It’s a casual story with the usual suspects: lonely writers, a foreign town, alcohol. When I moved to Amsterdam in 2001, no literary community existed that was accessible to foreign residents. I was surprised. Naïve, I guess, that Amsterdam would be like what I thought Paris would be like; well, really that all great European cities would have these shadowy expatriate writers in bars, some sense of international literary exchange that was going somewhere. I grew up as a poet within strong literary communities, and finding none here, I decided to build one. Versal and our community work all started in an effort to extend Amsterdam’s literary spirit with the international reach it already had, but wasn’t using.

(Also check out some poetry from Desmond Kon in Everyday Genius and other interviews by him at Cerise Press and Retort Magazine. And at Luna Park this week, more notes from Cave Wall and a guest post by David Backer of FictionDaily.)

Mary Miller edits the new flash fiction issue of Ekleksographia, with work by Jeff Landon, Claudia Smith, Kim Chinquee, and many other talents of the form.

Following (in a way) TriQuarterly’s lead, venerable lit mag Shenandoah is leaving print for online. Their final print issue will be dedicated to Flannery O’Connor.

Issue one of Bookcourt’s new literary journal, Reminder, is due out this month. Will include work from John Wray, Emma Straub, Alice Notley, Jonathan Lethem, etc.

Collagist editor Matt Bell has a symphonic new story up at Guernica, “Quella, Querida, Quintessa,” which begins liltingly: “How beautiful our daughter is in her white Tethering dress…”

The Asian American Literary Review has an upcoming event they’d like you to know about: a day-long literary symposium on April 24th at the University of Maryland.  Featured readers will include Karen Tei Yamashita, Ed Lin, Srikanth Reddy, Sonya Chung, Peter Bacho, Kyoko Mori, April Naoko Heck, and Ru Freeman. More info on their Facebook page.

“Seven Little Stories About Sex” from Eric Freeze and Boston Review, including this bit of wisdom for new fathers:

The boy understood that this was how every human being started, the proliferation of two cells dividing. But the father forgot to explain the sex part, how the sperm and the egg got to be in the same place at the same time and so for years the boy thought the sperm flew out of the man and through the air to where it entered the woman and multiplied like cancer.

And I don’t know how I missed this fantastic (and really long) interview with Jim Shepard in the December 2009 issue of Vice. (And why hasn’t Paris Review done an interview with him yet?) Here’s a funny bit on writing:

I will sometimes do more than one piece at a time, but it’s usually a sign that one of the pieces is in trouble, at least temporarily. I don’t think I’ve ever worked on two pieces at once that were both going beautifully where I’m like, “OK, it’s Tuesday. It’s Roman-soldier day,” whereas Wednesday is angry-Italian-relatives day.

Every Tuesday, Travis Kurowski presents Luna Digest, a selection of news from the world of literary magazines. Travis is the editor of Luna Park, a magazine founded on the idea that journals are as deserving of critical attention as other artistic works.

It was a difficult process to select a particular story out of my tons of faves. Many of my favorite stories have already been removed from the files, happily being tweaked for publishing somewhere, I’m sure. From the rest, I scanned quickly and selected about ten to focus in on, then ground it down to one of my favorite fields of magical realism. Then I went through those four until I picked one that was easy for me to identify exactly why, on a second reading, I liked it.

The first is that unexplainable “wow” feeling in your gut tinged with the bile of resentment that it wasn’t you that wrote it. The rest is a bit more methodical. The story I picked is “The Snowbank” by Shelagh Power-Chopra and the very concept–taken from a life event Shelagh read about evidently–is exquisite: a man finds himself stuck in a snowbank. Not only is this immediately interesting, it appeals to an inner fear bred into every snow-bound child by its mother. Instant empathy and tension. Shelagh sets the stage easily with a good intention gone bad–the quick trip to the store for a holiday necessity.

Shelagh then adds humor and conflict into the situation by way of a squirrel who was also scooped up by the plow and is the only thing the character can see inches away from his face. Here again, Shelagh depends upon the reader’s knowledge of an angry squirrel and the danger it threatens. I love magical realism, and the absurdity of this scenario is wonderfully handled by the author. Pinned in place deep within the snowbank, with no sure chance of being saved, the character’s thoughts travel through his life situations, which seem just as frustrating as the squirrel who was, with, “One eye wide open and less then a few inches away, staring straight at him.” He decides the squirrel is dead, but isn’t quite sure, and in either case, it’s metaphorical existence in both his current state and the possibility of his death is conflict enough.

The story has all the elements of strong character, tension, arc, reflection, drama, and resolution along with its humor, and when I found myself shaking my head in wonder with a big smile on my face, I knew it was a fave.

Fictionaut Faves, a series in which Fictionaut members recommend stories on the site, is edited by Marcelle Heath, a fiction writer, freelance editor, and assistant editor for Luna Park. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth for Fictionaut): I have a gut feeling Metazen started as a blog, it’s an instinctual guess. How’d it start?

A (Frank Hinton): Metazen did start as a blog. Actually as a drunken blog. Last March I drank a bottle of whiskey and woke up the next morning with a fiction blog. Then I didn’t touch it for three months. I started up again in May just writing little bits of flash fiction and publishing them every few days. I felt I was being vein so I started to ask a few friends to submit. In 6 months we went from a blog to a weekly fiction site to a daily literary magazine in September.

Q: Who pics the pics I love them so much.

I choose the pictures. I’m a pretty strict aesthete…I like female legs, necks, lips and eyes. I scour the internet for pictures. I actually spend more time looking for photos than I do writing or editing the site. The pictures are everything.

Q. How is the Fictionaut group different to the Metazen site?

The Fictionaut group is something I don’t focus on enough. I usually put all of my stories on there and because we’ve had over 100 authors at Metazen, I encourage my writers to add to the group. I try to talk about upcoming events on there, but right now my thumb isn’t as green as I’d like it to be for the Metazen Fictionaut garden.

Q: Metazen publishes stories every day. Does the F’naut group do the same?

Metazen publishes stories every day, a “Saturday Morning” feature and “Best Of” story with author commentary on the weekends. The group is growing on Fictionaut but I think I’m going to set my new editors to come up with some creative ideas for it. Yeah, we’ve got 3 new editors coming to our site too…some Fictionaut celebs actually.

Q: Talk about three stories Metazen has published.

“Pretty” is a story by Christopher Allen. I read one story a week to my girlfriend when she’s in the bathtub, and “Pretty” was the story that started that tradition. The story is about a girl named Pretty and her mother Bonita riding on the train. The way Christopher paints this grotesque girl and her even more grotesque relationship with her daughter is perfect. You feel like you’re right on the train. You want to hug Pretty and take her home. You want a photo of her face to look at when you feel low.

“Rice” is a piece by Dorothee Lang. It looks like a plain and sparse story when you first read it and then after you finish, it sits with you. It doesn’t digest. You go back and read it again and then where there was once a minimal feel, now new colors and ideas come to mind. You realize it’s a trick. The story is not a puddle but a lake. It’s clean and bright and steaming like a bowl of rice.

“The Serious Writer and His Penis” is a story by Finnegan Flawnt. First off, without Flawnt there would be no Metazen. He is the spectral force that ignites the entire site. Really. I don’t know why. This is a story about penis perception. I think it’s something all men worry and wonder about. But it is also something else. It’s a meditation on the nature of human reception. I think it’s saying we can only take what we believe and that’s how we form our ideas.

Q: Floor’s yours, get personal.

I live in Halifax. I write all the time. I write on the toilet, my pockets are full of paper scraps. Last night I wrote a story on the inside of a cereal box. Most recently I published “American Serial” at Metazen, a 20 part novella about a man that doesn’t exist. I am a pretty neurotic person. I’m getting married next week, so I’m really excited to lose my virginity. I’m worried about how sex will affect my artistic life. Sigh. Next month we’re publishing our 26 Vaginas, 26 Penises ebook. We have 52 stories from 52 different authors. Each author wrote on one word from each letter of the alphabet. Alcohol, Boredom, Confession, Delusion etc…It will be interesting because each story will be published on a different website. Different theme, colors and HTML presentation. Complex, but fun.

Nicolle Elizabeth checks in with Fictionaut Groups every Friday.

What story or book do you feel closest to?

For me, it’s always books over stories. I can’t think of a story I feel close to, but there are so many books. The few that I go back to over and over, which makes them feel close in a way are DeLillo’s End Zone, Davis’ The End of the Story, and Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter. Of my own work, it’s whatever I’m working on at the time. Of my published work, it’s How Much of Us There Was, mostly because it is my most personal book, so to speak.

Do you have a mentor? Do you yourself mentor?

I don’t officially mentor, but there is a young man, who was homeless and addicted to crack for a time, and I try to help when I can. If it’s just writing that we’re talking about, I don’t have a mentor, but I do help people with some of the vagaries of the publishing industry when I can – contracts, agents, all that.

How do you stay creative? What are your tricks to get “unstuck?”

I like to do things and make things, so staying or being creative is never much of an issue for me. And I’m usually doing more than one thing at a time—either writing fiction, writing life stories, painting, making documentaries. If I ever am feeling stuck, then I just do something else. And, then, whenever I go back to the stuck thing, I’m usually not stuck anymore. I like to let my subconscious do work for me like that whenever I can.

What are your favorite websites?

I love HTMLGIANT and Largehearted Boy and Big Other and sites like that that do a great job of getting the word out on a huge range of books and writers.

What is happening right now that you would like to share in your writing world?

Dear Everybody just came out in paperback, which is pretty exciting. And my pseudonym, Andy Devine, which I’ve been using for conceptual writing for about 10 years, has a book called Words coming out with Publishing Genius in April.

How did you end up with a pseudonym?

Andy Devine started as my Vegas name and evolved into a pseudonym for my conceptual writing when I was editing Taint Magazine (this was back before there were so many online magazines). We were looking for content and didn’t want to publish work under our own names. Then a while after that, I was telling my agent about it (and how the work was structured) and he thought it was a great idea for me to use the pseudonym for that kind of work. So I kept it in part to keep my agent happy. It’s always good to keep your agent happy.

What is it like to write the life stories of objects for Michael Kimball Writes Your Life Story? Just recently I saw one of your postcard life stories about a chair!

I love writing the postcard life stories, of course, but I have a special affection for the life story of Red Delicious Apple and Chair. I have also written them for a Sammy the Dog and Moose the Cat. It pushes the narrative into a perspective that I’m not used to working with, which makes the language fresh. And it also makes me realize that there are stories everywhere.

The Fictionaut Five is our ongoing series of interviews with Fictionaut authors. Every Wednesday, Meg Pokrass asks a writer five (or more) questions. Meg is an editor at Smokelong Quarterly, and her stories and poems have been published widely. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

I wish more magazines would do this: A Public Space invites readers behind the curtain of their upcoming issue in order to expose the editorial process in action: the final poem from APS 11 here, the editing here.

New Aussie lit mag sighting: Kill Your Darlings.

As everyone no doubt knows by this point, FSG’s Lorin Stein has been named the new editor of The Paris Review. In case you somehow missed it all, or just want some more info, here’s a very brief interview of Stein by Edward Champion about the new job. And here’s Stein on the magazine’s famous interview series:

Aren’t the interviews wonderful? Think of the ones with P.G. Wodehouse, Philip Larkin, Henry Green, Hemingway — I wouldn’t wish for video, even if it could be had. And I feel the same way about Nat Rich’s recent interview with James Ellroy. It’s a work of art in itself.

More important news of the past week was of course the very sad death of novelist and story writer Barry Hannah. Last year, Gulf Coast published an excerpt of his at one time forthcoming novel Sick Soldier at Your Door—which was later reconceptualized by Hannah as a book of short stories (or so the rumor goes). Whatever the format, the excerpt is now up at the Gulf Coast website.

One well-read lit mag.

The third issue of Cerise Press is now online. Broken into sections of Poetry & France and Japan & Latin American, the issue has poetry from Jim Daniels, Kimiko Hahn, Robert Wrigley, Osip Mandelshtam, translation from Marilyn Hacker, fiction from Pablo Medina and Mary Helen Stefaniak, and much more.

Finally, the cover of Hobart’s upcoming Great Outdoors issue.

Every Tuesday, Travis Kurowski presents Luna Digest, a selection of news from the world of literary magazines. Travis is the editor of Luna Park, a magazine founded on the idea that journals are as deserving of critical attention as other artistic works.

In “Streams of Unconsciousness” by Sharanya Manivannan, the author gives us two characters in a life long relationship, who are endowed with such precise attributes, that we imagine we know them. What struck me is how she manages to do this in such a short piece. “He was a watch collector, a failed auteur, a misogynist. She was the kind of woman who would crack a rib if someone looked at her too sweetly, and cry for six months if he didn’t, a masochist. They fit together, but with some effort, like Tetris blocks” It is this precision that allows her the luxury of a short story. For all its preciseness and short length, the story describes the complexity of a relationship at its core. Love/Hate relationships, relationships carried on over a span of years and oceans, relationships that we carry with us like an appendage we just cant bear to amputate. The characters exist in an alternate reality all their own, doing the dance of “I want you, now go away”. It is this tension that makes the story bristle with life although the outcome seems hopeless for this pair. I think Ms. Manivannan is a master at short story telling, because she knows how much to tell, how much to leave out and when to stop.

On Darryl Price’s “Being for Being Against the Common Sense”
by Bob Eckstein

This collection of poems by Mr. Price plays like a record album of different songs. I’ve been aware of his writing for quite some time, seeing it grow and push boundaries and he is really developed his voice. I personally find his writing vibrant and never stale. Sentimental without getting pretentious. I’m excited to recommend his work to other Fictionaut readers and hope you agree Price is one of the premier poets here.

On Kathy Fish’s “Foreign Film”
by Sam Rasnake

A great piece of writing is one I carry in my head – voice, setting, tone, imagery – long after reading it. It’s a piece I directly connect with in such strong fashion that my everyday life is impacted. On a cold, snowy day on a drive by an empty field, Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” begins to tug at me. That’s great writing. “Foreign Film” by Kathy Fish is such a work. Using only 337 words in a compressed and Carver-like style, complete with sharp dialogue, Fish creates a multilayered piece that is staggering in its directness.

When I first read Fish’s story, I couldn’t get the scene – this one powerful moment in the lives of no names – out of my head. It’s there still. In the structure of the piece, there’s a real-life couple fictionalized, arguing the night while watching a foreign film on television – a film whose characters are fictionalized but made real in the story. Life resembles art resembles life. The two worlds meet, as it were, and it’s Fish’s writing ability that makes this work. The final paragraph – a story in itself – is haunting. Two physical acts, though separated by time, language, and levels of reality, move as though locked in parallel motion. Great writing indeed. This story is a gift.

Fictionaut Faves, a series in which Fictionaut members recommend stories on the site, is edited by Marcelle Heath, a fiction writer, freelance editor, and assistant editor for Luna Park. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Ray Carver called Amy Hempel some pretty good names, including “a precisionist.” Praised by the

I wrote this story, my first, as a workshop assignment in Gordon Lish’s “Tactics of Fiction” class at Columbia in the late ’70s or early ’80s (I have no sense of time). The assignment, the only one we were ever given, was to write our worst secret, the thing we would never live down, the thing that dismantled our sense of ourselves, as he put it. My worst secret was that I felt I had failed my best friend when she was dying. And this is the story I wrote. I sent it to Triquarterly, and returned home to San Francisco. Which is where the editor, Reg Gibbons, reached me to say they wanted to publish it. I sent a copy to the mother of my friend who had died, and asked her to tell me if the story seemed in any way exploitative. I was prepared to pull it. But she gave me the go-ahead. This story, the first I wrote and the first I published, has been translated into more than 20 languages, and I feel certain I would not have written it had I not been assigned to look in the place I didn’t want to look.

Line Breaks is a regular feature in which accomplished authors introduce and share their first published stories with the Fictionaut community. Line Breaks is edited by Gary Percesepe.

What book are you closest to?

This question makes me think of the books I first loved as a child. My mother had me reading Dickens and Hawthorne and the Brontes by the time I was nine. I remember very vividly though reading True Grit when I was eight and jumping up in the middle of the night on my bed wanting to run and tell everyone I knew what I wanted to do with my life, that I wanted to write books. I loved those main characters and that story so much. Then it was Tolstoy while I was a teenager, a long obsession. All the lines that would give me chills because of their perfection. All the big questions considered through character. Anna Karenina is very much an influence that remains, and a model. Jesus’ Son. The Time of The Doves. I can’t pick just one. But these are all books I’ll read and read again.

Do you have/have you had a mentor/mentors?

My first mentor would probably be my mother and all that reading and love of the classics. More officially Kevin McIlvoy. I took a class from him and it set my course toward studying fiction, right when I was closing in on finishing my Bachelor’s in Psychology and Journalism. So I started with that treasure of a teacher and my luck in that regard has continued. My second college mentor in writing was Antonya Nelson. I had the great experience of working in an independent study course with her on my first novel while I was still new at it all. She and Kevin McIlvoy are still there with me in various ways when I write, he in ways to open the paths to mystery, she especially when in deepening that sense as I revise. In Tucson, while I was working on my MFA, I studied most with Joy Williams who was so good at conceptualization and just a wonderful presence to be around. In Mississippi, Mary Robison who sort of saved my life as a writer through the connection we made, and Frederick Barthelme from whom I learned more about story form than anyone, I think. All of these, from my mother on, are great presences to have in my life as a writer, and I’m happy that we’re all walking around on this earth at the same time.

What methods to you use to get creatively “unstuck”?

Just getting going. Sitting down with a pen and paper. I handwrite just about everything first. I’m in a group in Zoetrope that helps a lot. Trying to clear the deck of all the things that are piling up too so I can focus without distractions. Sometimes that’s the hardest part, to not let teaching or other deadlines get in the way, worry over loved ones.

What are your favorite web sites?

By far, Zoetrope where I’ve found such a wonderful community of writers these last several years, and where I’ve been able to keep in touch with so many dear friends on an intimate level. I’m enjoying Facebook lately. And I really like to read the Rumpus blogs. My dear friend Sue Henderson’s LitPark.

What are you working on now?

I’ve been working on a memoir about my experiences growing up and traveling so much, about time in Mississippi and New Mexico. It’s very much centered on my relationship with my mother and the mystery of her life before me, the secrets she had and their power over us, the undeserved shame. I’m on my way right now to see her as she’s very ill and dealing with the crazy family dynamics, my troubled father mainly and the way he puts so many barriers between us all, in his need to control and the bizarre ways he deals with insecurity toward education and poverty. I don’t know if I’ll need to write on something else for awhile, but I do have a related novel that I put aside that I may start working on again. It’s a novel that I’d like very much to finish as a gift to my mother. This summer I’ll be working with Dorothy Allison at the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference and I can already feel these two projects fighting for attention for the work I will be most focused on while I’m spending time in the New Mexico of my childhood.
I’m also preparing my finished novel to send to an agent today and working on lining up readings and all for my short story collection, Rattlesnakes & The Moon, that just came out this month.

Can you tell us about one of the stories from your new collection Rattlesnake & The Moon?

I’ve included stories from a range of time in my collection. I wrote “Lafayette” when I was in my 20s. I consider it and “A Man Wrapped In Gold,” which is also in the collection and written about the same time, two of my firs tbreak through stories. Both helped me win a Henfield Transatlantic Review Award in Arizona. A later version of “Lafayette” also won the Joan Johnson award at the University of Southern Mississippi, and was one of a dozen finalist stories for Playboy’s College Fiction Contest. It took a long time but finally found a home at The Gingko Tree Review. I had lost my best friend not too many years before I wrote it when we were both in Louisiana. The story is certainly fiction but that grief is one of the things that drove the writing. The baby girl in it used to be a baby boy. It was originally titled “Dead Armadillos” which Kevin Canty pointed out sounds a lot like it should be the name of a punk rock band from Texas.

The Fictionaut Five is our ongoing series of interviews with Fictionaut authors. Every Wednesday, Meg Pokrass asks a writer five (or more) questions. Meg is an editor at Smokelong Quarterly, and her stories and poems have been published widely. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

Marcelle asked me to say something about one of my faves, which made me realize I’ve given a lot of faves, more than eighty, some for friends, but most to writers I didn’t know and was pleasantly surprised by. All of them I stand behind, each of us putting together our own anthologies. And for those who don’t know, “recommended stories” can be sorted for “all-time,” where James Robison’s “Mars,” Kathy Fish’s “Spaceman,” and Pia Earhardt’s “Ambulance” crown the heap. There’s Myfawny Collins, Meg Pokrass, and Scott Garson up there too. All of whom have gotten my faves.

I know I’ve probably missed some great stories along the way, so I’m excited about this new blog feature, to see what else gets recommended. Among my favorites, I’d highlight Meg Pokrass’s “The Big Dipper,” Joe Tripician’s “Remember Me to the Motherland,” Sam Nam’s “I Use Commas Like Ninja Stars,” Jason Lee Norman’s “Animals in the Sky,” Mary Hamilton’s “It Is True that Me and Theodore Swallowed Pop Rocks and Pepsi Cola and Now We Are Dead,” Noria Jablonski’s “Arroyo Vista,” Victoria Lancelotta’s “Everything Is Fine,” Marcy Dermansky’s “Adults at Home,” Ben Loory’s “The Book,” Sean Lovelace’s “Someone Emailed Me Last Night and Asked if I Would Write About Nachos,” Matt Mullins’s “Three Way of the Saw,” Katrina Gray’s “Sectioned,” and Kim Chinquee’s “I Had Time to Kill.” There are a few more I would name, but the authors chose to take them down. And here I’m asked to recommend one.

Gary Percesepe’s “The Way You Live Now,” is the one I wish I’d written, a story about the loss of a child, our relationship to objects, and the nature of time. It’s a mature, subtle, and patient story, from a writer who has been paying very careful attention. In the comments section, James Robison said, “How dare you use second person to portray the entirely singular state of a well ordered mind blunted by shock, sorting through wreckage and stumbling for an ontological foothold, and succeed? And succeed so emphatically?” Erin Fitzgerald said, “I’ve been back a few times to read this again. Thanks for that.” And from David Erlewine, “I think we need to petition Jurgen for a special category of favorites, like ‘game changers,’ or ‘go back to school, son, because you ain’t even close to writing something like this’ stories.” And so now we’ve put it there. If this one doesn’t get to you, nothing will.

Fictionaut Faves, a series in which Fictionaut members recommend stories on the site, is edited by Marcelle Heath, a fiction writer, freelance editor, and assistant editor for Luna Park. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

On Fictionaut

• Fictionaut April Fool’s Challenge!
• Jim Hanas leads up to his Significant Object on Fictionaut.

Fictionauts at Large

• At Litsnack, John Minichillo’s “Moving In And Reunited With Her Things.”
• “The House as Rita Sees It” by Ben Greenman at 52 Stories.
• Arlene Ang’s “On the Last Known Destination of a Missing Person” at Staccato.
• Michael Kimball writes Kim Chinquee’s life story on a postcard.
• Women Writers: A Zine with fiction by Katrina Gray, Roxane Gay,Julie Innis, Susan Tepper, Vallie Lynn Watson, and Meg Pokrass.
• “Chocolate gives nose bleeds to children, my grandmother said.” Lisa Lim’s “Beards” at http://wigleaf.com
• “Fifty-One” by Ajay Nair at Bull Men’s Fiction.
• “Obelisk” by Ravi Mangla at Necessary Fiction.
• “What’s on TV? We could watch murder shows.” Two flash fictions by Scott Garson at 3:AM Magazine.
• “Stephen King, Stephen King. You’re afraid of everything.” William Walsh at the Kenyon Review blog.
• New SmokeLong Weekly: “Complicit” by Gay Degani, selected by Tara Laskowski.
• Publishers Weekly meets Publishing Genius.
• “The Man Sitting Behind You Is a Serial Rapist,” by Bess Winter — just up Wigleaf.

Submissions & Contests

• Submit to La Petite Zine before they close submissions for preemptive spring cleaning.
• Win Tom Lee’s Greenfly and Joseph Young’s Easter Rabbit at The Short Review.
• Women writers! Submit to A Room of Her Own’s Orlando contests & eMessage competition. $1000 prizes.
• Rick Moody will pick the winner of HTML Giant’s “So Many Books” contest. No fee, and you have till March 21.
• Round-up of writing contests for poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, flash & more at Newpages.
• Matchbook is now accepting submissions for a series of postcards that will showcase both visual art and poetry.

Etc.

• We guessed the literary mystery spot.
• Viral Lipsyte.
• “The first 12 years are the worst.” Ten rules for writing fiction from Margaret Atwood, Richard Ford, Neil Gaiman &c.
• Edward Hirsch: “Culture can’t absorb that many people trying to make a living in poetry.”
• Spring Indie Preview: Dzanc Books,  Emergency, Featherproof, Softskull, 2$ Radio and more.
• Noted poet C. Dale Young’s first published story in Guernica.
• Weekly translations of “super-short” fiction by Haruki Murakami.