Pushcart Nomination: How The Sun Burns, Minnesota Review

Photograph by Marion Doss, used under CC license

Good news! The Minnesota Review has nominated my story "How The Sun Burns Among Hills of Rock and Pebble" for a Pushcart Prize.  This is the title story of my next story collection, and the third time I've had a story nominated for a Pushcart.

"How The Sun Burns" was published in the Spring 2013 issue of the journal. 

A Man Walks into a Bar: An Interview about Time, Writing, and What Isn't Revealed

Photo by Mark Kelly, used under CC license

The incredibly generous writer and editor, Michael Noll, is featuring my story "The Midwife" on his website Read to Write Stories.

On Tuesday he featured a writing exercise based on the story, and today's installment is an interview with me in which I discuss why I don't use advertising in a story and some of the problems caused by writing in present tense and how I tend to deal with those.

A man also walks into a bar. Come on over. :)

Time Present and Time Past: The Midwife is Under Discussion

Photo by Alexis Fam Photography, used under CC license 

Over at Read to Write Stories, Michael Noll is featuring my story "The Midwife" this week in a discussion focused on ways that times moves in the story. Today he has based a writing exercise on it, and on Thursday, you can read an interview with me about some of the story's elements, and other writing-related thoughts.  

"The Midwife" was originally published in Glint literary journal and will be in my next collection, How the Sun Burns.

Million Writers Award Open for Nominations

The 2013 Million Writers Award is open for nominations.

Nominate any short story that was published in an ONLINE -magazine during 2012.

To fill out the nomination form, go here or copy/paste this link into your browser: http://www.storysouth.com/millionwriters/2013-individual-submit.html

Of my stories, "The Midwife" is eligible for nomination. Read the story here, at Glint literary journal.

Minnesota Review Spring 2013: How the Sun Burns Among Hills of Rock and Pebble

the minnesota review: Spring 2013, Issue 80

My story, "How the Sun Burns among Hills of Rock and Pebble" is published in the Spring 2013 issue of minnesota review, which is now available for purchase (Issue #80).

The story is the title story for my next book, How the Sun Burns, and the story was a finalist in the 2012 Kore Press Short Fiction Award.

It also happens to be one of my favorite stories.

Here is the opening:

But aside from the black crepe ribbons that flap on the white poles of the fair entrance archway, anyone who didn't live in the town last summer or close enough to hear the nightly news or who didn't ask about the luminaries lining the dirt avenue that ran along the fair's midway last night, wouldn't know that a young woman named Helen Greene disappeared from last summer's Agricultural Fair.

To read the rest, order this Spring's edition of minnesota review.

Featured Author on LibraryThing

Evidently I'm one of the two featured authors today on LibraryThing, so that's pretty lovely.  It's also my nephew's birthday.  So, a good day all around.

Cheers!

Erin

Featured Authors

Today's featured LibraryThing Authors. Are you an author? Join up!

Erin Pringle (memberErin_Pringle), author of The Floating Order

The Burning Bard: The Great Fires by Jack Gilbert

These Great Fires: 1982-1990 
by Jack Gilbert

This week I read Jack Gilbert for the first time.  The poems I read are from his book The Great Fires.  Gilbert is an excellent poet.  One of our great bards.  I need not read all of his books to know this, to make what may seem like a sweeping claim. But I've read enough dead books to feel when a book is real, when the person's words come from are honest and display the rawness that is right.  No differently than a child can tell when an adult is talking down to her and when an adult is not.

Most every poem has hurt with its vision, but hurt in the way that happens when one finds that someone else has put words on life, held it still long enough to say, Yes, me, too, but this way.

The two poems that so far have shifted the world of words are these: "Guilty" and "Married."  The poem "Guilty" must be read out loud and alone, but here is the other:


(from the anthology Earth-Shattering Poems, edited by Liz Rosenberg--Google Books preview)


Those interested in hearing the man behind the poetry might be interested in the Interview with Jack Gilbert at the Paris Review.  The questions are sometimes inane, but the answers never are.

Poem in Your Pocket: Celebrating National Poetry Month

We're four days into National Poetry Month over here in the United States.  If you know a poet, probably you know that this is the month where most everyone who writes and reads poetry takes the time to encourage the writing and reading of poems in any number of attempts to spread poems like a beautiful virus into the minds of others.  It's the month when readers are allowed to become desperate to find and infect new readers.

There are a number of ways this is done. One, for example, is by overheard transmission: this is when you find yourself in an elevator, on the way to floor 5, and a stranger begins to recite a poem.  Another method is by invitation to listen, or to be part of, a community poetry reading; many of these are recently inspired by the Favorite Poem Project begun by our former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. 

Aside: This is one of my favorite Favorite Poem mini-documentaries: 

We Real Cool by Gwendolyn Brooks read by John Ulrich Student South Boston, MA.

Photograph by Ella Novak, 

used under CC license

This year, a new attempt at trying to grow Reading Culture and sustain poetry into the next century is a pocketed one.  You may never know that someone beside you has a poem in his or her pocket.  But it's true.  And if you ask, you might be given an incredulous look or, better, the poem for your pocket.

Poem in Your Pocket is a recent phenomenon that began in North Carolina, travelled to New York City, and is now spreading into the national scene.    

The Way It Works:

It's pretty self-explanatory. Put a favorite poem in your pocket and carry it about on April 18 (this is Poem-in-a-Pocket day, evidently). Make a copy for your friend's pocket. Then, join in any pocket-poem events near you, or lead one. These are some suggestions from the website:

Start a "poems for pockets" give-a-way in your school or workplace

Urge local businesses to offer discounts for those carrying poems

Post pocket-sized verses in public places (Do this one. Also, it would be good to leave lone pockets about, with poems in them.)

Handwrite some lines on the back of your business cards

Start a street team to pass out poems in your community

Distribute bookmarks with your favorite immortal lines

Add a poem to your email footer

Post a poem on your blog or social networking page

Project a poem on a wall, inside or out 

Text a poem to friends 

If you want to find a new poem that is already pocket-size, then you can select one from the Poem-in-a-Pocket page on Poets.org.

If today were April 18, I would carry this poem in my pocket: "The Committee Weighs In" by Andrea Cohen.  And I would print a copy for your pocket, too. 

"The Rabbit" in Big Pulp Spring 2013

Big Pulp's Spring 2013 issue is now available in print, and the editors are slowly releasing the stories online. My short-short, "The Rabbit," is now available to read.

This is my third publication with Big Pulp, and I was happy to work with Bill Olver again.  He's top-rate.  They've even made an author page just for me.  Awesome. :)

The Rabbit (2013)

Palestine, IL (2010)

Every Good Girl Does Fine (2008)

Photographer on Focus: Anka Zhuravleva

photograph by (c) Anka Zhuravleva,
all rights reserved by photographer

It has mostly been my life experience to find soul-mates after they have died.  T.S. Eliot, for example.  I remember reading his work in college, falling head over his words, and then having to come to terms with the fact that he was, in fact, dead.  It happened again when I watched Ingmar Bergman's Through a Glass Darkly, and then continued to watch all of his films.  He had not died yet, but I could not think of what to write to him on a postcard.  But then he died, as people tend to do.

I don't know how I came across Anka Zhuravleva's photographs, but I did recently, and I think we have a similar vision of the world.  Or, at least, I recognize in her vision something of my own.  I suppose that's one sign of a great artist . . . making it sort of impossible for anyone not to see themselves in the vision.

In her bio, she notes the deaths of her parents, within two years of each other, when she was a young woman.  Perhaps, then, that's what I share with her.  Perhaps there's something that happens, when that happens, if it happens at just the right time in a persons's life, and that person already had tendencies to imagine herself away. . . Maybe that's what I see in her work that makes it seem to me that she has shown me a photograph she took of my nightmare last night, and of my dream by day.

Regardless, her work has a disjointedness about it that I enjoy.  The way she shows the impossibility of reality by showing what it can't do.  To show how impossibly grounded the world is by showing the wishes.  To show the limits of the body by showing images of the body in motion, the body outside of gravity, the body moved by the unseen that isn't. The photograph's attempt to capture the can't-be, as though it did catch it, like you will hear suddenly the voice of a long-dead friend saying your name, and you turn to it and find you'd heard the voice through your mind and not through your ear.  And then you remember why and see that you're still standing in the world, somehow, and on your way to whatever task you have.

I think one of the great things about Zhuravleva's work is that, unlike the typical visions we're given of impossible worlds (the romantic comedy, for example, or most anything on TV) is that she's asking us to ache for the can't-be rather than pretending that the can't-be can.  She provides longing for us, and lets us both feel it and think about it.  Her photographs don't say, Here is a fantasy for you to escape your life by living.  Her photographs don't say, Fantasy is better than reality, and so despise your reality now that it isn't like what you can imagine. Her photographs say, Look, look what I found for you, look at the impossibility of beauty through its impossibility.

photograph by (c) Anka Zhuravleva,
all rights reserved by photographer

This especially becomes interesting when even scrolling down her Facebook page, for there is a mix of the obviously fantastical photographs with straight-eyed head shots, or a woman sitting at a table and not, as in another photograph, floating into the room.  And so the bleed-over from the fantastical photographs onto the more realistic photographs begins a deeper narrative about the real.  For suddenly, I think, the viewer begins to see the woman floating while being trapped inside the gaze of a woman who stares out, daring us to look away, to float away, to leave as all people do eventually.