR #49, that the call for submissions for HFR #50 was focused on the idea of “artifact.” I was delighted. In fact, I have been asking myself many of the questions the call for submissions asks. I am interested in the power places, objects, events and phrases have to create both personal and communal mythos. Earlier this year, I finished my first manuscript and began to shop it in earnest. This allowed me to imagine a new project. I began to think of the places I have traveled (I have been to every state and quite a few countries) and lived (New York, Connecticut, Florida, Missouri). The first thing that struck me was the many different ways people use the word work. This spawned a series of fifteen poems interrogating the different ways work works and means. From that, I found snippets of folk lore and urban legend that I found interesting to connect with. I began to retell or inhabit tales I have heard. “One Booth Over” is such a retelling. In my new project, I am essentially creating a curio cabinet of whens and wheres and the some of the things that make them distinctive. While many fine poets and theorists have written about the responsibility of travel writing, I think Cynthia Hoffman’s Sightseer handles it as well as anyone has. I tried to learn from her. I don’t populate the poems much with anyone but myself and maybe a character in a tale. That way, even the narrative moments can retain a lyric feel through unstable deixis.

In “One Booth Over,” I recount an actual incident that occurred in a truck stop. I don’t situate it because I think I am interested in being able to strike a chord with anyone who could understand this bit of lore as theirs. I attempt to create a speaker that is both peeved and captivated and a tale teller that is both insistent and incessant. The man speaking of dead birds finds his tale so important to tell, that he results to pantomime when the setting becomes too noisy to continue. His dedication, even if his telling is invasive, reaches the speaker deeply enough that he feels the need to repeat it. Here, the speaker’s dismissive tone contradicts itself in the fact of the poem itself—in his retelling. Like artifact, it is nearly impossible to detect which shreds of life will gather up meaning. We rarely know what our most meaningful memories will be until they have slithered past. I hope to fill my curio cabinet project with moments, objects and places that mean in unexpected ways, that role out like a time-space road map that interrogates historiographical, social and geographical strata—that digs for some truths about myself and hopefully the world around me. In the poems I try to invite the readers to tell the story with me instead of simply watching it be told. I believe, as Mikhail Bakhtin does, that “Every piece of literature faces out.” So does every piece of archaeology. The dug up nugget only means if some one is curios enough to consider it—to wonder what it could be trying to tell them.

Here are a few of his other poems featured around the net: Wolfpeach, Through Ends of Autumn, Three Poems, Storm Windows (Imago), and Backyard.

A Cup of Ambition: The Editor

We've all heard it before, at dinner parties, from relatives, from our therapists: "Oh, you write. Does that mean you'll be a teacher?" Fine, fine. We can't make enough money to "eat" or "live" from our poetry. Every MFA graduate knows the horrible feeling that settles into his/her stomach as graduation approaches. You finished a whole book!, you keep telling people. And still, no prospective employers come a-calling. Here at HFR, we know how you feel. We thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at some jobs we writers and lovers of books might enjoy. Or do enjoy. Or have tried, and regret. This regular post, A Cup of Ambition, will talk to those in-the-know about what the working world is really like. (To see our previous interviewees, click here.)

Introducing...

Rob Spillman, Editor, Tin House. New York.

The Job

I oversee content for thirteen year-old bi-costal literary magazine. I read, solicit, go to literary festivals and readings, literary conferences, basically spend most of my time looking for great stories, poems, essays, and interviews.

Getting Started

I co-founded Tin House in 1998.

The Good

What I love most about my job is being surprised. I love being proven wrong, having my expectations subverted, and discovering new voices, or new gears by established writers.

The Bad

Rejection. I know how hard it is to write, and to make the leap of faith in sending your work out, so I really dislike rejecting anyone. I hate rejecting people I know and respect.

Surprise Me

My other job is being a roadie for my sixteen year-old daughter, who is a drummer in a punk/feminist band.

Who would make a good editor?

Start with being a voracious reader, add curiosity and openness, a willingness to be surprised. Then it is about removing your ego from the process of editing, meaning that you are there to help the writer see their vision through and your job is to help them get there. It isn't how you would revise something, but how they can do it to the best of their ability with your guidance.

How do I become you?

Read. A lot. Then work your way through the system by interning or reading for a magazine. I, like most editors I know, hire from within. All of my editors have worked their way through the system so they know it from the ground up.

Thoughts about this job for writers...

For many writers it is great for their writing. You are exposed to amazing writing all of the time, get to see the minute choices that can have a huge impact. You also get to see what doesn't work, and a lot of that. By analyzing these things on a regular basis, you can't help but get better. That said, some writers can't deal with working on other's work, with switching gears constantly. It isn't for all writers.

Rob Spillman is Editor and Co-founder of Tin House Magazine and the Executive Editor of Tin House Books. His writing has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Boston Review, Connoisseur, Details, GQ, Nerve, Rolling Stone, Spin, Sports Illustrated, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, among others.

Tweeted Questions: Lit Mags From Scratch

There's been a burgeoning of literary magazines in the past year or so, and the interest in the literary community seems quite alive and well. If you've ever considered starting a literary magazine of your own, you can thank @cmaum, one of HFR's Twitter buddies, for prompting following panel discussion with the question:

I would love to know the behind-the-scenes process on moving a lit mag from a germ of a (maybe alcohol-fueled) idea into a living thing.

Specter, Mensah Demary   Specter Literary Magazine has only existed a few months and we're approaching our second issue. Still, there's a lot we'd like to do differently, should someone invent a time machine. That said, motivation and passion are prerequisites for launching a literary magazine. By and large, there's no pay involved; there are easier ways to attain attention as well. The space between idea and reality—in any endeavor, including lit mags—is where one's passion will be tested. You'll ask yourself why you should bother with site design, with mission statements and staff, and so on. What's the point? Passion for literature, for the literary community in general, motivated us to get up and get going—and to sustain our efforts.

Ninth Letter, Jodee Stanley   The most important part of starting a new lit mag, especially if you’re working with a group of people, is talking, talking, talking, and WRITING THINGS DOWN. Brainstorm about what you want to publish, where you want your journal to fit into the literary landscape, WHY you want to publish a journal, and how you'd like to see it happen. This is how it was done at Ninth Letter—once the founding editors spent some time talking together, they realized that they all had the same sense of what they wanted to see literary publishing doing (taking more advantage of the printed form, showcasing a wider variety of narratives), and from there they were able to draft a mission statement that, although it was primarily an internal mission statement, helped guide them through the more practical concerns of how this product would be put together and marketed to the public. Go through your brainstorming notes and highlight repeated words—those will be a good jumping off point to defining your mission. For us, words like "interplay, intersection, exchange, merge, undefined, new definitions," and so on kept cropping up in discussions, which really helped us focus on the collaborative project Ninth Letter came to be.

Joyland Fiction, Brian Joseph Davis   Joyland was indeed alcohol (and travel) fueled. Emily Schultz (Joyland's co-publisher) and I had made a lot of friends over a couple of years of touring our books and we wanted a way to keep working with our contacts. I also had a vague notion that distributed editorial with really divergent tastes among the editors could be an interesting model for an online journal. The magic moment was when we convinced our original web designer, Bill Kennedy, also a great digital artist I've worked with on several projects before, to build the site for us. I made the logo in a half hour, sent emails to our original four editors seeing if they'd be interested, and from there it kept going because it kind of worked.

CutBank, Josh Fomon   For CutBank, our vision started back in 1973 with William Kitteridge and some great grad students, but each year there is a rebirth of sorts with every new editor. To quote our former Editor in Chief, Kate Rutledge Jaffe, "Essentially, we're phoenix-like—okay, we don't turn to ash, but we do have to be reborn yearly via graduate student scrappiness, vision, integrity, and enthusiasm."

We are entirely student run and our funding fluctuates year to year, which means that we really have to be passionate about getting administrative work done (and there is a lot of it) as well as coming up with enough funds to put out consistent, quality writing. Thankfully, a community exists around the magazine that fosters enthusiasm and dedication; readers are equally important as editors to keep the cogs of the machines running. Most importantly, it's imperative to reach out into the community of writers; when a lit mag is first burgeoning, one has to not only reach out to established writers, but also must foster the truly unique voices that will find loyal readers.

Black Fox, Racquel Henry   The idea for our magazine started with several events during our MFA residency program. We were realizing that a lot of people weren't open to genre work, no matter how good the writing was. We wanted to create a space where writers of all genres could be published, as long as the work was of quality. When we agreed to take on the endeavor, we sat down to brainstorm an actual name for the magazine. Once we had the name, we had to figure out how to get the word out for submissions. We decided our first step should be to create a website. The website would have all the information about the magazine and how to submit. We researched literary magazine after literary magazine to see how they operated, and that's how we decided how we wanted ours to be run. We listed ourselves on various free forums, put up flyers at local universities and even paid for ad space in a writing magazine. We also discovered the power of Twitter. It was a slow start, but we were able to put out Issue 1 and submissions have picked up.

Barge Press, Shawn Maddey   Barge Journal (and Press) actually took about a year to develop from an alcohol-fueled germ of an idea into an alcohol-fueled colony of ideas before my brother and I even decided to begin trying to figure out the first aspect of making a run with it. It really began as simply the two of us being passionate about a few key things: the arts and our personal shared aesthetic, really wanting to share and spread and support that aesthetic, and wanting to promote Pittsburgh as an artistically strong and unique city. A lot of this time was spent figuring out what we wanted to promote, how, why, the best way to go about it, etc.—then poof, one day we realized that we had all the foundation we need to rock this shit, and, even more importantly, the conviction that we could do it in very different ways that would befit our aesthetic for the bizarre. We were all learning on the job, and nothing's that easy when that's the case.

One of the first things you learn, through any number of weekly drunken editorial sessions, is simply how to have a discerning eye. There were many early submissions we held on to for way too long—out of fear we wouldn't get anything better? Out of uncertainty in what we really wanted? Whatever it was—but you have to learn to get over that. It's really not dissimilar from a writer submitting to mags like ours (and I, like most other editors, have certainly been on both sides). As a writer, rejections don't hurt, you learn to improve your writing from them... If you don't learn that, if you don't adapt to it, you've got no direction and no business in this business, as an editor or a writer. (On the other side of the coin, sending out acceptances is just as awesome as receiving them.)

Then there's actually putting the book itself together. Compiling all the pieces—did I mention that the whole time you need to keep updated on people's bios and mailing addresses, especially if you're sending them pdf galleys like we do? All the details you don't notice at first, like missing italics or incorrect font size, line editing, trying to figure out what's a typo and what isn't. Then there's finding a printer. This isn't terribly difficult, but it is time consuming. Keep in mind, unlike many other places that rely on grants or outside funding, every issue we print comes out of my own pocket. Every penny. (That's many pennies, especially for someone working as a mere server at a brewpub.) Certainly, there are other mags that share this perspective. I'm not saying we're singularly unique in that respect, but it certainly seems we're out of the norm, and cost becomes very, very real, and very much a potential hindrance. You have to look at quote after quote, seek out printer after printer for the best price, wait for samples to make sure they're pro, learn about bleeds and costs and paper stocks, cover stocks, it goes on and on, but this is really the nuts and bolts of publishing. Perception-wise, there's a giant difference between natural and white text stock, between 10pt. cover stock and 12pt., between matte finish and gloss finish (and which looks better specifically with your cover design). But when you hold that first printer's proof in your hands, it's like Christmas no matter what time of year. Seeing your work take form as a real-life object, knowing all the hours that were poured into it, it's amazing. Now's the next frontier: figuring out how to sell the damn thing. Naturally, we've got plenty of ideas.

Hayden's Ferry Review, Beth Staples   HFR also grew out of an MFA program, and was going strong for twenty years before I took over. So as to not repeat what's already been said, I'll just offer up one piece of advice, and that would be to define a clearly articulated mission. Personally, if I were to start a new journal, I'd want that to be way more specific than "the best fiction, poetry and nonfiction." There are lots of well-established journals already touting that. Part of my job these last few years has been to figure out how HFR does more than that, or something different than that, which is why we've grown our translation and art sections. I think it boils down to this: you want to be able to answer the question, "Why should I subscribe to (or submit to) your journal?" The mission, of course, influences all sorts of other choices: design, marketing, logo, format, grant writing (I said grant writing, for reals!) etc. etc. In such a competitive (and non-lucrative) market, I think individuality should be a big priority.

Black Fox, Racquel Henry   The common denominator I'm noting is that there is, without a doubt, a love of literature. We are clearly all in this for the sake of good writing and definitely not the money.

Barge Press, Shawn Maddey   We've all cited love of literature as having to be the necessary motivation in starting up a journal or press. And that's true. You should love it to your core. There's honestly a great deal of people out there that embrace and support passion and vision; loving literature, to me, means taking advantage of that. It means being as passionate as you can be about your work and wanting desperately to not just produce literary publications but to work hard to always be expanding awareness of the small presses and always broadening literacy and readership for the betterment of your community. It's quite honestly shocking how many people are completely unaware of even the concept of small presses and literary magazines/journals. Best advice I have: the community in the broadest sense is your best friend in this venture and it will welcome the efforts you make to better it, plus the face-to-face sale is a crazy powerful weapon that the big houses, no matter how much money, can't duplicate.


We've enjoyed the challenging and interesting questions we've received from our friends on Twitter. If you have a question about writing topics, publishing, the ins and outs of literary magazines, or anything else you might wonder about (how many editors does it take to figure out how to turn on a perfectly functioning, new coffee pot?), let us know! Tweet us, message us on Facebook, or email us at hfr@asu.edu.

News Around the Net

The Millions is bringing back their "Year in Reading" series, the first post is by Jennifer Egan. There will be more as the month goes on.

Spy novelist Quentin Rowan, just caught in a huge plagiarism scandal, says he's addicted to plagiarism. Addicted! No word on whether this essay uses stolen works, yet.

Everyone loves some really harsh rejection letters sent to famous writers and not to us (for once).

David Milch recently signed a deal to adapt all of William Faulkner's work for HBO. Is it just me or would As I Lay Dying be pretty boring to watch?

Jack Kerouac's first novel, The Sea Is My Brother, is being published for the first time, nearly 70 years after it was written. Kerouac seemed not to be the biggest fan of it.

Unusual Call for Submissions

The Tidal Basin Review is calling for submissions regarding the Prison Industrial Complex and the Death Penalty. Deadline is December 31, 2011. Details here.

Silver Boomer Books seeks submissions for an anthology on the widowhood experience. They are interested in all aspects of widowhood-grief, memories, glitches, triumphs. Either prose or poetry is acceptable. You can even send a 6-word memoir if you like. Submissions will be read between December 1, 2011 and January 31, 2012. Submission guidelines can be found here. (You have to scroll to the very bottom of the page).

The Indian River Review is currently soliciting submissions for its inaugural issue slated for publication in late spring 2012. The theme for this issue is “Time and Place.” The deadline for submissions is January 15, 2012. Genres include short fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, critical essays, black and white photography, and book reviews. Submission guidelines here.

CavanKerry Press will be having an open submission period from January 1-31, 2012 for its Laurel Books imprint. Details here.

Selected Shorts is having a writing contest. The 2012 Stella Kupferberg Memorial Short Story Prize with guest judge Maile Meloy. Story requirements: Submit a single short story that centers around a single object or addresses the theme "Objects of Desire." If objects could talk, what stories would they tell? Every object tells a story. Deadline is March 2, 2012. Details here.

The Winning Photos Are...

We asked you to send us photos to go along with the story "Goodbye, My Chickens, Goodbye" by Anne Earney, and you answered. The winning photos are below. But we need more! Send us photos, music, and ideas! See here for submission details. The best photos will be turned into a loving montage for the story and displayed on YouTube, and if your photo makes the cut (chances are pretty good), you get a free copy of issue #49!