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.