Proofs

Wade just emailed me to say that we sent the proofs back to the printer on Friday; apparently we also had a few things on the cover that we wanted fixed.

Also, we're settling up things for our trip to AWP, so that is good.

More later.

Spring 08 Issue printing soon

A few things before we break for winter:

We've received bluelines from the printer and it looks like we'll have to make a few changes - I'm not sure how much this will affect the time it will take to get this new issue out, but I'm hoping we can have it printed over Christmas? Ethan and Wade will take a look at it tomorrow one final time.

I've got a few fiction withdrawals to mention, but I don't have the info in front of me, so I'll have to post them after I come back.

Also, we're going to start sorting through the contest submissions - we received about 160 submissions in fiction this year (I'm not sure about poetry). We'll read through those and see how many make it to our judge, Peter Orner. Those who submitted can probably expect to hear results in early March.

That's all for now.

Pushcart Nominations!

All of us at Phoebe are thrilled to announce our 2008 Puschcart Prize nominations:

Fiction
Danielle Evans - "Harvest"
M. D. Baumgartner - "Like Gods of the Sun"

&

Poetry
Eleanor Graves - "Your Boarders"
Angus Bennett - "On Whether the River Will Break"
Reba Elliot - "Child Not Made"
Julie Marie Wade - "Law of Parsimony"

Best of luck to all of these writers, and thanks for contributing your wonderful work to Phoebe.

More Withdrawals

T.J. Forrester recently withdrew his story "To The Bone."

It will appear in the inaugural issue of The Bruiser Review, which is due out this January. Visit their site and have a look around.

And Brandon Patterson withdrew his story "Kotaimbo."

It will appear in the next issue of descant.

Also, I want to apologize to those authors who have received rejections even after they withdrew their story. We're trying to be more organized around here, but I think a few still slip through the cracks. Thanks for you patience.

Layout

So Nat and Ethan are still working on bringing the pages of the issue together and we're still waiting to hear from a few more contributors about edits and bios and things like that.

But in the meantime, I found this guest post by Joshua Ferris over at Maud Newton's blog; she's posting writers' recipes.


Joshua Ferris' grilled cheese sandwich


One thing I don't like about grilled cheese: I sometimes burn the roof of my mouth because I lack patience.

The Paris Review

The newest issue of The Paris Review includes work from recent Phoebe contributor Danielle Evans. Her story appeared in our Spring 2006 issue. We'd like to congratulate her on the publication (the editors there call it her national fiction debut), and of course we're happy that she mentioned us in her bio in the contributors' notes section.

Spring 2008 Issue in progress

So a few updates -

Today Wade and I made the last few calls to our authors to finalize the lineup for the Spring 2008 issue. Obviously, we're still reading submissions (so do keep sending), but we're now in the process of putting together the Spring issue - submissions that haven't been responded to will now be read for the Fall 2008 issue.

I'm not sure about the poetry side of things (though I did take a peek at the special feature on visual poetry in layout mode, and it looks amazing from what I can tell), but the fiction will be a little different than what we've done in the past. Usually we've had four stories total: two medium long and two long. This time around, the Spring 2008 issue have quite the variety of pieces; I won't give names of authors just yet, but we will have a mix of some very very short fiction, some short fiction, and a couple lengthy pieces (our shortest piece is about a paragraph long and our longest piece is a worthwhile 6,200 words). This probably doesn't make sense at all - basically, it's a nice departure from the standard that we've had in the past, in my opinion. The nine (as of now) fiction contributors come from a wide range of backgrounds: for two of them, this will be their first publication/acceptance, for two more this will be their first lengthy print publication, and we're happy to say that we have a Pushcart Prize winner as well contributing fiction for the issue. It's a strong mix, I believe, of new writers and newer writers, and I really do think the fiction all comes together nicely.

There'll be more as we go on with the publication of the issue. Ethan has been hard at work on the design/layout, which will also be a nice change from last year: we're anticipating a greater attention to detail than we've had in the past, so do look out for this issue - it should look very very fine.



Now for some fiction withdrawals:

• Abby Nance's story "Calling Out" will be published in Quarterly West
• A.S. Holmes' story "The Rain in Mississippi" will be published in Many Mountains Moving
• Townsend Walker's story "Super Secrets" will be published in Muscadine Lines: A Southern Journal
• Mathew Goldberg's story "Bat Mitzvah" will be published in Passages North
• Nikki Bazar's story "Orphans" will be published online at Mississippi Review

That's all for now. Congratulations to these authors on their recent withdrawal/acceptances. We're happy to hear about withdrawals, because we're authors too, and withdrawals mean acceptances. Very good, and that is all for now.

Reading Party...

We had an excellent turnout last night at the Firehouse Grill for the return of the Candid Yak and Phoebe/So To Speak publication celebration. Quite a few people turned out and all the readers were quite fabulous. Thanks to everyone who came and supported, with an extra nod to those who read (including the open mic)! Hopefully we will be able to do more events there in the near future...

Update and Website

Nat and I spent a few hours worrying about the main website today - Dreamweaver had us very confused for a bit. We've worked it out though (we think), and now we're slowly posting samples from our current Fall 2007 issue, which you'll be able to read here. So far we've only got Karen Anderson's poem up, but soon we'll try to have the other two and of course the story by Kurtis Davidson. Please pardon the work in progress.

In fiction, we recently accepted a third story, which we're very excited about, and I finished working with another of our authors on some final edits to his piece. We've still got room for more stories, so send in if you haven't already.

Our submission readers have been working with us now, and so packets are constantly circulating among them; I don't know how this will affect response times, but I'm glad to have the extra help.

NBA 07 Finalists

The National Book Award Finalists are posted and Joshua Ferris is among them.

Phoebe/So to Speak Publication Celebration!

Phoebe will be joining So to Speak and GMU's graduate reading series, the Candid Yak, for a fall kick-off party next weekend...

Dog Girl - Heidi Lynn Staples

Ahsahta Press, 2007
Paperback. 82 pgs.
Review by Robb St. Lawrence

If you were to google the phrase “dog girl,” the top results would point you to websites about Oxana Malaya, a feral child from the Ukraine. When Oxana was three, her parents left her at home without anyone to care for her, and, without a place in her house, she went to live with the family’s dogs. She was found at the age of eight, barking and running on her palms and knees. Over time she got the nickname “dog girl,” a name that she apparently takes no offense in. If you watch a video, you can hear her speak in a voice devoid of inflection, her tone so flat and formal that it takes a moment to realize what seems off. This is fairly common among feral children that learn to speak, who have missed the crucial stage of their linguistic socialization, and can only ever look at language from the outside. They can only look upon language, never dwell inside of it, never be fully infected by the inflection of some mother tongue. And it might be here that one finds a connection to the title of Heidi Lynn Staples’ Dog Girl, its lyrics replete with wordplay that exposes the other in language, interrogates the buried echoes that infect speech in our clichés and our sincerest thought, coming at language from the outside. Even the title, a homophonic echo for “doggerel,” can be read as a demonstration of the way that levity and dead-dreary meditations on feral children’s relationships with language are possible within the same speech act.

Dog Girl consists of four sections that correspond roughly to the seasons. Beginning in winter, with Janimerick (like her first collection, Guess Can Gallop, this is a collection of poems that interrogate traditional forms as though they were carriers of disease), and ending on Decemblank, there is a kind of narrative trajectory as written on the body. Winter begins with a body empty as we expect the landscape, and the reader enters the collection with caution, with a feeling that they are entering in the aftermath of tragedy.

There once was a white with a mouth
And a caul with a north for its south
The cold snapped err its ice
White as laboratory mice—
A quiet thrall bid a sprout broken. (3)

The back matter of the book would indicate that the “explicit subject matter” of the book includes a “core-deep grief from a late-term pregnancy loss,” and one can begin to see this grief and the loss itself addressed where a reader might expect the punchline: “A quiet thrall bid a sprout broken.” While there isn’t any way of accessing what “a white with a mouth / and a caul with a north for its south” gestures toward in any figurative way, there is certainly emotional resonance with the idea of a caul that’s backwards in some way—the veil of amniotic sac remnant on some births (particularly early ones) that tradition sees as a sign of luck, perhaps in this case a grave misfortune. And as invocatory form, as a mood-setting, a tragic limerick is pretty nearly a perfect way of demonstrating early on the—not conflicting, but complementary—thematics of grief and of joy toward the world that dominate the collection; I find it hard to imagine a limerick that, however sad, doesn’t call to mind a kind of “joy that exceeds pleasure,” to borrow a phrase from Robert Duncan, in our addresses to the world through language.

This joy is perhaps most explicit in the places where Staples makes most use of the punning wordplay for which her poetry has often been cited. For instance, in “Prosaic,” she writes, “I had become a release of banditry that triste sweet and bad at the defamed signs” (8), which calls up the cliché of “tastes sweet and sad at the same time,” and “a release of energy.” But the poem manages the doubled phrase as a kind of commentary—‘release of banditry’ is what ‘release of energy’ holds underneath it in its sonic echo. In a poem that seems on its surface about an affair, the wordplay makes explicit that whatever enervation the speaker has in this relationship is also that of the bandit, the thief who tristes sweet and tristes bad, who dwells near (in signs of) the defamed. And it is in moments like this, where the pun comments on its echoes, that this particular compositional strategy works most effectively for Staples. There are places, however, that what is often quite effective can feel like a tic, and lose its weight.

Very often in this collection, where one would expect “day,” Staples’ speaker gives “dei.” That would start to grate after a while if it wasn’t for its playfulness, and it’s possible that this playfulness does save those instances for some readers. But it was hard not to feel robbed of impact, going through the majority of the book, its first two movements, seeing this particular pun happen occasionally and with light impact, only to find myself in “Not, you no,” an incredibly affecting lyric to the aforementioned lost pregnancy, seeing “A whole nude dei” after a few instances of the same pun. Robbed of its potency by repetition (Stein’s rose was working against tradition, where this pun works against other instances in the same book put to different uses), by the way that the pun almost becomes cliché in context, what could and should be powerful writing becomes, potentially, another sleight of hand. If we see “dei” replacing “day” only here though, if its impact is fresh: “dei,” God, is shown as whole and naked in the loss of this child, Job’s suffering is re-positioned (as God is revealed nakedly as can be) with a woman at its center, experiencing a grief that many women experience, universalizing that myth’s core of suffering. The poem on its own is powerful, resonant, and enough to recommend the book:

Not, you no
not any more.
Still has the womb.

Not—
Though I thought the stone had grown
a bloom, a blue-eyed wild wily you.
A room called lit with rose.

A whole nude dei.
A now made of then. An us
swum in me, as the perfect
opposite of astronaut.

It’s worth noting:
You were to kick, crawl, laugh, noting
everything. Arise!
Wake in the middle of the night!

Yet this unholy host
shrank, backed into
preemptive: How could we? As if
a bee asleep in a bloom, you were
bled as raid. O Nothing more
numinous than mere chanson.

Mere chanson, only song
sung which weaves ever’s message, adored
organism weaving cellular faction, action
had to be taken, taken out
of the growing squall. (52)

***
Robb St. Lawrence lives in Arlington, VA. He is in the MFA program at George Mason University and his poetry has appeared recently, or is forthcoming, in CutBank and Third Coast.

Politics and the Poetic Language: A Review of Mike Maggio’s DeMOCKracy

Plain View Press, 2007
Paperback. 80 pgs.
Review by Danika Stegeman

Like many college campuses, mine featured several corners stationed with flier-peddling, open-air evangelists. John, Mark, Luke, Revelations…all were there with open arms, whether I wanted the arms or not. One day I’d had enough. As a young man handed me a flier I looked directly into his enlightened blue eyes and crammed his Word into my mouth with my index finger. The gesture was symbolic. “If I wanted your rhetoric crammed down my throat,” my eyes told the man, “I could do it my damn self and do it with more style.”

I am usually reminded of that scene when I read overtly political poetry. “If I wanted your rhetoric crammed down my throat…” It is a scene I had in mind while preparing to write this review of Mike Maggio’s new collection DeMOCKracy. I read the title and braced myself for cramming.

I was not mistaken, to do so, exactly. The book’s intentions and content are as clear as their title; they are political, satirical, and experimental. In fact, they are shamelessly so. The poem “oanly in am- erica” is an example of all three ingredients. Maggio writes:

“oanly in am-
erica

lief
as
nvr
b4
scene

dth
in
lvng
klr

real’ty
s t r e t c h e d
a cross
yr
screem”

The liberal politics behind the poem are not masked by the experimentation with language, as might be expected. Instead the politics are made more glaring by way of the attention the language calls to itself. The poems that do not employ experimentation to these ends are no less politically oblique. Repetition is often used to great effect— to far better effect, I would argue, than the misspelling and visual word games, because the repetition also often contributes to the poem lyrically—in poems like “Collateral Damage” to draw attention to the political: “(we regret the loss of)/civilian casualties/(we regret the loss)/ of innocent bystanders/(we regret the)/loss of independent observers.”

Maggio wears his politics so much on his shirt-front, part of me wanted to get annoyed. I was being evangelized. Again. A few lines I read in the poem “Flag Burning,” however, made me reconsider where the cramming of rhetoric begins and ends. Towards the end of the poem, Maggio addresses the U.S. government and its machinations, writing “here’s my reply to your two-tongued promises/here’s my response to your soft, serpent lies/here’s my answer to the threats you propagate.”

In these lines, I recognized that neither Maggio, nor any other political poet, is the originating evangelist. This is not the first rant; it is a response. It is a response to a rant given each day by our government and media and their resultant culture. When approaching the book, the overt placement of the word “MOCK” in the title should not be ignored. Maggio turns on what he sees as his own open-air evangelist—the government, war, racism, classism, etc.—and uses the evangelist’s own phraseology (“corp/ O-rate/ merger,” “We fully believe/ in our/ (White)/ people” “Uknighted Stakes of Amerika/ & its affiliate Ltd.”) and in some cases visual tactics (some graphs and other visual poetic exercises also appear in the book) to create an unflinching political satire.

While I cannot say that I am convinced of the effectiveness or worth in shouting back at one’s adversaries, Maggio does come across as quite honest in the diction of his lines, which is more than I can say for the demockracy he rails against. The book has its strongest moments, in fact, in its most honest attempts—poems like “Raw Footage,” “Paper Cranes,” and “After the Beheading” which evoke more of an “I” speaker than a “we” speaker or a persona.

Though at times the overt politics in the poem still make me uncomfortable—
particularly when Maggio invokes a voice he perhaps has no right to, such as the immigrant worker/the homeless in “Alienation Blues” or African Americans in some of the “Notice” poems—I must consider that discomfort may be called for in the present political climate. Is it most effective to display anger in earnest in poetry or is it better to mask the anger in clever metaphor so that the “good ole poets’ club” can boast exclusive understanding and the right to wink at one another about it? Or is it preferable to ignore the problem entirely and write about flowers? I cannot answer these questions here, or perhaps ever. Mike Maggio, it seems, has answered it for himself and stands firmly by that answer in his poems.

***

Danika Stegeman is studying poetry in her second-year at George Mason University and is the assistant poetry editor for Phoebe. Her work has appeared in The Denver Quarterly and is forthcoming in The Cimarron Review.

Poetry Reviews

Phoebe is happy to announce that we will now be reviewing books of poetry on our blog. Although there is limited page space in the journal for such features, we feel it important to participate in and help further the dialogue about poetry, something that our recent entry into the world of blogs allows us to do easily. Our primary focus, like that of the journal itself, will be to give attention to, and create discourse around, books by new(er) writers and small presses, though we won't rule anything out and are open to anything that piques our interest, excites, or confuses. We'll also make an effort to support contributors to our journal, by prioritizing reviews of their work as well as that of the extended conmmunities of publishers and and presses they are inlvolved with.

Expect three to four reviews per month to start, kicking off with Joe Hall's take on David Mutschlecner's newly released Sign (below), as we continue to expand the scope of our reviews over the coming year. If you'd like to consider a book for review, or add us to your mailing list of reviewer's copies, please direct mail to address below. We're excited to be moving forward with this new feature and welcome your thoughts and feedback as it grows and evolves.

Phoebe: A Journal of Literature and Art, MSN 2D6 ATTN: Poetry Editor
George Mason University, 4400 University DriveFairfax, VA 22030-4444

Sign - David Mutschlecner

Ahsahta Press, 2007
Paperback. 92 pgs.
Review by Joe Hall

One leaves Sign hungry, parched. Things are eroded down to the bare bone of the eye and mind: “Eidetic / steps / the eye / ascends.” The line is the mind moving with deliberation, calculation. Absence is signified everywhere—from the body of his magnificent whale-like something scattered across the landscape to the gutted skulls that litter “The Night Watch” and “In Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream.” There is an admirable hardness to Mutschlecner’s lines, a refusal to make easy meaning, and, indeed, poems such as “The Night Watch” end evocatively: “Ask the skull a question / All hold Golgotha in their hands” (7). Yet there are also spots in which the habitual spareness of the line seems at variance with impulse of the poem. An example:

Wind sings into the mouth,
howls, cries into the mouth
gravid
with the memory of some
first sea

Mutschlecner’s strategy of isolating of this “first sea” on its own line to give it weight shuts down the rhythmic possibilities of the first two lines and doesn’t seem as effective in it the desired gravity as further expanding upon the image.

In terms of thematics, Mutschlecner evokes a spiritual crisis that takes on, sometimes, incongruously, national dimensions. Phrases like “a nose cone whose blown-back thought balloon / can no longer be read” burst out from the hermeticism of a landscape defined by arid philosophic language and elemental images. Later we find a much blunter assessment of crisis: “Gathering at the cusp / of our country’s wavering age. Many lusts / whirling in the heat and wanting / to pierce the light- / bulb” (51). Yet these gestures are far and few between—they seem to promise larger forays into more tactile land that never happen. As is, they remain unconvincing in their attempts to expand the significance of Mutschlecner’s investigations. Best not imply that missile silos and flickering screens are the substrata of our consciousness without saying something new about this.

Sign becomes much more compelling when not in the American apocalypse mode, but, rather, when it is affirming, invoking—not invoking absence in lines whittled down to nothing or images immediately taken back—but in attempting to positively name the holy, in admitting desire into its diction. This is riskier: “Lucenti / Incendi / Dello / Spirito / Santo” – pure naming which flanks, on either side, on discrete lines, a vertical column which spells out “IMMANUEL” (76). We go from the eye moving across the parched landscape and the mind pushing through the difficulties of appetite and the difficulties of attention—what prevents ritual praise—to the enactment of ritual language.

Consisting of mostly long poems long poems divided into numbered sections, Sign invites the reader to encounter it less as a collection of discreet poems and more as a unified whole. And there is a general movement from the absences of the first section to the stirrings of grace in the third. While the first and final sections, particularly “In Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream” and “Poems for the Feast of Corpus Christi” largely succeed at what they set about doing, the second section, though not without its pleasures, is, as a whole, unsuccessful in sustaining the general dramatic impulse of the book.

Mutschlecner is always careful and spare—admirable qualities in any poet, but I suspect that beneath the needle like spines of the lines he has given us (dutifully stuffed with biblical and philosophical reference) is a milky core of sensuous language waiting to emerge and more fully complement and complicate what we are given in Sign.

***

Joe Hall is finishing his MFA in poetry at George Mason University where he is a Thesis Fellow. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Versal and others.

Reminder

We're now reading new submissions.

We know our main site says that we're closed, but it is wrong!
(we've not been able to update it; Dreamweaver problems).

So yeah, send us things.

Jonathan Lyons in the next Gargoyle

We just heard word from Jonathan Lyons that his latest story will appear in the next issue of Gargoyle, due out summer of '08. Lyons' story "The Good Life" ran in the Spring 2007 issue of Phoebe, so we're really happy to report his newest success.

Fall Update #1

School is back in session at GMU and we are looking forward to a wonderful year here at Phoebe, with some exciting stuff in store. Here's a bit of an update on a few things....

Submission Period Open
We are happy to announce that the fall submission period is open and we are now reading work again, so feel free to start sending your poems + storeis our way. Full submission guidelines can be found here.

Winter Contests
We are happy to have Pete Orner (fiction) and Peter Gizzi (poetry) judging our winter contests this year. We will be accepting contest entries until
Dec. 1. Click here for contest details and judge bios.

Fall 2007 Issue
We're very pleased with our latest issue and will post sample work soon. All contributor and contest entrant copies have been mailed. If you've yet to receive yours, please drop us an email, as a few have come back.

Poetry Reviews
In the coming months we will be utilizing our blog to contribute to the discourse about newly released poetry collections, focusing on smaller presses and/or younger poets. We hope to publish 3-4 reviews per month, to get started, and then expand from there. Look for the first reviews to be posted in the next week or so. If you have a book or chapbook that you'd like us to consider for review, send it to:
Phoebe: A Journal of Literary Arts, MSN 2D6
ATTN: Poetry Editor
George Mason University
4400 University Drive
Fairfax, VA 22030-4444

A quick announcement before I head off to get some writing done. Congratulations to the following authors:

• Rebecca Hall withdrew her story "La Maison du Fada" from us a few weeks ago. Her story will appear in the next issue of Redivider. I am jealous.
• Holly Wilson, an editor at The Southeast Review, just withdrew a story from us the beginning of this month. Her story "Whisker Get Your Gun" will appear in the next print issue of the great Opium Magazine. You can read some of Opium's latest online content here. I am also jealous.

And also, we've got less than a month until our submission period reopens, so get those revisions taken care of if you're interested in sending work our way.

That is all.

Quick update before I leave for happy hour in Arlington:

• This morning, mail services came by and picked up the rest of the issues that we needed to send out to the contest entrants. That was a relief to get those out of here. Hopefully not too many will come back to us with the big red words stamped on them: Return To Sender. If you haven't received one for a while after today, send us an email and we'll check our records and try to get them out to your proper address.
  
• I finally got around to updating our main website. I put up Peter Gizzi's bio on the contest page and then I posted new pics and bios on our "about us" page. We'll try to get more of those up as we get closer to opening day of our next reading period, which is in about a month.
• And finally, I posted a mini-review of the latest Redivider here. It's a good issue.
  

Redivider, Spring 2007

I finally had a chance to finish the newest issue of Redivider the other night. The Spring 2007 issue (4.2) is about 160 pages of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, interviews, and reviews, with the usual mix of art scattered throughout, all bound together beneath the simple cover by Helen Kim: an oil painting of a woman(?) standing under the reddish glow of a street lamp. As for the list of contributors, it is a nice mix of recognizable names (Benjamin Percy, Julianna Baggot, Kim Chinquee) as well as names I'll have to look out for in the future.

Although I enjoyed all of the stories in this issue, two fiction pieces in particular stood out for me: Rob Phelps' "The Sinking Robert" and Percy's "The Faulty Building." Phelps' experimental story describes the neurotic self-destruction of a desperate man (The Robert) and how this affects the world around him. It's written in a surreal, mechanical sort of way. I'm reminded of portions of Barthelme's The Dead Father as well as a lot of Ben Marcus' work. In contrast to the intellectual mood of "The Sinking Robert" is Percy's emotional story about a vacation to the mountains in the Pacific northwest gone bad. I couldn't wait to read it, given how much I liked his first collection The Language of Elk and as his story "Refresh, Refresh." This is standard Percy, filled with nice descriptions, unique violence, and a strong plot, all of which give it a pleasant kind of sadness.

As for the poetry in the issue, I liked Josiah Bancroft's "The Skywriter," Ian Harris' "1776 Sea Battles," and Jae Newman's funny poem "Hole-in-One," which talks about Kim Jong, the trouble with convincing others that you're God, and golf all in 8 lines. Too bad Redivider hasn't yet posted some of the poetry online.

Other things of note:

• Catherine Roach has a cartoon: "left and leaving: illustrations of what was"
• Aydasara Ortega has two must-see collages: "Appeasement" and "The Will of the Wheel." They made me laugh. Look at them online to see their color; they're printed in black and white in the issue.
  
• Kathleen Rooney interviews Tao Lin
  

That is all.

I've been going through some of our emails and found the following fiction withdrawals:

• Mary Akers' story "Pygmalion (Recast)" will appear in the next issue of The Fiddlehead, Canada's longest living literary journal. It is a quarterly published at the University of New Brunswick. Apparently, they are famous for their rejection notes.
  
• Ingrid Satelmajer's story "Ladybug" was picked up by Talking River, a journal out of Lewis-Clark State College.
  
• Michelle Nichols had her story "Visitation" accepted by the editors of The Distillery. I'm assuming she'll be joining David Hammel in that issue.

As for the mailing of our fall issue, Nat and I figured out the label situation w/r/t the contest entrants, and so we were able to stuff more than half of those envelopes and address them last Friday. These will go out soon to all of those authors who supported us by submitting to our contest.

And don't forget, Peter Orner is judging this year's Winter Fiction Contest.

Well it's been a little slow around here: I just got back from the Tin House Workshop, and Nat just left for a week of vacation, so we're sort of getting in and out of the office less nowadays. Nat tells me he went ahead and mailed out this fall's issue to our subscribers (institutions, other journals, and individuals), but he's having trouble with the mail merge system and the list of those who entered our contests. Turns out we're also having trouble with previous subscriptions not being recognized by our system (we use file maker?), so we're trying to deal with that as well.

I know Wade's been reading quite a lot, and Nat has some packets for me when he gets back into town this Thursday. We're still not accepting submissions until September 1st, and I apologize if you're one of those authors who has recently received a slip asking that you resubmit in the fall (I know that costs money).

If I have time, I might write up a brief review of Tin House, but I don't know.

Eventually, Wade suggested that we try to post some particulars (hints&tips) as to what we're looking for in submissions, from the cover letter to the stories/poems themselves. So that's in the works.

And a side note: I was going through some back issues because someone sent us a check and a request for one in particular, and I found an issue from 1995 (Volume 24, Number 1) that made me happy. Apparently, the staff was in the habit of naming issues: this one was called displacement, and in it then-fiction editors Scott Berg and Patricia Fuentes had printed a story by Gordon Lish called "Konkluding Labor of Herkules: A Fiction," which you can find in his collection Self-Imitation of Myself. I liked that collection, and so I was glad to see that we'd published one of those stories.

The Headmaster Ritual and New Stories From The South 2007

Taylor Antrim, a past winner of our Winter Fiction Contest, just released his first novel, The Headmaster Ritual, in June. I meant to point this out earlier, but frankly, I got busy with other things. Anyhow, I haven't been able to find any reviews of the book yet, but I did find a sort of glowing profile/review thingy in The New York Observer by Sara Vilkomerson.

The profile begins with groups of words that say things like "Even for someone as painfully—ridiculously—attractive as author Taylor Antrim, the process of picture-taking can still be painful" and "He may have felt uncomfortable, but Mr. Antrim looked downright Gatsby-like" and "Patrician-boned Mr. Antrim." Anyhow, I thought that was funny.

And then, as the article goes on, Sara sort of relaxes the language a bit and lets Taylor do a lot more talking on his own. We hear about the book, about his prep school background, about his jobs, etc, and I think that's when the article gets more interesting.

Forbes has excerpted the novel here.

In related news, Joshua Ferris' story "Ghost Town Choir" from Prairie Schooner was selected by Edward P. Jones for inclusion in the upcoming volume of New Stories from the South. This may be old news, since Dan Wickett posted the information in February, but I figured I'd highlight it again.

Another Phoebe?

It came to Wade's attention a few weeks ago that there's another journal out there called Phoebe. Apparently a few poets thanked him for accepting their poems, when in fact he hadn't. After a bit of research, Wade figured it out. Apparently, the Women's and Gender Studies department at SUNY-Oneonta publishes a semiannual journal, "which fosters intellectual exchanges between scholars of women's and gender studies & gender & sexuality studies within SUNY, across the country and abroad."

Two more withdrawals to note on the fiction side of things:

• David Hammel recently withdrew a story titled "Tables" from consideration; the editors of The Distillery have picked it up for their next issue. The Distillery is a literary and creative arts journal out of Motlow State Community College in Lynchburg, TN.
  
• And according to email Bulletin #6 from the editors of Glimmertrain, Ron Savage's story "Baby Mine" will appear in a future issue. He withdrew the story from us back in May, if I remember correctly.

So congratulations to those two authors on their forthcoming publications.

NewPages Review

Last week, NewPages posted a batch of reviews of literary journals here.

Scroll down to read what Danielle LaVaque-Manty thought about our Spring 07 effort.

(Hint: the reviews are in alphabetical order)

Poetry Update

A quick follow-up to Ryan's recent post-
We got a bit backlogged during the Spring and are still reading poetry submissions from March and April. I hope to have all of those done before the start of the Fall semester, if not sooner, and will send notifications as we get stuff read. Anything we read now will be considered for our next issue (Spring 2008). We have received several withdrawal notices, which have been taken into consideration. If you've sent a submission query in recent weeks, expect a reply soon. As Ryan pointed out, we do not read over the summer (and our office is "officially" closed) but we are taking some time to catch up with reading - just expect a longer response time if you do send a query or other email.

Also, any poems received this summer (before Sept 1) will be returned unread. Please consider resubmitting in the fall.

Thanks for your patience and support.

Summer Reading, Submissions, Mailing

On the fiction side of things, we've just about gotten through our submissions (though Regan has a few packets of as-of-yet unread stories that she took with her on vacation to read through). We're at the stage now where Nat and I are passing around a lot of the stories that made it through the initial stages of review. These are stories that have caught our eye for one reason or another, and so we're reading them again and again to see what we think.

I saw that Wade is starting to get into the poems from March and April. So he's working hard to get those read as well.

So far, we've accepted one story that we're really happy with and we're about to accept another probably later today. These are stories that we absolutely had to have, that we were really moved by, and we can't wait to print them.

A quick note: we're not currently reading new stories. In other words, stories that come into us over the summer, we'll have to return unread (if they have enough postage) or we'll have to send a note asking the author to resubmit when our reading period reopens in the Fall. I know some journals take in submissions year round, but I think this little breathing period is important for us; we have a small staff, and we do a lot of catching up over the summer.

Nat's currently working to get the mailing taken care of (the Fall issue we just printed), and we're looking at possibly getting the issue into some local bookstores, so we'll see how that goes.

7/15 Celebrating the Poetry Chapbook

Recent Phoebe contributor (and GMU MFA alum) Melissa Tuckey reads in DC on July 15, as part of a chapbook release event at Busboys and Poets. Check it out...

Sunday Kind of Love: Celebrating the Poetry Chapbook
With E. Louise Beach, Michael Gushue, Alan King, and Melissa Tuckey
Sunday, July 15, 4-6 pm
Followed by an open mic
Hosted by Sarah Browning of DC Poets Against the War and Regie Cabico of Sol & Soul.

Busboys & Poets
14th & V Streets, NW
Washington, DC
U Street/Cardozo on the Metro green line
Wheelchair accessible
Free and open to the public
For more info: 202-387-POET, womenarts2 (at) aol (dot) com
www.busboysandpoets.com

Featured Withdrawals

I've noticed here at Phoebe we get quite a few withdrawals from authors who've had their stories and poems accepted elsewhere. This probably isn't rare; I expect it happens at other journals as well, but I thought it would be interesting to try to give those authors a public congratulations for their continuing success and point out where their new stories will be featured and/or printed (I feel sort of like it's a good thing to do, since we encourage simultaneous submissions after all).

So anyhow, I'll try to keep a running thing going and post these withdrawals (acceptances!) as they happen, or as we find out about them, so that you (our dear and few blog readers) can find these stories and poems, read them, and be happy.

(Our knowledge of these works will vary, depending on how far along they traveled in our review process)

Here are some that immediately come to mind:

• Amy Knox Brown sent along a wonderful story called "Why We Are The Way We Are" last year, and we wanted to print it for Fall 2007, but she withdrew it because the Beloit Fiction Journal had accepted it before we got to it. I tried to find out more at the journal's website, but there's little there to see. Here's a quick blurb I found online though. Pick up the hard copy to read her work.
• Luke Geddes recently withdrew a story from us. It was picked up by Wandering Army, an online journal. You can read it here.
• And finally, Carl Peterson withdrew a story that was picked up by DIAGRAM back in late winter.

That's all I've got, maybe we'll post some poems too.

Greg Grummer Poetry Contest, 2008

Phoebe is again sponsoring its annual Greg Grummer Poetry Award contest. The author of the winning poem will receive $1000 and publication in the Fall 2008 issue of Phoebe. Peter Gizzi will judge. We will be accepting entries until December 1, 2007. The entry fee is $15. You can find contest guidelines here.

PETER GIZZI's books include "The Outernationale" (Wesleyan, 2007), "Some Values of Landscape and Weather" (Wesleyan, 2003), "Artificial Heart" (Burning Deck, 1998), and "Periplum and Other Poems 1987-1992" (Salt Publishing, 2004). His honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets (1994), and fellowships in poetry from the Howard Foundation (1998), The Foundation for Contemporary Arts (1999), and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2005). He is also the editor of "The House That Jack Built: The Collected Letters of Jack Spicer" (Wesleyan, 1998). He currently teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Postage, Computers, Fiction Submissions, Fall Issue, and other thoughts

I can't sleep, and I don't want to wake up my wife by rattling submissions around out here in the living room, so I figured I'd add a few thoughts to this newsreel for anyone that's interested:

• It's no secret that the USPS raised their rates recently and added some confusing regulations on top of that mess, so we've stocked up on 2cent stamps. Those of you who submitted to us before this crazy rate increase, do not worry, we'll be able to respond. Though I will be honest here, a few of you who asked that we return your manuscripts (and provided us with a full-sized, stamped manilla folder), I must warn you, some of those envelopes will have quite a lot of 2cent stamps on them.
• This information is for our international authors: we're having trouble with the International Return Coupons. I don't know what it is really, some of them have been coming to us postmarked and some haven't. We can't use the ones that aren't postmarked, since, according to the postman, they haven't been paid for (in other words, we'd have to pay). And basically, everytime we get an IRC, we have to go the post office to send back our response. This isn't a huge problem, but it needs some attention. I guess what I'm saying is for international authors, 1) I want to apologize for taking so long to handle this, and 2) we might be able to save a lot of hassle if we just respond to you by email in the future. Now this isn't an official change of submission guidelines, but I'll have to talk it over with everyone else, since I'm just fiction.
• I don't know about poetry, but we're now getting into the fiction submission packets that we received in February and March. I can't promise anything concerning decisions, when they'll be made, etc, since the Spring 08 Issue print deadline is a while off yet, but I will say that we're reading those stories now. As far as our summer process goes, it's a bit more relaxed (read: slow, sorry), since we have a smaller staff. Nat's reading, I'm reading, and I think one or two of our fiction readers will stay on board to help out. Our assistant fiction editor will be out of town this summer, but I'll be in touch with her to talk about what we've been seeing. But we're taking our yearly break from reading incoming submissions so we can catch up on what we already have.
• And our Fall 07 issue just came in a few weeks ago (all 1,200 copies of it, I think) and it's cluttering up our tiny cubicle. We can't wait to get it out to everyone, especially our contributors, but we're having a little trouble with the bar code; we have to wait for stickers or something like that. But I will say, it looks great. I'll post the new cover when we get our new computers up and running.
• Yes, maybe not exciting for you, but definitely for us: we've got two new machines that Nat's setting up this week. Our old ones were about ready to conk out (we were scared of losing all our submission records, money stuff, artwork, blah blah blah), but now we'll be safe and sound.

That's it for me. Have a good weekend.

Poetry Contest Judge

I'm pleased to announce that Peter Gizzi will judge Phoebe's 2008 Greg Grummer Poetry Contest. Peter is the author of four books of poetry, including, most recently, The Outernationale. I'll post a formal bio soon. Contest guidelines and more information can be found via the Phoebe website.

1/2 of Kurtis Davidson Places 2nd in Glimmertrain Contest

Good news for Kurtis Davidson and Phoebe, since we're publishing his/their story, "The Second Coming of Afro-Christ," in our Fall 2007 issue. I'm not quite sure how to talk about this, since, well, Kurtis Davidson is actually two people writing as one (Kurt Ayau and Davis Rachels: "Because two heads is better than any other number of heads"). I won't even pretend to understand: imagine the confusion at author readings, etc. Anyhow, go to his/their website .

Here's the official news and link:

The editors of Glimmertrain honored Kurt Ayau, who placed 2nd with the story "Outsourcing" in the winter 2006/2007 Very Short Fiction Contest.

We're happy.

Weekend Conference

This Saturday I'll be heading to the Writer's Center at Bethesda to represent Phoebe at the Conversations and Connections conference along with other area journals, authors, publishers, etc. While we were at AWP, both the folks at Barrelhouse and the editors of Potomac Review invited us to come along and take part, but we sort of never did anything about it. Well, I finally got in touch with Dave at Barrelhouse, and he was able to find a spot for me on the Submissions panel along with some other great editors.

Anyhow, it's a day long conference with a few big speakers, a speed-editing session during lunch, and a series of panels through the evening. It should be a good experience to hear what other editors say about their journals and their reading/publishing process; hopefully, I'll learn some things that'll help us improve how we work around here. I've already got a few ideas.

Update on that to follow next week probably.

In other news, we just received our proofs for the fall issue of the journal and we've approved them; now it's up to the printers to do their thing. We're still reading through all the submissions we have (we stopped taking new ones April 15th), but it's sort of slowed down a little since everyone is busy with end-of-semester work. But we're doing as much as we can and we hope to respond as soon as possible to everyone who still has work with us.

Barrelhouse, Issue Three

One word. Barrelhouse. And, no, I don't mean that intriguing little liquor store in DC, you know, the one with the front that looks like three or four enormous barrels. Rather I mean the newish literary journal founded by Aaron, Dave, Joe, and Mike, self-proclaimed purveyors of pop flotsam and cultural jetsam, in addition to the usual mix of great fiction and poetry.

This year I finally became acquainted with the magazine, and after picking up Issue Three at AWP, I realize that I made my move just in time: this latest one is about Love. Yes, Love. I seem to have skipped all of those awkward, confusing steps; you know, the steps between that moment when you first lock eyes and the moment when all that mumbo jumbo, the death do us part stuff, that kind of silliness, or whatever, you know, whatever happens at the end, the moment that all of that suddenly becomes very not-silly at all. Not that I don't want to read about those steps, but that I'm fairly happy to have blindly stumbled into the exciting part. You know, kind of like returning from the bathroom during, well, during any part of the movie 300 (so maybe it wasn't that exciting after all). Anyhow, I clearly have some catching up to do w/r/t this journal.

But, so, and, well here's what the editors have to say about this issue: "It's kind of like our third date. The first date, we were chaste and sweet and overtly cool, dressed to impress. The second date, we tried to mix it up a bit, let you know we had a wild side. This time, baby, we want some commitment. In other words, you best be puttin' out."

So put out I did. And to be honest, I learned. I learned a darker side of Love, the "love set to not-as-cool-music-as-we'd-like" kind of love. I learned about Love from stories titled "Dot Dot Dot" and "Resin" and "Recommended If You Dig" and "Billets Doux" and "Carseat." From an interview, I learned about the kind of primitive, spiritual Love that George Saunders' characters miraculously seem to feel as they stumble around in a modern, loveless world. And, gasp, I learned about Love from a poem titled "House Over the World." Hopefully, Wade will explain it to me, even though I already know that I really liked reading it for some reason.

I wish I had more time to talk about all of the stories, but frankly, I'm getting tired, and won't be able to fit everything into this post. So I'll just talk about Greg, the husband in "Dot Dot Dot," who must simultaneously deal with an infestation of little black bugs in his house as well as his wife's sudden withdrawal from him and his affection. Greg says, "Marlin started using my real name months ago. No explanation, no apologies. But I kept on. I still use our nicknames, arrested in their evolutionary development at 'Binger,' in the hope that she'll eventually come back into the cutesy fold." And I'll just talk about Westly, the sleep-deprived father from "Carseat," who, because of his rude tailgating, incurs the wrath of another driver during a late-night lap around the neighborhood with his baby daughter. The man follows him to his house and confronts him, and after the driver and he scuffle in the yard, Westly sits on the porch of his house, which shelters his sleeping wife, and thinks; he sits on the porch with his daughter, who rests in the carseat, and says, "I kept thinking how it never seemed real, as if I had conjured him up. How standing on the slanted lawn, looking back at all of this, I felt caught. Because if I didn't have this, where would I be?"

"Carseat" has stuck with me since I read it a few weeks ago; it has surprised me with how many times it suddenly appears in my thoughts, and I can see why the editors chose to publish it. I feel I can't do it justice with a few sentences. Nor can I explain every wonderful piece in this issue. I'm sorry. I just can't. So here's where I say you'll have to see for yourself.

Rumor has it that the next issue is going to press very soon. And although I'm not sure what exactly the editors will have ready for us, be it Death or Birth or some other general kind of issue, which might put an end to this extended date metaphor, who knows, I know I want some of it, whatever it is, because it will be fantastic. So keep up the good work, Barrelhouse.

That is all.

Good night.

08 Fiction Judge for Winter Contest

I'm excited to say that Peter Orner has agreed to judge our Winter Fiction Contest next year. I've wanted to announce for a while, but we had the 07 contest running, and we clearly still have a long way to go until December 1st, 2007 (the PM deadline), but now you know. So start thinking about submitting and put that date on your calenders.

I've copied his Bio off his website for those of you who aren't familiar with him and his work. If you're interested in learning more, click on this.

Peter Orner was born in Chicago and is the author of the novel, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown, 2006), and the story collection, Esther Stories (Houghton Mifflin, 2001).

The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, a San Francisco Chronicle Best-Seller, won the Bard Fiction Prize and is being translated into French, Italian, and German. The novel is set in Namibia where Orner lived and worked in the early 1990's.

Esther Stories was awarded the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction, and was a Finalist for the Pen Hemingway Award.

Orner has published fiction in the Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, The Southern Review, and various other publications. Stories have been anthologized in Best American Stories and the Pushcart Prize Annual.

In 2006, Orner was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Currently, Orner is on leave from San Francisco State University and living in up-state New York where he is writer-in-residence at Bard College.



That's all for now.

We'll have details up shortly at the official website.
As for the upcoming Greg Grummer poetry contest, I'll check with Wade and then we'll announce what's going on with that when I learn something.

Our 2007 Contest Winners

I'm sorry we've taken so long to post this information, but we've finally gotten our act together. We wanted to make sure we could announce both contests at the same time, and since we're in the middle of finishing this issue, it's been crazy around the office.

Greg Grummer Poetry Award Winner:
Angus Bennett – "On Whether the river Will Break"

Poetry Finalists:
Joshua Kryah for "My Easter"; "Come Hither"
Eliza Rotterman for "Two Girls"
Kimberly Lojek for '[Draft of Interior System of Structure]"; "[Harnessed Dove and Window Broken]"
Reba Elliott for "Child Not Made"; "Los Mineros para Los Minerales"
Arpine Knoyalian Grenier for "The Cables Set, The Light"
Melody S. Gee "Migration"
John Pursley III for "[You Can Look Through These Windows—Look, & Not See Anything…]"



and



Winter Fiction Contest Winner:
John Blair for “The Road to Little Happiness”

Fiction Finalists:
David Norman for "The Great Basin"
M. D. Baumgartner for "Like Gods of the Sun"
Matthew Goldberg for "With a Mighty Hand and Outstretched Arm"
Pierre Hauser for "Girlyman"
Amy Ralston Seife "What We Do"
Alison Hicks for "Texture"
Kristie Smeltzer for "Bridges"
Richard Jespers for "Engineer"


Congratulations to our winners and finalists and thank you to all who submitted your stories/poems. We'll also mail out notification to everyone who provided an SASE. And of course, when we publish, we'll send you along your copy of the contest issue.

Now I must go to class, but check back later for other things.

Almost There

We're in the final stages of the selection process for the upcoming issue of Phoebe, and we're nearly ready to post the winner and finalists of our fiction and poetry competitions. After that, I'll announce next year's fiction judge. Then Kati and Nat will layout the issue, and our work will be momentarily complete. Sorry this has taken so long, there always seem to be snags and setbacks along the way, which I'll discuss later.

So everyone who has asked about results and such, thank you for being patient; we'll get those to you soon.

Avery Anthology

So I received the first volume of the Avery Anthology in the mail a few weeks ago. And although I couldn't read it immediately because of other busy things, I took it with me on spring break to see just exactly how these people had realized their vision. And, to be honest, I had a personal interest in their publication, since they’d rejected one of my stories with a very nice note last fall. So after a nonstop read on the flight down to the beach, I must say that I am genuinely happy for Adam, Andrew, and Steph, the founding editors.

A quick history: I first caught wind of the project sometime last spring, and so throughout this past year I checked on them to see how they were doing as they traveled the long road to press. Their blog tells of their ups and downs (non-profit applications, printing issues, marketing/advertising, reading and selecting fiction, etc), and it's a fairly interesting look at the effort, more than a year long for this crew, needed to get a small, non-profit journal up and running.

As for the future, the editors of Avery seem to be on a rolling schedule as opposed to a semi-annual or quarterly schedule like most journals. But they also say that they plan to publish two “anthologies” a year. So I'm still unsure about the whole anthology versus journal thing; I guess I just don't see how it's any different, but perhaps time will tell.

The issue itself weighs in at just over a pound (acc. to their blog), costs 10$ plus shipping, and runs to 245 pages or so of fiction. The design is nice; it looks as though their art director, Seth Sanders, has taken the time to paint or create an illustration and title page for each of the 19 stories, as well as the startling cover, which seems like a lot of work, but it adds a nice, personal touch to the journal. As for the contributors, they all seem to be fairly experienced writers, who range from the popular to the obscure (but no less able). The editors have picked up a piece from Ander Monson, and an excerpt from Stephen Dixon's forthcoming novel, which is great I think for the inaugural issue. Their other contributors seem to have solid publishing backgrounds as well, and more noteworthy, those backgrounds vary: the contributors notes mentions Tin House next to elimae and Juked; Best American Short Stories credits next to small press releases. And of course, there's an "emerging author" in there somewhere, though I would have liked to see "this story is the author's first publication" appear once or twice in the contributor's notes as well.

But obviously though, it comes down to the stories, not who an author is or where they’ve published.

So, to the fiction.

I can't touch on all of it, since this post has become a bit longer than I wanted, but I'd like to mention a few that grabbed me, that “knocked my socks off.” I’ll start with Dominic Preziosi's “Aftermath.” Preziosi's story takes place in the apocalyptic landscape of New York City shortly after the attacks, though the narrator finds a way around the obvious pitfalls such a story might encounter by focusing more upon the characters (a husband, a woman, and a lecherous, one-eyed priest) rather than the event itself. The piece reminds me of those news stories and legends that we all heard concerning men and women long presumed dead, who returned home after having wandered around in the smoky haze of the city for several days. In the story, the main character spends a few days with a stranger, a women he's met after the collapse, and, with the help of a one-eyed priest, they try to make sense of what has happened before he finally thinks of returning to his wife.

“The Importance of War” by Dean Bakopoulos is a three-page story about a squad of soldiers, who stay in a trench and wait for a fellow soldier to die in a nearby field. They sit around, play cards, and try to light bong resin, since they’re too scared to go outside and fight or help their dying comrade. Apparently, the enemy has poison gas and nail bombs. The soldiers say things like, “I’m getting damn sick of pork and beans,” and “I’d give my left nut for a cold six-pack today.” They debate whether or not they should put the dying soldier out of his misery, and eventually one of them rolls a grenade over the side with the pin still in it, so as to leave the final decision up to him. Instead, the dying man treats them to a delirious operatic concert in Italian. When one of the soldiers says, “We should ask him to sing us something American,” the narrator responds:

“Nothing beautiful comes from America anymore,” I said, but nobody paid attention to me anymore when I said things like that. The war was too important. I didn’t blame them.


Anyhow, I thought it was a sad story.

My favorite story in the anthology is “Incidental Music” by Daniel Levin Becker, which is about a billing clerk, named William, who works at Amity Credit where he opens the incoming envelopes and files payment checks. He begins to receive from a certain man random bits of intricately drawn sheet music, which the man has folded around his checks. William takes the sheet music to a neighbor, Lenore, a librarian, and together they play the music on her piano. As the months go by, they fail to make any sense of the various kinds of music, but they do become attached to each other. They fall in love. One day the checks stop coming, and William finally seeks out the mystery composer. I won’t give away the ending, but I will say it’s a great story about how one life’s coming to an end leads to the beginning of another man’s life.

I realize that these quick write-ups don't do the stories justice. I'm sorry. The best thing would be for you to read them yourselves and see what you think. So that’s about it for this post. Sorry about the sudden cut and stop and such. I’m tired and it’s time to do other things. Check out Avery though if you can. It's a new journal that I'd like to keep track of.

New York Times Book Review

Read James Poniewozik's review of Then We Came To The End, recent first novel of Phoebe contributor Joshua Ferris.

"Then We Came to the End, it turns out, is neither small nor angry, but expansive, great-hearted and acidly funny."

Go to the NYT for more.

AWP 07 Recap

We just got back into the office after a good time at AWP: we sold our journals, then gave away the remaining copies; we traded issues with other journals, especially those with whom we haven't organized a formal exchange yet; we went to panels; we met lots of people; we probably forgot other people, and we're sorry about forgetting those people; we attended readings; we had drinks; we saw famous people, etc.

We did many things, and those things were mostly fun.

I can't speak for everyone on our crew, but here are a few of the highlights from my trip.

• Hobart. This is a great journal, which I recommend everyone read. I chatted with Aaron Burch, the editor, for a bit about his starting it up, his reading submissions, and other things. The design itself is very nice. And he's been receiving plenty of submissions to keep him busy reading. The guest edited issue (edited by Ryan Boudinot) is particularly good, by the way.
• Also, many people came to our table and said they really enjoyed reading Phoebe. This was a nice surprise, as we rarely hear anything back at all. Putting together an issue always seems to end after it's printed and distributed, so it's nice to see how the process continues. Thanks to those who continue to read us. And many thanks to those who continue to submit as well: you're where it all begins.
• Robert Olen Butler read a story that he wrote about Nixon. The story, "18 1/2," appeared in the most recent issue of Zoetrope: All-Story. And his Nixon impression is pretty good. He also read from his newest collection, Severance: Stories.
• Went to the Fence/Actionbooks poetry reading at some bar (django?) on Thursday evening and had my first PBR tallboy in a long while. Wade, our assistant poetry editor, helped me to understand the meaning of certain poems. Other poems I did not understand as well.
• On Friday, I was happy to hear Susan Shreve read from her new memoir, due out in June 07. I didn't realize that she'd be coming to AWP, so that was great to see her and to say hi.
• Met Liam Callanan, an '02 graduate from Mason's writing program and author of two books. He teaches in the writing program at UW-Milwaukee. He'll be in D.C. on March 18th, I think, to give a reading at Politics and Prose to support his most recent release, All Saints.
• Talked to the Bat City Review folk and picked up their first two issues. Hopefully I'll read them in the next few days. Other journals I checked out that are worth noting: American Short Fiction (the people at Badgerdog are doing lots of good things right now), DIAGRAM, and Backwards City Review. I could list plenty others too, I suppose, but I don't know. That would take a long time.
• I met and spoke with Andrew Brown of Red Morning Press. He and two other Mason poets started the press in '04 after they graduated from the writing program and, according to their catalogue, it looks like they're putting out a title a year, though I also remember Andrew said that they plan to expand that number to two titles a year fairly soon, and eventually they'll accept nonfiction and fiction submissions as well.
• Finally met Richard Peabody, editor of Gargoyle and a very active figure in the lit scene here in D.C. I think he plans to reopen his submissions period this summer. Apparently, he's been a bit backlogged over there, which is no surprise considering the many other projects he's working on.
• Checked out the new issue of Redivider, in which one of our readers, David Conner, has a painting. It's a fine issue, I think, both because of Conner's work and the fiction.
• Heard Martone and Barth both give readings from new work. They are funny people. I think Barth's story, "Us/Them," will be printed in the newly resurrected Johns Hopkins Review? However, I can't find any links to this news online, so I don't know if it's true or not. I don't know what's true when Barth speaks. Or Martone for that matter. But either way, it was good to see and hear both of them.
• Met up with the Black Warrior Review staff at the local pub late Thursday and Friday nights to celebrate nothing in particular. They are great folks, who put out a great magazine and seem at home in any bar with anyone. Thanks BWR for the company.

That's about it for now. I think at some point Wade will give a brief rundown of AWP from the poetry side. Otherwise, I think you can check out Perpetual Folly and the Emerging Writers Network for some other comments about the conference. And I think Erika over at the Practicing Writing blog will post something soon as well.

That's about it; I'm off to log some fiction packets.

AWP 07

Tomorrow, Kati, Wade, Shawn, and I travel by plane and by automobile to Atlanta for AWP's annual conference and book fair.

Drop by table 254 to visit. We have issues to sell to you for your delight at low low prices. And we also have a wonderful poster that is not for sale.

We'll be sharing the table with the folks over at So To Speak, our university's feminist journal.

Also, the George Mason poetry faculty will be giving a reading at the conference, so if you can stop by and see that as well, do so. They are good people.

Search Out These Authors and Read Their Work

Word came to us about two of our recent contributors and how they're doing out there.

Pretty well I'd say.

Ryan Bartelmay's story, "All This Flatness," recently won the Boulevard Short Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers and appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of that journal.

And Joshua Ferris' debut novel, Then We Came to the End, published by Little, Brown & Co., is now in bookstores. If you can't get away from the computer for some reason, then you can find it here or here. Also, Mark Sarvas, contented defiler of prose and host of The Elegant Variation, has blogged about his own experience with the novel: how he briefly overcame his prejudice against MFA grads to discover his favorite book of the year. Visit his site for the story, and the first chapter of Ferris' novel, which Mark has nicely excerpted.

As for our other contributors, please send us hints and tips at phoebe@gmu.edu as to what you're up to, awards you've won, publications, etc. We'd be happy to brag for you. Simply write "blog" in the subject line.

Fiction Contest Finalists in the Mail

Kelli sent the Winter Fiction Contest finalist stories to judge Nell Freudenberger last week. I imagine we'll announce the list of finalists and the contest winner as soon as Nell gets back to us with her choices.

Thanks to all who entered; I think we had over 140 contest entries this year.

We've now turned our attention to reading regular fiction submissions, which haved clogged up our filing cabinet; those of you waiting to hear from us, we haven't forgotten you.

Pushcart Nominations

Some old news that we're happy to announce.

Last November we sent our nominations to the Pushcart prize committee.

In no particular order, here they are.


Poetry:

Lynn Xu: "[Language Exists Because]" from volume 35 issue 2
Elizabether Winder: "Where Is That Salty Place Where X Gives Up Her Subtlety" from volume 35 issue 2
Daniel Gutstein: "Code" from volume 35 issue 1
Megan Harlan: "Atget's Paris" from volume 35 issue 2


Fiction:

Joshua Ferris: "This Would Be Life-" from volume 35 issue 2
Ryan Bartelmay: "What Good Is It If You Can't Reach It?" from volume 35 issue 1



Congrats to the nominees and good luck.

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