Photo by B. A. Van Sise (for ontheside.info

InDigest continued its reading series “1207″ the other night at the KGB Bar.  Dustin Nelson founded the quarterly online mag two years ago and has crafted a solid website that plays host to a variety of voices in the arts.

InDigest’s analog manifestation is the reading series, which encourages presenters to read something from their own work as well as something that inspired them as they wrote it. This time Deborah Clearman read from her Guatemela-based novel Todos Santos from Black Lawrence Press.  Clearman, not wanting to outshine her own words, read from the US State Department’s 11-page document of travel warnings for Guatemala. Emily St. John Mandel read an excerpt from her second novel The Singer’s Gun new this year from Unbridled Books, offering a quotation highlighting the difficulty of “being impeccable” in a universe without virtue. Finally, the disarming Aaron Michael Morales–who I’d seen at a Coffeehouse Press reading with Travis Nichols at McNally Jackson last week–read an excerpt from his new novel Drowning Tucson. Forgetting to bring something that inspired him, he read something that devastated him: a passage from a book about the sexual deviancy of meth addicts, the subject of the novel he’s currently writing. In the passage, a police officer describes the three bathtubs of human feces he found in a meth cook’s living room, as well as some other colorful habits of addicts.

Watch out for the next 1207 reading at KGB on August 22 with Justin Taylor, Tom Grimes, and JC Hallman.

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground), 1989

If you asked me about the general ratio of female and male authors included in BluePrintReview—the online literary magazine I founded in 2005, and that is now up to 24 issues—I would be able to give you the answer without going through pages: it’s about 50/50. Same goes for the answer to the question: “What’s the ratio of poetry versus prose?” Again, the answer would be: about 50/50.

These ratios developed during the first months of editing, combined with the plan to create issues that offer a balance of voices and cover a wide array of styles, approaches, and originating countries. This concept has continued since the start, with one exception: the current issue (“micro cosmos”), which is dedicated to flash fiction.

Even though I try for a balance of poetry and prose, those categories don’t appear anywhere. The starting page of each issue includes only the titles of the texts, without telling if it is poetry or fiction or non-fiction. Added to that, up to issue 22 all texts were centered, which blurred the lines between prose and poetry. In 2007, when one of the stories in BluePrintReview was selected by Sundress for their “Best of Net” list, the Sundress editor wrote and asked me to confirm that the text they had selected is a story.

Same goes for the images: there are photographs, digital art, and paintings included. Some photos look like paintings, which again blurs the lines of definition. READ MORE >

Anderbo had a lovely reading two nights ago at the KGB Bar. This is an excellent journal that boasts a million hits a year thanks to the prodigious efforts of its editor Rick Rofihe, who sat in the center of the bar like a conductor orchestrating the presentation of eight highly enjoyable pieces.

Some highlights: First, Sally Bliumis-Dunn read several crisp and heartfelt poems from her collection “Talking Underwater.” Then Adam Gallari, in from England, read a character sketch of a 6’6” baseball player in the second person, rhythmically accusing the audience of Chasing Adonis. In confident cadence Bridget Bell read an invigorating poem “Our Small Pets,” published in Pedestal Magazine, that says “We named our goldfish Chaos. It lived for a hundred years.” (I had to thank her personally for this particular line. If there’s one thing you read from this list of links, read that poem, preferably aloud.) Anna Lisa McClelland read a well-voiced piece from an unpublished novel, getting perhaps the most laughs out of us. Then finally Caroline Silveira read her playful-wishful-smart “How James Franco Became My Boyfriend”, ending her story and the event with a happy ending.

Afterward I introduced myself to Rofihe and, laughing, he handed me an Anderbo t-shirt. I wear it today with pride.

Named after novelist Frederick Barthelme, who edits, Rick Magazine is a new/old online literary magazine. It is new in that Rick Magazine never existed online, old in a couple ways—one stretching back to the beginnings of literary magazines on the internet.

The “first” online literary magazine was technically Swift Current in 1984. Begun by Frank Davey, Fred Wah, and David Godfrey, Swift Current was a literary database loaded onto a VAX 11-750 computer located at York University in Toronto and made accessible by subscription to personal users and institutions. More of a creative commons than an editor-run literary publication, Swift Current nonetheless served as a forerunner to the online literary magazine. READ MORE >

Interview with professor and novelist Timothy Schaffert, the new web editor of Prairie Schooner. Founded in 1926, Prairie Schooner is today a  literary quarterly published with the support of the English Department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Nebraska Press. Current editor Hilda Raz recently won the 2010 Stanley W. Lindberg Award in Literary Editing.

Marcelle Heath: I’d like to start off by discussing the pleasures and pitfalls of online reading. What are your thoughts regarding reading habits and readership in general?

Timothy Schaffert: When I’m on the computer and I’m online, I’m generally doing fifty things at once. I start reading an article, I follow its links, I remember something I’ve been meaning to look up, so I look it up, then remember something else… in other words, I’m in a constant state of hitting pause, not to reflect, but to meander, to investigate something else. But literature calls for a full immersion; you want to turn yourself over to the author, and follow her lead. So though I do read fiction and poetry online—both new and old—the shorter it is, the more likely I’ll make it to the end of it without flitting away in search of information, or hyper-checking my email, or falling into the gaping maw of Facebook updates. But it’s while I’m online that I most often discover the work that I want to read offline. READ MORE >

There is a thrilling new story from Jim Shepard in the newest Zoetrope: All-Story. The story—”The Track of the Assassins“—is not unlike much of Shepard’s recent short fiction: slowly-revealed characters lodged in alluring moments in history. The setting of “Assassins” is the 20th century Iraqi and Irani deserts, where Freya Stark searches for Alamut, ancient home of the Hashshashin, the infamous Persian sect of assassins of the middle ages. (It is also the setting of a recent Disney blockbuster.) Shepard’s story begins:

My mother liked to remind me that at the age of four I left a garden party one rainy afternoon with my toothbrush in my fist, fully intending a life of exploration, only to be returned later that afternoon by the postman. Her version of the story emphasized the boundaries that her daughter refused to accept. Mine was about the emancipation I felt when I closed the gate latch behind me and left everyone in my wake, and the world came to meet me like a wave. READ MORE >

Armchair/Shotgun #2

New York City based literary magazine Armchair/Shotgun is looking for a new graphic & book designer:

Job Posting: Graphic and Book Designer

Armchair/Shotgun is seeking a graphic and book designer to assist in
the design, layout, and production of a Brooklyn-based literary
magazine which twice yearly publishes (on paper!) exemplary new
fiction, poetry, and visual arts. READ MORE >