Fall Update!

Hello, Hayden’s Ferriers! We hope you’re as excited about this year as we are. This Friday, we’re sequencing issue 53 (due out in November) and we’re thrilled to be able to share all the amazing prose, poetry, translations and photography in it. Meanwhile, the editors are currently accepting submissions for issue 54, due out this spring.

A bit of a brag: we got quite a nice review over at the Review Review! Joelle Jameson gave us five stars, writing that she was “impressed with the quality and variety of writing” in issue 52, mentioning several favorites (particularly among the prose) and praising the international and art sections.

She also noted that our web site is “woefully out of date,” as many of our readers have as well! It’s true! We’re sorry! We’re in a bit of a transitional time, so we’re working on launching a new web presence and, well, time got away from us. For now, keep up to date with us here on the blog and at our Submittable page, and we’ll let you know as soon as our new site goes up.

Speaking of which: our online store has a new location. Purchase individual issues, subscribe or make donations to Hayden’s Ferry Review here.

Thanks so much for your support.

Thanks to The Review Review for This Write-Up!

We're happy to accept "often odd, but always interesting" and--from their weekly newsletter-- "ever-surprising, ever-delightful" from the folks at The Review Review. Check out the full interview of issue #48 here.

And, if you don't already, follow Becky Tuch and the gang through their various social media outlets. In addition to publishing fine lit journal reviews (cough, cough) they're a great resource for publishing tips, interviews, and other things lit journal.

Many Thanks For LitStack's Review of HFR Issue 48 Spring/Summer

HFR is very proud to thank Jennifer M. Kaufman, of LitStack, for her kind review of the latest HFR issue. In looking at the beautiful, but desolate and alien, cover of the issue, Jennifer writes that: "the journal itself (published twice-yearly by The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University) is densely and vibrantly packed with fiction, poetry, and photographs from a remarkably international list of contributors."

When it came to the review of individual works Jennifer writes: "with so many excellent pieces it would be impossible to do justice to each and every one, and of course with such a range, they will each resonate differently for different readers. There were a few – particularly from the women contributors – that I found especially exciting."

Some of the women contributors showcased within the review were: S.E. Smith, Anne Valente, Naomi Benaron, Chidelia Edochie, Anna Piwkowska and Diya Chaudhuri.

The full review can be found here.

NewPages.com Reviews HFR!

Man o' man is this a nice way to start off the month: NewPages.com has posted a flattering review of Issue #46 of HFR! It really made us blush a little bit.

NewPages reviewer Sima Rabinowitz called issue #46 "one big, bold, brilliant effort" and one of our "best issues ever" (I totally agree). She raved about our cover featuring Brian Dettmer's "New Books of Knowledge" and showed the diversity of HFR contributors by quoting from Kazim Ali's “The People of the Book” and Phil Estes' "surreal narrative," "Parties After the Afterlife Are a Lot Like Parties in Dayton, Ohio."

Overall, it was an incredibly generous review and it feels nice to know that people out there are really enjoying something that we all put a lot of work in to. Thank you Sima and the staff at NewPages!

Read the review in full, here.

Classy and Curious

The Review Review takes a look at issue #45...

The front page of their website teases, "Maybe you have a poem that takes a fresh look at racism, a story that's something of a genre-blending hybrid. Maybe you too are ready for the big-time, but you've got something a little edgy, a little wacky. You might be interested in HAYDEN'S FERRY REVIEW. Learn more about this classy, curious journal by reading Vince's latest review."

We thank Vince very much, for his generous review which found its way into their "overwhelmingly positive" (the highest!) category, as did our issue #42, the last they reviewed. The new review begins:

You would do well to judge the latest issue of Hayden’s Ferry Review by its cover. The front and back cover art, from Hong Hao’s photographic series “My Things,” was made “by using the scanned images of thousands of items from the artist’s everyday life.” It can take minutes for you actually to open the magazine, as the objects, “which appear almost as satellite-like representations,” continue to draw you in. Just when you think you’re finally ready to open the cover and start reading, what should fall out but a sturdy bookmark decorated with a detail from Hao’s very cover art. This is a class opening act that sets the bar high for content. Fortunately, Hayden’s Ferry Review is up to the challenge.

Read the whole review here.

People Are Talking...

HFR is getting some high praise around the internet this week. This (totally unsolicited!) from Kate Gale, Managing Editor of Red Hen Press:

Hayden’s Ferry Review is my favorite literary magazine right now and has been for a while. It’s beautiful, but it isn’t over the top expensive like Black Clock, it publishes great work, but it isn’t exclusive like Hudson Review or Zyzzva which are exclusive on opposite ends of the spectrum. It’s just a great variety of discoveries of all kinds of good writing which is what you read a lit mag for, you want to be surprised. That’s part of the reason I like Hayden’s, it’s edited by the brilliant MFA students at ASU’s creative writing program and they pick cool edgy stuff. When you read the work, you are surprised, pleased, amazed.

Read more on Kate's blog here.

And Caitlin Horrocks - former HFR editor, amazing writer, and all around wonderful person - answers some questions about her reading habits at the "Recommended Reading" blog. HFR wins for the one literary journal she would subscribe to if she only had one. Check out answers from Matt Bell, Sean Lovelace (both appearing in our next issue) and lots of other great writers, too.

Our Newest Issue Reviewed by New Pages

Check out this fantastic review of our latest issue, #44, written by Sima Rabinowitz at New Pages. We appreciate the very kind words! The site also features reviews of Monkeybicycle, Gulf Coast, Glimmer Train, Rattle, and many other lit journals you should read.

The Non-Reading Writer and The Review Review (Our Website of the Week)

A recent New York Times article about self-publishing began with this sentence: "The point may soon come when there are more people who want to write books than there are people who want to read them." It's a frightening thought, one which agents, editors and publishers alike must spend much of their time thinking about. As Managing Editor of HFR and a teacher of fiction writing here at ASU, here are a few things that I spend time thinking about/shuddering over:

1) At AWP, if you put out two piles of information on your bookfair table, one labeled "Submission Information" and one labeled "Subscription Information," the former pile will disappear five times as fast (okay, I'm guesstimating) as the latter.

2) If HFR got half as many subcriptions each year as we do submissions, I'm sure I would poop my pants.

3) For - I'd say - 25% of the submissions we receive, it's immediately obvious that the submitter has neither bothered to ever read HFR nor even checked our website for submission guidelines.

4) When I ask my class of intermediate level fiction writers about who they read or who their favorite writers are, half of people they name are dead. The other half are Stephen King and Chuck Palahniuk.

5) When I ask twenty students how many people have heard of "literary journals," the average number of hands that go up is two.

When giving advice to beginning writers about submitting their work to journals, I always suggest they get their hands on copies of the journals they want to submit to. This is for your own good, I tell them. It will save you heartache and postage. Still they look at me skeptically. I am a money-hungry literary journal editor, fishing for subscriptions. I always figure appealing to their egos and pocketbooks is an effective way of getting them to read. But here's what I think is a more important incentive: if beginning writers expect to have anywhere to publish their work (and anyone to read it) they better start reading themselves. They better start subscribing. They better start blogging about, talking about, and getting excited about the world of small press and literary journal publishing (including online journals). Now. Which is why I make students in my classes choose a literary journal to study, read and advocate for throughout the semester. By the end of the class, a few of the students have become subscribers. At the very least, the rest of them know that their are living writers creating work, and an active and vibrant world of print and online journals that support and celebrate "emerging" writers.

This morning I got an email from Becky Tuch at The Review Review, a website that reviews literary journals. She pointed me to this really wonderful (in their "overwhelming positive" category) review of our recent grotesque issue. The website posts in-depth reviews of literary journals, publishing tips, and allows both editors and writers to speak what's on their minds. Lots of great stuff to read through. Most interesting to me, though, was the "About" page, where Becky explains how she came up with the idea for the website. She starts off by saying, "Recently, I'd become disenchanted with literary magazines," and goes on to explain that while she was actively pursuing getting published in literary journals, she wasn't actually reading them.

Not only did I not subscribe to any, I hardly cared what was in them. There were even the magazines in which I'd had stories appear, magazines in which I'd won contests. Even those I didn't read.

I was not the only writer like this. What I found when I talked to my peers was that everyone wanted to be published in these magazines, but no one knew who published what, who edited which magazines, which ones were printed from universities and which were independent, or at the very least which magazines they liked and which they didn't.

Becky's realization led her to take action in the form of The Review Review, so there's a pretty happy epilogue here, but I worry about the number of writers out there who don't take an interest in the work of other writers, who don't bother to read and support literary journals, even as they expect these journals to support them through publication.

On a literary journal blog like this, I would hope this kind of rant would be preaching to the choir, but I'm not sure it is. I'm interested to hear what submitters have to say about subscribing - those who can empathize with Becky, those who feel very differently. How do literary journals hope to generate an excited and lively readership if even their contributors can't be bothered to read them?

Matt Bell's Review of Issue #42

Matt Bell - writer and blogger extraordinaire - has posted a review of HFR's grotesque issue on his blog. Check it out - it's very favorable and very accurate. Matt's got his finger on the pulse of things.

For those of you who have not yet gotten a copy of the issue, drop an email to HFR@asu.edu, and we'll get your copy right out. You can read it, and then give it as a Christmas gift (if you're a cheapskate). Or, you can take advantage of our buy-one-subscription-get-another-one-free offer (also available at HFR@asu.edu), so you and a friend can both enjoy your own copies.

So, now you know that Matt Bell has great taste in literature. For more of his writing, opinions about books and music, and literary journal news, check out his website. Matt's very awesome story, "Alex Trebek Never Eats Fried Chicken," was also the winner of the 2008 Million Writers Award. Read it.

More Good News

Today, from literary agent Nat Sobel:

"This is an especially fine group of stories in your special, “Grotesque” issue. I think the editors should be commended."

Nat expressed special interest in four writers from the issue. To hear more about what Nat thinks of contemporary fiction, publishing, bookselling, and agents, read his remarkable interview in Poets & Writers here. Read more about Sobel Weber Associates, Inc. here.  

HFR in Los Angeles Times Jacket Copy!

Hayden’s Ferry Review’s new issue was featured in the Los Angeles Times’ “Jacket Copy,” a literary and book blog written by Carolyn Kellogg. She calls the cover “gorgeous and deeply disturbing — fitting for an issue on The Grotesque.”
After a trip to our website, where we have posted three poems, one short story, four photographs, Shamim Azad poems, translations and sound files of her reading them in the original Bengali, Carolyn declared our website “a tease!” Hooray! That’s what we were going for. We want people to subscribe! So we can, you know, keep doing this.

Click here to visit Jacket Copy