CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:

MICHAEL COPPERMAN

The email from the editor of the literary journal started out promisingly enough, noting that they liked my story very much. I knew that couldn’t be all, for the story I’d submitted was a dialect piece, and I knew from long experience that no editor would accept a story deploying a form of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) without some confirmation of authenticity: they would try to verify my racial background and personal history, especially in the absence of publications I didn’t possess because no editor would accept a story written in AAVE without…guarantees. And there it was:

Our editors have concerns about how you colonize this young girl’s voice.

I took a deep breath, wishing polemic came easier to me, and started to type.

My novel was about a naïve, idealistic young Japanese man who went to teach in the rural black public schools of the Delta, and the children he encountered there, sometimes from their own point of view as rendered in their own voices. I’d submitted my fiction on this material to over a hundred magazines, and had almost a 50% personalized, encouraging rejection rate—the better the venue, in fact, the more likely I was to hear back about the merit of the material, though eventually there would be some mention of the ‘originality’ of ‘representation,’ my laudable willingness to ‘transgress.’ If I’d sent a dialect piece, the note would mention the ‘boldness of the formal choices,’ the bravery of my ‘risk with voice,’ the way this was clearly ‘not at all an MFA story.’

For perhaps the first couple years, I was encouraged: I was hearing back from the finest literary magazines in the country. And then it began to sink in: what these editors were commending was the exact features of my work they were rejecting. They weren’t comfortable with my Japanese-American narrator because he didn’t exhibit any characteristics they associated with, as one editor noted, ‘his oriental culture.’ They weren’t comfortable with first-person stories rendered in a system for representing black Delta dialect. They weren’t sure if it was adequately authentic (i.e., Was I black?), and simultaneously, they weren’t sure how to confront unfamiliar representations of race (i.e., Why wasn’t this narrator more ‘culturally Japanese’?).  They weren’t sure if I was ‘reinscribing stereotypes’ or failing to conform to acceptable, established narratives, but they weren’t comfortable with the work. This was the age of Obama, post-raciality and post-identity politics and infinite hope were the order of the day, and this material was too—too something for them. Not easily digestible, perhaps. Not optimistic enough concerning the possibilities of black youth born into poverty. Not quite to their aesthetic. That was it. Great work, clearly something there, but sorry. Just a matter of taste.

As a writer and as a multiracial, Japanese-Hawaiian Russo-Polish secular Jew, I claim the right to know of a young man who like myself went to teach in the poorest and blackest part of the poorest and blackest state in the nation. And I would like my work considered on its merits, and judged in terms of its craft; on the written page, I maintain that craft constitutes representation. No editor has ever told me that my system for dialect is flawed, or claimed a piece failed because I privileged voice above the need to expose a character’s need adequately, or insisted I failed to get at anything that mattered. Those are the right reasons to reject a story, and when I read Alice Munro, Chekhov, Isaac Babel, Andre Dubus, Bernard Malamud, and Flannery O’Connor I recognize my ability as a fiction writer is small in comparison to what I aspire to do. I want my work judged on that criteria, not because of societal discomfort about race, or because the editors of a literary magazine have ideological objections to dialect’s potential to reify extant stereotypes of African-Americans.

The question of authenticity, then, especially authorial authority conferred on the basis of phenotype or racial background, is the wrong line of inquiry. I agree with Flannery O’Connor that “conviction without experience makes for harshness.” I would never claim to know the ‘black experience’, or to speak for African-Americans. I do know the lives of fourth grade children at Carver-Upper Elementary in Indianola, Mississippi, who were born into severe poverty.  I spent two years listening to them speak ten and twelve hours a day, five days a week, as I worked to offer them a different opportunity against all odds. I know their voices and their particular experiences, the distance between what a nine-year-old says and what is meant, what can be indicated by averted eyes or a long pause if you’ve known that child long enough and taken the time to listen to them. I have something to say about those children, and about what I lost wanting too much to help them without anything adequate to offer.

After six years of submitting, I have been lucky to finally find editors at The Oxford American, Guernica, Creative Nonfiction, Copper Nickel, 34th
Parallel, The Arkansas Review, Unsaid and Southword who will publish the work, and the support of a fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts to encourage it. I have high hopes. But if we are to say anything important, if fiction is to stay relevant and vibrant, then we have to ask the right questions. All art fails if it is asked to be representative—the purpose of fiction is not to replace life anymore than it is meant to support some political movement or ideology. All fiction reinscribes the problematic past in terms of the present, and, if it is significant at all, reckons with it instead of simply making it palatable or pretty. What aesthetic is adequate to the Holocaust, or to the recent tragedy in Haiti? Narrative is not exculpatory—it is in fact about culpability, about recognizing human suffering and responsibility, and so examining what is true in us and about us. If we’re to say anything important, we require an art less facile, and editors willing to seek it.

Michael Copperman has a B.A. in English from Stanford University, where he was a Presidential Scholar. He teaches writing to at-risk students of color at the University of Oregon, where he received his MFA in Fiction. His nonfiction has appeared in The Oxford American, GOOD, Guernica, Creative Nonfiction, Stanford Magazine, Anderbo, Brevity, The Oregonian, The Register-Guard, and The Eugene Weekly, and is forthcoming from Post Road and Copper Nickel. He was also the recipient of the 2009 Walter Morey Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction from Oregon Literary Arts. His fiction has been published in the Munster Literature Centre’s journal Southword, The Arkansas Review, Thirdreader, and 34th Parallel, and is forthcoming from Copper Nickel and Unsaid. From 2002-04 he taught fourth grade in the rural black public schools of the Mississippi Delta, and his novel concerns that experience.

[Above image is a photograph from Copperman's old blog of students from Carver Upper Elementary School.]

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SHERISSE ALVAREZ

 

Dialogue is the locale where both tension and connection can be present simultaneously; it is the site for both struggle and love.

-Layli Phillips, The Womanist Reader

As a writer, I have thought a lot about "community" and what it means.  I am often hyper-aware of my identities as I write: female, gay, Cuban-American, daughter of exiles. These identities have informed, situated, and contextualized my creative work.  However, at times it has meant isolating parts of myself and the literary community seemed to reinforce that. As a result, a few years ago when I was in college and had become very interested in women’s studies in particular, I stopped writing for a short time and turned my attention to yoga, meditation, and Buddhism. In the texts I studied, I was being challenged to think about impermanence, emptiness, non-duality, things we rarely discussed in academia but which had always concerned me. I suspected this “pause” would change my view of and approach to making art.

It was by examining the ways in which the principles of womanism intersect with yogic philosophy and practice that I began to discover new ways of engaging the body. In The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: “The word yoga (union) implies duality (as in the joining of two things or principles); the result of yoga is the nondual state.” This became a point of entry back into my writing.  I wanted to explore the personal/political/poetic while moving towards embodiment as a writer. I had decided to become a yoga instructor and one of the phrases I learned was “yield before push.” This seemed to be directly related to creative work. Observe first, then articulate. Let the work (like the breath) guide and support you.

So what does it mean to write about race, gender, class, sexuality and stay grounded in the body, in one’s desire for psychic/spiritual health? How can a literary community support this? During and after college I did work within the queer community (publishing work in Becoming: Young Ideas on Gender, Identity, and Sexuality edited by Diane Anderson-Minshall (Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris Press, 2004) and Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology edited by Amy Sonnie (Los Angeles, CA: Alyson Publications, 2000). I have come to believe that identity as we define it, the binaries—gay/straight, black/white, male/female—matter and they also don’t matter. The personal narratives associated with these identities certainly matter but the classifications don’t. The classifications marginalize (and isolate) us and I often explore this question of marginality within the work. In this way, what is under the surface of the work becomes part of the work. As I reveal to a reader my relationship to identity, I also reveal it to myself. It is often on the page that these discoveries are made.

The knowledge that arises from this exploration can move us from complacency to application, for if we desire to engage with the world that sustains our creativity we must not be satisfied with art for art’s sake. In The Womanist Reader, Layli Phillips describes a “spiritualized politics… rooted in the conviction that … the transcendental or metaphysical dimension of life enhance and even undergird political action.” She adds that, “Physical healing is integral to social change for a variety of reasons.  Bodily well-being is the foundation for other forms of well-being…” 

This is reminiscent of Audre Lorde’s, The Uses of the Erotic. She writes, “When we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us … Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.” 

Much to my surprise, it is in graduate school that I have found a literary community that is not only supportive but that encourages me to take risks in my work. I was apprehensive when I began the MFA at Hunter College; I imagined it would be incongruous with my goals toward embodied practice. Surely I would forget the body, I thought, as I re-entered academia. But I had been actively seeking out a community of like-minded thinkers, a group of individuals interested in writing, and I remained open. I’m now a year in. The group is predominantly women but diverse in terms of age, race, and class. We are all writing nonfiction, focusing on memoir. We are all writing our lives, personal narratives that require us not only to examine identity, but also what that means and how it intersects with the body and with history.

I have also worked collaboratively with a photographer, Lisa Ross, who has been making work in Northwest China for the past 7 years, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The process teaches me many things, including the importance of working in stages, in fragments, and also how all art-making is contingent upon one’s relationship to relationship. We become involved in creative work because we are interested in relating to our subject(s), exploring what it means to be separate from that which we are observing. 

What emerges from this kind of “spiritualized politics” that Layli Phillips has described is that the physical and metaphysical co-exist and contextualize each other. By contemplating this possibility as we write we allow the critical mind, the corporal body, and the sacred to mix in ways that bridge theory and practice. For me, identity shifts from a fixed to a fluid thing as I move through it in my work. My work has appeared in various publications interested specifically in issues of identity. I still struggle at times with the notion of the “mainstream,” how my work relates or does not relate to the canon. But because I am a writer interested in the body and therefore in identity, my work will continue to find its home within literary communities that engage with issues of race, class, gender, sexuality and spirituality.

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Lorde, Audre. "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power." Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984.

Phillips, Layli. The Womanist Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

Sherisse Alvarez is currently an MFA candidate in the Creative Nonfiction program at Hunter College. Her work has appeared in Palimpsest: Yale Literary and Arts Magazine; Daylight Magazine; Becoming: Young Ideas on Gender, Identity, and Sexuality; Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology, and other publications. Her one-act plays have been produced at the Clark Studio Theater at Lincoln Center and the Blue Heron Theater in New York City. Sherisse has been a resident at the National Book Foundation and the Fine Arts Work Center. She can be reached at sherisse@sherissealvarez.com

[Above images are the cover for Becoming: Young Ideas on Gender, Identity, and Sexuality and Audre Lorde’s, The Uses of the Erotic.]

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The idea for a series on race, class, gender, and sexuality evolved organically from reading literary magazines, blogs, sites, small and large press catalogs, reviews, best of lists, and the like. Discussions about these issues are robust within the academy, and I wanted to respond to how they surface in literary communities. There were two watershed moments this past year that provided an opportunity to engage in this dialogue. In August 2009, Roxane Gay, assistant editor for PANK, posted “Awkward Stuff: Race, Women, Writers, Editors,” decrying the scarcity of writers of color and women writers in independent publishing. While many voices echoed Gay’s concerns and conveyed their own similar experiences, others bitterly and aggressively dismissed her claims outright. In November, Publishers Weekly published their Best Books of 2009, which did not include any women writers. Again, the responses ran the gamut between outrage at the pervasive sexism within the publishing industry, and hostility towards those who claimed that the omission of women was anything but merit-based. Our intention is to explore how exclusionary practices dominate the publishing landscape and how writers and editors respond to such practices. To begin our series Roxane Gay addressed the numerous comments on her post in “I Don't Know How to Write About Race.”

In our second installment, below, we talk with Jarrett Haley, editor of BULL: Fiction for Thinking Men about masculinity, violence, gendered divisions of labor, and PW’s list.

—Marcelle Heath

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Marcelle Heath: As a literary magazine devoted to “Men’s Fiction,” you’ve published some fine stories by writers who address dominant notions of masculinity in their work. For example, in Sean Sullivan’s “My Father’s .45” the specter of violence in masculinity is portrayed through the narrator’s cleaning his father’s gun. In “The Winner” by G.C. Perry, the narrator is the silent and repressed father who refuses to help his wife. What are your thoughts on how masculinity functions in these stories?

Jarrett Haley: That I am not a sociologist or gender-studier by trade I should make clear to begin with. This should be obvious given that masculinity—as I see and feel it—I can best describe as some kind of nebulous something at work inside men, a thing of pride and comfort and at times anxiety, no doubt a big influence but ultimately something quiet, unexamined, generally unspoken of or at least spoken around, which I don’t think is altogether a bad thing. I find it kind of interesting in its vagueness, in the way these stories you mention, like others in BULL, make no grand statement about masculinity but just glance at a certain aspect or consideration.

Fathers have a lot to do with it of course, much more than I dare to dive into, but “My Father’s .45” is a prime example. And yeah, there’s violence in that story, but I consider that somewhat case-specific; I think a more universal notion is that of the permanently looming father—the physical loom in one’s youth becoming psychological later in life. The pressure to fulfill—whether put upon or self-originating—I think is widely relatable as opposed to the violence.  In my own case I can’t think of a kinder guy than my old man, but as I sit idly at this computer screen and think of him at my age and his worldwide exploits in the Navy, it’s like the story goes—“I know that he’s behind me and always will be.”

As for “The Winner,” I think it’s charitable to call the narrator “silent and repressed,” as I see that guy as an outright jerk. I suppose he could stand to represent a bastardized form of masculinity, an exaggerated (or not) example of the old guard. But in a story so short I take it that everything is amplified, and I see him essentially as a caricature of that prehistoric mindset, drawn to effect the irony at the end—that what he’s “won” is only a household full of anguish. ...[continue reading]

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Part 5: All the News

Now we come to the end, and, in the end, what we buy newspapers for is the news. Other print matter we buy for other reasons, things such as novels, literary magazines, comic books & so forth. Newspapers are for the news, and so it is good to see that there is a lot of it in The Panorama. Though, as this is an experimental newspaper, the news is much different than you would find in your typical daily edition—and I'll get into how it is different in a second. Also, it is much more varied than can be fully expressed here, in writing style and subject matter. Why is it so varied? I suppose because the newspaper is an experiment; they experimenting. Also, different reading audiences want different things. And McSweeney's is trying to give an example of a type of paper that can attract more readers than the typical ones do. All newspapers seem to attempt variance of one level or another. The Panorama is perhaps just a high degree of it. But I digress....[continue reading]

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Part 4: The Comics

As I've been reading through The Panorama this past week (see posts 1, 2, and 3) and recording my reading experience, I realized that most of my associations with newspapers date back to my childhood twenty or so years ago, and, more specifically, to my father. This realization came earlier this morning as I read through The Panorama's comic seciton. I wonder: Are comics so infused with memories of childhood and the smell of toast for everyone?...[continue reading]

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Part 3: Section One (or The News)

The name “San Francisco Panorama” is emblazoned across the top half of the front page of the newspaper in a chunky, Chris Ware like (or actual Chris Ware?) font: a tall, imposing font with a sense of humor. Like a comic strip. Already, The Panorama is reaching into other genres than just those newspapers are typically relagated to. Just look at the front pages of The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, for example—the rhetoric there screams news. The rhetoric of The Panorama's front page exists instead somewhere in between The Grey Lady and Looney Toons' Acme....[continue reading]

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Part 2: The Book Review of the Future?

That's what Gregory Cowles called The Panorama's book review section yesterday in the NYTimes Paper Cuts blog—a side project of their own book review section. And I guess that is what this Panorama thing is supposed to represent: something from the future, something about what newspapers could be. But Cowles seems to miss the point just a bit regarding what The Panorama's book review section is actually arguing, which I'll get to a little further on. Cowles is nonetheless right about one newspaper reading habit, at least for this reader:

Last month, when I received my copy of The San Francisco Panorama—also known as McSweeney’s No. 33, or the “newspaper issue”—I did the same thing you presumably do when The Sunday Times hits your doorstep: I went right for the book review....[continue reading]

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This week, Luna Park will be posting a day-by-day reading of McSweeney's recent newspaper-styled issue 33, The San Francisco Panorama. Our copy just arrived in the mail a week ago, so we are, honestly, getting a bit of a late start here, but hoping to make that up with duration of coverage. Honestly, the issue is so big, that there is too much to cover in one go. Already there has been a lot of talk about the issue, both good and bad. Some say it is a masterpiece of compelling design. Others say it doesn't do anything to represent the enduring power of the newspaper (which was a portion of its purpose). LP won't take sides, at least not yet. For the next five days LP will go page by oversized page through the contents of the issue in an attempt to to give a representation of the reading experience of The Panorama. If you have a copy of your own, then by all means follow along. If not, then maybe these next few days can be a first, in-depth look into what is surely an unprecedented publishing event for a literary magazine.

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Part 1: Opening the Package

The Panorama showed up in the mail last week in a white plastic envelope, inside of which was the newspaper issue itself, tucked again inside a super-sized ziploc bag. It took a minute to get the thing out of the layers of packaging. Maybe it was because it arrived so soon after Christmas, but the opening up of The Panorama's package felt more like opening a gift than it felt like opening the mail—even Luna Park mail, which is mostly made up of magazines like McSweeney's. The wrapping itself wasn't Christmasy—it was fairly bland, actually—but the thing inside was big, colorful, and awkward. (After looking at the unwrapped newspaper, my nine-year old daughter said, "Is that just one paper, or many?" Just one, I said. "That's a really big paper," she said, stepping back.)...[continue reading]

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Luna Park contributing writer Nick Ripatrazone has written a great essay on the use of literary magazines in the classroom:

I teach public high-school English full-time. My schedule includes advanced and introductory creative writing courses, as well as a course called Advanced Placement Literature and Composition. I use contemporary literary magazines in all of my courses as often as possible, and—at least based on my perception of student performance and the feedback from alumni—to a fair amount of pedagogical success. Sure, it’s important for students to read Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Flannery O’Connor’s “Parker’s Back,” but it’s also important for them to know that both writers had published work in The Kenyon Review, among other literary magazines. The Pynchons and O’Connors of the present are doing the same—and it would be a short-sighted injustice to avoid the good work accumulating in these “little magazines” and instead pining for and discussing in classrooms the latest novel release.

On that note, CLMP’s Literary Magazine Adoption Program for Creative Writing Students is now live. Go sign up.

One of the more interesting literary magazine discussions to come about in recent months has happened via email, twitter feeds, and blogs...[continue reading]

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Christmas Card

ETGAR KERET

Translated by Sondra Silverston

There was this guy who could walk on water. Not that that's such a big deal. Lots of people can walk on water. They usually don't know that because they don't try. They don't try because they don't believe they can do it. In any case, that guy believed, and tried and did it. And that's when the whole mess began.

That guy had an apostle who was very close to him and sold him out. Not that that's such a special thing either. Lots of people are sold out by someone very close to them. If they weren't very close, then it wouldn't really be considered being sold out, would it. Then the Romans came and crucified the guy. Which, also, isn't very unique. The Romans crucified a lot of people. And not just the Romans. Lots of other nations crucified and killed lots of people. All kinds of people. Ones who performed miracles and even ones who didn't. But that guy, three days after they crucified him, was resurrected. And by the way, even that resurrection thing didn't happen here for the first time, or even the last, for that matter. But that guy, people say, that guy died for our sins. A lot of people die for our sins: greed, jealousy, pride, or other, less well-known sins that haven't been around for such a long time. People die like flies because of our sins and no one bothers to even write a Wikipedia entry about them. But they wrote one about that guy. And not just any old entry, but a really big one with lots of pictures and blue-colored links. Not that a Wikipedia entry is such a big thing. There are dogs that have Wikipedia entries about them. Like Lassie. And there are diseases that have entries there, like scarlet fever and multiple sclerosis. But that guy, they say, unlike multiple sclerosis and Lassie, achieved what he achieved through the power of love. Which is something we've also heard before. After all, there were those four English guys with the hair and the beards too, just like him, except that they were a little less famous, and they sang many songs about love. Two of them are already dead, just like him. And they, by the way, have a Wikipedia entry too. But that guy, there was something special about him. He was the son of God. Except that, actually, all of us are God's children, right? We were born in his image. So what the hell was it about that guy that turned him into such a big deal? Such a big deal that so many people throughout history were saved or killed in his name?...[continue reading]

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Teachers: Use Literary Magazines

NICHOLAS RIPATRAZONE

Literary magazine subscriptions at the classroom level are an educational luxury, not a need.  But that’s not a sufficient excuse.

Can secondary school teachers save literary magazines?  Save might not the best choice: the word presupposes both power in the savior and tremendous need in the recipient.  Perhaps help would work better: yes, secondary school teachers can greatly help literary magazines by inculcating excerpts or whole issues into their curriculum.  The same dictum applies for university professors, of course, but the consideration must be made that secondary school instructors have a wider breadth of influence, as not every student who graduates high school attends college.

I teach public high-school English full-time.  My schedule includes advanced and introductory creative writing courses, as well as a course called Advanced Placement Literature and Composition.  I use contemporary literary magazines in all of my courses as often as possible, and—at least based on my perception of student performance and the feedback from alumni—to a fair amount of pedagogical success.  Sure, it’s important for students to read Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Flannery O’Connor’s “Parker’s Back,” but it’s also important for them to know that both writers had published work in The Kenyon Review, among other literary magazines.  The Pynchons and O’Connors of the present are doing the same—and it would be a short-sighted injustice to avoid the good work accumulating in these “little magazines” and instead pining for and discussing in classrooms the latest novel release.

Before I go any further, I should admit that I could be doing a much better job in my financial support of literary magazines. I wish I could get classroom subscriptions to the New England Review, The Southern Review, AGNI, and other wonderful journals, but those who have worked in public education know the difficulties of working within community-voted budgets.  Literary magazine subscriptions at the classroom level are an educational luxury, not a need.  But that’s not a sufficient excuse. I should push for some measure of subscription at the classroom level, and this is certainly a goal for upcoming years...[continue reading] 

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Sam Ruddick has a riveting new article up at Luna Park on the new (or fairly new) issue of Versal, an English-language lit mag from Amsterdam. More than simply writing a magazine review, Ruddick uses pieces from the issue to explore how words function in literature and what it is that draws us to melancholy narratives:

Nonetheless, it seems clear that these pieces share an interest in identity and loss. They paint a grim picture of the world. Think of it: if the common experience, the one shared across cultural and geographical borders, is loss, if the “insight… that can be applied everywhere” is only that the one certain and immovable fact of life is loss, it’s a sad, sad world. I would almost call it hopeless. But for some reason I still keep coming back to an image in the closing paragraph of “Suit.” Our narrator tells us that the dealership is having some kind of promotion on Saturday, and imagines herself standing next to a machine that makes bubbles and blows them into the air. They “float out…carried by the currents of passing cars.” Most of them will burst, she says, if not against the silly sign she holds, then against the silly suit she has to wear. But, she says, “some will make it across the street.”

And to those, we attach our hope.

Remember ‘zines? (Okay, so maybe you never forgot, but I’ve been losing touch ever since I moved away from Portland and Powell’s Books.) Michael Berger writes on The Rumpus about a ZineWiki he stumbled upon—and, from it, how he came back around to one of my own favorite magazines from the past: Hermenaut...[continue reading]

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Aiming High: The Impossible Ambitions of Versal

SAM RUDDICK

I have no experience with gorilla suits or child soldiering, myself, but I think it’s reasonable to suspect that standing around in a gorilla suit is better than being coerced into shooting people, or getting shot at.

The inside cover of Versal’s 7th issue gives us a clue to the magazine’s aesthetic: the definition of “versal.” As it happens, versal is not only a word for versification, but an abbreviation of universal. In that sense, we might assume that Versal wants to be an umbrella encompassing literary expression and human experience. But versal can also mean “single, individual, (or) rare,” and in that sense, the magazine wants to print work that sets itself apart not only in stylistic terms, but in its emphasis on the individual—or, more specifically, the “I.”

In her introduction to the 7th issue, editor Megan M. Garr uses the term “translocal literature” to describe the loose category of writing she’s concerned with. But the idea the word “translocal” suggests may be misleading. It’s true that Versal crosses a number of physical borders. Printed in Amsterdam, it showcases stories and poems by writers working in a number of locales. Garr herself is an American living abroad (also, in Amsterdam). But in spite of all this, Versal doesn’t seem much interested in place. Displacement, perhaps, and certainly identity—but what “translocal” writers can offer, Garr claims, is really “insight into the translocal line that can then be applied everywhere.”

It’s an ambitious goal—and probably an impossible one—but at a time when literary, academic, political, and cultural discourse seems focused on difference, I find the optimism refreshing. And, inasmuch as it is possible, Versal delivers. Its emphasis on identity and displacement illuminates the individuality of the I, and highlights, in a general way, the emotional experiences we share.

Who’s we? Well, that’s a little more complicated. I can only give you a few examples, and hope my effort to connect the dots makes sense...[continue reading]

[Above image is the cover of Versal 7]

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‘Tis the season to support small presses. Once again HTMLGIANT is hosting its Annual Indie Lit Secret Santa. Lots of indie publishers like The Lifted Brow and Keyhole have already begun offering up special offers for Secret Santa participants. Here are some details:

From now till December 15, sign up to play Secret Santa at HTMLGiant. It’s easy! On the sign-deadline, you will find out your recipient and her or his address, and by Christmas (it’s December 25, this year, I think), send them a book from an indie press or a subscription to an indie mag. And you get one too! Sounds like it was a great success last year, and it’s sure to be this year, too.

Today’s the day The San Francisco Panorama from McSweeney’s hits the streets. The idea is to put out an exciting newspaper edition to show the power of the medium in a world of declining newspaper publishing incentives. (Click image at right for more details.) Flavorwire put up some last minute news on the event along with a brief interview with publisher Oscar Villalon.

Though not a literary magazine, exactly, this is not to be missed: The New Yorker has published an excerpt of David Foster Wallace’s forthcoming posthumous novel Pale King. (Via Flavorwire.) Here’s how it starts:

Once when I was a little boy I received as a gift a toy cement mixer. It was made of wood except for its wheels—axles—which, as I remember, were thin metal rods. I’m ninety per cent sure it was a Christmas gift. I liked it the same way a boy that age likes toy dump trucks, ambulances, tractor-trailers, and whatnot. There are little boys who like trains and little boys who like vehicles—I liked the latter.

The translation of Maupassant’s story “A Parisian Affair” in the new Five Dials 8b starts with the intriguing line: “Is there any keener sense known to man than woman’s curiosity?"...[continue reading]

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For most people who read fiction and spend much time online, this won’t be news: Electric Literature recently twittered the entirety of Rick Moody’s story “Some Contemporary Characters” over three days with the assistance of several co-publishers, of which Luna Park was one. The event was interesting to say the least, and response ranged from excitement to annoyance. Was the publishing event a success? It really depends on your perspective. Here’s a list of some of the more interesting responses that came out as the tweets were still rolling in: Carolyn Kellogg on Jacket Copy, Ryan Call on HTMLGIANT, Dennis Johnson on MobyLives, Patrick Brown for Vroman’s Bookstore. and Moody himself in discussion with The Brooklyn Ink.

Luna Park is looking for submissions from editors and writers for our upcoming series on issues of Race, Class, Gender & Sexuality in independent publishing—an idea that arrived largely in response to a piece we published earlier this year by Roxane Gay “On Race and Publishing“). Below is more from assistant editor Marcelle Heath:

We’d like to invite editors and writers to participate in our new series on issues and representations of race, class, gender, and sexuality in independent publishing. How do these issues affect you as an literary magazine editor interested in publishing underrepresented communities, or a writer who wants to challenge dominant notions of identity? What are your thoughts, concerns, ideas about how literary communities reinforce, respond to, and confront racism, classicism, and sexism? Email Marcelle Heath at lunaparkonline@gmail.com.

After last week’s post about excerpts from David Shields’s upcoming book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto in literary magazines such as A Public Space and PEN America, the editors of Knee-Jerk alerted me to the fact that they are publishing seven parts of the book, and have already published five along with an interview with Shields. (I also stumbled upon a great write-up of the book and where to find excerpts of it on The Millions.)

New England Review has published in their newest issue an absolutely fantastic group of writing about and by editor and writer Ted Solotaroff, who passed away in 2008. Solotaroff was founding editor of New American Review, one of the most successful and influential literary magazines of the late sixties and early seventies, publishing such now famous works as A. Alvarez on Sylvia Plath and an early draft of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. The NER issue includes a portion of Solotaroff’s unpublished final memoir covering his early days in the publishing world and remembrances by Robert Stone, Allegra Goodman, Robert Chohen, and many others...[continue reading]

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This morning at 10:00 AM we began co-tweeting Rick Moody's "Some Contemporary Characters," the author's new twitter story from Electric Literature. Possibly the first twitter story ever? Here's the first line:

"There are things in this taxable and careworn world that can only be said in a restrictive interface with a minimum of characters."

More on the event at Future Perfect Publishing.

Follow the entire story—140 characters at a time.

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We are taking a break from Luna Digest for the holiday, but I couldn’t help at least mentioning this:

I’ve been stumbling across some great excerpts recently from David Shields’s upcoming book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (a book previously mentioned/excerpted already on this blog by Shields himself, “David Shields: Reality Hunger“). For example, yesterday I picked up a copy of the most recent A Public Space at Borders and found a thrilling excerpt about fiction and truthfulness from Reality Hunger. Then, this morning, I received a review copy of PEN America and inside is yet another excerpt from Shields’s book, this time a section about mimesis: “The origin of the novel lies in its pretense of actuality.”

Much intrigued, I popped Shields’s name into Google in the hopes of finding an excerpt for this post and also to get more information in general...[continue reading]

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