Hunger No More

Have you wanted to read Hunger Mountain's Body Issue, which was previously out only in print?Well, hunger no more. That special issue is now available online, including my poem 'Theories of Flow' (which appears in my manuscript Whiteout). There are also poems by Frannie Lindsay, Joel Brouwer, francine j. harris, and more Frannie Lindsay. Plus others. Check out this controversial issue (controversial because of the artwork and cover).

The Ninth Letter of Hunger Mountain is U!

I'm pleased to have my poem "On Hearing of Your Hearing Loss" in the Spring/Summer 2015 Issue of Ninth Letter. Thanks to editors Jodee Stanley, Michael Madonick, Sarah Fan, and the rest! And congratulations to Corey Van Landingham, G. C. Waldrep, Claire Donato, and others whose work was also selected.

Also, two poems, "The Fold" and "Theories of Flow," are in the Body Issue of Hunger Mountain, which came out this spring. Thanks to editors Miciah Gault and Karen Cygnarowicz! I haven't been able to find much evidence of the issue online, though here it's mentioned at New Pages. Click on that link and you will learn that it has "spectacular (and controversial) cover art," which may be why its web presence is so limited. My contributor's copies were sent (by my request) to my parents' home (I often do this to save journals overseas postage), and my father was upset by the art and wanted to destroy the copies, by my mother wouldn't let him, and apparently she hid them. Anyway, it goes without saying, I have yet to see it (well, I found it online at the website of the designer, Laura Rossi Garcia, if you want to see what the fuss is about, but controversial it is, so consider yourself warned).

So, there's that. And that's all the good news for now. Yay.

What I Did Instead of AWP

I didn't go to AWP. In fact, I have never gone.

It isn't that I didn't/don't want to, although being the introvert I am, I suspect that even had I gone/if I go, I would have spent/will spend a lot of time feeling overwhelmed.

Still, I'd like a chance to be so overwhelmed someday, when I don't live so far away that cost and travel time would burden my family. Someday.

Here's what I did instead of go to AWP:

1) Got excellent news concerning not one by two of my poetry manuscripts. Will tell more later, when appropriate.

2) Went to book club where we discussed And the Mountains Echoed, which was complex and interesting and yet didn't leave me wanting to read the other two Khaled Hosseini's bestsellers.

3) Got a haircut that I hate and still haven't figured out how to cope with.

4) Had tea with my closest Japanese friend during which time she told me she is moving.

5) Heard from my closest non-Japanese friend that she may also be moving.

6) Got a check for two poems that will soon be appearing in the Vermont College of Fine Arts' journal Hunger Mountain.

7) Took my son to a 4 1/2-hour awards ceremony in which children sat in a different section than their parents, so I was all alone, the only 'foreigner' in a sea of Japanese. I confess that at one point, for about an hour I put my iPod ear bud in one ear and ignored some of the endless drivel of the ceremony. Son received a medal for his academics.

8) Worked hard on three poems for my new project.

9) Baked desserts for my family, after not baking during the two years I was working on my newly-completed masters.

10) Cleaned out my bookshelves and got rid of over 100 books, but it didn't make much of a dent.

11) Wrote syllabi for the new school year starting in April.


Not quite the same as AWP, but no complaints here!

Interesting Interviews

Here are a couple of interviews worth reading.

First, Ploughshares blogwriter Jamie Quatro interviews four poets about first drafts and writing processes. The four poets are Traci Brimhall, Amy Gerstler, Andrew Hudgins, and Timothy Liu.

Also, Hunger Mountain blogwriter Claire interviews speculative fiction writer Cynthia Kraack, and here it's the questions that are particularly interesting. You might want to think about them yourself.

Book Shame

Just the other day I was emailing with my virtual friend Chris about books we haven't read and are embarrassed not to have. His was Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano; mine was (is!) Herman Melville's Moby Dick. We both have copies of our unread books and we both have good intentions, but......

Today on the blog at Hunger Mountain many editors reveal their Book Shame, classics they feel they should have read by now but haven't. I'm happy to report that at least one other person hasn't read Moby Dick!

Since my last post was about reading, and the previous one was about shame, book shame seems right up my alley.

What about you? What haven't you read that nags at you?

Bradbury's List

My parents recently sent me a box full of books and journals that they had received on my behalf (since I live in Japan, I often ask non-profits to send books to my parents' stateside address, and when they have a full box, they forward it to me).

In the almost magical box of books was two issues of Hunger Mountain, the VCFA journal of the arts, from last year. Flipping randomly through issue No. 15 : The Thing at the Top of the Stairs (which is an issue from 2010, delayed at my parents' home for an extended period of time), I noticed a lot of lists of seemingly random objects, each headed by an author's name, a date, and a location. Intrigued, I turned to the Editor's Note for an explanation. And found one.

It seems that Ray Bradbury, in his book Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You, suggests a word association writing practice he himself uses, in which a writer makes a sudden list of nouns to reveal to the self the self's own obsessions, to know what images to follow in order to mine deep spaces within the self. The editors of Hunger Mountain gave a similar challenge to some of their contributors, to make a quick unplanned list of nouns, and those were the lists I was seeing throughout the journal.

I love a list, as regular readers of this blog will now. So I could not be more delighted with this issue. Here are some of the more startling items found on lists (name of the listmaker will be in parentheses, and the capitalization and punctuation will represent the lists as they stand in the journal):

The stamen (Bruce Smith)
the confession booth (Michael Martone)
The dripping faucet and the fact of stars (Weston Cutter)
spider eggs (Richard Adams Corey)
The auger....The crawl space. (Gladys Haunton)
Lackawanna (Angie Estes; her list was particularly singular)
periodic table of elements. (Josie Sigler)
Torque. (J. D. Lewis)

Now the list above is my list, since I filtered through the lists in which the known world had already been filtered by these writers and others. But I did make a list all on my own too. It included: roofs, graph paper, electrons, and apples. None of which were big surprises to me.

What will I do with this list? I don't know. Should you make a list for yourself? I don't know that either. But it couldn't hurt, and it might be fun, and it might lead you somewhere.

Let me know.

Worth Sharing

Here are a few things I've run across recently that are worth sharing. First is "The New Writing Rule," post by Claire Guyton on the Hunger Mountain blog. (LOVE Hunger Mountain, by the way, both for their poetry and for their support of YA and middle grade writers. Also be patient when clicking on their link; it takes awhile, at least on my computer).

And here Seattle Magazine interviews Jennifer Borges Foster about her commitment to hand-binding Filter Literary Journal so that it's a tactile piece of art as well as a literary endeavor (see my earlier post on this journal for more information).

I thought I had more, but I guess that's it for today. Enjoy!