Poetry Contest Winner!

Thank you to everyone who supported Phoebe by entering our 2008 Greg Grummer Poetry Contest.

I'm very happy to announce that our judge, Peter Gizzi, has selected "Satire on La Playa a Las Muertas", by Nora Almeida, as the winner of the $1,000 prize + publication. Nora's poem will be published in our Fall 2008 issue.

In addition, the following poems were selected as finalists, and will be considered for possible publication. We received quite a few strong submissions and were able to send a very diverse group of poems on to the judge:

Mary Austin Speaker - "The Leftovers"

Arpine Grenier - "The Heart of the City"

Stephanie Anderson - "This Cleaving and This Burning" & "An Arrangement of Vertebrae"

Angela Szczepaniak - "Pancreas Puddings"

Jonathan Rice - "Inheritance"

Shira Dentz - "and now for contemplation"

Kimberly Lojek - "Vertical [With Russian Blue Gloves and Cigarette Burning]", "[Women Bathing]", & "[Conditional Winter]"

Fiction winners + finalists should be posted soon...

Back from AWP and wicked busy

Sorry we've been out and unable to post recently. And unlike last year, I probably won't be writing up a recap of AWP, since other things have been holding me up. But you can find out how it went from several other people: Cliff Garstang, Dan Wickett, the folks at Cutbank, and Erika Dreifus blogging for The Writer Magazine.

As far as I know, two of our Fiction contributors to this most recent issue have blogs up and running - if you find any others let us know. To read what's going on with Blake Butler, go here, and to see what's going on with Kim Chinquee, go here. Also, Kim Chinquee's book of short prose, Oh Baby, has just come out from Ravenna Press. Hooray.

Some fiction withdrawals shortly.

Phoebe at AWP!

Phoebe's coming to NYC! We'll be at the Associated Writing Programs Conference this week in New York. Look for us at table #483. As in past years, we'll be splitting a table at the bookfair with our sister journal, So to Speak. Drop by and say hello!

New Phoebe!

As Ryan mentioned previously, the new issue is out, and we're quite happy with it! We hope you will be too. We should have the cover image and some sample work online soon, but in the meantime, here's a list of what's in the issue:

Speacial Feature on Visual Poetry, Selected by Jessica Smith, with work from:
Anne Boyer, T.A. Noonan, Helen White, Michelle Detorie, Alixandra Bamford, Jessica Smith, Angela Szczepaniak, Jennifer Scappettone, K. Lorraine Graham, & Jess Rowan

Poetry from:
Zachary Schomburg, Charles Bernstein, Miriam Stewart, Cheryl Quimba, Stephanie Cleveland, Liberty Heise, Heather Green, Alejandro Escude, Joe Hall, B.J. Best, K. Silem Mohammad, Michael Murray, Amy Dickinson, Karen Rigby, Reginald Dwayne Betts, James Nave, Brenda Sieczkowski, & Brandon Lewis

Fiction from:
Beth Staples, Michael Wolfe, Aaron Burch, Carl Peterson, Kim Chinquee, Jason Skipper, Nathan Robison, Shelley Berg, & Blake Butler

& featuring artwork by Dan Hillier

If you're in DC, copies are available at Bridge Street Books in Georgetown, and The Writer's Center in Bethesda. We hope to have a pay pal ordering feature online soon, but for now, you can order a copy the old fashioned way, $6ppd to:
Phoebe, MSN2C5
George Mason University
4400 University Dr
Fairfax, VA 22030

Contributor copies are in the mail, and subscriber copies should go out shortly, if they haven't already.

If you'd like to review Phoebe for your journal/magazine/blog, please get in touch and we'll send you a copy: phoebe@gmu.edu

New Issue Here

We just received the Spring 08 issue from the printer, and it looks really good. I'll look around for an image of the cover to post soon, but not until we get a chance to send it out to our contributors. Hopefully we can surprise them.

Sorry our reading has a been a little slower than usual. Most of the editors have been out of town for the break. We'll get back to that shortly, especially since we've also got contest submissions to read.

More later.

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.

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.

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...

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

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.
  

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.

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.

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.