30 May 2016
Make art about Liberty, about its costs, about the quest for it, about the privilege and fragility of it.
Only a couple of days left to submit! Deadline June 1, 2016
HeartWood BROADSIDE SERIES CONTEST
2016 Judge: Diane Gilliam
Contest submission window: April 1 – June 1, 2016
A writing practice requires us to slow down, reflect, attend. HeartWood Literary Magazine & West Virginia Wesleyan’s MFA Program seek to honor this practice with the launch of an annual broadside series and contest. Partnering with West Virginia artist Diane Radford of Dog and Pony Press, we will print the winning entry (poetry or flash prose) on a limited-edition letterpress broadside featuring an original image inspired by the text. The annual broadside will be an artifact companion the fall issue of the digital magazine. Both the handmade and the electronic HeartWood venues aim to showcase work that gets to the heart of the matter.
Contest Judge: DIANE GILLIAM is the author of four collections of poetry: Everything Ever, Everything After (forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2016), Kettle Bottom, One of Everything and Recipe for Blackberry Cake (chapbook). She has won a Pushcart Prize, the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing, and is the most recent recipient of the Gift of Freedom from A Room of Her Own Foundation.
Guidelines
Submit Here! http://www.heartwoodlitmag.com/contest/
This week meet Doug Van Gundy, author of A Life Above Water. Doug teaches in both the BA and MFA writing programs at West Virginia Wesleyan College. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in The Oxford American, Poems & Plays, Ecotone, Appalachian Heritage, Waccamaw and Poetry Salzburg Review. He is currently co-editing an anthology of contemporary writing from West Virginia for WVU Press and working on his second book of poems, tentatively titled, No Dog Inside.
Doug has also has been an elephant keeper, a copywriter, a country radio disk jockey, a letterpress operator, a television game show winner, and is a multi-talented musician. He’s an incredible old-time fiddler (along with playing a kajillion other instruments), performing with Paul Gartner in the duo Born Old.
Buy Doug’s beautiful book!
http://redhen.org/book/?uuid=F6650841-8509-33C3-0C69-129FD872CC95
Praise for A Life Above Water
Doug Van Gundy s poems are pitch-perfect and packed with indelible images, each as striking and distinct as a hawk in a clear blue sky above one of his beloved mountains. This poet has a genius for quick characterization, too; I love his crow-eyed bachelor men/who lived on the hillside and smelled/of fried potatoes and machine oil, for instance. Some of these poems are like whole novels. Doug Van Gundy has captured a culture in this book. –Lee Smith
More about Doug, poetry and music, at his website
Learn More About Doug’s Music and Born Old
https://www.facebook.com/bornoldband
http://www.countysales.com/products.php?product=DOUG-VAN-GUNDY-%26-PAUL-GARTNER-%27Born-Old%27
Read More from Doug Online
http://www.connotationpress.com/featured-guest-editor/poetry-october-2009/137-doug-van-gundy-poetry
http://www.storysouth.com/poetry/2008/06/west_virginia_vs_extractive_in.html
http://www.fishousepoems.org/keeper/
http://appalachianheritage.net/author/dougvangundy/
Hear Doug Read
https://soundcloud.com/storyweb/doug-van-gundy-a-beautiful-jar-of-jelly
And Play!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeOj7nLF3_Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnKAOWSO410
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZisqgmidCc
Happy Reading!
xo
Mary
29 May 2016
Jumped out of the car at an intersection for this one.
Make art about discarded flowers, about what we throw away.
28 May 2016
I was 6 in 1969, and the only connection I could make to the war in Viet Nam was that my Uncle David was there. I remember watching footage on our black and white TV, looking for my handsome uncle’s face. I was too young to understand, but I remember the images clearly.
Make art about your earliest memories of war.
27 May 2016
So much talk this week in my summer school class on Activism, on how to create real world change, on how to lead, on what makes a leader. And such a lack of real leadership in any of the people running for president, it hurts my heart.
Make art about leaders, about leadership.
26 May 2016
Was out in the garden, putting up new stick trellises for those climbing stringbeans my son loves so much, when a woman walking by on our tiny backwoods rural road, called from the street, “That’s just how just how my grandmama used to do it!”
I laughed, and said, “That’s just where I learned it–from my grandmama!”
She walked over, and we chatted, her telling me her name was Ruth, and she was visiting family down the road. She told me how she always wished she’d kept a garden but raising a house filled with kids by herself and working two jobs most of those years didn’t leave much time for anything else. I told her it sounded like to me she’d tended to her garden magnificently. She tilted her head and asked what I meant.
Those kids, I said, all grown and making strong good lives. She smiled, patted my shoulder, and said, “You know, I like the thought of it that way.”
I did too. And now me and Ruth aren’t strangers anymore 🙂
Make art about a conversation with a stranger, with a Road Angel ❤
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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