What’s Up Rumpus? Two Pieces of Very Awesome News
(1) The Rumpus is having a book review competition open to all undergraduate and graduate students. There is no fee to enter. Book reviews must be at least 600 words (no longer than 1,500 words) and concern literary fiction, creative non-fiction, or memoir. The publication date of the book is irrelevant. The deadline to submit your review is June 1, 2009. (I know for a fact that editor Stephen Elliott is really psyched about this contest. If there’s a college student in your life (or if YOU are the college student in your life) who is interested in this sort of thing, you’d be doing him or her a big favor by passing the word along. Click anywhere here to see the details at the Rumpus.
(2) THE LONELY VOICE: A New Column About The Short Story by Peter Orner What else could you possibly need to be told about this? There’s basically no level at which it’s not exciting.
Black Tooth Grin: The High Life, Good Times, and Tragic End of “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott
I remember that I was dicking around at a Sydney Internet café in 2004 when I opened an email from my mom informing me that Pantera guitarist Dimebag (né Diamond) Darrell had been murdered by a crazed fan. You’d think that she was telling me my brother had died. The pain hasn’t faded with time. So when I received a galley from De Capo of the forthcoming Dime biography, I thought, “Hell, it’s about time.” The book comes out in May, and it will hold a place of honor on my bookshelf. You hear that, Jimmy Chen? Honor!
Dewclaw
Dewclaw is a new print journal edited by Evelyn Hampton, and one I am quite excited about. New independently compiled and edited magazines. That’s what we need.
This one indeed includes a few HTML Giant writers including myself, but surely the other fantastic presences exhibited below can allow to forgive this nasty error on the part of Ms. Hampton. :)
You can also now submit for issue 2: information below!
ISSUE 1 is now pre-orderable. $9 plus $1 for shipping. Click the Pay Pal button or email me if you’d like to pay some other way.
Contributors to issue 1!
Claire Donato
Matthew Simmons & Amy Minton
Mike Young
Blake Butler
Rachel B. Glaser
Claire Becker
Shya Scanlon
Cherri Wood
Amina Cain
Kathryn Regina
Matthew Salesses
Scott Garson
Jessica Treat
Leslie Patron
Isadora Bey
Stephanie BrachmanProse submissions may be between one and ten word-processor pages, poetry submissions may be up to six poems,and illustrators may submit up to four illustrations.
Send submissions to dewclaw.mag at gmail.com
Issue one will be perfect-bound and will be available in summer 2009. Check back here for ordering info.
Published contributors will receive a copy of the magazine.
Please check it out and show some love.
Uncategorized / 18 Comments
April 21st, 2009 / 8:33 pm
April 21st, 2009 / 8:33 pm
Reading Russia: The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov
It’s very hard for me to separate these two books in my mind. Elements of each strike me for their similarity: the characters Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov, Nastasya Filippovna and Agrafena Svetlova, Parfion Rogozhin and Dimitri Karamazov, Gavrila Ivolgin and Ivan Karamazov; there is some sort of complicated love triangle between everyone; someone is murdered in a gruesome fashion (by knife and by pestle); and so on.
The heft of these books encourages me to take them on long journeys, so that I may always have words to read. I want to wear them on my feet and grow two inches taller, because I am only 5’6″ and I read a study somewhere that taller people tend to make more $ in the business world. I want to hollow out these books and store smaller books inside of them and even smaller books inside of those books. These are the kinds of books that make me wish I could escape from writing stories that involve two people saying stupid things about sperm whales to each other. These are the kinds of books that make me miss good storytelling.
Uncategorized / 28 Comments
April 21st, 2009 / 8:29 pm
April 21st, 2009 / 8:29 pm
Risk sentimentality.
A nice piece of advice that started with Colum McCann, given to Marlon James, and then repeated in an interview conducted by Maud Newton.
The relationship is at least as gripping as what happens between Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre but fundamentally doomed. Was it difficult to write?
Oh my god it was the hardest thing I’ve ever written in my life. I remember calling friends shouting, “I just wrote a love scene! All they do is kiss!” to which they would respond, “. . . and are they then dismembered?” and I’d go, “No, after that they dance!” It was hard. I resisted it for as long as I could because I didn’t believe in it at first, and even when I did, I couldn’t figure out how to write it. Not until Irish novelist Colum McCann gave me permission by giving me the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten from a writer: Risk Sentimentality.
There’s a belief that sex is the hardest thing for a literary novelist but I disagree: love is. We’re so scared of descending into mush that I think we end up with a just-as-bad opposite, love stories devoid of any emotional quality. But love can work in so many ways without having to resort to that word. Someone once scared me by saying that love isn’t saying “I love you” but calling to say “did you eat?” (And then proceeded to ask me this for the next 6 months). My point being that, in this novel at least, relationships come not through words, but gestures like the overseer wanting to cuddle.
The rest of the interview is here.
EXCERPT: from Ellen Kennedy’s Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs (#2)
Brighter and Clearer
After I have an orgasm my body feels like a sombrero-shaped galaxy slowly expanding in the eyepiece of a 4th grader’s telescope
After I watch a family of lions tear apart the body of a large deer on the Discovery Channel I feel a calming sense of inferiority
After I watch a horror movie I can’t go to the bathroom without you holding my hand while I pee
After I take my vegan dietary supplement my piss is brighter and clearer
After I kiss your eyelids my lungs squeeze out through my ribs, then through my belly button and slowly fly to your face and push very lightly on your cheeks
After I forget something I said I would remember my brain becomes a roll of vegetable futomaki that an obese chinchilla is trying to eat all in one bite
After I make you cry one of my organs melts into a runny paste that trickles down the inside of my body and collects at the bottom of my feet
After I make you feel indifferent towards me my heart turns into a small desert hamster running very quickly on an exercise wheel and then tripping and then spinning around in distress until the wheel stops and the hamster can get up and try running again, but in a more conscious and concerned way
Buy Sometimes My Heart Pushes My Ribs from Muumuu House.
Ellen Kennedy’s blog.
HINT FICTION CONTEST
barry graham asked me to mention this contest. the guidelines are here. you have to write something termed “hint fiction” which is a piece of writing at or below 25 words. do the contest. don’t be stubborn.
Uncategorized / 37 Comments
April 20th, 2009 / 11:11 pm
April 20th, 2009 / 11:11 pm
Please help me destroy $75
I have a $75 gift certificate to Target that I got as a suprise bonus gift for judging some middle schoolers’ creative writing. It was mostly all entires about Michael Phelps, 9-11, and Barack Obama, but there were some nice surprises, like the one about the dude made out of hashbrowns. One kid had written a rap about candy and money and girls; I gave him second place in his grade. Two of my picks won state also, I am wondering if he was one of them? And will soon have a record coming out about candy and money and girls? Anyway, now I have no idea what to buy and it is burning my hand to hold. Their website actually has a pretty great selection of books, and plus all that other booshit that I never think about looking at. Any suggestions on how to spend this playa bankroll?
Influences 3: Nathan Tyree
And now the third response to my influences post. The subject is Nathan Tyree.
1) Pick one of the pieces you chose and describe the thing about it that seems particularly innovative about it.
2) Tell me what changed about your writing because of that innovation.
Here are his responses:
1) Naked Lunch was the first thing I read that was truly experimental. I was sixteen, and all the novels I had read followed the same rules, the same strictures of what a novel was. Burroughs seemed to be saying “fuck the novel”, he seemed to be spitting in in they eye of society. Naked Lunch wasn’t a novel; it was an insult- a savage cry. Everything I read after that had to be seen through a different, distorted lens.
2) I stopped being afraid. NL made me realize that you learn the rules so that you can break them with glee.
storySouth Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2008
soldier fighting in the south exerts his democracy by reading printed out online story
Here’s the list. I may need to be corrected on this, but I think this is how it works: 1) editors and readers nominate stories via blog comments under their respective categories, 2) notable anonymous editors pick through the list and come up with the ‘notable stories’ list, and 3) finally, Jason Sanford, the editor of storySouth, picks the winners (forthcoming).
This is a gathering of diverse tastes, wherein anyone (as readers), can nominate their favorite stories. So at this point in the process, these stories have received praise from at least two entities. With all respect to Jason Sanford’s final decision, I’m always more interested in this list, as it is indicative of a greater population of sensibilities.