Gulf Coast is now accepting entries for the 2014 Barthelme Prize for Short Prose. The contest is open to pieces of prose poetry, flash fiction, and micro-essays of 500 words or fewer. Established in 2008 after American postmodernist author Donald Barthelme, the contest awards its winner $1,000 and publication in the journal. Two honorable mentions will also be awarded.
This year’s contest will be judged by award-winning author Amy Hempel (The Collected Stories, Scribner, 2006).
For more details and guidelines, head over to Gulf Coast.
‘Mantic’ means ‘of or relating to the faculty of divination: prophetic,’ according to Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary. Alsop’s collection is indeed largely a tour of mantic poems whose helpful subtitles state the exact type of divination being attempted . . . . Mantic is a fascinating and consistently inventive exploration into the depths of experience. There is an ocean of feeling here, and the collection is at its most successful when the author brings a clear shape to the painful and dark currents running through the book.”
Join the festival both Saturday and Sunday between 11 AM to 6 PM, with a Vendor’s Village of booksellers, artists and craft makers, and food truck catering. Augury Books will be reading on Saturday at 4 PM on the White Horse stage, with Frances Justine Post (BEAST, 2014), David Joel Friedman and B. C. Edwards (TO MEND SMALL CHILDREN, 2012). Admission is free — don’t miss out!
Check out the press release for more info, or visit the Festival’s website for a full line up of each day, directions, and any additional info.
The focus of this weeklong workshop in the rhetoric of nonfiction prose writing—which will be understood as encompassing everything from personal essays and memoirs to high-end literary journalism to lyric essays of the sort that obliterate the distinction between nonfiction and poetry on the one hand and nonfiction and fiction on the other. Students will examine the ways in which prose is made to move and develop and create meaning and feeling through that movement, as well as read and dissect essays and memoir fragments by writers ranging from Nabokov, Orwell, Virginia Woolf and James Baldwin to contemporaries such as Anne Carson, Vivian Gornick, and John D’Agata.
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Vijay Seshadri is the author of the collections Wild Kingdom, The Long Meadow, The Disappearances,and 3 Sections, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His essays, reviews, and memoir fragments have appeared in periodicals such as The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Threepenny Review, The American Scholar, Verse, and in the anthologies The Anchor Essay Annual—Best Essays of 1998 and Best Creative Nonfiction (2008). A former editor at The New Yorker, he is currently the Michele Tolela Myers Professor of Writing at Sarah Lawrence College, where he was for over a decade the director of the college’s nonfiction writing program. He holds a BA from Oberlin College and a MFA from Columbia University and has received grants from the New York Foundation from the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony’s Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the James Laughlin Award.
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The Mayapple Center cultivates imagination through artistic and intellectual cross-pollination in a distinctly 21st century climate. The Center is dedicated to sustainability and its serene lake and peaceful landscape of trees and gardens serve as a retreat to inspire its residents. Activities such as swimming, tennis, canoeing, yoga and meditation promote a strong sense of community among residents, with an emphasis on mindfulness. Meals are partially prepared from organic produce from Mayapple gardens, and locally-sourced food is served at every meal.
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If interested in applying for the scholarship, please send an email inquiry to michelle.slater@mayapplecenter.org with your CV and writing sample immediately. The program cost is $1,200 and each scholarship is for $600. You can find out more about the program here.
This year marks the 10th annual Printers Ball, a day of performances, live printmaking demos, and exhibitions surrounding poetry and literary culture. Founded in 2004 by Poetry magazine’s Art Director Fred Sasaki, Printers’ Ball takes place each year in Chicago and has seen a number of venues spanning across the city. This year, the Ball will be hosted by Spudnik Press Cooperative at the Hubbard Street Lofts, with a central theme of CHATTER, focused on “the energy and chatter of concurrent creative practices.”
Augury Books is honored to be a selected publication at this year’s Ball.
Rain Taxi Review of Books is a Minneapolis-based quarterly review of literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. We are excited to announce a rave review of Halina Duraj’s The Family Cannon, written by Benjamin Woodard, in their current issue for Spring. Woodard acknowledges the central emotional ties of the collection:
Spun through the eyes of Magda, the daughter of Polish immigrants, these linked narratives bob between the familiar—growing old, betrayal, angst—and those unique to Magda’s lineage—accounts of Holocaust survival, fear of Nazis, summers overseas—creating a slim volume that nevertheless provides strong emotional resonance.”
To purchase a copy, head here. Rain Taxi also publishes a quarterly online edition—entirely different from the print edition—available free of charge on their website. Happy reading!
Some minor confusion over the Boy Scout reincarnation badge
Loki was an imp god and a shape-shifter. He could be reborn but never die. This suits me at my easel, as what shifts is not lost; connects in a ring. It’s easy reason I wish for when I see a bird tip like kindling. As small things do I repeat myself, like our beagle Shannon, who, like a sleeve or a raisin lives the same day over, knows no difference between voices and meals. Chanting is like mouth marching so the shoes in my room are doubling by night. At this stream I am fickle; am told I have rounded the bend of this day by the hundreds. I am mostly little bones by now.
Old Man Elli, who almost died, is grateful; he says he will be ready next time. He is off to buy more hammers. We are linked together, teacher says, think of your bodies as river hulls. Think of yourself as a paper well. I am a good bird: space abled. With my beak I build sand temples. I sit alone with angled knees, hum just like a spinning wheel.
Loki was father to a world serpent. He turned last, they say, to a salmon upstream. The water here is dark and clever (I want my mother;) Was this the canary for which we must prepare? I must carve deep into my third eye to speak of it: teacher,who can prepare to become a salmon?
Wendy Merry is poet and essayist from California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Nano Fiction, Vesper, Joe and Gigs, Transmission, Dossier Journal and others. She lives and writes in downtown Manhattan where she freelances as an Art Director for a street collective. You can find more of her work here.
This week, Poets & Writers wrote about Augury Books’ expansion into the world of prose with Halina Duraj’s THE FAMILY CANNON and the future goals of the press.
In what is surely a sign of more titles to come, Augury Books, an independent press previously devoted exclusively to poetry, expanded into fiction earlier this year….”
We are a little over halfway through our reading period, which is still OPEN through July 31, 2014. We accept full-length manuscripts in the categories of Poetry and Prose. The new Prose category includes Short Fiction Collections and Creative Nonfiction Manuscripts.
See our Submissions Page for length requirements and other guidelines, or find out everything you need to know (including our discounted book specials for those submitting!) on our third-party submissions manager, Submittable, where you can also submit your manuscript.
We can’t wait to read your work and find out who the authors of our 2015 books will be. Thanks to all of you in advance for sharing your work with us, and thanks to those who have already submitted their work this summer!
If you would like to know more about our aesthetic to see if your work might be a good fit for Augury, visit the Books and Orders page to see what works are already in our catalogue.
Don’t forget to Like us on Facebook and Follow this Blog (link in bottom corner) for continued updates about the rest of the reading period and information about our next publication and finalists!
Halina Duraj’s THE FAMILY CANNON (Augury Books, 2014) was recently featured in the Salt Lake Tribune, along with four other new books with Utah-related storylines and themes. The Tribune writes of Duraj:
“While living in Utah, Duraj says her writing was influenced by the drama of the desert landscape and local landmarks, such as the Oquirrh Mountains, which for a time she thought were named for the color ochre. ‘All that subtly influenced the way I was writing, which became more spare,’ she says. Her stories are carefully observed, never overexplained, while the language is both playful and precise. The collection’s final story, ‘The Company She Keeps,’ is searingly honest and particularly heartbreaking.”
