The Missouri Review launched their new online anthology last week, textBOX, a sort of greatest hits collection of fiction, poetry, and essays from the long history of that journal, available in their entirety, which is great news for readers, writers, and teachers all. A lot of great stuff has appeared in those pages since 1978. Also TMR's new main website is live now, too, and incorporates their blog, co-written by several of the editors. This is one of the few writing/publishing blogs I find worth reading.
As for my doings, I have my usual course load this spring, four classes total with three of those writing workshops. I have a nonfiction workshop for the first time, as well, which is great, and challenges me to reach beyond the normal copia of answers I use in fiction workshops. While both courses are concerned with story-telling, and there are more similarities than differences, the shift away from an emphasis on scene and new conversations about the nature of "truth" in essay form brings moments when I really have to think about my response. It's exciting.
It also jives with the work I'm doing now. Most of my friends know that I'm all-in on the storm chasing memoir at this point. The tentative title is WHEN THE WIND TURNS TRAVELER, (from a Li-Young Lee poem), and essentially covers everything that happened in 2007, but with material from before and after as well. One thing I've discovered already is that my "research" is more or less complete; after fifteen years of chasing I don't have to do much fact-checking. I'm not a writer coming from some distant place to describe storm chasing. I am a storm chaser. The words, happily, appear without much struggle. Of course the subject matter won't be as easy to live with again for such time as it takes to write a book. But what I've come to realize is that while we typically choose our stories, sometimes the stories choose us.
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Saturday, January 22, 2011
New year, new story
The Emerson journal Redivider has accepted my short story, "Saturday Children." The staff asked me to help spread the word about their new fiction contest. Here's a blurb from Boston:
"Redivider, a journal of new literature and art, is having its first annual fiction competition, with a submission deadline set for March 1st, 2011. The winner will receive $1000 and publication, second place receives $250 and possible publication, and third place receives $100 and possible publication. The contest deadline is March 1, and full details can be found at www.redividerjournal.org.
Redivider is ranked in the top ten literary journals in New England by the Boston Globe, and takes pride in having published renowned authors such as Sherman Alexie, Robert Olen Butler, and Ron Carlson, alongside many promising new voices in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction."
"Redivider, a journal of new literature and art, is having its first annual fiction competition, with a submission deadline set for March 1st, 2011. The winner will receive $1000 and publication, second place receives $250 and possible publication, and third place receives $100 and possible publication. The contest deadline is March 1, and full details can be found at www.redividerjournal.org.
Redivider is ranked in the top ten literary journals in New England by the Boston Globe, and takes pride in having published renowned authors such as Sherman Alexie, Robert Olen Butler, and Ron Carlson, alongside many promising new voices in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction."
That's a nice haul for would-be first place winners. Send them your work!
Saturday, November 6, 2010
"How to be a Poet" by Wendell Berry
(to remind myself)
i
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill—more of each
than you have—inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.
ii
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
iii
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
Saturday, August 28, 2010
GSEA Presents: Back To School Reading
Denton peeps: Tonight, fiction, poetry, and nonfiction by new grad students Chelsea Woodard, Nathan Logan, Tim Boswell, Jessica Hindman, Jaclyn Thies, and Zach VandeZande. 7 pm @Jupiter House Europa (503 West University Drive, corner of University and Carroll)
20th Annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editor's Prize Competition.
Wake up blog! The editors of The Missouri Review asked me to pass along information regarding their 20th Annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editor's Prize Competition. Here's their pitch:
"We offer $5,000 each, plus a featured publication, to winners in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Finalists also receive cash prizes and have their work considered for publication. The contest's postmark deadline is October 1, 2010, and winners will be announced in early 2011. The $20 submission fee includes a year's subscription to the journal. Submissions can be sent to our mailing address or entered online.
For complete guidelines, visit our website."
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
"For a Philosopher" by Jennie Wrisley
The poet Jennie Wrisley took her own life a few days ago. Jennie was a cherished friend to many in Iowa City for several years and lately in San Marcos, Texas, where she attended the MFA program at Texas State. The few times I met her in person or communicated via email left the indelible impression of a warm and open spirit.
Jennie shared a poem with me many months ago, "For a Philosopher," which I admired very much and will post below. Jennie's first published work is forthcoming from Copper Nickel and her closest friends will send out others, including "For a Philosopher," in the months ahead.
A Facebook memorial page for Jennie is online here.
For a Philosopher
1.
When I first said I love you,
you said, What is love?
and told me what Wittgenstein wrote
about definitions and distinctions.
Your heavy brows convened
in that same conversation
when I groped for the distinction
between sexual and spiritual longing.
The object, of course, you said.
But, I said, swooping my hand to signify
the prairie we were walking through.
2.
What I meant but did not say, my intellectual,
was Let’s pretend we’re flowers.
I’m the purple coneflower
and you’re the aromatic aster,
which is also a shade of violet.
We were grappling in the snags
of language but now we’re simplified:
color is our only voice.
Being blooms, we’re sun worshippers,
and our purple is praise.
We’re nothing but alleluias
in a small country of dainty heathens
singing for the god of blaze.
But our violet petals
also cry, Come to me, bees!—
the intensity of hue an indication
of intensity of yearning,
the desire to hold our dusty lovers
in folds of bright and supple flesh.
Here, the language of prayer
is also the language of seduction,
and the body is a song, or rather,
two throbbings harmonized.
3.
You are afraid of death because
no one has given you reason to think
that mind is more than brain.
And, of course, you do not want
your self to perish with your body.
You say anything, please, anything,
but the loss of self.
4.
Once, I walked through that field
on a new moon night:
empty space fills with dark substance
on a monthly basis, that ghastly blackness
loosed from some abyss
to annihilate all form. My self
was stranded in the thick of it.
I was alone but not quite alone--
there were beasts invisible to me
humming and buzzing and chirping,
their wild thrum sounding
from every niche of the obscurity.
At first I thought their call
was assertion or celebration
of self and existence
against the brutal dark: I am! I am! I am!
I chanted the same and found it
a hollow declaration.
If the preservation of self is all you want,
let me tell you, it’s not enough.
I think the beasts were only
whimpering to one another:
Where are you?
which is exactly
what I was crying out
(for you or for your body,
or for something unworldly,
or for all of those)
and for a moment the cry became bone,
became white, became
everything I was.
5.
Religions do not agree with you
because they all require
a sacrifice of logic.
I once said that you
were too much sharpness,
and in loving you I was crashing
through a field of reasonable thorns.
The beauty of the naked you:
you are stripped of all your reason
momentarily, and I am alone
with the wild of you, the soft
of you, your body a pasture of skin
stretched across the bed.
And when I touch my fingers
to your fallow chest, my curled
and folded chromosomes
only membranes
away from yours, something
blooms, purple and singing,
in that place between.
But I could not prove this
as you require, because when I
lift my hand, it’s gone.
I am telling you, my philosopher,
we were made in the image of fire.
Jennie shared a poem with me many months ago, "For a Philosopher," which I admired very much and will post below. Jennie's first published work is forthcoming from Copper Nickel and her closest friends will send out others, including "For a Philosopher," in the months ahead.
A Facebook memorial page for Jennie is online here.
For a Philosopher
1.
When I first said I love you,
you said, What is love?
and told me what Wittgenstein wrote
about definitions and distinctions.
Your heavy brows convened
in that same conversation
when I groped for the distinction
between sexual and spiritual longing.
The object, of course, you said.
But, I said, swooping my hand to signify
the prairie we were walking through.
2.
What I meant but did not say, my intellectual,
was Let’s pretend we’re flowers.
I’m the purple coneflower
and you’re the aromatic aster,
which is also a shade of violet.
We were grappling in the snags
of language but now we’re simplified:
color is our only voice.
Being blooms, we’re sun worshippers,
and our purple is praise.
We’re nothing but alleluias
in a small country of dainty heathens
singing for the god of blaze.
But our violet petals
also cry, Come to me, bees!—
the intensity of hue an indication
of intensity of yearning,
the desire to hold our dusty lovers
in folds of bright and supple flesh.
Here, the language of prayer
is also the language of seduction,
and the body is a song, or rather,
two throbbings harmonized.
3.
You are afraid of death because
no one has given you reason to think
that mind is more than brain.
And, of course, you do not want
your self to perish with your body.
You say anything, please, anything,
but the loss of self.
4.
Once, I walked through that field
on a new moon night:
empty space fills with dark substance
on a monthly basis, that ghastly blackness
loosed from some abyss
to annihilate all form. My self
was stranded in the thick of it.
I was alone but not quite alone--
there were beasts invisible to me
humming and buzzing and chirping,
their wild thrum sounding
from every niche of the obscurity.
At first I thought their call
was assertion or celebration
of self and existence
against the brutal dark: I am! I am! I am!
I chanted the same and found it
a hollow declaration.
If the preservation of self is all you want,
let me tell you, it’s not enough.
I think the beasts were only
whimpering to one another:
Where are you?
which is exactly
what I was crying out
(for you or for your body,
or for something unworldly,
or for all of those)
and for a moment the cry became bone,
became white, became
everything I was.
5.
Religions do not agree with you
because they all require
a sacrifice of logic.
I once said that you
were too much sharpness,
and in loving you I was crashing
through a field of reasonable thorns.
The beauty of the naked you:
you are stripped of all your reason
momentarily, and I am alone
with the wild of you, the soft
of you, your body a pasture of skin
stretched across the bed.
And when I touch my fingers
to your fallow chest, my curled
and folded chromosomes
only membranes
away from yours, something
blooms, purple and singing,
in that place between.
But I could not prove this
as you require, because when I
lift my hand, it’s gone.
I am telling you, my philosopher,
we were made in the image of fire.
Sunday, February 14, 2010
A note in the East Hampton Star
A kind note about my essay, "Put on the Petty" appears in in the East Hampton Star's review of the 2010 Pushcart Prize anthology.
http://www.easthamptonstar.com/dnn/Arts/Book/tabid/11269/Default.aspx
In It for the Love of It
By Evan Harris
"I took it as a challenge and a pleasure to read this year’s “Pushcart Prize XXXIV” cover to cover, starting with Bill Henderson’s heartfelt yet slightly sassy, deservedly proud, orienting introduction. He lets you know where the Pushcart Press stands on the current state of things..."
http://www.easthamptonstar.com/dnn/Arts/Book/tabid/11269/Default.aspx
In It for the Love of It
By Evan Harris
"I took it as a challenge and a pleasure to read this year’s “Pushcart Prize XXXIV” cover to cover, starting with Bill Henderson’s heartfelt yet slightly sassy, deservedly proud, orienting introduction. He lets you know where the Pushcart Press stands on the current state of things..."
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
Review of 2666 on Bookpunch
My review of Roberto Bolano's 2666 is live on the cool site Bookpunch. Many thanks to Micah Ling for the invitation!
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Pushcart Prize XXXIV in stores
A few developments. I'm up to five agents now holding full manuscripts of Remedy Wheel. Surely one will offer representation, if only by accident. Fingers crossed.
Also, the 2010 Pushcart Prize anthology has dropped, available now by Amazon or, better yet, your local bookstore. This one includes my essay, "Put on the Petty," originally published in The Missouri Review. It's available both in hardcover and trade paper and probably makes a fantastic companion text in a writing or short story lit class, too--not the original intention of the series by any means--but a good way to help keep it alive in difficult market conditions. In any case, you should go buy it. I can't say enough about how humbled I am to have work appear in this venerable series and how grateful I am to those who encouraged me during the writing of that difficult essay, especially Jeff Doty, Scott Blair, Kristen Keckler, Speer Morgan, and Lee Martin, who picked the title out from a description I gave him over dinner in October 2008. Thanks, all.
On a side note, author Cliff Garstang has long maintained a ranking of those magazines whose fiction either appears or is cited for special mention in the Pushcart most frequently. It's an interesting exercise, not intended to be critical at all, but an arbitrary way to gauge the quality of fiction from the various "little magazines." Here's his latest ranking with the 2010 results included.
On a side note, author Cliff Garstang has long maintained a ranking of those magazines whose fiction either appears or is cited for special mention in the Pushcart most frequently. It's an interesting exercise, not intended to be critical at all, but an arbitrary way to gauge the quality of fiction from the various "little magazines." Here's his latest ranking with the 2010 results included.
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