New Masthead at storySouth
Jason Sanford has changed some things over at storySouth. Here’s an excerpt from his letter prefacing the latest issue.
The new publisher will be Spring Garden Press, a well-regarded literary publisher in Greensboro, North Carolina. storySouth‘s new editor will be Terry Kennedy, the Associate Director of the MFA Writing Program at UNCG Greensboro and the editor of Spring Garden Press. Joining him as fiction editor will be Drew Perry, a UNCG alum who teaches fiction writing at Elon University; as poetry editor Julie Funderburk, who previously served as one of storySouth‘s associate editors; as designer Andrew Saulters, who created the websites for the UNCG MFA Program, The Greensboro Review, and Spring Garden Press.
All of the current storySouth editors will remain involved in the journal in different ways—for example, I will continue to direct our Million Writers Award—but the journal will now be run by Terry and his crew. I’m really excited about the skills and abilities Terry and Spring Garden Press bring to storySouth., and I know they will continue the journal’s mission of publishing the best writings from the New South.
Anyhow, this is merely a press release post to let people know if they didn’t already know.
Nothing exciting here.
Goodbye.
Uncategorized / 4 Comments
March 21st, 2009 / 1:12 am
March 21st, 2009 / 1:12 am
English lessons with Ma
My mom recently (finally) started using email. I set up a yahoo account for her and she doesn’t understand the concept of passwords, so neither my father or I can use our yahoomail accounts, as we must keep her ‘signed in’ at all times. The few times when I signed her out, she freaked. She has officially acclimated/regressed like the rest of us. Now she emails me every day ad infin asking me to edit her emails to her friends in China. This was today’s discourse:
Power Quote: Harold Bloom
Literature is not merely language; it is also the will to figuration, the motive for metaphor that Nietzsche once defined as the desire to be different, the desire to be elsewhere. This partly means to be different from oneself, but primarily, I think, to be different from the metaphors and images of the contingent works that are one’s heritage: the desire to write greatly is the desire to be elsewhere, in a time and place of one’s own, in an originality that must compound with inheritence, with the anxiety of influence.
– “Preface and Prelude” to The Western Canon
The Suburban Swindle by Jackie Corley
Femme Friday People! Next week I’ll highlight some old school righteous woman, but today, I review The Suburban Swindle by the amazing Jackie Corley:
“It’s impossible to be anything but a memory” Juliana Hatfield
Jackie Corley, in her short story collection, The Suburban Swindle, (So New Publishing), creates a loved and loathed world, a deeply felt suburban New Jersey, peopled by flawed, suffering characters and often narrated by an “I” that feels much older than her twentysomething years. Like Justin Taylor in his excellent book of poems, More Perfect Depictions of Noise (soon to be reviewed by my husband) Corley manages to use her youth as a writer to her great advantage. She is so close to her material that a rawness of emotion, a bewilderment with the edges of life, comes alive on the page.
The opening lines say it all and Corley never lets up after them:
What are we? What we are is oiled sadness. Dead Garden snakes and dried-up slugs. We’re what happens when you’re bored and scared too long, when you sit in piles in some dude’s basement trying to get the guy’s white supremacist brother to shut the fuck up for five fucking minutes.
Fun with… Mathias Svalina’s iPod
Probably most of you know Mathias Svalina as half of Octopus. Well, unlike other-half Zachary Schomburg, Mathias made the mistake of coming over to my house and drinking beer with me. He also made the mistake of leaving his iPod here. Then he went to Nebraska for a week. Then I went to Atlanta for a few days. Now other stuff is happening, but the upshot is that I’ve had his iPod for at least two weeks now–maybe three? It’s just been sitting on my desk. And we keep emailing about setting up a time to get it back to him, but we never seem to be able to meet up. So I finally decided I should make the most of my time, and share some of the highlights with you.
Literary Lessons from Metal Magazines: Double bass drum day
How about two metal posts today? This is from Terrorizer, an English EXTREME METAL magazine. Richard Hoak, drummer for Brutal Truth, has this band called Total Fucking Destruction. What follows is a synopsis of the concept around which they wrote their most recent album: READ MORE >
Conversations and Connections Conference
HL Mencken at last year's conference
If you’re anywhere near DC on April 11th, like within 250 miles I guess, you’ll want to sign up for the Conversations and Connections conference. It’ll be like AWP but with panels that are worth attending. There’s one about flash fiction and one about contests and I’m sitting on one that Reb Livingston put together about new ways to publish stuff. There’s a lot more, too, like craft lectures — but what I’m most looking forward to is the speed dating thing where I get ten minutes to be helpful talking face to face with people about their poetry. In such a short amount of time I’m sure I will be accidentally offensive, so this conference will be worth attending just to witness some lady kick the shit out of me with her purse.
Seriously, I recommend Conversations and Connections highly. It’s put together by the great people at Barrelhouse and a couple other journals and schools. A bunch of HTML Giant friends will be there. Plus you make the admission fee back in swag — a free book and a subscription to a journal.
Oh yeah, Amy Hempel is the keynote.
Uncategorized / 14 Comments
March 19th, 2009 / 10:26 pm
March 19th, 2009 / 10:26 pm
BookLyfe, or Compendium #1
Millions crushed underneath.
Hello everyone. Pappy Blake Butler has allowed me to talk out loud a bit, and for that I am grateful. I hope to not bug the hell out of everyone here at HTMLG.
I’ve gleaned a lot of booktalk from the internet in the past week or so, and I’ll present it here, all at once. To start: Over at the Vroman’s Bookstore blog, Patrick Brown discusses the National Book Critics Circle’s recommended reading list. Patrick says:
…their recommended list leaves a bit to be desired. It’s not that the books on the list aren’t good — they are — it’s that they’re, well, a little obvious. My friend Cory, blogger at Skylight Books in LA, pointed out that Philip Roth made the list. Looking at the fiction list, I feel a little like Jack Black’s character in High Fidelity, “Philip Roth? Not obvious. No, not obvious at all. Come on, NBCC, couldn’t you make it easier? What about Hemingway? How about William Shakespeare? Why not recommend Hamlet?” I don’t mean to hammer on Philip Roth, who I love, but come on. Does he really need the readers?
Literary Lessons from Metal Magazines: A Constant Variation in a Series
Cradle of Filth, uh, Rock.
Let’s head bang! I picked up the magazine Metal Edge (I like free CDs) the other day and I must say, I think I like Metal Maniacs better. Metal Edge’s list of the Greatest Frontmen in Metal made my eyeballs spit bacon (thanks Blake!). But I hate to complain. All these hard working metal journalists, not to mention the bands, make me happy. I had known about H. P. Lovecraft’s invented monster/thing/force, Cthulhu, but I didn’t know all the various bands that refer to him/it in their music (Metallica, Cradle of Filth, Black Sabbath, Mercyful Fate, Catacombs, The Black Dahlia Murder (I like James Ellroy’s WORK, WORKEDY WORK- that is for you Blake, and I once owned a first edition of White Jazz signed by Ellroy with this inscription “Fear this evil book”- it was stolen by a douchy editor from New York Magazine))! I also really enjoyed the little write up on Cthulhu by Matt Cibula and thought it worthy to share with my fellow htmlgianters who dig metal:
WHAT ARE YOUR WRITING HABITS/RITUALS/METHODS
"dear new yorker, enclosed is my story, HIT A HOMERUN FOR GRANDMA, LITTLE BILLY."
i think everyone has or has had a method. what is your method? here’s mine for right now:
sit down on my bed (which has no box spring, sits on floor)
pinch my eyes closed to avoid crying (then use the one or two tears that fall onto my leg to twist up my leg hair into “dreads”)
inhale a beachball filled with nitrous
then just cut and paste babysitter’s club books and pantera lyrics