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Issue # 32 Spring 2015
Table of Contents
Poetry Table of Contents
Fiction Table of
Contents
Nonfiction Table of Contents
Contributors' Notes
Editors for this Issue
Fiction: Meredith Sue Willis
Poetry: Roger Mitchell
Nonfiction: Reamy Jansen
Many thanks to Lynda Schor for
more than a decade of editing fiction for this publication.
Poetry
Billy Cancel
brine zone imperial drag
Darren C. Demaree
Emily as More & More Often
Emily as I Get to Hold the Masks
Howie Good
The Z Train
Still Life With Firearms
The Murk of Evening
Nels Hanson
Moments
Nora Iuga
terente takes care of sam
write sam, follow your calling
hey sam, a salesman calls to me
Seth Jani
Lantern
Dan Lewis
Insomniac
Instructions for Building a Greenhouse
Pastorale
Kevin McLellan
About/ Save/ Face
In Sunglasses
Kat Meads
Miss Jane Repurposes
Miss Jane Repurposes
Miss Jane Repurposes
Miss Jane Repurposes
Miss Jane Repurposes
Simon Perchik
You lean against the way each evening
Both hands and this ink
Erin Redfern
Live Oak
Margaret A. Robinson
Farewell to Eden
Keeping an Eye on the Neighbors
Terry Savoie
Holding Draft Lottery Ticket #87, You Lose Hope as the Vietcong Move Ahead with the Tet Offensive
Elaine Sexton
About You
In Memoriam
D. E. Steward
The Carolina Road
Bog People
Mark Young
A line from Gary Snyder
th’object of desire
manoomin
What a cabdriver told me
Lisa Zimmerman
An Abbreviated Tour of Tantrums
A Beginning
Fiction
Peggy Backman
The Cleaning Lady's Assistant
Dreama Wyant Frisk
Chapter 5 of Before We Left the Land
Edward Miller
Something Similar
Caleb Okereke
Terracotta
Michael Price
No Substitute for Terror
Patty Somlo
Photograph of a Cemetery
Peter Speziale
Torn
Scott Wheatley
An Open Sky
Nonfiction
Liza Case
Pigs Feet and Cowboy Boots
Chelsey Clammer
Hearted Skies
Reamy Jansen
Shaken
Dean G. Loumbas
Place and Identity in Henry James's Washington Square
Gregg Orifici
Blistered Confessions & Incalculable Kindnesses
Steven RoipheBrighton Beach Memory Gap
Contributors' Notes
Peggy Backman is a psychologist and writer, who divides her time between East Hampton, New York and New York City. She has always loved writing, since dictating detective stories to her baby sitter and then founding The Jerome Scoop, a weekly newspaper, when she was in the sixth grade. Now retired she has more time to write "fun things". Her first book of short stories, Did That Really Happen?, draws upon years of observing human behavior, as does her urban-country CD, "Honky Tonk Lady from New York City." The story published here is included in Peggy's latest book: The Painter's Bad Day and Other Stories of Life's Mysteries and Idiosyncrasies. Peggy, a graduate of Barnard College, received a Ph.D. from Columbia University and has completed postdoctoral studies and training at New York University.
Billy Cancel has recently appeared in Blazevox, Unlikely Stories & Other Rooms Press. His forthcoming body of work GAUZE COAST is to be published this Winter by Hidden House Press. Sound poems, visual shorts and other aberrations can be found at www.billycancelpoetry.com .
Liza Case's MFA is in creative writing from NYU and her plays have twice been honored by the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award. Her short film Destiny played on PBS and IFC. She has recently begun publishing essays and stories. For ten years, she published and edited the New York Independent Film Monitor.
Chelsey Clammer has been published in The Rumpus, Essay Daily, The Water~Stone Review and Black Warrior Review (forthcoming) among many others. She is the Managing Editor and Nonfiction Editor for The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, the Nonfiction Editor for Pithead Chapel and Associate Essays Editor for The Nervous Breakdown. Her first collection of essays, BodyHome, is forthcoming from Hopewell Publishing in Spring 2015. Her website is www.chelseyclammer.com.
Darren C. Demaree is the author of "As We Refer to Our Bodies" (8th House, 2013), "Temporary Champions" (Main Street Rag, 2014), and "Not For Art Nor Prayer" (8th House, 2015). He is the Managing Editor of the Best of the Net Anthology. He is currently living in Columbus, Ohio with his wife and children.
Dreama Wyant Frisk is the author of Ivory Hollyhock, a collection of poems. Her poems have been published in Wild, Sweet Notes, Fifty Years of West Virginia Poetry, "Grab-a-Nickel 2010", Inside/Out, Arlington Arts letter, and the Charleston Gazette (WV). A short story, "A Hunter's Moon", won third place in the 2009 WV Writers Contest. Excerpts from Before We Left the Land won second places in two categories in the 2013 WV Writers contest. Ivory Hollyhock was juried for placement at Tamarack, the West Virginia Arts and Crafts Center, and selected by Borders Books in Arlington, Virginia for a reading as part of a celebration of diverse cultures. It was also featured on West Virginia Public Television and has been selected for readings and placement in the Virginia Room at Arlington, Virginia Public Library.
The late Dr. Ruel Foster, Benedum Professor of American Literature, Emeritus, West Virginia University, was her first mentor and called her, "our elegist for the lost world of Appalachia". Dreama studied with Meredith Sue Willis at New York University; Appalachian Writers' Workshop at Hindman, Kentucky; and Tinker Mountain Writers Conference at Hollins College, Virginia. She is a member of WV Writers and James River Writers and has degrees from West Virginia University and the University of Virginia. She convenes Ice Mountain Writers in Romney, WV.
Dreama lives in Arlington, Virginia and Slanesville, West Virginia with her husband, John. They have two daughters and four grandchildren.
Howie Good is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including most recently Beautiful Decay from Another New Calligraphy and Fugitive Pieces from Right Hand Pointing Press.
Nels Hanson grew up on a farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California and has worked as a farmer, teacher and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart Prize nominations in 2010, 12, and 2014. Stories have appeared in Antioch Review, Black Warrior Review, Southeast Review and other journals and are in press at Fiction Southeast and ELJ Publications. Poems appeared in Word Riot, Oklahoma Review, Pacific Review and other magazines, and are in press at Squalorly, Sediments, Blotterature, Indiana Voice Journal and Lost Coast Review. Poems in Outside In Literary & Travel Magazine and Citron Review were nominated for 2014 Pushcart Prizes and poems in the Sharkpack Review Annual were awarded its 2014 Prospero Prize.
One of the most important, productive, and original Romanian writers and translators, Nora Iuga was born on 4 January 1931 and made her editorial debut in 1968 with the collection of poems It Isn’t My Fault. Her most recent book is the novel, Harald and the Green Moon (2014). These poems were translated from The Hunchbacks’ Bus (Autobuzul cu cocoșați, 2001, rpt. 2010).
Seth Jani originates from rural Maine but currently resides in Seattle, WA. He is the founder of Seven Circle Press and his own work has been published widely in such journals as The Foundling Review, East Coast Literary Review, Big River Poetry Review and Hobo Camp Review. More about him and his work can be found at www.sethjani.com.
Reamy Jansen's Available Light, Recollections and Reflections of a Son, a set of linked essays on fathers and sons, generations and mortality, was published by Hamilton Stone Editions in 2010. Jansen’s work—essays, poems, fiction—has appeared in a variety of publications, such as Gargoyle, Alimentum, Fugue, The Bloomsbury Review, LIT, Innisfree Poetry Journal and 32 Poems-Vol. 6, No. 1(www.32poems.com/issues), among others, and are reprinted in www.enskyment.org. He is also a long-time Contributing Editor to The Bloomsbury Review of Books and is the creator of it short essay section, “Out of Bounds.” He is also a founding Board member of Radical Teacher, along with Paul Lauter, Richard Ohmann, Louis Kampf, having co-edited the issue on privatization with Dick Ohmann. He has blogged for Radical Teacher as well, and was an editor for University Review where he interviewed Norman Mailer and later Jerzy Kosinski. Other interviews have included Li-Young Lee (collected in Breaking the Alabaster Jar, Conversations with Li-Young Lee, BOA, 2009) as well as D. Nurkse, Cornelius Eady, Michael Cunningham and David Means. He was vice president of the National Book Critics Circle for 6 years.
Dan Lewis’s work has appeared in The Cortland Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bombay Gin, Diner, Blue Unicorn, and others, as well as in two chapbooks, Tickets for the Broken Year, and Iconospheres, and a full-length poetry collection, This Garden. In 2012 I was winner of the 2012 Frank O’Hara Prize, judged by Lloyd Schwartz.
Dean G. Loumbas received his undergraduate degree from Iowa State University with a double major in English and Speech, Theatre, and Communication Education and holds a master of science in Speech and Hearing Sciences from Bradley University. He has done graduate work in English Studies at the University of Nottingham's School Of English and at the Teaching of English Department at Columbia University's Teachers College. Recently his essays have been published in Academic Medicine. His writing interests are in the connection of place and identity in literature and is currently working on a two act adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma. He is a licensed and nationally-certified speech-language pathologist residing and working in San Francisco, California.
Poet and playwright Diana Manole’s books include Angel with a Canadian Visa (2011), Oh, That's Too Much! (2000), Evening Habits (1998), and Love on the Elevator (1997). A new book of poems, B&W, is forthcoming from Tracus Arte, Bucharest. Her poems have appeared in North America in The Nashwaak Review, Third Wednesday, Lunch Ticket, Grain Magazine, Untethered, and Absinthe: A Journal of World Literature in Translation.
Kevin McLellan is the author of Tributary (Barrow Street, 2015), and the chapbooks Shoes on a wire (Split Oak, 2015) runner-up for the 2012 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry and Round Trip (Seven Kitchens, 2010), a collaborative series of poems with numerous women poets. He has recent or forthcoming poems in journals including: American Letters & Commentary, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Kenyon Review Online, Spoon River Poetry Review, Western Humanities Review, Witness, and numerous others. Kevin lives in Cambridge MA.
A native of North Carolina, Kat Meads has received an NEA in poetry and writing residencies from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Her work has appeared/is forthcoming in Blackbird, Drunken Boat, Rattle, Gargoyle, Radical Teacher and The Southern Poetry Anthology: North Carolina (Texas Review Press). She teaches in Oklahoma City University’s low-residency MFA program.
Ed Miller teaches English and composition at Madera Community College. Included among his areas of interest are pop culture, politics, poetry, and postmodern fiction. Lately his work has appeared in BorderSenses, Review Americana, and Birmingham Arts Journal.
Gregg J. Orifici is an MFA student and international educator at the University of New Hampshire. With a neglected law degree from Vanderbilt University, he has lived and worked in Europe and across the United States, and travels whenever possible. He plants trees and gardens obsessively, and has lost his heart too many times to count. Fascinated by misunderstanding, longing and serendipity, he writes to unearth unexpected connections. He has several poems forthcoming in Red Savina Review.
Caleb Okereke is a sixteen year old Nigerian writer. His works have been published on African Writer and other numerous blogs. He is part-convener of Nigeria's finest spoken word event. He blogs at www.thenigerianwriter.wordpress.com.
Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The Nation, Osiris, Poetry, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. His most recent collection is Almost Rain, published by River Otter Press (2013). For more information, free e-books and his essay titled “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.
Widely published in literary journals, Michael Price has been writing fiction for more than 30 years. He earned his BA in Theater from the University of Minnesota in 1980 and performed his own one-man one-act play "No Change of Address" to considerable acclaim at the 2012 MN Fringe Festival.
A San Jose, California native, Erin Redfern serves on the board of the Poetry Center San Jose and as associate editor for the 2015 issue of its print publication, Caesura. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Zyzzyva, Scapegoat Review, Mud Season Review and Compose.
Margaret A. Robinson's most recent chapbook, "Arrangements," is available at Finishing Line Press. Her work has appeared in journals such as "Prairie Schooner," "Tar River Review," and "Rattle." She teaches writing at Widener University and lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.
Steven Roiphe studied creative writing, literature, and history at Harvard University. His fiction has appeared in Hot Metal Bridge, and Summer Literary Seminars awarded him two tuition fellowships. He lives in Downeast Maine, where he is working on a novel about George Washington's greatest spy coming to terms with being gay at the end of the Revolution.
Terry Savoie has now retired and lives outside Iowa City. More than three hundred of his poems have been published in literary journals over the past three decades. These include Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Cutthroat, Great River Review, The Iowa Review and North American Review as well as recent or forthcoming issues of Tiferet, Tar River Poetry, One, Quiddity, Spillway, Commonweal, and America among others.
Elaine Sexton's third collection of poetry, Prospect/Refuge is forthcoming with Sheep Meadow Press. Her poems, reviews, and essays have appeared in numerous journals and periodicals including American Poetry Review, Art in America, Poetry and Oprah Magazine. She teaches poetry and text and image workshops at Sarah Lawrence College and her visual work has recently been published, exhibited, and posted online. elainesexton.org
Patty Somlo has received four Pushcart Prize nominations and has been nominated for storySouth's Million Writers Award. Her essay, "If We Took a Deep Breath," was selected as a Notable Essay of 2013 for Best American Essays 2014. She is the author of From Here to There and Other Stories. Her second book, Hairway to Heaven Stories, is forthcoming in January 2017 from Cherry Castle Publishing. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including the Los Angeles Review, the Santa Clara Review, Under the Sun, Guernica, The Flagler Review, and WomenArts Quarterly, among others, and in fifteen anthologies.
Adam J. Sorkin is an award-winning translator of contemporary Romanian literature. He has published more than fifty books, most recently, in 2014, Marta Petreu’s The Book of Anger, and Mihail Gălățanu’s The Starry Womb (both Diálogos Books, with co-translators).
Peter J. Speziale is a New York State attorney who has migrated to the business world, currently co-managing a venture capital and attorney finance business in White Plains, New York. Peter resides in New York City with his wife and son. His passion is creative writing. Among other writing projects, he is currently working on completing a collection of linked father/son stories. pspeziale@aol.com.
D. E. Steward is literary magazine writer with work in Massachusetts Review, Conjunctions, Antioch Review, Iowa Review, Northwest Review, Agni, Fiction International, etc. Since 1986, he has been writing serial month-to-month “months.” Of the twenty-eight years of months completed, over two hundred have been published in literary magazines. Shorter poetry and prose appear in the same manner. The whole immense project of months goes as Chroma and the months are mostly published as poetry but there is enough autobiography in them to make them nearly the enemy of the verity of remembering, which of course is what good writing must do.
Scott Wheatley is a writer and currently teaches writing in the small border town of San Luis, AZ. He has studied under several accomplished writers including Barbara Ungar, Daniel Nestor, and William Patrick. His poems have been published in Other. "An Open Sky" was inspired by his grandfather who fought in World War II.
Born in Hokitika, New Zealand, & now living in North Queensland in Australia, Mark Young has been publishing poetry for fifty-five years. His work has been widely anthologized, & his essays & poetry translated into a number of languages. He is the author of more than twenty-five books, primarily poetry but also including speculative fiction & art history. His most recent books are a chapbook of visual poems, Arachnid Nebula, from Luna Bisonte Prods, HOTUS POTUS from Meritage Press in California, & the ebook A Small Compendium of Bats, from Swirl press in Sweden.
Lisa Zimmerman’s poetry and short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Natural Bridge, The Florida Review, River Styx, Colorado Review, Poet Lore, Cave Wall, Redbook and other journals. She has published five poetry collections, most recently The Light at the Edge of Everything (Anhinga Press, 2008) and Snack Size: Poems (Mello Press, 2012). Her poems have been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize. Lisa is an associate professor at the University of Northern Colorado and lives with her family in Fort Collins.