From Action Yes editors:
For the rest of the month of April, Action,Yes is open to submissions. So please send your art, sounds, words and ideas to submissions@actionyes.org. Include the word ‘Submission’ in the subject line.
This is our first open submissions period. We apologize to those of you who’ve sent us work in the past who we’ve not been able to respond too. It doesn’t mean we weren’t impressed with your work; it just means that we didn’t know how pick through the prodigious spam of our (old) inboxes to find it. So please send again.
Looking forward to seeing your work.
Meanwhile, if you have not yet dug into the new issue, holy shit. Probably one of my favorite all-time issues of a magazine, only or no. Too much good from 2x the freaks, including Dodie Bellamy, Lily Hoang, Angela Genusa, Elizabeth Ellen, Aaron Kunin, Lara Glenum, FLUXCONCERT, Matt Kirkpatrick, Rauan Klassnik, Mark Leidner, Sabrina Oren Mark, Christian Peet, Evan Willner, Girjia Tropp, a whole lot of other madness.
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Uncategorized / 2 Comments
April 10th, 2009 / 12:09 pm
Back in ’93, a younger, debatably handsomer Drew Toal used to, before school, watch a pair of largely forgotten cartoons—Conan the Adventurer, as well as the poorly animated, yet colon-cleansingly awesome space drama, Exosquad. The latter, in particular, was—in the parlance of our times, “the tits.” It’s set in the future, as all worthwhile stories are, and chronicles the goings on of a group of soldiers in the Exofleet, as they battle the evil space pirates of Jonas Simbacca, and later join forces with him to fight a greater foe, the Neosapian menace (Perhaps one day we will have to strike an uneasy alliance with the Somali buccaneers against a resurgent Mongolian military? Time will tell). Now, the animation looks like it was done by a not-particularly-gifted two year old (creater Will Meugniot also made this terrible DragonLance cartoon adaptation awhile back), and the show was canceled before the story could be totally resolved, but man, what a story. So, yeah, I’ve been waiting patiently for about a decade for this business to come to DVD, and on April 14, my long wait appears to be at an end. Stop laughing at me.
Technology / 9 Comments
April 10th, 2009 / 9:33 am
Adam Peterson, coeditor of The Cupboard and author of My Untimely Death, visited Houston today. He flew into Houston this morning. He walked into my office around, like, 1:30pm or something. We talked about stuff. Then I went to teach my intro lit class, and he checked into his hotel room. Then we met up again after my class and drove to The Menil to look at art. Then we met Gene Morgan for burgers. Then we drove with Gene Morgan to Poison Girl for a few drinks and met up with Brian Rod of The Joanna Gallery. Then I drove Gene Morgan home, and then I dropped Adam Peterson off at his hotel, and I drove myself home.
This is a quick review of Adam Peterson’s chapbook My Untimely Death from Subito Press. Thank you for reading this post.
Adam Peterson’s My Untimely Death is a small, perfect-bound chapbook of 43 pages. The cover design is minimal, simple, and exciting: a block of something (lead?) crashes downward across the front page, smoke and fire billowing behind it, to strike Adam Peterson on the face, if he were standing just off the page.
The fifteen texts in the chapbook tell of various ways that the narrator has arrived at an untimely death: death by block of lead falling from the sky, death by long fall, death by bubble bath, death by malfunction, death by roo-roo.
Death by ex-lovers.
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10 Comments
April 10th, 2009 / 2:02 am
I just got this in the email like a second ago. So it’s just a press release, but I figure who wouldn’t want to know about this? Goons, is who. So all you non-goons, read on:
One Story would like to take a moment to announce the publication of our next issue, “Hurt People.” This story is by Cote Smith, a previously unpublished author.
At One Story, we are committed to discovering new talent and showcasing original voices. For this reason, One Story will never publish an author more than once. We are proud to say that 10% of our writers are published for the first time in our pages.
This issue marks the launch of our “Introducing New Writers” series. “Hurt People” will arrive in a custom envelope, marking it as a fiction debut and inviting subscribers to congratulate the author on our blog.
We will host a reading in Lawrence, Kansas–where Cote Smith is finishing his MFA in fiction writing–in May. As part of this series, we will be hosting hometown readings for writers who publish for the first time in One Story in 2009. This is made possible by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
We hope you enjoy “Hurt People” and the introduction of a bright new literary voice.
Uncategorized / 24 Comments
April 9th, 2009 / 5:20 pm
(Did you miss Part 1?) Yesterday I taught Ernest Hemingway’s very short story “A Very Short Story” to my English 101 class. It was a pretty successful venture, I think. After teaching the story twice in as many hours, I got on the 4:26 New Brunswick->Penn Station train, and read “Pet” by Deb Olin Unferth.
There may not be quite a PhD dissertation to be written on similarities between Hemingway’s and Unferth’s work, but all the same, I found myself dwelling on how my two tours through “A Very Short Story” seemed to have primed me for “Pet,” which I heard Unferth read once but hadn’t yet myself read on the page.
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20 Comments
April 9th, 2009 / 11:54 am
I don’t know if you’ve read about this anywhere, but via Galleycat a few weeks ago I clicked on a link to a downloadable story written in an Excel spreadsheet. It’s author, David Nygren, wrote a story and typed its various parts into columns.
Reactions on the internet have been, um, confusingly positive, based on my lazy web browsing. 10,000 people have downloaded the story. The comments section at his blog is full of praise. Other blogs and sites link to it. Even a blogger for The New Yorker picked it up, though she was deadpan in her post:
A writer has “built” a short story using an Excel spreadsheet divided into three columns: one for action, one for dialogue, and one for internal monologue.
I wonder how tempted she was to put those quotation marks around writer.
Sorry, David. I’m just teasin’ ya!
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Mean / 29 Comments
April 9th, 2009 / 2:04 am
For Immediate Release
We are excited to announce a wonderful event upcoming on April 23-25 in New York: A Celebration of the Chapbook, a three-day festival featuring panels, workshops and a bookfair. For a full schedule of events, visit http://centerforthehumanitiesgc.org/festival .
This festival celebrates the chapbook and highlights its rich history, as well as its essential place in poetry publishing today, as a vehicle for alternative poetry projects and for emerging authors and editors to gain entry into the literary marketplace. The festival hopes to forge a new platform for the study of the chapbook inside and outside the academy.
We invite you to visit the fair and attend the panels and workshops, all of which are free of charge. Please note that the workshops require registration, and will fill up fast, so reserve your seat now. Visit http://centerforthehumanitiesgc.org/festival for instructions on how to register.
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Random / 10 Comments
April 8th, 2009 / 11:58 pm
there is a new issue of DOGZPLOT up. ELIZABETH ELLEN, BRAD GREEN, JA TYLER (he is now JA, not J.A., as in “jah” as in “jah calling”), VERLESS DORAN, HANNAH PASS, BRIAN ALLEN CARR, NATE TYREE and other people (i just lost the will to continue to copy and paste the names).
Uncategorized / 15 Comments
April 8th, 2009 / 10:06 pm
Interviewer: You were in your forties when you wrote the first of the stories from Heart Songs. Do you think you had a late start when it comes to writing fiction?