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)