"This work is unlike any other, in its range of rich, conjuring imagery and its dexterity, its smart voice. Carroll-Hackett doesn’t spare us—but doesn’t save us—she draws a blueprint of power and class with her unflinching pivot: matter-of-fact and tender." —Jan Beatty
Deadline: After first 500 submissions are received.
While Aji publishes poetry, fiction, literary nonfiction, graphic art, and photographs on all subjects in every issue, the theme for our spring 2017 issue is music, the tempo of a city street, the dissonance of a conversation—what are the melodies, the harmonies, and the rhythms of your life? Send us work on music of all types, classical, jazz, experimental, pop, and of course the thundering and whispering of storms, the jangling of traffic, the noise in your head that won’t let you sleep. We’re a small staff—we will close submissions after the first 500 submissions. www.ajimagazine.com
1 Sept. – 15 Dec. reading for an issue devoted to authors who are also women.
“(And anyone not currently a monogender dude; we define gender ≠ sex.) Work does not need to be about gender. Send us wild things.”
Storm Cellar is a national literary arts magazine with a special emphasis on the Midwest, appearing in print and ebook editions. We want your prose, poems, chimeras, and ideas penned on envelopes in buses and train cars. The magazine aims to publish amazing work by new and established writers and artists, present a range of styles and approaches, and be as un-boring as it can. If you write one thing to be read while waiting for the all-clear to sound, send it here.”
Been helping my son put together his costume for the Renaissance Faire. He’s reaching back to his roots in the coastal lowlands of eastern North Carolina, and going as a pirate this year, appropriate since he lived the earliest years of his life only twenty miles from where the infamous Edward Teach–Blackbeard–made his home in Bath, NC. In fact, archaeologists from my alma mater, East Carolina University, worked in conjunction with the NC Department of Cultural Resources, to raise Balckbard’s ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge, from those wild waters on my beloved Outer Banks. (ECU’s mascot is a Pirate 🙂 I am purple and gold forever! 🙂 )
All this work on his costume, plus, I think, the current political situation, probably led to the dream I had last night where I was pouring beer for ruffians in some steampunk version of an 18th century tavern.
Make art about pirates. Or inspired by the word ‘pirate.’
Hofstra University Has Two Forums for Your Literary Work
Submissions accepted year-round.
Submissions for AMP: Always Electric (a digital literary site) are accepted in poetry, short prose, innovative and cross-genre texts, video poems and literary videos. AMP is a project of the Hofstra University Digital Research Center and is co-sponsored by the MFA program and the Department of English.amp.hofstradrc.org
Windmill: The Hofstra Journal of Literature & Art accepts both print and digital submissions including fiction, creative nonfiction, art and photography, and poetry. Our inaugural issue will be published in January 2017. Windmill is a joint project of Hofstra University’s MFA in Creative Writing and BA in English/Publishing Studies.hofstrawindmill.com
I grew up in Hurricane Alley, eastern North Carolina, so the preparation for these big storms is something I learned early. Hurricane Matthew has ripped through Haiti, and is on his way to the US East Coast. All my provisions are laid in, flashlights and emergency equipment in place and ready, and I’ve battened down as much as I can. But sometimes Mama Nature’s just too big and unpredictable for any kind of preparation.
Make art about preparing the best you can.
10/5/2016
Thinking a lot today about all the ways people find their way to, or demonstrate faith. Took me immediately to one of my top three favorite songs, The Mountain, by Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer.
Excerpted Lyrics by Dave Carter
Some build temples and some find altars, some come in tall hats and robes spun fine. Some in rags, some in gemstone halters, some push the pegs back in line.
I see the mountain, the mountain comes to me, I see the mountain and that is all I see.
Make art about temples or altars or shrines, faith in some unexpected way.
10/6/2016
Road Angel Andrea at Walmart today told me about her grandmama teaching her to sew, first by making curtains, long straight hems, she said, over and over again, summer curtains, winter curtains with their heavy lining. She said her grandmama was patient but tough, making her tear out crooked stitches, and try again til she got it right. “I learned to take my time,” she said. “I learned to take my time, look ahead of the foot, and how a pair of curtains can make all the difference in a room.”
Make art about curtains. Or about what you learned from an elder.
“The falling leaves, all over the forest, are protecting the roots of my plants. Only look at what is to be seen, and you will have garden enough, without deepening the soil in your yard. We have only to elevate our view a little to see the whole forest as a garden.” ~Thoreau
Make art about ‘garden enough.’
10/2/2016
Driving back from WV, I stopped for gas, and Road Angel Louise tells me her story of trying to recover from the recent flooding, what it’s like to lose so much. “Just go from here, I reckon,” she said.
Make art about rebounding from tragedy, about how we ‘just go from here.’
10/3/2016
Dreamt someone I love brought me apples, Honey Crisp and Red Delicious, Granny Smith and Winesap, even a couple of Arkansas Black. He sliced one with his sharp knife, and smiling, said, Here you go, Missy. A taste of what’s to come.
Make art about the taste of autumn. Or about what’s to come.
The most recent book from one of my always favorite poets, Pattiann Rogers.
Ms. Rogershas published eleven books of poetry; two book-length essay collections, The Dream of the Marsh Wrenand The Grand Array; and A Covenant of Seasons, poems and monotypes, in collaboration with Joellyn Duesberry. She is the recipient of two NEA grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award for poetry. She lives in Colorado.
“I believe Pattiann Rogers walks the world at night when we are sleeping. Her poems are translations of our dreaming life—what we know to be true but fail to remember. We read her words, sentence by sentence, image by image, and return to all that is beautiful, mysterious, and erotic.” —Terry Tempest Williams
“Pattiann Rogers is a visionary of reality, perceiving the material world with such intensity of response that impulse, intention, meaning, interconnections beyond the skin of appearance are revealed. Her language, unmarred by clichés, springs up out of a sense of how various and endlessly amazing are the forms of life and the human ability to notice them.” —Denise Levertov
“How the densely detailed, thickly textured, imaged stanzas of Pattiann Rogers result in so much light-as-air wonderment is surely one of the greater questions—one of the greater magics—of contemporary poetry. But however it happens, we must be thankful—for both the science text and the psalter of her work, for both the physical abundance and for the spirit flimmering over it.” —Albert Goldbarth
Ms. Rogers
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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