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.