Tag: Fiction

Submission Calls for Writers 1/19/2023

Denton Loving2 Comments

Since it’s still January, it feels acceptable to still wish you a happy new year. In yet another attempt to get the year off to a good start, I spent much of yesterday sorting through these calls and submitting my own work. I was reminded both of how much time and effort it takes, and how important it is. Submitting is vastly different than the work of writing. We can be steadfast writers, dedicated to our craft, but the act of submitting our work forces us to evaluate our words in new ways. Which of my poems work together? Which of my essays is the most ready for others to read? Which of my stories is a good fit for this journal? Sometimes we’re lucky and our work is accepted. But even rejection can prompt us to see our pieces under new eyes. If we’re very fortunate, a kind editor takes time to offer a word of encouragement or advice. So yeah, I believe submitting is an important part of our job as a writer. Toward that end, I offer this list of one dozen submission opportunities. Good luck!

Glass: A Journal of Poetry Glass is back and now actively accepting submissions. We’ll be publishing weekly, a single poem every Wednesday, starting in July and we’d love to see your work. We’ll never charge reading fees and we’ll read year-round (except in March when we’ll be reading chapbook submissions). Past contributors have included Rane Arroyo, Saeed Jones, Lisa Fay Coutley, Adam Tavel, Sandy Longhorn, and Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, among many many others. Past work has been included in Sundress Publication’s Best of the Net and on Verse Daily. Submit 3-5 poems, any style, any length. http://www.glass-poetry.com/journal/submit.html  

Café Review Submit up to three unpublished poems in one file. The Café Review welcomes both new and established voices and has no limitations or preferences as to form or style. We publish the most exciting, impressive, and affecting poems that come to us. https://www.thecafereview.com/submissions/poetry/

Prelude Prelude is a journal of poetry and criticism based in New York. We publish online quarterly. Send us up to 8 pages of poetry. Send us a draft or a description of an essay. It could be a critical essay, an experimental essay, a personal essay relating to poetry, etc. https://preludemag.com/about/

Hawai`i Pacific Review  HPC is Hawai`i Pacific University’s award-winning online literary magazine. While we often publish work about Hawai`i and the Pacific, we accept great work from all regions and on all subjects. Submit no more than 3 poems at a time. Fiction and Creative Nonfiction submissions should be less than 4000 words. We also accept flash fiction and flash nonfiction up to 750 words. Deadline: February 4, 2023. https://hawaiipacificreview.org/submissions/

Orange Blossom Review OBR publishes innovative poetry, short fiction, creative nonfiction, and visual art. Submit short fiction and creative nonfiction up to 5,000 words. Submit up to three poems. We accept unsolicited general submissions through February 15, 2023. https://orangeblossomreview.org/

Swing  Swing is home for the emerging writer to the renowned, the discovered to the too-long neglected. We are creating a magazine with the energy and verve of its home city, Nashville, a town of vagabonds and roots, where new influences course through the old. Swing wants the poetry, fiction (auto-, hybrid, very short, or regular but extraordinary), nonfiction (creative, travel, personal, hybrid, surely there are other variations), and comics that could only have been written by you. Submit up to 5 poems or up to 8,000 words of prose. Deadline: February 16, 2023. https://www.porchtn.org/swing

Dunes Review  The Dunes Review is published in northern lower Michigan, a place of exquisite natural beauty and hardy local culture. Place is really important to us. Not only physical place, but the place created in a piece of writing. The feeling of being rooted in any somewhere grounds our work. If your work expresses or includes a significant tie to a significant somewhere, we are bound to love it. You and your work do not necessarily need a tie to a Michigan location, but we do appreciate work that fits Michigan-like themes or motifs. We consider short fiction or creative nonfiction up to 3,000 words, or up to 4 poems. Deadline: March 1, 2023, or when we have received 300 submissions, whichever comes first. www.michwriters.org/dunesreview/dunes-review-submission-guidelines/

Gulf Coast  Stories and essays should be no more than 7,000 words. Send up to 5 poems per submission. Gulf Coast typically commissions book reviews, but unsolicited reviews are accepted and occasionally published. We are particularly interested in reviews of first or second books. Interviews should not exceed twelve pages. Deadline: March 1, 2023. http://gulfcoastmag.org/submit/

Barrow Street BS is a nonprofit literary arts organization that was started in Greenwich Village, NYC in 1994. Submit up to five manuscript pages. Response time is one week to four months. Deadline: March 31, 2023. http://barrowstreet.org/press/submit/

Raleigh Review General submissions are open from January through March for Poetry. Send up to 5 poems. Deadline: March 31, 2023. https://www.raleighreview.org/submit.html 

Salamander Published biannually, Salamander features poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Submit no more than five poems at a time, OR one story or memoir at a time, OR up to three flash pieces in either fiction or nonfiction. Deadline: April 1, 2023. https://salamandermag.org/how-to-submit/

Asheville Poetry Review  APR is an annual literary journal that publishes 180–220 pages of poems, interviews, translations, essays, historical perspectives, and book reviews. Send 3–6 poems of any length or style. We are open for regular submissions from January 15 through July 15, 2023. http://www.ashevillepoetryreview.com/submissions

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Writing Exercise 22.7

Denton LovingLeave a comment

In my previous post, I had a wonderful conversation with Erica Plouffe Lazure about her new linked-story collection Proof of Me. Today, Erica is sharing a very short story from her collection. Originally published in Swink, Erica’s story, “Re: Division Unification,” is a mere six paragraph structured in the form of an inter-office memo. I appreciate interesting narrative structures such as in this one. Another story in Proof of Me, “Azimuth and Altitude,” is told through a series of phone messages. These kinds of structure lend towards a monological confession. In other words, it’s a great way to let a character loose to better reveal their voice and their particular narrative. Read Erica’s story below, and afterwards, I’ll share Erica’s advice about how to use interesting structures in your own work regardless of genre.

RE: Division Unification

Golden Poultry Processing Plant
MEMO
To: All Golden Poultry Division Employees
From: Kitty Ingram Lanford
RE: Division Unification

As you know, Boss Karpinski likes to say that we here at Golden Poultry should all aim for division unification. Better workers, he says, produce better teams; better teams make for better projects; better projects create a better office atmosphere, which brings better leadership, all of which contributes to a better, more unified division, which, in turn, makes our company succeed. The company is considered successful when it makes more money. And it is the division’s office’s leader’s team’s project’s members—each of us—who are charged with making that happen.

To motivate us into further unifying our division, Karpinski tells us to get our “ducks in a row,” to “think outside the box,” and to always leave “room on our plate.” Achieving these three goals, he says, will no doubt put “a feather in our cap.”

More than once, he has noted that members of our division’s team must “wear many hats” in order to succeed. This in particular caught my attention because I have yet to see anyone in our division, save for myself, wear a single hat, let alone several. I did a good stretch of knitting a few years back, after my father died and before my daughter joined the Marching Tigers, and those of you who work on my team in our division’s office know that I actually own and wear an extensive collection of woolen hats—although not at the same time. I’d like to know why Boss Karpinski suggests that we all wear hats, then, when in fact I am the division’s sole multiple hat wearer. I can imagine he’ll read this memo and say, “there’s no ‘I’ in ‘team,’ Kitty Ingram.” But there’s no ‘we” in team, either. Only “me,” mixed up. And wearing all the hats. And while I see boxes of chocolates and boxed pens doled to my colleagues as quarterly rewards, I—the lone multi-hat wearer of our division—have yet to see a reward, let alone a single feather, for my cap—or caps, as it were—come my way.

Perhaps the source of these elusive feathers is the ducks which Mr. Karpinski is so fond of aligning. Every time he urges us to get our “ducks in a row,” I can’t help but think we are getting bad advice. My father was a prize duck hunter out at Mattamuskeet each year, Mallard Class, and I know that, unless they are stuffed and mounted on your mantle, ducks do not readily get in rows, nor do they like to. As everyone knows, ducks in flight make v-shaped formations, which is not a row but rather an elegant, egalitarian arc. And anyone who’s ever watched ducks in a marsh could tell you they aren’t about to line up for you when they’re sitting in the water. That’s why they make buckshot. Yet Mr. Karpinski seems to believe that there is some relationship between row-friendly ducks and our mission of division unification. But to put them in rows is contrary not only to the natural tendencies of ducks, but also to the true aim of the statement, by which I assume he means: get organized.

But in order to get organized, he wants us to think outside the very object that would help us, logistically, to achieve it. It has been nearly three decades since I have been able to maneuver my body to fit inside a box, let alone think inside of one. And, unless you are compelled to place a box over your head as inspiration to get the neurons firing, thinking outside of a box is a natural, if not logical, thing to do. It begs the question why a box would even need to be present in order for thought to occur. My experience suggests that thinking happens—and should happen—when no box is present. So it makes one wonder: why the emphasis on the box? If, perhaps, the word “box” is meant to suggest my rather boxlike “cubicle,” then I heartily agree. And, since boxes tend to stay where you put them—except if that box happens to be in the supply room closet filled with staples and designer pushpins and the four-dollars-a-pop fountain pens and deluxe desk calendar—it seems a far simpler and more logical task to put your boxes in a row, and to let the ducks outside where they belong.

By solving the dilemmas of box placement and duck-alignment, it frees us, then, to consider Mr. Karpinski’s third piece of advice to achieve division unification. When I first heard him say, “don’t tell me your plate is full; always leave a little room,” I thought he was talking about the holiday all-you-can-eat chicken buffet the division pays for down in the break room. It’s advice I get from my dietician, too. And my therapist. But I always want to know, and no one ever tells me: what are we leaving room on our plates for? Ducks? In boxes? But then I realized that leaving room on a plate simply means that there is more to life than ducks and boxes and Golden Poultry, for that matter, and that you need to be ready for it. Leaving room on your plate is, in essence, making room for change, something that would mix up and rehash stale leftovers, be it food or phrase. Maybe it’s something that might inspire you to leave the division’s office for a while, even for just an hour, to take a walk in the woods to experience box-free thinking. And maybe you’d find in the woods a lake, where, if you are lucky enough, you may come across a family of ducks and observe them. You would know how unwilling they’d be to get in rows for you, how easily they spook if you rush at them, scare them a little into taking flight. I used to do this when I was a girl, on those Saturday mornings duck hunting with my dad. I’d rush at the ducks and when they flew away, a feather sometimes would fall from their fold, and land, miraculously, at my feet.

~~~

Erica Plouffe Lazure: When I wrote RE: Division Unification, I was working in an office at a university, and often had to edit the somewhat formalized and (at times abstruse) language of professional communication. And my brain is always looking for something to be entertained by—I’m a terrible punster—and so I thought it would be fun to see what would happen if one of my characters were to co-opt some of the hackneyed phrases we always hear in corporate settings, and use them to address a topic that is personal in nature while maintaining a somewhat formal tone.

I think stories that steal from other formats (with essays they’re called “hermit crabs”) can work, due to the sense of urgency (that “confessional” feel) and the familiarity of the format itself. Something that I always think about when I compose stories (no matter what format they take) is what circumstance would motivate, or even force, my character to ACT? What would push them into divulging something that they might not otherwise? Something I would caution against is using unusual forms gratuitously—there’s a fine line between coopting an unusual format to bring the writer (and character) closer to the truth of a situation, and using it as a gimmick.

As far as Kitty Ingram Lanford, we are introduced to her in the story “Marchers,” but we don’t know precisely what motivates her until she has a chance to speak on her own behalf via the memo in “RE: Division Unification.” Here we see a woman who is probably unseen and ignored at work, who dedicates a lot of time to causes she cares for, who is likely still grieving the death of her father, and who is sick of having people steal office supplies from the closet. To refer back to our earlier conversation about how I shaped my story collection, “RE: Division Unification” is a good example of how I’d reworked the names and some of the minor points of the original story (published in the now-defunct Swink journal) and found a space and voice for her in Proof of Me as Kitty Ingram Lanford.

Prompt: Start by making a list of unique structures along the lines of an office memo/email, or a voicemail. Pick one that allows a character to tell their story. Be sure to allow your character to confess something to their audience. Include a memory from the character’s past.

If you are writing nonfiction, try to recall a job you once held, and write about a time when you wanted to express something to a co-worker or boss, but didn’t. Use a memo, email, or voicemail format to recall that moment to your former colleague, and why it still stays with you.

If you are writing poetry, make a list of the objects of a workspace that is familiar to you. Then make a list of words you associate with that profession (feel free to look them up). Mix and match the words to see what story or throughline surfaces. Or, find a format within the workspace (an admission ticket or order form, for example) that you might borrow to “contain” the poem.

If this prompt helps you, I’d love to see the final product. In the meantime, please check out Erica Plouffe Lazure’s website, and don’t forget to buy her collection, Proof of Me, available from online retailers and your local bookstore.

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Conversation with Erica Plouffe Lazure

Denton Loving1 Comment

Erica Plouffe Lazure is quick to explain that she is not a Southerner nor a Southern writer. But what exactly is a Southerner or a Southern writer today? Are such distinctions based on the accident of birth? On the range of time and experience? How do perspective, talent and empathy work into the equations? I’ve heard every side of these arguments over the years. All I know for certain is that regardless of the way she self-identifies, the stories in Erica Plouffe Lazure’s linked-story collection Proof of Me authentically center on a small square of land called Mewborn, North Carolina, a place born out of Erica’s lived experience as much as from her imagination. Erica was kind enough to answer some of my questions about putting these stories together, about her submission process, and about winning the prestigious New American Press Fiction Prize.

DL: How long did it take you to write the stories in Proof of Me? Can you talk about how some of these stories link together and how those links impacted the shaping of the collection?

EPL: The stories in Proof of Me go back from when I first started pursuing creative writing—as early as 2005. Some were completed and published right away; others sat as drafts that I’d revisit and revise from time to time. I always keep a folder of stories that are “workable” but as of yet incomplete, and as I set out to help round out the stories and voices in this collection, they were integral.

I enjoy the editing process, and believe that, especially when you’re feeling stuck with a particular story, setting it aside for a while and returning to it can help shake loose its arc, and get it into publishable shape. Combing through each story one by one can help you to see how they might all fit together. Initially, I had not set out to link the stories (geographically or otherwise) in earlier configurations of the collection, but in the early days of the pandemic, I decided to dust off the collection, print it out, and see how I might more consciously connect each story to the other. I’d already written several pieces about some of the characters (like the Weaver sisters, or Cassidy Penelope), and so those stories became natural anchors for the larger collection. From there, I reworked some of the other pieces to connect more organically to other characters in the collection, or found ways to tie back stories that were set outside of Mewborn to the town itself. If I hadn’t allowed myself the flexibility to change certain aspects of the stories as I’d initially envisioned them, I’m not sure the collection would have been as strong.

DL: These stories are set in a range of locations such as Nashville and Boston and as far away as India, but each story is centered emotionally around Mewborn, North Carolina. Was it helpful in your writing process to create your own Yoknapatawpha County?

EPL: Mewborn the town is very much an imagined community, a bit of a hybrid of the small city of Greenville, in Pitt County (where I’d lived for about eight years), certain parts of Eastern Carolina, and my own hometown in Massachusetts. The name Mewborn is taken from a small crossing close to Kinston, but I chose it because I liked the sound of the name, and did not want (like Faulkner, I would guess) to have to adhere to the actual historical particulars of Pitt County while crafting a fictional work. And yet, a strong sense of place—about a small town, about how families and neighbors live and function alongside each other, about how even those who leave their hometown are still tethered to it—is what I hope surfaces in this collection. And as I mentioned earlier, I hadn’t intended the stories to be linked when I first set out to write them, but the revision process enabled me to see how I was, in fact, writing of, or about, the same place all along. And I should note that, for the record, I am not from the South, nor do I claim to be a Southerner, but I am very much a student of its literature, and I had never written a word of fiction until I moved to North Carolina.

DL: Can you describe the time between writing and publishing these stories? How did you connect with New American Press? Were there many rejections along the way?

EPL: Since about 2009, I had submitted various versions of Proof of Me to book prize contests offered by smaller presses. I like to joke how I almost renamed the collection The Bridesmaid, because it had been a finalist or runner-up in at least a half-dozen or so competitions (including New American Press, which eventually took it). But I think my effort to substantially rework the collection to make it more directly linked, geographically and thematically, worked in my favor. Rejection is part and parcel of the publishing game, and at some point, you understand that it’s not because the work isn’t any good; it’s more of what fits with the vision of the press, and the aesthetic tastes of the contest judge (or editor). I haven’t really gone the agent route—the agents I’ve had conversations with were always asking about my novel (! Don’t ask !) and were not interested in story collections. I’ve found there is certainly an interest and demand for short stories, but I guess we story writers have more work to do in making a convincing case to big publishers.

DL: Do you have advice for writers who hope to publish story collections?

EPL: This is rather technical advice, but something that helped me to envision my collection AS a collection was printing it all out (1.5 spacing, double-sided) and then read it aloud and edit with a pen in hand. I would make notes of key objects, characters or themes in a notebook, and then look for spots where those objects (sewing machines, dice, cars) might show up in another story. In some cases, I realized that, with a name change and a shift in a few key details, a story that might not have been part of the collection could be transformed into another piece of the Mewborn puzzle.

As far as submitting your work, I suggest that you research the publisher first to make sure it will be a good fit. Some publishers will want you to chip in for paying for a publicist (and there goes your advance), others might not do much in terms of promotion, or expect you to do much of that work yourself. I suggest researching a few past winners of story collections prizes of publishers that you’re interested in, and see how their books fared (via reviews, or press interest, or readings). Smaller presses tend not to have big budgets for book launches, so be aware of that.

DL: What are you working on now?

EPL: I’ve been working on a collection of flash stories under the thematic title Desire Path. It’s a term often used by city planners and landscapers to describe a “footpath made through foliage or grass by repeated traffic, rather than laid out by design.” I plan to take this literal definition in a metaphorical direction, where each of my characters will aspire for something guided by their desires, instincts and travels, and endeavor to carve a path of their own making to attain it. It is slow-going, but I’m enjoying discovering how each story might bend toward (or even challenge!) the established theme.

Huge thanks to Erica Plouffe Lazure for speaking to me about her new book. Don’t forget to order Proof of Me now. Stay tuned for my next post where I’ll share a writing exercise from Erica based on one of her short stories. Make sure you never miss a post by subscribing here:

Submission Calls for Writers 8/9/2022

Denton Loving2 Comments

Thanks and welcome to those of you who’ve recently subscribed to my blog. If you’re not yet subscribed, I hope you’ll go back and check out some recent posts such as A.E. Hines’ poem Waiting for the Diagnosis as well as his prompt based on his poem.

A lot of journals and magazines are opening up now that schools are also starting back. This month, I’ve compiled a list of a dozen opportunities for writers in every genre. So take advantage of the timing and send them some work.

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Anomaly CALL FOR BLOG & FEATURE WRITERS  We’re looking for writers who are interested in contributing in an ongoing manner to the Anomaly Blog, either by proposing a column or series, or by joining a team of staff writers who both pitch and take on assigned pieces for the blog. We are particularly interested in writers to focus on reviews, interviews, and profiles of artists and writers; and in getting pitches for columns or series that focus specifically on a particular artistic or writing community within the purview of our expanded mission. If you are interested, please send an email to Features & Reviews Editor Sarah Clark [sarah (at) anomalouspress (dot) org] with a paragraph about what you’re interested in writing about and your CV attached. https://anmly.org/calls/

Bodega  Bodega releases digital issues on the first Monday of every month, featuring poetry, prose, and occasional interviews by established and emerging writers. Submit up to 3 poems or up to 3000 words of fiction or nonfiction. http://www.bodegamag.com/about  

Lime Hawk Lime Hawk, a quarterly independent online journal of culture, environment, and sustainability, seeks new, unpublished submissions of short fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and visual art. No deadline to submit. No reading fees. www.limehawk.org/journal

Four Way Review  FWR accepts poetry and fiction from both established and emerging authors. We look for work that demonstrates fine attention to craft while retaining a powerful and compelling voice.  We want writing that showcases the imagination’s unique ability to refine the raw materials of human experience. Unsolicited submissions are considered year round. Submit 3-5 poems or up to 6,000 words of fiction in a single document.  http://fourwayreview.com/submit-3/

CRAFT  Our creative categories are open year-round to any emerging or established author. For flash fiction and flash creative nonfiction, send work up to 1,000 words. For short fiction or creative nonfiction, send work up to 6,000 words. We will also consider previously published creative work. We pay our authors $100 for original flash and $200 for original short fiction and creative nonfiction. https://www.craftliterary.com/submit/

BULL   We are dedicated to examining and discussing modern masculinity: what works, what doesn’t, what needs to change and what needs to go. We’re in quickly shifting times and more than ever this conversation is crucial. We want fiction and essays that engage that conversation from every angle from men and women, gay and straight, Americans and citizens of the world. Everybody has a stake in making men better and, by proxy, culture as a whole. We want stories of exemplary masculinity, cautionary tales, accounts from every possible perspective and persuasion. https://mrbullbull.com/newbull/submit/

2022 University of New Orleans Press Publishing Lab Prize  We are looking for the best unpublished novel or short story collection. The Publishing Laboratory at the University of New Orleans seeks to bring innovative publicity and broad distribution to authors. We collect submissions through August 31, 2022, deciding on 15-20 finalists. The finalists are read by students from The Publishing Laboratory in the fall, and one is chosen for publication. The work does not have to be regionally focused. There is no word limit. There is no limit on subjects covered. https://unopress.submittable.com/submit

Another Chicago Magazine  We’re open through August 31, 2022, for poetry, fiction, nonfiction, reviews, and translations on the theme of Trans/formation. (Trans/formation: shifting, fluidity, change, and rediscovery in all forms, big and small. Consider how trans/formation raises the ideas of both a continuing process of becoming, and of some kind of coalescence. What does trans/formation mean to you?) We have no restrictions on length or style. https://anotherchicagomagazine.net/submissions/

Apple Valley Review  Apple Valley Review is currently reading submissions of poetry, personal essays, and short fiction. Several pieces from the journal have later appeared as selections, finalists, and/or notable stories in Best American Essays, Best of the Net, Best of the Web, and storySouth Million Writers Award. We accept poetry, short fiction, flash fiction, and essays. Submissions are read year-round, but the deadline for the fall issue is September 15. http://www.applevalleyreview.com/ 

Cream City Review  We devote ourselves to publishing memorable and energetic fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and artwork which represent a broad range of creators with diverse, unique backgrounds. Both beginning and well-known writers are welcome. We are currently reading for our Fall/Winter Issue from now through November 1, 2022. For Fiction and Nonfiction, send fewer than twenty double-spaced pages. We are interested in dynamic, well-crafted nonfiction, including creative journalism, personal essays, travelogues, flash, and polemics. We seek book reviews of any CCR-published genre and relevant author interviews. Please submit no more than five poems at a time. https://uwm.edu/creamcityreview/general/

Scholarships & Fellowships Available for the 2023 Eckerd College Writers’ Conference: Writers in Paradise  Located on the coast of the picturesque Boca Ciega Bay in St. Petersburg, Florida, Eckerd College Writers’ Conference: Writers in Paradise offers an intimate experience of workshop classes in Crime & Suspense, Memoir, Non-fiction, Novel, Poetry, Structure, Short Story and Historical Fiction, along with craft talks, panel discussions, Q&As, readings, book signings, and receptions with our award-winning faculty and lecturers. The workshop is scheduled for January 14 – 21, 2023. Deadline is November 1, 2022. www.writersinparadise.com

Outlook Springs Send us stories we can’t put down. Our emphasis is literary fiction, but we aren’t biased against genre. Send poems that ooze with sonic pleasure and stagger from line-to-line with an animated corpse’s lingering bravado. As for nonfiction, send us your travel narratives, your lyrical essays, your personal essays, and everything in between. If it’s real, if it’s interesting, if it’s well-written and gives us a new and exciting way to see the world (or – even better—inside your head), then we’ll publish it. Our current reading period ends December 14, 2022. http://outlooksprings.com/

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Conversation with Tony Taddei

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For many years before Tony Taddei was creating characters on the page, he was creating them on the stage as a trained actor.  Born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, Tony now lives in New Jersey. I first met Tony in 2014 when we both attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. A few years later, we reconnected through the Bennington College Writing Seminars. Though all of my interactions with Tony had been related to writing, I hadn’t had the pleasure to read his work for myself until the recent publication of his collection of linked short stories, The Sons of the Santorelli. What a joy it was to discover the craftsmanship and poignancy in these twelve stories about an immigrant family, particularly the men in the family who struggle with their desires and ambitions. Yes, this is a narrative about an immigrant family, but as David Gates said about the book, this is not “the conventional immigrant family saga.” Tony was kind enough to answer some of my questions about putting these stories together, about how he avoided convention, and how he infused a political slant into such personal, character-driven writing.

DL: How long did it take you to write these stories, and do you recall when you knew how individual stories would work together? Can you talk about your reasons for writing multiple, linked stories rather than a novel?

TT: I took my time writing these stories, so that the process from drafting the initial stories to finalizing the collection probably took five or six years.  The collection wasn’t the only thing I was working on during the time, and, in any case, I didn’t want to rush the process of writing the collection.  First, because I wanted to get the premise of each story right as well as to spend time considering what stories might need to be added, and second, because I was having a lot of fun writing about these people and I kind of wanted to savor it. 

During the process of working on the stories I don’t think I really had a master plan for how they would all work together.  That said, once I decided to write one story for each of the Santorelli sons and grandsons as well as at least one story about the patriarch, the linkages between stories started to become evident, and I was able to find ways in rewriting the stories and adding new ones to get them to work together as a piece.  My goal was to have each story stand on its own but also for a reader to be able to sit back and think about them in their entirety after finishing the collection to realize that the parts of the book made up a whole.

As to why I wrote the saga of this family as linked stories rather than a novel, I did it because it gave me the ability to tell multiple, smaller stories that I would not have been able to tell in a novel (while still trying to make the novel a cohesive whole).  It was also a lot easier for me to write about the individuals in this very complex and human family in separate stories than it would have been in a novel.  By telling the story of the Santorellis a character at a time, I think I did more justice to each individual while still creating the personality and a legacy of a whole family.

DL: One of the recurring themes throughout these stories is the idea of the immigrant experience, often depicted here in connection with “immigrant shame” and the idea that America “breaks” the spirit of immigrants. This is the antithetical American story. How conscious were you of making this kind of political statement during the writing? Do you have advice for other writers about incorporating political ideas into fiction?

TT: As the work progressed, I was very conscious of it.  Having come from an immigrant family and seen them fail more than succeed at the things they most wanted I can be somewhat cynical about the idea of an American Dream to begin with. I knew that cynicism would likely play a role in the situations I put my characters in.

That said, I didn’t I initially set out to tell stories that torpedoed the idea of what can be achieved in America.  I set out to write human stories that were compelling to read as well as funny and tragic with as many twists and surprises as I could manage.  In order tell the truth about the characters in this family as I saw them, I had to show the forces that were working upon them. The largest of those forces being that for most immigrants and, especially for the poor, this country very often only lets them get so far before it pushes them back down again.  This comes in the form of economic imprisonment, and it comes in the form of racial imprisonment where one wave of immigrants who’d faced bigotry visits their own xenophobia and bigotry on the next wave of immigrants to reach America’s shores.   

My advice for writers who want to incorporate political ideas into fiction is to first find an honest story that is personal and then begin writing it without focusing on the political or cultural connotations. If the story is honest and tracks with the world we live in, they won’t be able to help themselves from writing about the political forces that are acting upon their characters. Those forces come into play in our lives most of the time without us even realizing they are there.  After that, when the writer looks back on what they’ve written, they can draw out the more political aspects of the story to any degree they choose. To put the above more succinctly, all politics are personal. I think any political writing should follow that guideline.

DL: Many of these stories are told through the male point of view which makes sense given the title of the collection. But that’s not to say that you don’t give voice to women within the Santorelli family. How did you settle on the balance between male and female characters and points-of-view? Were there any challenges in allowing the women to have their say in this male-dominated cast?

TT:  Not at all, because I think if you look closely at each of the stories, you’ll see that the women in the backgrounds of these men’s lives are the real truth-tellers.  The stories would not have found the ballast they needed for their conflict and reasoning if it weren’t for the women characters. A reader will likely see this most clearly in a story like “Commedia Dell’Arte” which has the matriarch of the family as the protagonist trying to make sense of and tell the truth about male dominance in her life.  But it’s just below the surface of most of the other stories as well. From “Songs for Swingin’ Lovers” where a prostitute early on dominates a group of highly dysfunctional and misogynist men, to “Valiant” where the sisters and especially the mother in the family turn out to be stronger and more insightful then either the father or the son.

So, no, I did not find many challenges in allowing the women to have their say in my largely male-dominated cast.  In fact, I’d say that the challenge was being able to hold off in letting the women have their say long enough so that the men could act out in the wrong-headed and solipsistic ways that I think make the stories interesting and recognizable to readers.  Especially female readers.

DL: In an effort to demystify the process, I always ask writers about the process of submitting their manuscripts for publication. Can you describe the time between writing and publishing these stories? How did you connect with Bordighera Press?

TT:  The time between writing and publishing was, to some extent, concurrent.  I started to send the manuscript to publishers when I had most of the stories finished but was still revising the last two or three.  At that point it was rejection, rejection, rejection until I found Bordighera Press.

Bordighera is a small independent press that is partially privately funded with a mission to publish writing about the culture of Italy and Italian Americans—essays, fiction, poetry, what have you.  They publish a semiannual review of shorter work as well as a twice yearly run of new full-length work and are always looking for good writing that fits the themes of Italian life.   About 2 years ago, I submitted the title story of my collection to Bordighera for consideration in their semiannual review, and it was accepted.  Once I realized that they also published full length work, I sent the full and, by then, nearly completed manuscript, and I was thrilled when they said they wanted to publish it. 

I’ve been telling people who ask how you find a publisher for your work that you have to persevere until you find a publisher that is the right fit.  Most of the time that’s easier said than done.  In my case I believe it was a bit easier because the work was a more-or-less exact match with the kind of work Bordighera is looking for.

DL: What are you working on now?

TT: I’m finishing up another collection of short stories that revolve around the melancholy, indignities, and occasional pleasures that men face as they age.  Each of these stories also weaves in animals and their ability to live instinctually and unquestioningly as a humorous and (I think) affecting counterpoint to the men in the stories who are creating their own problems and then struggling to accept the circumstances they find themselves in.  These two themes may not at first glance seem to go together, but I think the stories work better because of their juxtaposition. I’m hoping to have these stories published as a collection sometime soon and readers can judge for themselves. For now, if any of your readers want to take a look a couple of these stories, they a can go to Animal Literary Magazine and The Florida Review online.  I’m also beginning a novel but it’s too early to say much about it, so I’ll have to get back to you on that.

DL: Are there any opportunities coming up for readers to hear you read from The Sons of the Santorelli either via Zoom or in person?

TT: Yes, I recently read an excerpt from a story in the collection – “We Now Conclude Our Broadcast Day” – online for the Prospect Street Reading series and readers can view that on Facebook Events at  https://www.facebook.com/events/413658933932101/?ref=newsfeed (no Facebook account required to view).

Folks can also go to the Selected Audio section of my website and listen to me read the first two stories from the collection.

Other readings are in the works, and I’ll post the particulars to my social media feeds when they’re set.  (@tony_taddei / Twitter; Tony Taddei / Facebook; tonytaddei / Instagram)

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Huge thanks to Tony for speaking to me about his new book. Don’t forget to order The Sons of the Santorelli now from Bordighera Press. Make sure you never miss a post by subscribing here:

Submission Calls for Writers 7/14/2022

Denton LovingLeave a comment

It’s been nice this month to have heard from a few different blog readers. I still owe responses to a few of you. Please know they’re coming. It’s always great to hear from anyone following the blog. Please know how happy I am if you find the content here useful to you and your writing.

It’s easy to forget about submitting in the summer. Many university journals close during the summer break, but many are still open. In this post, I’m sharing a list of 10 opportunities that range from journal to book publication. There should be something here for everyone.

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The Peauxdunque Review Whether your podunk is a small town in Alabama, middle-of-nowhere-Indiana, a working-class block of slab-houses in New Orleans East, piney-wooded East Texas, a Tennessee hill or holler, or an Atlanta apartment house, send us your expression to the world. Fiction and nonfiction should be no longer than 7500 words. Flash fiction should be no longer than 750 words. Please send no more than 3 poems per submission. https://peauxdunquereview.com/

Image We welcome unsolicited submissions and consider all submissions carefully. We produce two publications: Image, a quarterly journal, and Good Letters, a daily blog. All the work we publish reflects what we see as a sustained engagement with one of the western faiths—Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. That engagement can include unease, grappling, or ambivalence as well as orthodoxy; the approach can be indirect or allusive, but for a piece to be a fit for Image or Good Letters, some connection to faith must be there. Please submit no more than five poems or ten pages total. For fiction and nonfiction, we have an upper limit of approximately 6,000 words. We rarely publish stories or essays under 3,000 words. https://imagejournal.org/journal/submit/

New Orleans Review For web features, New Orleans Review seeks fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and book reviews. Submit fiction and nonfiction pieces up to 5,000 words. Flash pieces welcome. Submit up to five pages of poems. We are looking for reviews of books (all genres) forthcoming or published in the last year. Query us if you’d like to submit or propose an interview. http://www.neworleansreview.org/submit/

Virginia Quarterly Review Submissions are open through July 31, 2022. Submit poetry of all types and length, short fiction between 2,500–8,000 words, and nonfiction between 3,000–7,000 words. We are generally not interested in genre fiction (such as romance, science fiction, or fantasy). We publish literary, art, and cultural criticism; reportage; historical and political analysis; and travel essays. We publish few author interviews or memoirs. In general, we are looking for nonfiction that looks out on the world, rather than within the self. Submissions are limited to one prose piece and four poems per reading period. https://www.vqronline.org/about-vqr/submissions

2023 Howling Bird Press Nonfiction Prize  Howling Bird Press, the publishing house of Augsburg College’s MFA in Creative Writing, seeks submissions for its 2023 Book Prize in Nonfiction. The press welcomes innovative, original work from established and emerging authors. Recommended length is between 20,000 and 60,000 words long although exceptions are permissible. The competition is open to all writers in English, whether published or unpublished. Author of the winning manuscript receives a cash award of $2,500, which serves as an advance, with book subsequently published by Howling Bird Press under a standard book contract. There is a $25 entry fee. Submit through July 31, 2022. https://augsburghowlingbirdpress.submittable.com/submit

The Boiler  The Boiler began in 2011 by a group of writers at Sarah Lawrence College. We publish poetry, fiction, and nonfiction on a quarterly basis. We like work that turns up the heat, whistles, and stands up to pressure.  Our writers include authors such as Thomas Lux, Bruce Bond, Joseph Millar, Cynthia Cruz, Emma Bolden, Marina Rubin, Paul Lisicky, Raena Shirali, and others.  Our current reading period extends through August 15, 2022. http://theboilerjournal.com/guidelines/   

Gold Line Press & Ricochet Editions Gold Line Press and Ricochet Editions are sibling presses run by students of the University of Southern California’s PhD Program in Creative Writing. Ricochet will be open to hybrid manuscript submissions through July 31 2022. Gold Line will be open to chapbook submissions in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from August 1 to September 30, 2022. https://goldlinepress.submittable.com/submit

Bat City Review BCR is published annually. Submissions are open through September 15, 2022, with responses typically sent within two months of receiving a submission. We are interested in poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, art, and cross-genre pieces that experiment with language, form, and unconventional subject matter. We also welcome traditional styles as well as translations. Send us writing that plays, that strikes out, that enjoys itself, that makes its own rules. http://www.batcityreview.org/submit

Ponder Review Ponder Review is a student-run publication of the MFA program at Mississippi University for Women. We welcome fiction, flash fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, short plays, new media & visual art. Our current reading period runs through September 15, 2022. https://www.muw.edu/ponderreview/submit

I-70 Review The I-70 Review welcomes submissions of poetry and fiction through December 31, 2022. For poetry, submit 3-5 poems of 40 or fewer lines. Fiction and flash fiction should not exceed 1500 words. Publication of I-70 Review is annually in the fall. http://i70review.fieldinfoserv.com/submissions.html

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Thanks for reading. Next week, I’ll share my recent conversation about writing and publishing with Tony Taddei, author of The Sons of the Santorelli. To receive posts like these directly in your inbox, subscribe here:

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Conversation with Patti Frye Meredith

Denton Loving1 Comment

I can’t exactly remember the first time I met Patti Frye Meredith. I definitely have memories of her at one of the early Mountain Heritage Literary Festivals making people laugh and playing music late at night. One thing I know for certain is that Patti can make anyone laugh. That’s true whether you’re fortunate enough to sit down and share a meal with her, or whether you’re reading her beautiful new novel, South of Heaven, a multi-generation narrative set in Carthage, a small town in the Sandhills of North Carolina. At the center of the novel are two sisters, Fern and Leona. Both have secrets they are keeping from each other and from the world. There’s also Fern’s son Dean who, as Fern says, doesn’t have any secrets. South of Heaven is a meaningful exploration of how the things we try to keep bottled up complicate relationships. The novel is deeply Southern, completely universal and wonderfully fun to read.

DL: South of Heaven centers on the McQueen family, and it’s set in the late 1990’s, a time not so long ago but a time that feels infinitely different in hindsight. Do you have any advice for other writers writing about the recent past?

PM: When Dean first “talked to me in my head,” he told me his dad was MIA in Vietnam, and how as a child he pretended to find his daddy in the overgrown bamboo patch in his backyard.

I wrote the book from that one scene. I knew Dean was in his early 20’s, and that his father went missing at the very end of the war. That’s why I set the novel in 1998. After I got into it, other 1998 occurrences came into play like the Clinton/Lewinsky drama. There’s a lot in the book about the lengths we will go to avoid the truth, so that worked.

Early readers suggested that I move the story up in time, to make it more contemporary, to use the Iraq War instead of the Vietnam War and put it in present tense. I tried, but I couldn’t make it work. By that time, too, I felt like I knew Fern and Leona very well, and I realized they wouldn’t be the same people if they hadn’t grown up like they did in the sixties.

There are pitfalls. It’s not historic, and it’s not contemporary. The characters are just modern enough for readers to wonder, “Why would they think that?” or “Why would they do that?” It’s embarrassing, but I had to do research to remember if everyone had cell phones in 1998, or if fax machines were still a thing. We’ve seen a lot of change in twenty-four years, and it’s amazing how quickly we forget recent history.

DL: I loved reading the “Backstory” on your website about your job at University of North Carolina Public Television, and how you met so many writers there. The authors you mention (Lee Smith, Doris Betts, Reynolds Price, Fred Chappell) all come from the Southern tradition, and South of Heaven feels like a very Southern novel. How natural was it for you to write in that tradition?

PM: Like so many others, reading Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Spencer, Lee Smith, Jill McCorkle, Tim McLaurin, and so on and so on, showed me that stories set in small towns were okay to write.

I grew up in Galax, Virginia, population around 6,000. So, it was natural to stick to the world I knew. Thinking about it, I’ve now lived in Memphis and Chattanooga, Tennessee, Huntsville, Alabama, Durham and Charlotte, North Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Cities large and small, but with the same southern sensibilities. (Or maybe I think all those places have the same southern sensibilities because “wherever you go, there you are”!)

DL: Did you feel any pressure to “live up” to the works of those writers you admired so much?

PM: If I thought I had to live up to their work, I’d never write another word! Back when I first started writing, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, however, it didn’t take long to realize I was never going to be in the same league with the writers I admired most. I’d give anything to see the world and put that world on the page like Fred Chappell, but I don’t have his complexity or depth. That doesn’t mean I don’t love reading his work. But, even when you study the craft and learn what makes great literature, even when you can recognize it, it’s still not possible to re-engineer your brain to create it. Thank heavens. There should be only one Lee Smith, one Jill McCorkle, one Darnell Arnoult.

That’s not to say I don’t spend a lot of time being discouraged! But you have to write what you write, be who you are, I mean, you can’t fake your subconscious! We all have our own perspectives and experiences, and we’ve all drawn our own conclusions.

I’m hooked on the joy of writing. The discoveries, the occasional good sentence, exploring the minds of my imaginary people. Writing helps me understand what matters and it’s my way of expressing what strikes me—good and bad—about being human.

And, since I love a cliché, I’ll say, “It’s the journey, not the destination.” Chasing after the “secret” to good writing has led me to friends who absolutely make my whole life better. Having the opportunity to be with other writers is the best reason to write!  Sorry for getting off on a tangent, but maybe that’s the southern tradition!

DL: How long did it take you to write South of Heaven? How many drafts did you go through?

PM: There’s no telling how many drafts I have. Dean’s voice came to me at Hindman Settlement School in 2005. I wrote the original draft in first person present tense. Then changed it to third person present tense for my MFA thesis at the University of Memphis in 2012. Then I wrote a draft in third person past tense. I was always changing something, adding, taking away. Starting over. We moved seven times in twenty-eight years for my husband’s job, so I had a lot of distractions (excuses) through the years.

When my husband retired and we moved back to North Carolina, I set up my little office and joined a weekly writer’s group. Then the pandemic hit. Everyone is different. I know there are many great writers with extremely busy lives, but for me, the stillness of the pandemic quarantine made it possible to devote the time I needed to work. No travel, no socializing. I don’t think I understood what it meant to really work until the pandemic. I discovered the long stretches of uninterrupted time helped keep the story together in my head, helped me play out the scenes I needed to make the story more cohesive. I think of it as bandwidth. Writing South of Heaven took a lot of bandwidth!

DL: Your novel is published by Mint Hill Books, an imprint of Main Street Rag which published my poetry collection, Crimes Against Birds. What was your experience like in finding a publisher?

PM: I can’t remember if I saw Main Street Rag’s call for novel chapters on social media or in Poets & Writers, but I had one of those “What the heck” moments and sent chapters. Months later, I got an e-mail saying they were interested in publishing the novel, and Scott Douglass sent a contract and a detailed explanation of how the process would go.

I had sent out query letters to agents off and on for years. (One agent had almost taken it years ago, but that fell through when the third reader in her office didn’t think they could sell it.) I knew South of Heaven wasn’t the kind of book that was getting the attention of traditional publishing, or the independent presses I was familiar with. It wasn’t full-blown literary, and it wasn’t quirky enough to be chick-lit.

I didn’t think it was going to set the literary world on fire, but I wanted my imaginary people to live in a real book. So, I asked you, Sue Dunlap, and Darnell Arnoult to read it and tell me if I was about to embarrass myself, and you all said, “Do it.” So, I did. I fiddled with it after I got it back from you all, and I hired an editor to make sure I hadn’t added a lot more typos. Then I fiddled with it some more, and my niece, Becki Vasques, found my last snafus. We made it a family and friend affair! You and Darnell suggested I put an emu on the cover, and my husband, Lee, and I put it together (with Darnell on the phone). It’s been fun. Not “have lunch with your agent in New York City” fun, but better. A true labor of love. And I like that my North Carolina story is published by a North Carolina press. Scott Douglass does something very special with Main Street Rag. He publishes wonderful poetry and stories. I’ve gotten to know him and his wife and his dog, Harley, and I really appreciate the work he does.

DL: Do you have any advice for other writers ready to send their novel out?

PM: Don’t discount the small independent presses. We all appreciate independent bookstores. These presses deserve our appreciation, too.

Do ask yourself if you’re ready to be in the book marketing business, though, and the weird thing is part of that is selling not just the book but yourself. The great thing about the small press is, “You have a book to sell.” The scary thing about the small press is “YOU have a book to sell.” Just be honest with yourself about what you want to accomplish and why you’re doing it.

For me, the experience has been amazing because it has reminded me that I have the very best family and friends in the world. The support has been phenomenal. People I haven’t seen or talked to in ages bought my book after seeing my Facebook posts. Friends talk about my characters like they’re real people they care about. So, if I don’t sell another book, I’m very happy with the response South of Heaven has gotten.

CYNICAL ALERT!

The truth is, without Facebook, I wouldn’t have sold m(any) books. South of Heaven is in two bookstores, Chapters in Galax, my hometown, and McIntyre’s in Chapel Hill, where I live now. I’ve had one reading at McIntyre’s. I hired a publicist, and maybe there will be more readings, but maybe not. Even if I devote a lot of time to driving around, going to bookstores, taking them a book and a nice press kit, there’s no guarantee they’ll carry it. I have a couple of book club gatherings coming up. The bottom line is: It’s up to you to promote your book, to make yourself known. I believe even if you have an agent and a traditional press, they want you to have a “platform” meaning they want you to use your social media connections to publicize and sell your book.

DL: You’ve described South of Heaven as coming out “late in life.” We could argue about what that means, but I’m more interested in something else you said which is that having the novel out in the world helped clarify where and on what you want to focus your energies. Can you talk more about that?

PM: I know for sure I don’t want to be an author who dresses up and talks about writing. I want to be a writer who writes. I want to spend more time with my imaginary people and less time telling real people why they ought to like my book! Ha! I recently got together with a group of my writing friends, and afterwards I realized all we’d talked about was how close each of us were to having finished products to try to get published. Like there was some big door we were all clamoring to walk through to get to a different, more perfect life. I want to spend more time talking about ideas, or break-through moments, or what we’ve discovered about the craft. I don’t want my energy focused on end-products. I want to focus on better writing and storytelling.

DL: What are you working on now?

PM: Not much. I’m caught up doing what I think I ought to be doing to sell books. It’s uncomfortable and not much fun. I did have a little “conversation” with one of the characters in South of Heaven the other day. So, I wrote that down.

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Find out more about Patti on her website, and don’t forget to order South of Heaven, now available from the Main Street Rag Bookstore. Coming soon, I’ll share my conversation with Tony Taddei about his debut story collection, The Sons of the Santorelli. Make sure you never miss a post by subscribing here:

Submission Calls for Writers 6/2/2022

Denton Loving3 Comments

One of my top priorities for the month of May was to compile a list of submission calls to share here. If you have followed my posts for a while (and if you’ve only recently subscribed, thank you and welcome), then you may be aware that there was no list last month. I build these lists in part to share with writers, but I also depend on the process to ensure that I’m submitting my own work. Anytime that I haven’t shared a list, it’s a safe bet that I probably haven’t been submitting either. Such is life, I suppose. But I like to be intentional about these kind of priorities. So here, finally, is a list of journals, presses and contests open this month. Good luck submitting!

Carolina Quarterly The Carolina Quarterly welcomes unsolicited submissions of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art. Submissions are accepted year round. As of Winter 2020, we pay contributors to our print volumes $50 upon publication, plus a free copy of the issue in which the work appears. Submit no more than 6 poems at a time. Submit no more than one prose piece, per genre, at a time. We charge a $2.50 submission fee. https://thecarolinaquarterly.submittable.com/submit

Kestrel Kestrel is now accepting submissions year-round. Kestrel publishes fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction by established and emerging writers. We are especially happy to publish work by West Virginia and Appalachian writers. Kestrel features reviews and visual art in each issue. All accepted work is for the print publication; select work may be featured on our website. Kestrel submits each issue to Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, and Vox Populi, and, therefore, work published in Kestrel may be chosen for reprint in those venues. https://www.fairmontstate.edu/kestrel/submission-guidelines

Monologging For Monologging’s Autumn 2022 edition we are seeking stories and artwork that explore the theme of Influence. Who influences us? What compels a person to urge another to follow their lead, and when we follow? What questions of morality arise from these relationships? Our 2022 edition will be an exploration of the realms of influence, a profound meditation on evolving online ethics and etiquette as well as a quest to celebrate the lives of friends, neighbors, loved ones and mentors who have been our most devoted anchors, advocates, muses and guides. http://monologging.org/submit/

32 Poems We welcome unsolicited poetry year round and accept simultaneous submissions.  As a rule we publish shorter poems that fit on a single page (about 32 lines), though we sometimes make exceptions to accommodate remarkable work that runs a little longer.  We charge a $3 reading and processing fee. http://www.32poems.com/submission-guidelines

Florida Review & Aquifer: The Florida Review Online We are looking for innovative, luxuriant, insightful human stories—and for things that might surprise us. Please submit no more than one piece of fiction, nonfiction, graphic narrative, review, or digital story at a time. Poets and visual artists may submit up to (but no more than) five poems or artworks as a single submission. We charge a $2 or $3 submission fee depending on category. https://floridareview.submittable.com/submit

2022 New American Fiction Prize The New American Fiction Prize is awarded each year to a full-length fiction manuscript, such as a story collection, novel, novella(s), or something that blends forms, like a novel in verse. The winner receives $1,500 and a book contract, as well as 25 author’s copies and promotional support. Final judge is Weike Wang, the author of Joan Is Okay (Random House 2022) and Chemistry (Knopf 2017). Deadline is June 15, 2022. There is a $25 submission fee. https://newamericanpress.com/category/new-american-fiction-prize/

Los Angeles Review The Los Angeles Review is open for general submissions year-round. (Submissions for the Los Angeles Review Awards are open through June 30, 2022.) Send fiction, flash fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, translations and book reviews. We charge a $3 submission fee. http://losangelesreview.org/submission/

Cheap Pop Cheap Pop is open for submissions during the month of June. We’re looking for your best work in 500 words or less—please, nothing greater than that. We don’t differentiate between Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, and anything in-between, nor do we have restrictions on genre—if it pops, it pops! What we want to see is good writing, your best writing, and that’s it.  Please note: CHEAP POP does not publish poetry, so please do not send it. Deadline: June 30, 2022. http://www.cheappoplit.com/submit

Black Lawrence Press Through our annual contests and open reading periods, we seek innovative, electrifying, and thoroughly intoxicating manuscripts that ensnare themselves in our hearts and minds and won’t let go. During our June open reading period, we accept submissions in the following categories: novel, novella, short story collection (full-length and chapbook), poetry (full-length and chapbook), biography & cultural studies, translation (from the German), and creative nonfiction. We also enthusiastically accept hybrid submissions. https://blacklawrencepress.submittable.com/submit

Alien Magazine Alien Magazine is currently open for all types of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and visual art submissions. We are nice people; don’t be afraid to send us anything. We are not a science fiction magazine, though we are open to SF work. By “Alien” we mean “outsider” or anything that exists outside the societal norm. Deadline for Fiction and Poetry: July 1, 2022. https://alienmagazine.submittable.com/submit

The Orison Chapbook Prize We are accepting submissions through July 1, 2022, of chapbook manuscripts (20 – 45 pp.) in any genre (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, drama, or hybrid) for The Orison Chapbook Prize, judged by Orison Books founder and editor, Luke Hankins. The winner will be awarded publication, a $300 cash prize, a 2-year Duotrope membership ($100 value), and 20 copies of the chapbook, in addition to a standard royalties contract. We plan to announce the winner and finalists by October 15, 2022. Submission fee is $12.00. https://duotrope.com/duosuma/submit/orison-chapbook-prize-6T0fK

Asheville Poetry Review We are open for regular submissions through July 15, 2022. Please send 3–6 poems of any length or style. http://www.ashevillepoetryreview.com/submissions

Thanks for reading. In the coming weeks, I’ll share my conversations about writing and publishing with Patti Frye Meredith and Tony Taddei. To receive posts like these directly in your inbox, subscribe here:

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Conversation with Christopher Linforth

Denton LovingLeave a comment

I first met Christopher Linforth in 2014 at Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Our paths crossed again in 2019 at Writers in Paradise – Eckerd College Writers Conference. Christopher is a graduate of Virginia Tech’s MFA program, and recently, he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of Atticus Review. Christopher’s first two books are When You Find Us We Will Be Gone (Lamar University Press, 2014) and Directory (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2020).

His third collection of short fiction, The Distortions, was named winner of the 2020 Orison Books Fiction Prize and has just been released by Orison Press. The Distortions is a beautiful collection of stories, thematically linked by the Croatian-Serbian War, particularly its aftermath. In each story, the weight of the past continues to press against the present. For many of these characters, historical events have had generational effects. These are not war stories although the war is a villainous character, always looming in the background. More than war stories, these stories are often about love–all kinds of love including the kinds that are sadly insufficient as well as the kinds that keep trying.

Christopher is a gifted writer. His own experience living in Zagreb was surely useful in writing these stories, but each story is subtly elevated by detailed knowledge that must have required significant research. In the same way that these are not war stories, this is also not a book about Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, etc. as much as it’s a book about displacement and identity and the universal ways we humans struggle to put the past behind us. Christopher agreed to answer some questions about The Distortions as well as about his writing and publishing.

DL: Your new collection of short stories, The Distortions, centers on the aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars, mostly focusing though on the Croatian-Serbian conflict. Although you lived in Zagreb for some time, you come from a very different background. Did you find your outside perspective to be helpful or more challenging as you wrote these stories? Can you talk about how the kinds of research that were required for these stories?

CL: In some ways, my position as an outsider helped me to broach the aftermath of the war in new and different ways. Josip Novakovich talks in the afterword to Infidelities about the reluctance of people in the former Yugoslavia to talk or write about the war. Though this has changed in recent years and has led many writers from those countries to write compelling novels about the war, I still felt I had something to say. Over the years, to aid my poor memory, I read dozens of history books on the subject and watched documentaries, and delved into tranches of original documents and news reports, and I talked with people from that area. Much of that information, though, never appears in the book. Instead, I focused more on the characters and the stories while hewing—as much as one can—to the historical, political, and cultural realities of the time.

DL: So much of the tension in your stories comes from the weight of the past pressing into a character’s present. Moving back and forth through time can be tricky, but it can also enrich a narrative as it clearly does in your stories.

CL: Whenever possible, I try to eschew as much backstory as possible and instead focus the story on the present action. With the stories being set in former Yugoslavia and revolving around a major but little-known war, I tried to strike a balance of including information (in non-expository ways) that would help an American audience understand the ramifications of the war for the characters while also keeping the pacing tight and the stories interesting.

DL: Two of my favorite stories in The Distortions are epistolary. I’m thinking about “brb” (seemingly told through a long Instant Message) and “Sojourn” (told through a more traditional letter). What I appreciate about both stories are their gestures toward the confessional. Do you have advice for writers who want to explore the epistolary form? Does a story told through a letter have special considerations?

CL: It’s funny. For me, “Sojourn,” is an imagined letter, not an actual one. The story reads and feels like a letter and perhaps contains a vestigial element of that form. The story, to me at least, has an uncertain form: part letter, part monological confession, part a story being told. The hybrid nature perhaps also reflects the vacillating nature and identity of the narrator. Similarly, “brb” uses misdirection about the narrator’s identity to say something about the stylized IM form. The intersection of the confession and the letter form, or variants thereof, often work well together. They allow a “natural” unfolding of thought on the page addressed to someone off it. For me, that is where the intimacy and magic of the epistolary form lie.

DL: I’ve been working on a collection of short stories for several years, and through that time, the manuscript keeps shifting. How long did it take you to write and shape these stories? What was the submission and publication process like for The Distortions?

CL: The earliest stories were drafted around 2014 and the latest around 2019. It was a long process of revision and then discarding the lesser stories (perhaps another six or seven). Some stories, like “brb,” emerged fully formed, with only minor edits later. Others, like “The Little Girls,” I rewrote several times over the years. I entered the manuscript into a handful of contests in late 2019 and early 2020, perhaps only five or six altogether, while constantly fine-tuning it the whole time. The collection won the Orison Fiction Book Prize in July 2020 and then underwent another year of refinement.

DL: What are you working on now?

CL: I’m working on two books. One is a sister project to The Distortions. Tentatively titled The Homeland War, it’s centered on two young men in Zagreb just before the outbreak of war. The novel explores toxic masculinity and social class and the football hooliganism endemic in the 1990s. The other book, currently untitled, examines the intersections of internet culture and the New York art scene. Stories from this collection are forthcoming in Cutleaf and in the Irish magazine, Banshee.

DL: Are there any opportunities coming up for readers to meet you or study with you via Zoom or in person?

CL: Yes, I teach online creative writing classes for The Writer’s Center in DC, and I take on private editing clients now and again. I’m also available for workshops and readings and so forth. I also have some more on the origins of the book over at Necessary Fiction.

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Submission Calls for Writers 3/9/2022

Denton LovingLeave a comment

For those of you who aren’t in submission mode but are rather needing some inspiration for generating work, I hope you will refer to some of my recent blog posts. Since my last list of submission opportunities, I’ve posted conversations with Lauren Davis and Walter Robinson about their new books. I’ve also posted generative writing exercises (Exercise 22.3 and Exercise 22.4) from both writers. And I’m looking forward to speaking with additional writers in the next few weeks.

As I’ve been collecting and organizing this list of opportunities today, I’ve been thinking a lot about the AWP Conference that is coming up in Philadelphia at the end of the month. I’m planning to be there along with the other EastOver Press editors. If you’re going to be at AWP, I hope you will let me know or at least stop by our small corner of the bookfair to say hello.

Until then, here are a dozen submission opportunities for writers. There’s something here for you regardless of what genre you’re writing in. So happy submitting, and good luck!

The Madison Review The Madison Review accepts  poetry, fiction, and art submissions during our reading period. We publish two issues, one online in fall and one physical in the spring. Fiction submissions should be no longer than 30 pages. Send up to 5 poems. https://madisonreview.submittable.com/submit

Sepia Journal Sepia is committed to showcasing the work of both emerging and established artists. We are open to submissions all year, and we aim to reply to all submissions within three months. We welcome submissions of both fiction and creative nonfiction. We prefer work that is below 8,000 words long. Submit up to five poems at a time. https://thesepia.org/submission-guidelines

Real Karen Fiction Contest Got a great original story that includes a well-written character named Karen? We welcome flash fiction, multiple submissions, simultaneous submissions, and work that has been published elsewhere for which you hold the copyright. We prefer not to publish work from authors who use and or have used the word “Karen” as a slur in their other writing. Stories should be less than 8,000 words in length. https://www.therealkaren.com/inspired-fiction/submit-your-fiction

Berkeley Fiction Review The Berkeley Fiction Review is a forum for short fiction, published annually. We invite submissions of previously unpublished short stories from around the country and the world year-round. There is no minimum required page count, but submissions should not exceed 30 pages in length. https://berkeleyfictionreview.org/submit/short-fiction/

Movable Type: 1455’s E-Magazine 1455’s Movable Type publishes every other month. Each issue provides a forum for a diverse array of poets, masters of prose, essayists, educators and anyone with passion for written expression. Each issue revolves around a theme. Please see the themes for 2022 and send your original work. https://1455litarts.org/movable-type/

Cortland Review TCR considers poetry, translations, book reviews. We accept simultaneous submissions, but kindly ask that you notify us as soon as possible when you have placed submitted work elsewhere. Submit  up to 5 poems at a time. https://www.cortlandreview.com/submissions/

Salvation South Salvation South accepts submissions in two broad categories: stories that address critical issues facing the South and stories that celebrate the culture of the South. In our submission form, you will find several more specific options. Please choose the one that best applies to your submission. We also accept Southern short fiction and poetry. https://salvationsouth.submittable.com/submit

Rust and Moth We are accepting submissions for the Summer 2022 issue. At this time, we publish only poetry. Submit up to three poems in any style. Deadline: March 31, 2022. https://rustandmoth.com/submissions/

Split Lip Review Split Lip Review is a literary journal of voice-driven writing with a pop culture twist. We publish online monthly and in print yearly. We accept fiction between 1,000 and 5,000 words, flash fiction under 1,000 words, and memoir up to 2,000 words.  We accept only one (yes, just one) poem at a time. Please do not send us more than one poem. Send your best poem, but only one. We mean it. Submissions are free through the month of March. https://splitlipthemag.com/submit

Passages North Passages North is open to submissions of poetry, short-shorts, nonfiction, and hybrid work from through April 15, 2022. Please submit a packet of 1-5 poems. Send up to three short-shorts or five mircos (fiction, nonfiction, prose poems, hybrids). We’re looking for all manner of well-written, innovative creative nonfiction (up to 8000 words) including, but not limited to, lyric essays, personal essays, memoir, and literary journalism. https://www.passagesnorth.com/submit

Posit Journal Posit is currently considering submissions for 2023. Send 1-3 pieces of prose, including fiction and hybrids, but no nonfiction please, 1000 words or less each. However, if you are submitting very short pieces, please send us at least three to choose from. Please include a minimum of five and a maximum of six poems for us to consider. Deadline: June 15, 2022. https://posit.submittable.com/submit

Rhino Our diverse group of editors looks for the best-unpublished poems, translations, and flash fiction/nonfiction by local, national, and international writers. We welcome all styles of writing, particularly that which is well-crafted, uses language lovingly and surprisingly, and feels daring or quietly powerful. Send 3-5 poems or flash fiction/nonfiction pieces (500 words or fewer), totaling no more than 5 pages. Submissions are open until monthly caps are reached through June 30, 2022. https://rhinopoetry.org/submit-1