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I don’t know about you, my friends, but here in Columbus the snows have set in, which means it’s time for me to get back to my duties as Online Editor, and likely means it’s time for you all to come in from your holidays and get back to your books. As we let this past year’s frozen remains sink into the ocean’s icy dark, while we remain on a piece of wreckage-turned-life-raft, floating into the mysterious waters of 2013, it’s time for 2012’s last gasp (“We’ll never let go!”). And thus, I come to you this week with an end-of-the-year list.

Nick McRae, Poetry Review Editor: Olives, A.E. Stallings; The Coal Life, Adam Vines

McRae’s first pick is the third collection of poems by Athens-based American Alicia Elsbeth, and you can read and listen to the title poem here. Nick’s second pick is The Coal Life by Adam Vines, who is the editor of the Birmingham Poetry Review. This debut collection is available from the University of Arkansas Press.

Dominic Russ, Fiction and Nonfiction Review Editor: Train Dreams, Denis Johnson

Mr. Russ picked a book that came out in August 2011, but it’s the Holidays so I let it slide. Also, I have a soft spot for Denis Johnson, who, in my opinion, is one of our greatest living prosers. Not one of his books has failed to impress me, including this novella about the development and expansion of the American West during the early 20th century, which was originally published in The Paris Review in 2002.

Silas Hansen, Nonfiction Editor: Wild, Cheryl Strayed; Hitless Wonder: A Life in Minor League Rock and Roll, Joe Oestreich

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail is Cheryl Strayed’s memoir of hiking up the West Coast after the death of her mother and the dissolution of her marriage and, being a Pacific Northwesterner myself, I’m looking forward to reading it (Wild was also the first selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0). Joe Oestreich is an OSU Alumnus who was very kind and funny when he was here for the Creative Writing Bookfair in September. The reading he gave from his book dealt with his experiences with his Columbus-based band, Watershed, and was also quite hilarious.

Michael Marberry, Poetry Editor: Touch, Henri Cole; Holding Company, Major Jackson; Slow Lightning, Eduardo Corral; Maybe the Saddest Thing, Marcus Wicker; Animal Eye, Paisley Rekdal

If this list is any indication, Mr. Marberry has been busy this year. I won’t try to cover all of these titles, but I’ll note that Henri Cole is a member of the faculty here at OSU, who has gained himself a good bit of notice for his excellent dispatches in The New Yorker. Good reading, if you’re in a Paris state of mind.

Nick White, Fiction Editor: This Is How You Lose Her, Junot Díaz; The Round House, Louise Erdrich

My brother gave me Díaz’s story collection for Christmas, which Nick has picked as one of his favorite titles of 2012. This Is How You Lose Her reunites us with Yunior, and in it Díaz uses a variety of perspectives to paint this portrait of a cheater’s downfall. The Round House just won Louise Erdrich a much-deserved National Book Award, and deals with a rape on a Native American reservation.

As for me, the best I’ve read this year is either Nathan Englander’s spectacular short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, or Kevin Powers’ The Yellow Birds, which is one of the first novels that deals with the most recent Iraq War in a way that feels equal to the subject. If you’re so inclined, you can read an excerpt here.

That’s it for 2012, ladies and gents. Celebrate duly, and check back with us in the New Year. Bonne nuit et bonne chance.

A noted teacher and poetry critic, William Logan is the author of numerous poetry collections—most recently, Madame X and an edition of John Townsend Trowbridge’s Guy Vernon, both released in 2012. William’s poem “Winter Before Winter” is featured in issue 37.1 of The Journal. Recently, he spoke with Associate Poetry Editor Jenna Kilic about stanzaic form in free-verse poetry, the role of reading in writing, and his own growing interest in his childhood experiences.

Jenna Kilic: In “Winter Before Winter,” your couplets connect thought to thought or observation to observation, building an argument; they also isolate and therefore augment a series of beautiful images. When you write, how do you conceive the stanzaic organization? How did you see the couplets working here?

William Logan: Dividing free verse into regular stanzas is fairly recent in American poetry—I suspect we owe Stevens that debt. When I was young, tercets and quatrains were common. I long felt that quatrains possessed a grave formality, while tercets absorbed a certain jaggedness of logic in their forward rush. Perhaps I’ve favored those forms too much, but I like the play of sentence against line, line against stanza. I like the astringency of couplets, their sharp-minded melodrama of form; but if overused they empty out everything they touch. Many poets now work in one-line stanzas. There I stop. I’d like to think that the poem conceives its own stanza, but that’s just romance.

JK: I’ve had contentious conversations with other poets about what constitutes a “poem.” Some think a poem is whatever you call a poem. I’ve argued that if you define it as everything you define it as nothing. Since we’ve blurred the lines between genres, how do we now define the term “poem”?

WL: That’s like trying to hit a moving target with a shoe, and not a very good shoe. Why believe that a poem is, say, the “best words in the best order,” if lovely poems by Williams have not-so-good words in not-so-good order? (Unless the argument is circular, a good poem automatically having best words in best order.) Any definition sufficient to corral the varieties of poetry would be ridiculously vague or longer than a Russian novel. I like a definition that doesn’t legislate or criminalize. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott suggested that the poet “does one thing only, he imagines poetically.” That will do.

JK: In Madame X, “Along the Autumn River” addresses the loss of fishing commerce and nature in your boyhood town of Westport Point, Massachusetts. I’ve had similar observations about losses in my hometown and on the river on which I grew up. What is your connection to this town and why does it mean more, say, than other places you’ve lived?

WL: For decades I wrote almost nothing about my childhood, because it seemed as dull, as profitless, as unpromising as most childhoods. Only in the past few books have I had cause to reconsider. My father was a salesman for Alcoa, and in 1955 we moved to Westport Point so he could work out of the Providence office. Westport is a village hard by the Rhode Island border. It had some small manufacturers in the nineteenth century (part of the northern reaches of town is still called Westport Factory), but the Point survived mainly on whaling and fishing. I went to first and second grade in a two-room schoolhouse—the last names of my classmates (Tripp, Macomber) could be found in the census records a century or more before. It was a quiet, unpretentious place; and we were allowed to roam without restraint. The bachelor who lived behind us down the hill suffered our visits with extraordinary grace. When he later murdered a man over the salvage of a boat, my father flew back to serve as a character witness at his trial. By then we lived in Pittsburgh, but we returned summers until I was fourteen. I realize now that what I took for granted has almost vanished from American life. The town hasn’t changed much, but the locals can’t afford the houses unless they inherit.

JK: Many of your poems might be considered erudite, and I’m astounded by how well-researched they are. How do you write the historical poems? Does the desire to write a poem fuel your research, or do you acquire the necessary knowledge and then decide to write the poem?

WL: I hope I’m too wayward to have a method. I’m willing to chase facts if facts are required. On rare occasions, my stray reading has tossed up a topic, though I’ve read hundreds of memoirs and books of letters without an end in view—if that’s a method, it’s singularly unproductive. The letters between the Custers in Madame X and the letter from Charles Dodgson in Sullen Weedy Lakes are based on real letters, with only the adjustments the syllabic form demanded. For the long poems “Keats in India” in Vain Empires and “The Underground” in Sullen Weedy Lakes, I read, then read more. The Keats poem was based on travelers’ journals; it steals a few images from Bishop Heber. “The Underground” required at least paltry knowledge of the intricacies of Victorian banking and the causes of the Crimean War. I’m sure some of the facts in my poems are just imagination, and some of the imagination plain fact.

JK: What advice do you have for poets graduating from MFA programs?

WL: Eat cheaply. Buy more books than you can read. Read more than you buy. Brush your teeth.

JK: Movies. You’ve watched so many, and you seem to love westerns and Japanese films. What is it about these genres? Do you find similarities in your preference for movies and your preference for poems?

WL: No doubt I watched movies on the little Magnavox my parents owned in the fifties, but what I remember are evenings they took us to the Westport drive-in. I used to see 150 or more new movies a year—now it’s barely one a week. I loathe pretentiousness, artiness (I’m not a big Godard fan), and virtually any American movie made in the fifties—all that unbearable social conscience—honorable ideas, but too much hectoring. I loved Bergman when I was young; now I’d rather see Preston Sturges, Ozu, Kurosawa, with a few bad thrillers thrown in. Like Wittgenstein, I find that movies offer escape without regret (he preferred westerns)—unless the movie is awful, of course, as so many are. Bad thrillers excepted.

If my love of movies bears any relation to my love of poems, someone will have to explain it to me.

There is no rest for the weary around The Journal’s offices—I was as busy as a one-armed paperhanger in November, and the posting around here has suffered a bit as a result. But, as we head into the home stretch of 2012, I plan on getting back on a more regular schedule, so please check in during December for posts on the current state of the literary translation market and The Journal staff’s favorite volumes of the year, as well as interviews with some of our distinguished former contributors.

As the days grow short though, there’s no mistaking that we’re in the midst of award season. So, in keeping with Holiday spirit, we at The Journal have submitted our Pushcart nominees and we just can’t keep them to ourselves any longer.

In fiction, we’re proud to nominate “Out of Illiana” by Chidelia Edochie (which appeared in issue 36.1, our winter 2012 issue) and Joan Murray’s “Abu Grave” (Issue 36.1, Winter 2012). In nonfiction, we were delighted to be able to put Robert Long Foreman’s “James and the Giant Noise Violation” (Issues 36.1, Winter 2012) up for the honor, as well as “What is the Shape” by Liz Scheid (Issue 36.3, Summer 2012). And in the poetry department, we happily sent along Christina Veladota’s “The Threshold of Can We Do This Now” (Issue 36.2, Spring 2012), and Keetje Kuipers’ “Just Outside” (Issue 36.4, Autumn 2012). Unfortunately, we did not have anything appropriate for the category of “literary whatnot” as listed on the Pushcart website, but we’ll work on that.

The bribe envelopes have been distributed, so now it’s just a matter of counting the, um, votes.  See you around, dear readers, and stay warm out there.

Justin Runge lives in Lawrence, Kansas, where he serves as poetry editor of Parcel and helms Blue Hour Press. He is the author of Plainsight, published by New Michigan Press. Poems of his have appeared in Linebreak, DIAGRAM, Harpur Palate, and elsewhere. He can be found at www.justinrunge.me. Justin’s poems—“The Arbor” and “Love” —appeared in Issue 36.4 of The Journal, and he recently spoke with Poetry Editor Michael Marberry about these poems, the connections between poetry and film, and the role that technology might play in literary publishing.

Michael Marberry: “The Arbor” and “Love” are such weird, wonderful things—enigmatically titled, very carefully constructed at the line-level, and beautifully haunting in their imagery. I’m curious: where in the world did these poems come from? What inspired or shaped them? I must know the answers to these questions immediately!

Justin Runge: Well, the real “secret” behind the project is that each poem is a response to a trailer for a movie I haven’t seen. The project is inspired by Rae Armantrout’s Versed, which has a poem—I think it’s called “Versions”—with sections titled after a film. She doesn’t draw attention to their true natures, but I remember thinking, “Huh, The Happening? Like that M. Night Shyamalan movie?” The application of ekphrasis to trailers was very intriguing to me. I was in a slump, so I thought that using trailers as prompts would get me writing. Like Armantrout, my poems share titles with their respective films: “Love” and “The Arbor.” (The trailers can be found here and here.)

MM: Wow! I never would’ve guessed that these poems spawned from movie trailers. In fact, hearing you talk about these poems, it seems like form was the major catalyst for their creation. That’s very interesting.

JR: Form fascinates me, and trailers are a definite form. With a little distance from their advertising function, they become almost experimental short-films—clipped narratives with overt re-sequencing and a primacy placed on the compelling image. But their form has become rigid: similar run-times, similar beats, similar musical cues. I wanted to mimic that stricture by using the same “fast-cut” line length, the same number of lines, and even the same number of stanza breaks.

I’m also fascinated by the strange relationship that trailers have to narrative. They’re promoting something distinctly narrative, yet they interpret that narrative, twist it, condense it, and leave it incomplete. A trailer’s true narrative becomes something “above” the trailer, emotion-driven. An audience’s emotional response to any trailer would graph pretty cleanly to Freytag’s triangle, I think.

MM: So, you chose films with which you were unfamiliar. Then what? Take us through your process a little more and what you discovered.

JR: It was important for me to draw the images out as purely as possible, so, as I said, only trailers for films I hadn’t seen made the cut. No ties or affinities junking things up. Films with minimal titles—one word, with/without an article—so readers would arrive without preconceptions. “Some Like It Hot” or “There Will Be Blood” were out of the question.

I’d watch the trailers only once and pull everything from memory. I was curious to see just how resonant the images would be, how they would concretize. This also kept me from doing too much scavenging for “good stuff” or prewriting. What hit me hardest? What seemed strangest or most capacious with meaning? Taking those images, converting them to language, unpacking them—that was the fun of it.

Returning to the poems and the trailers now, I’m surprised how little they sync up. At the time, I felt they were almost documentary, but they’re much less slavish than I had thought. I color out of the lines, and that’s a good thing.

MM: I’m very intrigued by the possible intersections between poetry and film, as they seem like two forms of expression uniquely capable of rendering traditional narrative, high lyricism, and formal experimentation. (I’m thinking, in particular, of folks like John Ashbery, Maya Deren, Lisa Jarnot, Andy Warhol, etc., who clearly saw some connection between these forms.) If “The Arbor” and “Love” are inspired by films that you haven’t seen, let’s talk about things that you have seen or experienced. Are there any filmmakers whose works strike you as particularly “poetic” in some regard? Or, conversely, are there any poets whose works strike you as being “cinematic”?

JR: You nailed the elements that film and poetry share. An even more distressing characteristic: they’ve become definitions of other genres, other categories. It’s more of a problem for poetry. People love to call other media “poetic,” but they’d rather not engage with actual poetry. The adjective (“poetic”) is almost pejorative. Whereas “cinematic” designates cool, vastness in scope, and contemporariness, “poetic” indicates dowdiness, pretension, and impenetrability. We’ve lost their critical applications. They’ve become value definitions, useless.

Jeez! Now that I’ve complicated the question, I’ll answer it. David Lynch is a poetic filmmaker— disjunctive, dreamlike, referential. He also avoids language in his work, which actually makes his work more poetic. The late Chris Marker, Murnau, Tarkovsky, Dreyer, Ozu—they succeed because they’re using the language of film and not actual language. Moments of Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon and Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire stay with me like lines and stanzas. The obvious reigning cinematic-poet is Terrence Malick, though I’m worried his flood of new work will sour people to his brand of mystic sentimentality. Lars von Trier’s latest films extend toward poetry (maybe bad poetry?), but he’s too much a filmmaker to allow an entire movie to live in a poetic space.

Cinematic poets…that’s harder. My two pieces don’t build that bridge—they’re poems, through and through. It’s actually difficult to think of examples because there’s the lazy definition of “cinematic” to avoid: one that involves kineticism, heavy plotting, ostentatious transition. That describes my poetry when I was younger, when I was riffing off other art-forms as I found my legs. Maybe it’s easier to think of the cinema of Eisenstein and Griffith—spatial relation, montage, juxtaposition—in the attempt to find cinematic poets. Strand, Simic, and Stafford come to mind; their use of body placement and setting feels filmic. The tension and cross-cutting of Forché’s “The Colonel.” This feels like uncharted territory, Michael! There’s a literature thesis in there somewhere!

MM: Ha! Yes, I think there might actually be a book in there. It’s certainly very interesting to think about, at the very least. OK…last question: I’m a big believer in the aural power of poetry, so it’s such a delight to hear you read your poems in our recent issue. We’ve only recently begun to offer this audio dimension to our readers with the introduction of our website and our online issues. I know that you’re a pretty savvy tech-nerd and have been involved with some online publishing—most notably the gorgeous web-chapbooks at Blue Hour Press. What sort of role do you see technology playing in literary publishing? What are some of the benefits and/or dangers of the literary community’s shift toward more and more online production and distribution? Where would you like to see all of us head, as a community of writers and readers, in this regard?

JR: I don’t think technology is just playing a role these days—it’s the stage (or, at least, one of them) and it’s gaining square footage. The sooner people step onto this stage, the sooner we can gather people into its auditorium.

The major risk, I think, is that people see the object, the work, the effort in a digital space as being less physical. There’s a weightlessness to digital publishing. Today’s reader can sort of cloud-hop to this Dickens novel, this long-form essay, this poetry blog—constantly consuming half of the work, a quarter of the work, and bouncing on. It’s like a glorious buffet where you can take a bite of this, a few grapes, a sip. There’s less pressure to sit down to dinner.

I’ve always said that online publishing needs to gain a little gravity. Publishers need to make the experience feel as lavish and tactile as print, but generous in ways that only the web can provide. Lots of print books come with “bonus content” in the back, which I think is silly. The web can do that effortlessly. The Journal can put audio of the author right next to the work, publish an interview with her a few months later, connect the work to related content that requires just a click. But it has to be beautiful; the reader has to want to dwell in these spaces. A book will always feel comfortable in this way. That’ll ensure its continued existence. How do we begin to curl up with the web?

As you might have guessed, a large part of my internet travels are dedicated to essentially validating myself as a lover of books and literature; storing up retorts to people who think it passé, self-indulgent, or uninformative to read with the idea of broadening oneself (and, incidentally, becoming a better writer—but still.); and perhaps finding solace in the company of even loonier bookies.

Unsurprisingly, the internet provides when asked.

Leave it to Kurt Vonnegut to display the clarity of expression—in this case, of quite important social ideas—enabled by the mastery of language. In his 1973 letter, he puts to shame the Drake School Board for banning his books on the grounds of obscenity, evilness, or filth, exposing the very lack of nuanced thinking in the administrators that literature is supposed to cultivate, and which would have saved his books from what he called “the now famous furnace of your school.” He provides a bold reminder that to be un-American is to be “ignorant and harsh” rather than un-profane and unquestioning.

I found further reassurance in the form of the following Atlantic article, which contends that the story of the ailing, shriveling publishing industry—which we’ve all been following—is a myth. Or rather, that the industry’s been changing beyond recognition to some traditionalists, but been by no means dying. It might very well be that the advent of e-readers incorporates the act of reading into the ever-digitizing lives of those who don’t sniff books at the library, and may improve sales of both paper and electronic books. What the publishing companies are lamenting, it seems, is their reliance on Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple—the new power brokers in publishing.

This article is a short reiteration of the above. The appearance of both articles around the same time suggests to me that we’re reaching a threshold in the e-book phenomenon where its real effect is becoming clearer.

And lastly, here’s a man who has read more books than I ever will, and who loves and hates and defends books more fiercely than I ever could. This is a biography of a man’s life as a reader, entitled “My 6,128 Favorite Books,” which I found particularly refreshing for hazarding some unpopular opinions that I’ve held for awhile. Things like, “Don’t saddle me with a book as a gift,” “Speed-reading is utterly pointless,” “Sharing the same ethnic heritage as an author does not imply any obligation to read their book,” and finally, apropos of his distaste for e-books: “the world is changing, but I am not changing with it.”

That’s our October links roundup for you. As always, we’ll share the fruits of another month’s worth of compulsive bookishness one month from now.

This week I bring you an interview with our nonfiction editor, the one and only Silas Hansen. Silas has been manning the nonfiction helm at The Journal for nearly a year now, and I thought it was about time y’all were properly introduced to him. Like myself, he’s a third-year in the MFA program here, though unlike me he hails from western New York. Without further ado, Silas Hansen and yours truly, talking truth:

Mike Larson: So, just to kick things off, let’s hear what you did over the summer? Where were you? What book was on your nightstand?

Silas Hansen: I was here in Columbus. I taught an introduction to creative nonfiction class, so that was pretty cool. And I was working on my thesis, which is a collection of essays. I was reading a lot for The Journal—we had our contest going on, so I was reading entries for that. And I read Eula Biss’ book, Notes from No Man’s Land, Chris Coake’s new novel, You Came Back, and I just started Joe Oestreich’s book, Hitless Wonder.

ML: Was there anything about your teaching experience over the summer that helped you with your own writing, or taught you something new?

SH: I actually experimented with not doing a traditional workshop. I had my students do more generative work.  They turned in a bunch of writing exercises. I was a little worried the exercises were too prescriptive, but it actually turned out nicely because it made them think about things they weren’t thinking about otherwise.

ML: Cool. So what are you reading right now?

SH: Well, like I said I just started Joe Oestreich’s book, Hitless Wonder: A Life in Minor League Rock and Roll. He’s an OSU alumnus, and the book is about going on tour with the rock band that he’s been in since high school.

ML: What are some books that you’re looking forward to before the Holidays? Anything coming out that you’re excited to read?

SH: One of my professors from undergrad has a novel coming out—Butter, by Anne Panning. And also the new Rose Metal Press Field Guide for Writing Flash Nonfiction that Dinty Moore edited and Lee Martin is in. That’s coming out at the end of September, so I’m really looking forward to that.

ML: Sweet. Okay, let’s take things in a slightly different direction. In your mind, what are the major areas of nonfiction?

SH: Like memoir, personal essay, etc.?

ML: Yeah, exactly. What else do you see as the important categories that fall under the creative nonfiction umbrella?

SH: Well memoir, personal essay. I think the lyric essay is also becoming a bigger thing. Literary journalism, travel writing, nature writing, also flash nonfiction.

ML: Let’s take literary journalism. What do you see as the big difference between journalism and literary journalism?

SH: Journalism tends to be more interested in the story: what happened, how it happened, why it happened, when, where, etc. More the basic facts. Literary journalism tends to be more interested in the broader implications, the bigger questions, character, stuff like that—who the people are beyond this story. So there’s this event that the author is writing about, but they’re also writing about who this character is aside from that. They’re interested in complicating the character a little bit more.

ML: Do you have some favorite literary journalists?

SH: Susan Orlean is probably my favorite. I also really like the H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, and George Plimpton’s Paper Lion.

ML: Awesome. Let’s move on to a recent headline from the nonfiction world. What did you think of the whole John D’Agata controversy?

SH: Well, I read Ander Monson’s review of Lifespan of a Fact in the Los Angeles Review of Books, and I agreed with him—he said that the people writing about it were kind of missing the point. People kept writing about how John D’Agata lied about this or that, but Monson looked more at the missed opportunities that he created for himself. You know, there were places where D’Agata could have talked about why he wanted to change things, or why he wanted certain events to happen this way instead of some other way. To me those answers are one of the most interesting parts of nonfiction. I don’t care if people lie, as long as I know why they’re lying. I think that tells us something about their character. Why we tell ourselves the stories we tell ourselves.

ML: Or say, why they remembered something one way, but then, when they went back and checked it, they realized it had actually happened a different way.

SH: Yeah, exactly.

ML: So, you said you’re working on your MFA thesis. Can you just tell us what your collection of essays is about and what your plans are form it?

SH: Though I tend to write more narrative work, I’ve been experimenting with form a little bit with this collection. I had read Ander Monson’s Neck Deep and Other Predicaments last winter, and I’ve been writing these kind of weird essays. I have one essay that’s in the form of an OKCupid dating profile. So I wasn’t sure what to do with that—I wasn’t sure if it would fit with the overall collection. But after I read Monson’s book I felt like I had permission to do that. He’s got more narrative essays in there, but then he’s got these other ones—there’s one in the shape of the Harvard outline—and he kind of experiments with form. So I’ve been doing that a little bit and mixing the two.

ML: Very cool. Well, do you want to tell us about the nonfiction you selected for the fall issue?

SH: I’m in love with the nonfiction piece that we picked for the fall issue. “Discovery” is by a writer named Amy Bernhard, who goes to the University of Iowa, and her essay is really beautiful. The essay is about her grandmother and she is just a gorgeous writer. She has a wonderful command of language and this essay is narrative, but it has lyrical elements, which I liked.

ML: Can you say a little bit about what it was that drew you to that piece? What made you want to publish it?

SH: I’m really interested in essays that are able to create a specific tone through language and I think Amy does a really good job with that. Something about the word choice and the way the sentences flow—the voice is what drew me to it.

ML: Are there themes that you’re drawn to in works of nonfiction, whether it be family or loss or anything else?

SH: I think identity might be something that draws me to different essays. Eula Biss is a really good example of that. I was interested in the way she handled questions of identity in Notes from No Man’s Land. It’s a collection of essays that examines being a white woman in predominantly black spaces. She writes about that and about what race means, coming from a place of privilege, but being in a place where you are not of the majority. And I thought that was really interesting because she asks really complicated questions and I think she never answers them simplistically. There are times when she doesn’t answer her own questions, but she will hint toward a conclusion.iBut for the most part I’ll read anything. Tone is definitely something I’m drawn to and I often like pieces that are more meditative. I don’t like things that are really melodramatic or…kind of just downers. I’m okay with things that are sad, but I want them to try to transcend that sadness a little and be about more than just being sad.

ML: That’s reasonable. Okay, last question: what are some other journals that you look to for good nonfiction?

SH: My favorite journals are River Teeth, The Normal School—they’re one of the best magazines out there, last issue they had Ander Monson and Joe Oestreich—and Hayden’s Ferry. I also like Third Coast, Colorado Review, and Missouri Review, which is just a wonderful magazine.

I appreciate Silas’ sitting down with me. Until next week.

Keetje Kuipers has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow and a Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident.  Her first book, Beautiful in the Mouth, was awarded the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize.  Kuipers’s poems “In Medias Res” and “Just Outside”—both from her new manuscript—were featured in Issue 36.4 of The Journal, our current autumn online issue. Associate Poetry Editor Shelley Wong recently spoke with Kuipers about these poems, her upcoming book, and the way that landscapes influence her writing.

Shelley Wong: We are so excited to publish your two poems: “In Medias Res” and “Just Outside.” I’m curious if these two poems are part of your upcoming book The Keys to the Jail (forthcoming from BOA in 2014) and how they speak to the manuscript’s broader themes. If they are not part of that collection, what inspired them?

Keetje Kuipers: Yes, these two are part of the forthcoming book, The Keys to the Jail. Here’s how I’m describing the new book these days: “This new work continues Elizabeth Bishop’s tradition of the art of losing, but delves deeper into the self-accusatory nature of such an examination of loss. While they have often been elegiac, my poems are currently more interested in examining who is at fault for our losses: Who can we blame? I find the bereft female speakers in my poems blaming themselves for everything—the harsh words of failed love, the aging of a once-beautiful body, even their own voracious desires. These speakers sometimes put on a brave face, but their self-condemnation becomes apparent as I tease out two speakers—two selves—in the poems. While I have always enjoyed the use of persona in poetry, this evolving collection works to capitalize on our ideas of female roles in particular, and the obligations that come with them, finding failure in the self who cannot succeed as a mother or a wife, a sex object or a daughter. These poems want to come face-to-face with many of the things our contemporary culture loathes—an unsanitized death, a sagging breast, the ubiquitous sense of isolation in a crowded world. And in their many-voiced turnings—often making use of such obsessive forms as the villanelle and pantoum—the speakers in these poems ultimately come to rest in a familiar contemporary landscape of acquiescence, one without redemption or forgiveness.

The two poems in The Journal, “In Medias Res” and “Just Outside,” both deal with the type of alienation that comes from self-blame—how once you’ve reached a place of such deep disappointment in yourself, it’s as if you’ve stepped outside of your own body to gape at what you’re doing to it. Haven’t we all watched from a distance as we ruined a love affair, sabotaged our own careers, withheld the nourishment we needed (food, forgiveness), or drank or drugged ourselves into submission? These poems are written from the midst of that distance wherein the self gazes so unkindly at the self.

SW: Your wonderful first book, Beautiful in the Mouth, referenced many specific cities, states, and places. It seems that these two poems are about recovery, placelessness, and making a mental journey. How would you describe the shift in writing your second book? Was it a different process?

KK: The second book came together much faster than the first. The poems in the first book were written over a span of about six years, while the second book came together in just two. I was a Stegner Fellow during those two years, and many of the poems in the new collection draw on the landscape of the Bay Area—fog, eucalyptus, the ocean. However, I didn’t feel particularly rooted in the landscape, and I think that sense of not belonging to the place coupled with the fact that the landscape seemed so mutable to me (again, the fog, the ocean—all of that constant shifting and creeping) really encouraged me to produce poems voiced by a speaker occupying a liminal space. The speaker(s) in the new collection do make a sort of journey from sadness to anger to blame to a kind of attempt at forgiveness and recovery.

I enjoyed my time as a Stegner Fellow more than I can express, but it was also a difficult two years for me. Those two years worked as a sort of bridge in my life between a period of dead ends (in terms of publishing, my love life, and my stalled professional career) and where I am now, which is a much more secure and happy place. At the time, those two years felt like a bridge to nowhere—at least not anywhere that I could imagine. And those poems were written from the very midst of not knowing who I might become, and not being able to reconcile how I would forgive myself if I failed at my every attempt to become someone I might love and respect.

SW: These two poems seem to present a state of interior retreat that is deeply connected with nature’s transformative power (withdrawing into the ocean’s fist or going nowhere, growing one’s hunger “like a root”). You have lived in many different states and served as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident in 2007. How does your immediate natural environment influence your poetry’s content or form—or does it? Do you find yourself writing more about landscapes from memories?

KK: Much of my writing that makes use of landscape comes from a place of longing, and there are a number of poems in the new book that once again return to the landscape of Montana—a place that I longed for intensely during the two years I was working on the new book. I do write more about landscape from memories, and now that I am living in Alabama, I once again find myself writing about the landscapes that I miss the most.

Just last week, I wrote a poem called “On Needing to See a River”—of course, there are rivers here in Alabama, but I’m used to an excess of rivers, and that is something I don’t have at the moment. At the same time, I love to make use of the new vocabulary that I encounter when I travel or move (which I’ve done often). I find myself making lists of new flora and fauna or features of the landscape. Here, it’s bugs—palmetto bugs, mule killers—and plants like crepe myrtle, magnolia, and kudzu. I love the strangeness of these new things in my life, and I love to employ strangeness in my poems whenever possible.

SW: Many poems read as being “in medias res”—whether it’s in the middle of an emotion or a narrative—and the poet has to negotiate how much to disclose and withhold. How do you know when a poem is finished?

KK: For me, a poem that I’m writing can never fully answer the question that it asks. If it reaches a conclusion in response to the question that it inherently poses at the outset, then it’s overwritten and might not be salvageable. At the same time, the poem must work toward an understanding of itself or its speaker. So many of the poems in the new collection work as a conversation between the self and the self. These voices of anger, blame, and dissatisfaction volley back and forth in each poem until one voice says something that’s nearly unspeakable, something to give the other voice pause. I see this last call as a kind of final threat or dare launched across a deep chasm of misunderstanding, and it hangs there for a moment before it drops into the darkness below. That’s when the poem’s done: when there is no voice left to answer back.

SW: What has inspired you lately?

KK: Well, I’m six months pregnant, and that is an endless source of inspiration these days. I was very sick the first six months, so I didn’t do much writing then. However, now that I’m back on my feet, I find that I’m predictably drawn to the subject matter of pregnancy. While I’m very excited about becoming a mother, these poems seem to be working as a place to express the natural fears that come with first-time parenthood. My own mother appears in almost all of them, along with my looming belly, full of the unknown.

Right now, I’m working on a poem about my father shooting and butchering an elk while, three-thousand miles away, I’m watching videos on YouTube of women giving birth. The strange and marvelous intersections of the unknowable future are my inspiration these days.

Best of the Net 2012 Nominees

Well, the poetry contest is officially closed for submissions and the new issue is up, so… shazaam! We’ll announce the winners of The OSU Press/The Journal Award in Poetry sometime this winter.

In other news we’ve had some awesome content online this year (points at self, mouthing “me”) and some of that awesome content has been nominated for the Best of the Net Awards 2012. And the nominees are (coughs, reaches for envelope)…

In fiction, we’re proud to nominate Dan Moreau’s “Lake Trash” (Issue 35.2), in nonfiction, we’re proud to nominate Pamela Baker’s “Hush, Hush, Voices Carry” (Issue 35.2), and
in poetry, we’re proud to nominate Amanda Auchter’s “Casket Girls” (Issue 36.2), Brad Henderson’s “December Calving” (Issue 35.2), Melissa Kwasny’s “What Starlight Has Become in the Moving Trees” (Issue 35.2), Ryan J. Browne’s “Theory of MRI” (Issue 36.2), Oliver de la Paz’s “Labyrinth 55” (Issue 36.2) and Helen Wickes’ “November Chill and All the Animals” (Issue 35.2).

We’re pulling for all our nominees, and by ‘pulling for’ I mean sending large bribes to the judging panel. And by ‘large bribes’ I mean the leftover bagels from our bagel Tuesdays in the grad lounge.

Until next time.

This week I come to you with links from the Internets. Most of these are recent, pulled-from-the-literary-headlines kind of stuff, but a few are older gems I’ve stumbled across that were just too damn wonderful or hilarious not to include.

Also, I’m inclined to use this post to shamelessly plug the OSU Press/The Journal Award in Poetry, the winner of which will be published and receive the $3000 ($3,000!!!) Charles B. Wheeler Prize. Entries must be postmarked by September 30th. Shameless plugging = accomplished.

Granta, which has just launched a Chinese-language edition of is magazine, apparently plans on adding more foreign editions to its catalogue in the future. Perhaps there will be employment opportunities for writers who speak more than one language. Très bien, non?

Phillip Roth recently got in a little tiff with the people of Wikipedia, who refused to allow him to edit the entry on his novel, The Human Stain. Apparently, the entry listed former The New York Times book critic Anatole Broyard as the inspiration for the novel’s protagonist Coleman Silk, but Mr. Roth cried “¡No es verdad!”

Salman Rushdie has been doing interviews to promote his new book, Joseph Anton, a memoir of his time in hiding during the fatwa against him. I caught his appearances on The Daily Show and Charlie Rose. I have a lot of respect for Rushdie as an artist, and was very glad to hear his comments on the recent, tragic events in the Libya. Check it out.

This video is from ten years ago, but it’s probably the greatest thing in the history of the world, ever. In it Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip acts out/reads “At The Quinte Hotel,” a poem by Canadian poet Al Purdy. “Your beer is half fart and half horse piss,” has got to be in the running for best line of the last decade.

Finally, I’m not here to hype OSU’s MFA Program (and not that the program needs it), but some of our alums have been getting themselves in the news recently. So here’s a review of Claire Watkins’ Battleborn in last Sunday’s The New York Times Book Review, and here’s Michael Kardos on The Huffington Post brilliantly discussing the differences between literary and genre fiction.

Good stuff. As always, thanks for reading. See you back here in a week or so.

Hey there, The Journal blog readers. Today we have a guest blog post by The Journal issue 36.3 contributor Michael Shea, about a recent kerfuffle in the poetry world. Speaking of poetry, did you know that OSU Press and The Journal are putting on a poetry contest? Did you know that the winner of the contest gets the $3,000 Wheeler Prize? Well, as Bill Nye the Science Guy used to say, now you know. The contest deadline is October 1^st, and you can find more info here. Get your submission on.

Is there something about election years that encourages poets to cast wide-angle narratives on the state of our craft? It seems these pieces are in abundance recently, the latest offering coming from Willard Spiegelman in the spring issue of Virginia Quarterly Review. Though on a fundamental level I disagreed with some of his points, Spiegelman’s essay was everything you could reasonably want from a critic (or a politician, for that matter): measured, informed, well-structured, humble and transparent in its biases—which is why it’s such a shame that VQR decided to follow-up on that article with the alarmist response from William Childress, entitled “Is Free Verse Killing Poetry?” The basic argument in Childress’ article, which is not even entirely coherent, is that the preponderance of free verse has restricted not only our understanding of the craft and the possibility for “memorable poetry” but the appeal of poetry in general. The question for us, then, becomes which absurd claim to address first.

Childress goes to, well, very few lengths to show that free verse has none of the power of formal poetry, citing four lines of Howl (which he reads with more than a little latent homophobia) and one poem by Asturo Riley in support of his claim that free verse’s record of important work is “spotty,” before moving on to the same tired critiques of slam (which he calls a “circus”) and academic poetry that have been repeated ad nauseum, the former coming with a hefty dose of condescension that feels utterly classist. Even leaving aside the fact that he’s (purposefully) vague with regards to what constitutes this not-free-verse—does he want meter? rhyme? form? some confluence of the three?—and correspondingly, what we can rightly claim to free verse’s credit (as gray areas abound), we have to take issue with an argument that ignores free verse’s ability to interrogate natural rhythms of speech, especially one that sees Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Ashbery, O’Hara, and countless others (and this is just the list of old white men)—in short, some of the most widely-read poets in English—as forgettable.

In fact, I’m not even sure there are sufficient grounds for his central objection—that the barbaric, anarchist Free-versers are stifling the good people of Formaltown. Perhaps most telling is that midway through the essay, Childress himself admits that he doesn’t “read much modern poetry.” That’s painfully obvious. Because if he were reading, he’d know that Annie Finch and Maurice Manning (who grabbed a Pulitzer nomination a few years back) write most of their poems with strict metrical or formal regularity. That contemporary poets—and good poets—like Ben Lerner and Sandra Simonds are writing sonnets—true sonnets, to not even mention people like Nick Demske and K. Silem Mohammad, whose work constitutes a new investigation of the form. Formal poetry may not have the hegemonic grasp it used to, but given its continued relevance, Childress’ complaints sound like those of the Religious Right, crying oppression just because their monopoly has eroded (to which experimental poets have to reply, “You think you got it bad?” This is, truly, no country for Charles Olson). Moreover, his allegations that poets are not engaged with current events or that formal poetry is not taught anymore are downright laughable. To the former, we need only to look to the hundreds of readings given in the wake of the 2010 Gulf oil spill; as for the latter, I’m not so far removed from high school that I can’t remember the poetry unit consisting of the usual suspects—Frost, Dickinson, Shakespeare, Donne. And to the claim that the supposed disappearance of formal poetry somehow relates to poetry’s declining readership, while I see a lot of value in formal poems, I find it hard to believe a regression to 19^th Century language patterns will inspire any new readers from a generation raised on Twitter and absurdist comedies—or, to quote one of my students: “What we learned in high school was boring.”

But my circle-the-wagons rhetoric aside, and with no real disrespect implied to the great formal poetry of history nor its current practitioners, what’s truly important is what the article fundamentally overlooks: that the decision between writing free verse and writing in any kind of prescribed form is not a question of laziness, lack of education, or self-obsessed narcissism. It’s one of ideology, which is not to say that specific meters or forms endorse specific ideologies (a ridiculous claim, given how different a Frost sonnet is from a Demske sonnet, on so many levels), but to suggest that the presence of a regulating artifice—whether that be meter, rhyme, villanelle—carries with it a loose ideological backdrop about language and how it orients the speaker to the world by suggesting a sort of overarching order or the possibility of developing and maintaining such an order through language, even if that order is posited simply to be rejected. And this is important not because I wish to cast formal poets as fascist arbiters or out-of-touch conservatives—they’re not, or at least, if they are, it’s not because of their poetics—but because the decision to adopt or abandon this sort of ideological baggage is a central part of a writer’s vision. Okay, so perhaps not everyone writing free verse sees it in those terms—surely my undergraduate workshops don’t focus on the rhetorical underpinnings of iambic pentameter—but the contemporary poets worth reading (and in my idiosyncratic view I count among them Joyelle McSweeney, John Taggart, Cathy Wagner, and Tim Earley, just to name a few) are hyper-aware of the ways in which their formal choices (that is, to mostly reject prescribed forms) bear on their work. It is this inability to conceive of free verse as a distinct formal choice, and the corresponding willful ignorance about the implications of form beyond the fact that it makes a poem look and sound nice, that marks the deepest failing in Childress’ piece.

Despite all this, I think Childress is right about a few things. For example, we may well be living in a one-poetry nation. I wouldn’t disagree with the idea that we could use an injection of new life into our culture of slavish devotion to mimesis and metaphor, one that’s constructed hagiographies around poets of immense talent but perhaps limited or now-tired vision (Levine and Plath come to mind). I think a greater celebration of rhetoric, of sound, of irreverence, of non-discursive elements, of found text, of a specific refusal of perfection—some of which might involve a greater discussion of meter and form—would be welcome, at least for me. Nor do I begrudge Childress his self-appointed status as a malcontent—poetry desperately needs those people. But it also needs them to know what they’re talking about.

Kathy Fagan is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at The Ohio State University. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council and is the author of four books of poetry: The Raft (1985), which won a National Poetry Series Award, MOVING & ST RAGE (1999), which won the Vassar Miller Prize for Poetry, The Charm (2002), and Lip (2009). Currently, she is working on her fifth collection, entitled Sycamore, from which poems have recently appeared in FIELD, Cimarron Review, The Awl, and The Laurel Review.

Kathy is serving as this year’s judge for The Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry; and she recently sat down with Poetry Editor Michael Marberry to talk about all things poetry-contest—including how she approaches the responsibility of judging manuscripts, some tips for writers who are putting together a manuscript for the first time, and some writers whom she is currently reading.

Michael Marberry: Kathy! Thanks for taking some time to talk about the upcoming poetry book prize from The Journal and OSU Press. Before we start, here’s a true story: I once helped you and your husband move some heavy furniture, exercise equipment, and whatnot. Take a brief moment, for our readers, to laud my impressive feats of strength on that day.

Kathy Fagan: I believe those feats were iambic feats.

MM: Ha! Yes, that sounds right. I will take that as a compliment, thank you. Speaking of poetry, iambic and otherwise, you’ve written four excellent collections at this point in your writing life; and you’re well on your way toward completing your fifth collection. What advice would you offer to someone else about creating a manuscript?

KF: At this point, I can honestly say that each book demands a different kind of preparation, but my best overall advice to newer poets: Don’t rush. Take your time writing individual poems and getting feedback on them before contemplating a manuscript. Second, in most cases, it’s best for the manuscript to be shorter rather than longer. Include only the poems that still speak to you and that speak most directly to your subject or aesthetic. All that said, I suggest employing a cautious recklessness in the ordering of poems. Making a book is like making a new poem. It should be just as textured, strange, and satisfying. And, like a poem, a manuscript should begin promisingly. What you’ve heard about front-loading your manuscript is true. It works. It sets the tone and anticipates its reception.

MM: That seems like really keen insight. But your response made me wonder about something—particularly about poems that speak directly to a subject or aesthetic. I tend to see that idea at work in lots of contemporary poetry collections—i.e. books with clear, cohesive “parts” and even quite a few collections that follow a singular subject and aesthetic throughout. Just to play devil’s advocate here for moment: Is there a place in poetry today for what we might call a dissonant manuscript—that is, a collection that oscillates wildly, even joyfully, between different subjects and aesthetics? Or are we in an age of the poetry “concept-album,” where every poem in a collection really ought to be consistent, either in its adherence to a similar subject or in its mode of expression?

KF: Great question. Anyone who knows me knows that I nurse a pet-peeve against high-concept anything and love me an old-fashioned “collection” of poems. I am also known to write a wide range of poems myself and to possess, as an editor and a teacher, a pretty eclectic and even catholic taste. But when I say subject or aesthetic, I mean those terms in the context of organizing principles. And one needs to craft a manuscript, “dissonant” as you call it or otherwise, in as careful and layered and interesting a way as one structures a poem. The choice of the first poem, eighth poem, fourth section, final poem, whatever—none of that is random. It’s not consistency that I’m looking for but control and abandon in all the right places—an overriding intelligence that assures me that I’m in for an experience that only this particular book can give me.

MM: That’s very interesting to hear. So . . . with that in mind, who are some of the writers that you’ve been reading and admiring lately and why?

KF: When I was in Brazil this summer, I visited the Portuguese Language Museum—a marvelous place. One exhibit featured the novels of Jorge Amado and, because some of the content in them is sexually explicit, there was one room saturated in red light with peep-show vents in the walls. If you looked through the vents, you could read a sexy passage. It made me wish that we had such a thing here in the States. Anyway, I’m reading Amado in translation right now.

I’m also reading poems by Marosa di Giorgio in translation. And scads of shockingly good work by former students and friends of students with new books: Betsy Wheeler, Letitia Trent, Ida Stewart, Natalie Shapero, Daniel Carter, Allison Davis. I have a stack of books that I’m working through by Noelle Kocot, Amanda Nadelberg, and the wonderful Sabrina Orah Mark.  I’m also reading Mary Ruefle’s essays.

What I admire is a certain shapeliness of image and phrase that can best be described as painfully astute and psychologically adventurous.

MM: This year, you’re judging The OSU Press/The Journal Award in Poetry.  For our readers who may not know, you have some connections with The Journal, as you were the Poetry Editor here for over 20 years, which I hear is actually something like 100 years in the life of an editor. How did you manage to maintain your writing prowess, your sanity, and your good looks throughout all that? What’s your secret?!

KF: Why thank you, Michael! No wonder you have my job now. I loved editing The Journal, and I made many, many strong and enduring poetry friendships with contributors and student editorial assistants alike during my time there. Those relationships and finding good poems made it all worth the crunch of production and the financial stress. I feel as if Michelle Herman and I did something really important during those years—just as you do now. Editing can be a generous, collaborative, creative, and generative activity.

MM: That’s interesting to hear you talk about editing as a collaborative process. Am I wrong in assuming that you’re not just talking about collaboration among staff-members but also a spirit of collaboration among editors and submitters/contributors as well? And, thinking particularly about the poetry book contest, to what extent do you approach those submitted manuscripts in a similarly collaborative manner? Or, in your mind, is a judge’s job in some way different than an editor’s?

KF: Yes, you’re absolutely right in assuming that the collaboration I’m talking about is between an editor and a writer. To be in a position to steward work into print when it’s not your own work is both utterly selfless and entirely selfish. I mean, the editor gets to say, “Your work slays me, and I have a hunch it will affect others in the same way. Let me put it in my shop window. But it’s my shop window, right, and everybody has to stand in front of it to see this great thing that I found of yours.” Between an editor and reader, too, there’s this wonderful social contract in which the editor says, “Lookit! Lookit! You’re really gonna love this poem I found for you!” I don’t know . . . maybe I need to join a circus, but I love being able to hawk what I find beautiful to people who might not otherwise find it.

Judging is a less intimate activity than editing for me and a heavier responsibility. I’m led toward the ultimate winner by asking questions such as: Is this a manuscript that will most fully round out, enhance, brand, or diversify the OSU Press poetry list? How is it like or unlike the recent winners of the OSU Press / The Journal competition? How is it like and unlike new books that I’ve read in the past year or two? How does this manuscript represent the prevailing aesthetics of The Journal, if at all? Does the world need more poetry collections about this subject or has that trend run its course? How great of an impact will this book have on poetry readers? My choice is about gut-feeling, but it’s also an instinct informed by lots of experience, plus a handful of practical issues.

It’s exquisite to identify those two dozen instantly publishable manuscripts, excruciating to narrow those down to one, and joyous to make the phone call saying, “You win!” I love that part.

For more information about how to submit your full-length poetry collection to the contest during the month of September, please visit the OSU Press website.

On August 21st Best New Poets announced their winners for 2012, and the lineup included several scribblers who have recently been affiliated with The Journal, including: Tory Adkisson (former The Journal poetry editor), Oliver Bendorf (featured in The Journal 36.1), Michael Martin Shea (featured in The Journal 36.3), Chris Tanseer (featured in The Journal 36.1), and Jane Wong (featured in The Journal 36.3). Lots of celebrating to be done in the name of our contributors and former editor (and a note to contributors, if your work receives accolades elsewhere, let us know about it at online@thejournalmag.org, and we’ll chat you up on Twitter, Facebook and/or our blog).

The Journal editors are delighted to announce the 2012 contest winners in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry! The winning story, essay, and poem will appear in issue 37.1, our Winter 2013 issue, available in January 2013.

Fiction:

Leslie Parry, author of “Old Pretty”

Leslie is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, Cream City Review, Indiana Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. She was recently the writer-in-residence at the Jack Kerouac House in Florida.

Fiction contest judge Christopher Coake says:

This was a tough contest to judge, but in the end I couldn’t choose any winner but “Old Pretty.” It’s a simple story—one summer afternoon, two young sisters go swimming together at a city pool, still reeling from their father’s abandonment and the subsequent loss of their mother to grief. The narrator, from a point in the future, tells us how, that day, she gave into selfishness and cruelty, via a story suffused with both the whimsical minutiae of girlhood and a mature mind’s regret. What makes the story truly exceptional is its language. After her sister’s hair falls out, the narrator “was finding clumps around the bathtub drain, in static tantrums on the pillowcase.” After a slap, the narrator heads to the bathroom, “my cheek fizzing-hot and neon scribbles in my eyes.” This is highly literary writing—which is not automatically of benefit to every story. But here the beautiful, odd, fussed-over prose suggests a hard truth: that our narrator, like many of us, so needs her family that even her old and painful memories of it have, in time, become precious treasures.

Nonfiction:

Suzanne Richardson, author of “Oh, Niagara!”

Suzanne Richardson earned her MFA at the University of New Mexico. She currently lives in Utica, New York where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction at Utica College. Her work has appeared in New Ohio Review, New Haven Review, Blood Orange Review, Front Porch, and MAYDAY Magazine. It is forthcoming in High Desert Journal and Southern Humanities Review. Find more of her writing at: www-suzannerichardsonwrites.tumblr.com/.

Nonfiction contest judge Sonya Huber says:

“Oh, Niagara!” takes on, at first, what seems to be a small and innocuous event—a trip with the narrator and her parents—and gradually unfolds the trip’s scenes in a nonlinear fashion that encloses larger themes and concerns. The reflection is particularly beautiful, and although the essay touches on familiar topics of family, anxiety, love, and the unknown future, it steers away from the sentimental and toward the surprising at every turn. I found myself captivated by the writer’s ability to weave in research and to use these facts judiciously and meaningfully in service of the essay. The suspense and surprise of this essay originates in the writer’s consciousness and her direct and trustworthy voice, both of which propel the reader through the pages and into scenes that reach into moments of vulnerability that ring true to life.

Poetry:

Emilia Phillips, author of “In vacuo, Universal Studios”

Emilia Phillips received her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University and serves as the associate literary editor of Blackbird. Her poetry has appeared in many journals including AGNI, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Kenyon Review. She recently completed her first manuscript Signaletics in which “In vacuo, Universal Studios” appears.

Poetry contest judge G.C. Waldrep says:

“In vacuo, Universal Studios” makes of the most prosaic experience—standing in line at the eponymous attraction—an ecclesiological event: if not an act of worship outright, then a prelude to worship, to a worship that may in fact never occur (“We begin in line. We end there.”). Breaking gently through the texture of experience is an incipient elegy for the speaker’s father, in whose “temple, / in the heat, a vein is swollen,” a being who “sweats / through his clothes.” Love resides “at terminus,” but in this poem “terminus” is a place the human, shuffling forward along Zeno’s benighted paradox, may never reach.

Thank you to everyone who submitted to our 2012 contests!

For the first time ever, Ohio State’s MFA program will be
holding a book fair and festival featuring talks, readings, and signings by former MFA students..(Details here). This three-day event will begin on September 14th and will include several graduates with forthcoming books, such as Christopher Coake (You Came Back), Michael Kardos (The Three-Day Affair), Joe Oestreich (Hitless Wonder: A Life in Minor League Rock and Roll), Catherine Pierce (The Girls of Peculiar), Letitia Trent (One Perfect Bird), Claire Vaye Watkins (Battleborn), and Betsy Wheeler (Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room).

We’ll also welcome back OSU stars Donald Ray Pollock (Knockemstiff, The Devil All the Time), winner of the PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for a first work of fiction; Natalie Shapero, author of the upcoming No Object and current Kenyon Review fellow at Kenyon College; and Ida Stewart, author of Gloss and winner of the 2011 Perugia Press Prize for a first or second book of poetry by a woman.

The festival, in addition to talks and signings, will include panels of extremely high interest to aspiring writers and literary connoisseurs. These panels will touch on topics such as publishing a first book, finding and keeping a tenure-track university job, online publishing for poets, genre versus literary novels, and the transition from story collection to novel, as discussed by writers whose first published works were collections.

All in all, this is a great chance to enjoy, (and in my case, learn from), the writings and ideas of Ohio State’s publishing luminaries. We’re honored to have them home.

Here we find ourselves, already past the halfway point of 2012, and I thought it an appropriate time to take a look at what the next six months or so of publishing has in store for us. The first half gave us Nathan Englander’s superb What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, Richard Ford’si Canada, Lee Martin’s Such a Life, and another historical novel from Hilary Mantel. We were also privy to the whole John D’Agata controversy and the hullabaloo surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey. I hope that the literary world stays this entertaining through the holidays.

In keeping with traditions sacred and mysterious, I’m going to limit my listing to ten lucky books, so pre-apologies to anyone left off. Also, you’ll notice a dearth of poetry among my choosings (I thought about including Frederick Seidel’s new volume on the list because I—knowing next to nothing about poetry—enjoy his work, but then I didn’t want to upset all the poets who’ve told me I’m mistaken in my regard for him) so, again, apologies; I thought it best to confine myself to the realms I’m familiar with. I implore poets to let me know what titles they’re looking forward to in the second half of 2012 in the comments. Finally, let me say that I know my interest in book lists is sick and wrong and goes against everything my liberal arts education was supposed to instill in me—I know that such lists simplify a whole six months of publishing and reading into a few paragraphs and focus on certain books and not others for all the wrong reasons, and I know they’re a poor substitute for the slogging through of the literary marketplace that a diligent reader is supposed to do on his or her own—but damn it, I like them anyway.

So, in no particular order, here are ten books I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for in the second half of 2012:

Woes of the True Policeman—I don’t know what it is about Roberto Bolaño, but I can’t resist his prose. Even when his plots go nowhere but in circles, and some of the characters are all just thinly disguised tough guys, and even when the work is something of a mess that Bolaño left unfinished when he died. Even Monsieur Pain (2010), which left me feeling like someone had dumped a box of puzzle pieces out on the floor of my living room, had that weirdly intoxicating feeling. Maybe that’s just the anticipation that a reader feels when they think they might be reading a book that reaches the same heights as The Savage Detectives (2007) or 2666 (2008). (Comes out November 13^th 2012.)

Telegraph Avenue—My history with Michael Chabon’s work goes like this: first I read The Yiddish Policeman’s Union (2007), and liked it enough, then I accidentally read part of Gentlemen of the Road (2007), which I did not develop an affinity for, and then I read The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), which was really good, just shy of great. I know chronology isn’t on my side here, but from my vantage Chabon is on the upswing, so I’m looking forward to his novel set in the Bay Area, about a white family and a black family, the fathers of which co-own a used record store. My love for music writing is noted elsewhere in this post (see Fear of Music). Excerpt courtesy of the Millions here. (Comes out September 11^th 2012.)

This is How You Lose Her—I am aware that I’m in the minority here, but I prefer Junot Díaz’s short story collection, Drown (1996), to his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Thus, I’m not at all disappointed to see that Díaz is going short for his next project. (Comes out September 11^th 2012.)

Fear of Music—Jonathan Lethem’s meditation on the Talking Heads’ album of the same name looks at why we fall in love with certain works of art and New York City in the late 1970’s. (Okay, I know, this one came out on June 1^st, but I love a good piece of music writing and I confess to being a Lethem fanboy, so I’m going to sneak this one in.)

Dear Life: Stories—Alice Munro has staked her claim to the title Master of the Short Form, so a new collection by her is officially a bona fide literary event. (Comes out November 13^th 2012.)

The Silent House—Orhan Pamuk. Nothing I’ve read of Pamuk’s since he won the Nobel Prize in 2006 has been quite as good as those pre-Prize novels, like Snow (2005) and My Name Is Red (2002). This is why I’m excited that this novel, which originally appeared in Turkey in 1983, has finally been translated to English. (Comes out October 9^th 2012.)

It’s Fine by Me—Per Petterson. I’ve been making my way through Out Stealing Horses (2007) as of late, and it’s already good enough that I was tickled to hear about the forthcoming release by Graywolf Press of one of Petterson’s earlier novels (it was originally published in Sweden in 1992), about a teenage boy who moves from Olso out into the sticks. (Comes out October 31^st 2012.)

Tenth of December: Stories—George Saunders’ stories often make me laugh out loud in bookstores, which attracts the wrong kind of attention from passersby. George Saunders’ soon-to-be-released collection is getting all the right kind of attention, as evidenced by this interview that he did with The New Yorker, and the appearance of the title story of his new collection in that very same magazine. (Comes out January 13^th 2013.)

Both Flesh and Not—I can’t say that I’ve read a ton of Foster Wallace’s work, but between the fiction (Girl with Curious Hair, 1989) and the nonfiction (A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, 1997) of his that I’ve been through, I prefer the truth to the lies. That’s why I’m looking forward to this new, posthumous collection of essays more so than I did The Pale King (2011). (Comes out October 30^th 2012.)

Battleborn—Claire Vaye Watkins. I know Claire and her work from when she was here at OSU, and I can tell you her stories are something worth getting excited over. Here’s an interview she did with One Story about her short “Man-O-War,” and a nonfiction piece she wrote for Granta about her family’s history in Nevada. Oh, and here’s a story she published, also in Granta. (Comes out August 2^nd 2012.)

Happy reading, folks, stay safe out there.

To help out with the blog posting in these parts, we at The Journal have decided to bring in some new blood: Mr. Michael Pecchio. I met Michael at the OSU MFA Program’s open house, and I can tell you he’s a fine gent, as well as a fiction writer, who comes to us via UC Santa Barbara. I’m proud to present Michael Pecchio, in his own words:

Since I’ll be posting occasionally, as well as working on the blog behind the scenes, I’d like to introduce myself. I’m an incoming Creative Writing MFA student, as well as the new assistant online editor for The Journal.

I’m in a funny position now, a couple months before my move to Columbus, Ohio, for grad school: I serve burgers and bus tables all day in Hollywood, California, and then go home and picture snow storms—what they’re like to drive in, dress for, live with. What it’s like to be unable to wear sandals. What it’s like to use the word storm as a verb (e.g. “You think it’ll storm tonight?”). I saw a YouTube video of people sauntering through the Oval at OSU without sharing looks of astonishment at all the ice falling from the sky, and wondered how I’d fit in.

But, stylistically, I think I’ll settle in well at The Journal. I read with the same eye for clarity and craft that The Journal’s title, for its lack of frills, suggests. Like everyone else here, I will try to see the beautiful and trite in every submission with equal camaraderie. I like reading and talking about literature (especially of the 19th-century Russian variety…sorry English majors), and I’m working on a semi-autobiographical novel-in-stories that I can’t seem to finish. For a little while yet, I live with my cat in Studio City. She says hello, and so do I.

Today we have an interview with the one and only Mr. Michael Marberry, who is taking over (well, already has taken over, technically) as poetry editor. Michael is a fine southern gentleman, originally from Tennessee, who previously earned his Master’s at the University of Alabama. Without further ado, here are some questions and their answers, in no particular order at all.

ML: What’s your editorial philosophy as poetry editor? Who influenced you and are there any editors out there whom you consider a model for your own endeavors?

MM: In terms of editorial philosophy and preference, I’m most interested in stuff that…well…interests me. That sounds ridiculous and a bit cryptic too. But I suppose I’m being intentionally vague there because I want The Journal to be a home for narrative poetry, lyrical poetry, formalist poetry, imagistic poetry, political poetry, fractal poetry, translated poetry, erasure poetry, sound poetry, etc, etc, etc.  I like all those “types” of poetry, and I think the table is big enough for everyone and every brand of poetry to find a seat somewhere, preferably next to someone/something quite different. I really want to publish stuff that I wish I’d written—even the stuff that I know I couldn’t possibly have written. I often ask myself: is this a poem that I want to read again (and again…and again). Does it compel me in some way—emotionally, cognitively, physically? Does it challenge me with something new or something old made new again? Is it surprising and important (whatever that means)?

ML: What are some poetry collections you’ve taken a shine to as of late?

MM: I just recently read a couple poetry collections that I thought were very interesting:  Eduardo Corral’s Slow Lightning and Jorie Graham’s P L A C E. Talk about two different books by two different writers! But I was equally intrigued by what both brought to the table—the way they oscillated between narrative and lyricism, the way they explored ideas, emotions, events, things, etc. in a manner that was, at least to me, exciting and memorable.  (We actually published a couple of Eduardo’s poems in last winter’s issue of The Journal.) A few older collections that I seem to return to often: Major Jackson’s Hoops, Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris, Maurice Manning’s Bucolics, Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow. Those are just a few of the collections that I personally like. Tomorrow, I’ll remember more and kick myself for forgetting to mention them.

ML: When you say that you want every kind of poetry to have a seat at The Journal‘s table, that seems to speak to the fractured nature of the poetry scene right now. I wonder if that element of fractiousness is something you lament, or something you celebrate, or some combination of both.

MM: I think there is some sense of “fracture” in today’s poetry community. People tend to do different things or have different concerns or want to explore different ideas. Often, like-minded people gather together and read and promote and teach and share the work of their peers and/or those “masters” of the genre with whom they feel some sort of creative or ideological kinship. In some sense, I think some fracturing or grouping is unavoidable. As long as we challenge ourselves to also read those whose work differs from our own (e.g. aesthetically, formally, culturally, politically, etc.), I don’t believe that such fracturing need necessarily be a “problem” or something to be feared.  I also don’t believe that “fracturing” is a unique phenomenon to those of us living and writing today. My guess is that the history of poetry (or fiction or non-fiction) is similarly fractured—that, although it may be useful/practical to remember history as being entirely unified or, at its most complicated, simply bifurcated, the history of anything is constituted by innumerable fractures of influence. It’s all excitingly messy.

ML: Good answer—I’m going to steal some of those lines. All right, moving right along, what other lit journals and magazines do you admire?

MM: Some of my personal favorites are Indiana Review, Copper Nickel, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Sycamore Review. They consistently publish surprising stuff, I think, in each issue—stuff that I like to read multiple times. I’ve got a soft spot for Black Warrior Review because I used to do a little reading work there, and it’s also a really gorgeous publication with a very committed staff. I also admire Nashville Review and The Missouri Review, albeit for different reasons—the former because of their wide scope, publishing lots of different artists across lots of different genres, and the latter because of their depth, publishing multiple poems by only a few poets. But, like I said, there are lots of good journals out there—way too many to name here, in fact.

ML: This is a bit of curve ball, but what do you see as the role of the poet in the contemporary world? To your mind, what function does the poet perform in our technology-driven/dependent, high-speed culture?

MM: I only hope that people are fulfilling their own goals for what their work ought to ideally do and, in turn, constantly challenging themselves to rethink and refine those ideas, techniques, expectations, etc. In terms of The Journal, I always tell people: “Send us what you think is your best work.” And I mean it. The worst thing is when people send something that they think that I’ll think fulfills some role for what a poem “ought to do.” Send us your absolute best work regardless of whatever “role” or “function” you think it’s performing. We want to read it.

ML: To wrap this up and put a bow on it, what are your plans for the summer? What/who do you plan on reading?

MM: My summer plans are still largely to-be-determined. I’m hoping to travel a little bit to Tennessee and Michigan. I’ve got to do some preparation for the fantasy-football league that I do with my buddies back home each year. I just bought some books that I’m hoping to read—a short-story collection by Gabriel García Márquez and another by Roald Dahl. I’ll be watching lots of summer blockbusters. I’ll be working with some talented, local high-school students at OSU’s Young Writers Workshop. I’ll be revising my thesis and studying for GRE tests. And so on. I’ll probably drink a lot of iced coffee and Bell’s Oberon (but not at the same time).

To see some of Michael’s editorial work, all you need to do is crack the poetry pages of a recent edition of The Journal (he was helping out Tory last year). I want to thank him for sitting down with me for this interview, and thank all of you for reading. Until next time.

One thing I’m going to endeavor to do in this space is to introduce you to some of the other drifters here at The Journal, especially our genre editors. Joining us for an interview today is Nick White, our incoming fiction editor who will start shaping the pages we dedicate to the liar’s art in our magazine in the fall.

ML: Just to tie this up with my last post, let’s say the Pulitzer Board called you one evening a month or so ago. “Nick,” the head of the board says, “Listen, we’re completely lost on this whole fiction thing. Don’t worry about who the finalists were. What should we pick?” What would you tell our distressed friend?

NW: It’s been a great year for fiction, so I think the decision to not award a prize can be a bit misleading. For my money, I was hoping Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision might be considered. Her collection has already won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and was nominated for the National Book Award. I think she’s a wonderful American voice. Her stories seem to be about the very things critics say American writers shy away from. There’s been talk for a long time that American writers are too insular, that our stories and novels are too provincial. Ms. Pearlman’s stories are anything but. For instance, her story “Vaquita” centers around a female prime minister of a South American country embroiled in a revolution of sorts. The story was brilliant and sad and very different from some of the writing I am seeing from others. Winning the Pulitzer, I think, would have brought her more readers. Also, I really enjoyed Julie Otsuka’s novella The Buddha in the Attic, a searing portrait of Japanese picture brides who come to the United States soon after the turn of the century and endure hardship, racism, and sexism up until the time they are sent away, with their husbands and children, to concentration camps in California after the attack on Pearl Harbor. It was told from a first-person plural point of view—the “we” voice—and I thought it was really well done; parts of it read like poetry.

ML: Well, staying in the vein, who’s your favorite living author who doesn’t write in the king’s?

NW: Probably Marquez, if I had to choose. One Hundred Years of Solitude is one of my all-time favorite novels: the scope, the language! It’s a beautiful read. Also, enjoyed Love in the Time of Cholera, a decadent romance that didn’t translate so well to the big screen. I am also a fan of his short fiction and plan to teach “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” to my creative writing class this summer.

ML: So what’s on your nightstand now?

NW: I’m reading four books at once. It’s kind of crazy. I have a problem, I think. I’m reading Roth’s The Human Stain, because I think his Zuckerman novels will help me with my thesis, which also deals with a writer. Though I hadn’t read much by her, I am just finishing up Anne Tyler’s The Amateur Marriage, which, sentence by sentence, has blown me away. I’m also about halfway through Tobias Wolff’s Old School. And I’m mixing it up a bit by reading a biography of Eudora Welty. Reading about her love life gives me hope.

ML: I know you worked with Michael Kardos on Jabberwock Review. What were some lessons you took from that experience?

NW: One thing I took from Mike, just in general, is the idea of being an open-minded reader, and to not impose my own aesthetic onto a story. So when I approach a story, as difficult as it may be, I try to look at it and let it tell me what its goals are and see if the story is meeting the goals it’s set for itself. Jane Smiley has this wonderful book called Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, and she says she doesn’t think of fiction as good or bad, but looks at it in terms of the worlds it invites you into, and whether or not it’s successful at rendering those worlds. So I’ve learned not to be closed off to a particular style, whether it be hard-nosed realism or something more speculative. For the issues of The Journal that we’re going to try to craft I want it to be very diverse.

ML: If you have one, what’s your editorial creed?

NW: Martin Luther, and this is going way back, said to sin boldly, and if I have one creed it’s that I want the stories I read to sin boldly. To have a confident voice, to not be apologetic, but to be bold. I want strong voices.

ML: What’s coming out of your pen these days?

NW: I’m working on a cycle of stories about a Southern writer from the Mississippi Delta, down and out on his luck. I’m working on one of them now about his time as a librarian in Oxford, MS. That place has a very specific writer culture that I am trying to capture.

ML: Is that a locale where you’ve spent a lot of time?

NW: Well, I have a complicated relationship with Oxford because I earned my Master’s from Mississippi State, which is the arch-rival of Ole Miss. But some of the grad students and I would always go up to Oxford to use their library—they have a wonderful facility. It’s such a literary town, too, and when you think of Mississippi in the zeitgeist you don’t necessarily think of it as being literary, which is a shame, but Oxford has a certain panache to it because they have Faulkner’s home and he’s buried there, and it was also the home of Barry Hannah—the great Southern writer—before he passed. It’s a place that inspired me, as I’m sure it did many writers from that region. Authors always stop by to promote their books because there’s a great bookstore there called Square Books. The story I’m writing now deals with a bookstore too, though only in a minor way—it becomes the backdrop for a disastrous love affair my narrator becomes entangled in.

ML: Setting aside the fact that we want our readers to go through our issues cover to cover, if you had to choose one thing our loyal subscribers should read from the most recent print issue, what would it be?

NW: “Abu Grave.” I love that story. I found it in the slush and thought it was just hilarious—it was really funny in a horrific way. Also the novel selection “Out of Illiana” was great. One of our readers, Brett Beach, found us that gem.

ML: In this past year, 2011, who was the best new writer you discovered?

NW: New to me or new to the scene?

ML: Either or.

NW: New to the scene would probably be Kevin Wilson, who wrote The Family Fang. New to me, I would say Edith Pearlman. She had three books out by small presses, but she’s new to me and she just blew me away. Also, Ethan Rutherford. He doesn’t have a collection out, but I’ve read a couple stories by him now: “Summer Boys,” which was put out by One Story, and “The Peripatetic Coffin” which was in The Best American Short Stories 2009. He writes really interesting work that is just very different from anything else.

ML: All right, to take it home, what are you doing for the summer, and what are you planning on reading?

NW: I’m teaching that creative writing class, where we’re going to be reading a lot of speculative fiction. I’ll also be making my way through Phillip Roth, and some more Ann Tyler. Probably the next thing I’ll read will be Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Maybe some more Jane Smiley too, I met her at AWP and she was just wonderful.

I want to thank Nick for sitting down with me. We’ll all be seeing him in the pages of The Journal next fall. Until then.

The Journal is proud to announce our first ever contest in fiction, nonfiction and poetry. A $500 dollar prize will be awarded in each genre, and the winners will appear in the Winter 2013 issue of The Journal. All entries will be considered for publication in The Journal.  Each contest-submission should include 1-5 poems.  One story or essay per submission.  There is no word limit for fiction and nonfiction.  Multiple submissions are permitted for the contest; however, each additional submission must be accompanied by a new contest-fee  Entry fee is $15 dollars and includes a one-year subscription to The Journal. Please go to submishmash to submit. Entry deadline is May 15th.

Fiction Judge, Christopher Coake

Christopher Coake, a native Hoosier, received his MA in creative writing from Miami University of Ohio and his MFA in fiction from Ohio State University. His short fiction has appeared in journals such as The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, Epoch, and Five Points, and has been anthologized in The Best American Mystery Stories 2004. His first book, a collection of short stories titled We’re in Trouble, was released in 2005 by Harcourt. His new novel, You Came Back, will be published in Spring 2012 by Grand Central.

Nonfiction Judge, Sonya Huber

Sonya Huber is the author of two books of creative nonfiction, Cover Me: A Health Insurance Memoir (2010), finalist for the ForeWard Book of the Year, and Opa Nobody(2008), shortlisted for the Saroyan Prize. She has also written a textbook, The Backwards Research Guide for Writers: Using Your Life for Reflection, Connection, and Inspiration(2011). She teaches at Fairfield University.

Poetry Judge, G.C. Waldrep

G.C. Waldrep’s most recent collections are Archicembalo (Tupelo, 2009), winner of theDorset Prize, and Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (BOA Editions, 2011), a collaboration with John Gallaher, as well as a chapbook, “St. Laszlo Hotel,” from Projective Industries.  Other recent work appears in recent or forthcoming issues of Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, Threepenny Review, Boulevard, The Nation, Harper’s, New American Writing, and Best American Poetry 2010. A past National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Literature, Waldrep lives in Lewisburg, Pa., where he teaches at Bucknell University, edits the journal West Branch, and serves as Editor-at-Large for The Kenyon Review.