It's April 30, and that means we won't be considering submissions that are postmarked after today (we'll start reading for RMR4 on Oct 1). Truth be known, we've long had our fiction line-up set for RMR3 (as reported here in this space a couple of months ago). We're now almost all set in the other genres as well. And we've been blown away by the number of chapbook entries we've received. (Guess there's a market out there for a free chapbook contest...) Thanks very much for entrusting us with your fine work.
The chapbook contest will work like this: we'll send each entry to our initial readers, poetry editors Jim Murphy and Mary Kaiser, who will score each manuscript anonymously. The five highest-scoring finalists will then proceed to this year's judge, Katie Ford. We hope to have her final decision by no later than August 1. We will announce the finalists and winner in this space as soon as Katie makes her choice. (Please do note: This will be our only means of notification.)
The contest winner will receive a $500 honorarium and ten copies of a limited edition, stand-alone print run of the chapbook itself. The chapbook will also appear in RMR3. We will host the chapbook winner and judge Katie Ford in Birmingham for a joint reading and release reception later on this year.
Thanks to all for your interest in RMR, and please do excuse the radio silence on this blog as we turn our attention to coordinating the chapbook contest and putting out a great-looking third issue of the magazine! Happy summer....
4.30.2007
SUBMISSIONS DEADLINE IS HERE!
3.11.2007
NEWSFLASH: POETRY IS SMALL!
We were fortunate to enough to be in attendance at the first JARS (Journal Alliance Reading Series) event of 2007 earlier today, when RMR's own Mary Kaiser read from her new chapbook of poems, "Falling Into Velazquez" (Slapering Hol Press, 2006). There were a total of 23 people at the Bottletree Cafe in the lovely, gritty little Avondale neighborhood just east of the Magic City. That's 23 counting the bartenders. And the poet. You could look at that and say, "See...
1) ...poetry is insignificant!" and/or
2) ...the masses are ignorant slobs!"
You'd be wrong on both counts, though, and here's why...
As regards Count #1: Some of the most essential things are relatively small. Germs, for instance. Also kidneys. Wethinks our addiction to big portions stems from an excess of positivistic rationalism (or is that rationalistic positivism?) -- more is better because we can see it, and if we can see it, we can count it, and if we can count it, we can be sure it means something. But poetry's lack of size makes it stealthy, hearty too, and replete with coping strategies. And what is life without stealth and coping strategies? Boring and/or insufferable.
As regards Count #2: Poetry combats ignorance in the only way it can be beaten: that is, hand-to-hand. Sitting with 23 people in what used to be a gay bar, there isn't any such thing as "the masses." That vast shared numbness dissolves away. We will all, soon enough, retake our positions in regards to "the masses" -- among them, stalking their perimeter, etc. The point is 23 people on a Sunday afternoon listened to good poems and good thought and thereby engaged in something not very unlike a worship service. Contemplation. Reflection. Fellowship. Communion. A small moment made larger for its smallness, a brief time to step out of the world, our world: its ignorance, its significance, its sheer mass. Amen.
3.01.2007
500 WORDS (MORE) OR LESS: MICHAEL MARTONE
Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and he was educated in the public schools there. He attended Indiana University in Bloomington where, as a freshman, he took part in the famous Kinsey Report by completing a survey of his sexual history during orientation. Alfred Kinsey, a biology professor at the university, had begun his famous work on human sexual response when he was teaching, after the war, the "marriage" course, an early attempt in the health curriculum to provide information in what was called then sexual hygiene. One day, a co-ed, who was to be married that summer, approached Kinsey after a lecture to ask what she could expect from her husband, and Kinsey, always the scientist, couldn't answer her since he didn't have, he realized, any hard scientific evidence. "I'll get back to you," he told her, and began his decades long project collecting oral interviews, written personal narratives, taped anecdotal commentary, and computer scanned surveys from a vast range of informants in order to build a workable database of sexual behavior.
There, years later, in a crowded lecture room in Ballantine Hall, Michael Martone participated in the very same ongoing effort of data gathering, carefully blackening with the provided No.2 pencil the appropriate bubble corresponding to the numbered response most accurately representing such desired information as his masturbatory habits and history, his sexual preference, his preferred positions (there were illustrations), and the time, to the nearest minute, of his recovery after "performing vigorous coitus." The room fell silent as the freshman class bent to this initial collegian task required of them, the quiet broken only by the scratching of pencil lead on the rigid manila IBM cards and the counterpunctual response of the rubbing of rubber erasers.
Afterward, Martone remembers racing from the building into a bright fall day, the trees of Dunn Meadow just taking on the color of the season. That night, he called his mother, who had also been a student at Indiana University to ask her if she, too, had been recruited to contribute to Professor Kinsey's report, indicating to her, as best he could, the extent and duration of statistical instrument he had just endured. "No," his mother responded, "they didn't have that when I was there. I did take this facts-of-life course the spring before I married Daddy." She went on to say that she didn't learn much, that the class had been dry and very statistical in nature. "I even asked the professor about it." It hadn't mattered, she concluded, since shortly after that meeting with the professor who had told her he would get back to her about her questions, she and her soon-to-be husband figured out how to go about the very thing that had been so mysterious.
Late one night, in a classroom where, in his senior year at Indiana University, Martone would take a class on Chaucer, his parents, ignorant of contraception in spite of the courses they took, managed to conceive their son. Though when asked, years later, by her son for further details, his mother simply said she couldn't recall much more about that night but that she could make something up if that would help. [From Michael Martone by Michael Martone (FC2, 2005)]
Q&A
RMR: Cormac McCarthy once said, “Teaching writing is a hustle.” Agree or disagree? Discuss.
MM: So I guess he doesn’t mean that in a good way. And I guess that he is saying two things. First, that writing can’t be taught. And because he believes the first, it follows those who do teach are up to something, are taking advantage of someone. I don’t agree that teaching writing is a “hustle” and I think I disagree because we have different working definitions of “teaching.” I admit I am a teacher of writing. I think Mr. McCarthy’s notion of teaching is fiduciary. By that I mean, that the knowledge of a subject is held in trust by a teacher and one goes to school to have the teacher/trustee transfer that knowledge, the secrets so to speak. This model makes sense for law, say, or medicine. If it is applied to writing—that there are writing secrets mature writers know and can transfer for a fee—if that’s the way you think about teaching and writing well then it is a hustle because it is a commodity exchange. I don’t think about writing that way. I know no secrets. I cannot withhold or dole out wisdom on the matter. Teaching for me is more like helping the writer discover what he or she already knows. I provide what I hope are interesting spaces for people to read and write and talk about writing. The space is protected. The time is given. All my students are paid to come to school. There is no tuition. Let me talk about another hustle. A friend of mine, a writer, got fed up and quit teaching for reasons along Mr. McCarthy’s line. He thought most of his students wouldn’t become great writers. He felt he was deluding them by encouraging these less-than-great writers. Now it turns out David, my grumpy writing/teaching friend, also ran in marathons. And I just asked him if when he lines up at the start in Boston, New York, Chicago does he think he’s going to beat the world class Ethiopians. Well, no, he says. And I say why do you run if you aren’t going to win. The answer is that there are other reasons to run, other benefits besides winning. Ditto writing. Still another hustle. I just heard on the radio that students of medicine and law leave grad school with a debt of $50,000 to $80,000. Sure they will have jobs that will pay that back one-day. But those secrets are costly. Not so my none secrets for my writing students.
RMR: James Frey. Brad Vice. George Bush. All have fudged, fibbed, or fabricated here of late -- with disastrous results. Your work often tiptoes the blurry line between fact and fiction. What’s more, you seem to have a soft spot for the good old-fashioned hoax. Not only did you write The Blue Guide to Indiana but -- correct me if I’m wrong here -- you sought to have it reviewed as a legitimate guidebook, not a work of fiction. Likewise, in Michael Martone, you’ve written fifty fictitious bio notes for yourself -- actually placing many of them in the Contributors sections of literary magazines prior to their collection as a book. I think of the acknowledgments section of Michael Ondaatje’s novel Coming Through Slaughter, an artistic embellishment of the life of real-life jazz forebear Buddy Bolden: “While I have used real names and characters and historical situations I have also used more personal pieces of friends and fathers. There have been some date changes, some characters brought together, and some facts have been expanded or polished to suit the truth of fiction.” When and why should we favor “the truth of fiction” over cold, hard facts, and what responsibilities must we live up to -- as readers, writers, citizens, leaders of the free world -- when we do it?
MM: My feeling is that we should all be very careful. Collectively we have made a cultural choice to live in an empirical world. That is we know things our senses tell us. If you don’t believe we live in an empirical world then why do most of us stay in school so long or go to school so young. We believe that we are born blank slates and then are filled up by our experiences. But our senses can be so easily fooled. Satire begins with the cultural shift in the West to empirical belief. So we have always lived in a world where fact and fiction was supposedly easy to tell apart but at the same time we know it’s not. And remember this. A fact is a thing done. Once it has happened it is over, it does not exist. Instead we have residue of the facts. Facts are not real. Fiction on the other hand is a thing made. It is a fabrication. Even what we call nonfiction is a fiction in that sense. It is a made thing. This made thing, this construction has a reality but it is a constructed reality. So as I said above one must be careful in the making and in the consumption of the made thing.
RMR: Either/Or (Explain or not).
Letterman or Leno?..... Letterman
Jeter or DiMaggio?..... Mantle
Libby (I. Lewis “Scooter”) or Liddy (G. Gordon)?..... G. Gordon
Bones or Spock?..... Kirk the Midwestern boy
Brittany or Madonna?..... Christina
Form or Function?..... Form
Bobby Knight or Dean Smith?..... Knight
Borrowed or Blue?..... Blue
Quayle or Lugar?..... Bayh
Barth or Borges?..... Barthelme
RMR: You are George Steinbrenner for a day. Make a to-do list.
- Wake
- Evacuate the bowel
- Oatmeal
- Shower, shave, brush and floss teeth
- Read the New York and Florida Newspapers
- Place a call order on General Dynamics, Biomet, Viacom
- Read an hour in the work of Patrick O’Brien
- Confession, Mass
- Lunch at Four Seasons (steak Tartar)
- Circle Line Cruise and visit to Ellis Island reconstruction
- Call to Sports Talk Radio on XM
- Watch TiVo, saved shows of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert
- Lou Dobbs and Kramer’s Mad Money
- Drinks at the Century Club
- Attend opening reception for Gees Bend Quilts at the Whitney
- Dinner at Sea
- View Manhattan from the top of the Empire State building
- Greet arriving zeppelin
- Prepare for bed and retire in a continuously cruising Airstream trailer cruising the West Side Highway
RMR: Fill in the blank: Michael Martone is absolutely, positively, unequivocally, 100% NOT...
MM: Serious.
2.13.2007
MORE INTERVIEWS ON DECK!
Hope you've been enjoying 500 Words (More) or Less. Stay tuned in March, when we post a recent e-chat we had with the inimitable Michael Martone. Here's a little teaser: At one point, he assumes the blustery persona of one George Steinbrenner. Hilarity -- with a healthy dollop of keen insight into the human condition -- ensues. You won't want to miss it. Until then, keep sending those chapbooks. And remember: We take e-submissions at RMRsubmissions@gmail.com!
2.06.2007
RED MOUNTAIN READING SERIES HOSTS POET ALLISON JOSEPH...
...this Thursday, Feb 8, on the Shelby campus of Jefferson State Community College! The reading starts at 11 a.m. in Room 211 of RSH Hall. Allison Joseph is the author of five books of poetry: Worldly Pleasure (Word Press, 2004); Imitation of Life (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2002); Soul Train (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1997); In Every Seam (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997); and What Keeps Us Here (Ampersand, 1992), which won the Ampersand Women Poets Series Prize and the John C. Zacharis Award First Book Prize from Ploughshares. Her many awards include a fellowship and a Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council, fellowships from Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences, an Academy of American Poets prize, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and an Associated Writing Programs Prize. She is an Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University and editor of Crab Orchard Review.
2.01.2007
500 WORDS (MORE) OR LESS: ANDER MONSON
Just in case you weren't aware, here it is all spelt out for you: Ander Monson is, in fact, the hardest working man in show business. 300+ shows a year. A growing media presence on all the habitable continents. (Stay tuned for an exciting announcement in the very near future regarding Antarctica!) Rabid, cult-like followings germinating out in concentric circles from all the world's major cities...
In all seriousness, the man is and always has been pretty dadgum large-and-in-charge. A phenom, if you will, in the truest sense of the word. A graduate of Knox College (a school that happens to be one of the best-kept secrets in the world of writing academe, by the way), Iowa State, and the University of Alabama, Monson is the author of two books: a novel, Other Electricities, Sarabande Books, 2005, which was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Award; and a poetry collection, Vacationland, Tupelo Press, 2005. Neck Deep, a collection of "weirdo essays," won the Graywolf Press 2006 Nonfiction Prize and will be released TODAY! He edits the online magazine DIAGRAM as well as its comrade-in-arms, New Michigan Press. His individual stories, poems, and essays have been published damn-near everywhere, including (happily for us) the inaugural issue of RMR. To wit, a sampling from RMR1, by way of Vacationland...
APPROXIMATION
The coroner’s best guess as to time of death
is sometime in the earliness
before the light has staked its claim
with hammer-blows and threats of ice
useless, spilled like perfume across roads.
As for cause, you know it’s notoriously
iffy — in this case it is safe to say death
by drowning or by impact of the body
against the windshield, against the radio dial
which left its mark, and then the drowning after,
or death due to after-prom excitement — the occasion
marked by streamers in the rafters
and the crowning of the school’s best
heads and shoulders with a tin-foil
wrapped, fake-bejeweled band.
Death due to lack of the right date
who might have taken the right route
to the after party, who might not have swerved
to miss the fish — the enigmatic trout
frozen in the middle of the lane,
body like a beacon
warning of the impending season’s
weakness, of after-graduation life
in bars and doldrum rum and cokes in glasses.
Death due to lack of escapist training,
no Houdini present, no Tupac, Elvis
surviving death at least in myth
and continuing to release
themselves in beats & language
to critical suspicion.
Death due to loneliness
and books checked out too long ago
from the Public Library
and not returned on time,
death due to accruing, reoccurring fines
that continued to mount like banks of snow
until she returned them on prom night
until I went to check them out again
to have her signature—some vestige
of her neck/her mind/her hands.
____________________
Q&A
RMR: TRUE or FALSE: James Frey is the spawn of Satan. Discuss.
AM: False. Though I don't think we should give him credit for all the ensuing and in its way enjoyable fiction.
RMR: You are large and contain multitudes. Parsed out by project, your enormous productivity -- scads of journal pubs, three books and counting, DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press, etc, etc -- is truly mind-boggling. ("How does he have time?" one wonders.) All well before you hit the big 4-0, no less. Taking a step back from it, I think there might be a more holistic -- and even more impressive, really -- way to look at it: That is, it seems to me that being Ander Monson is more process than product. Would it be a mistake, then, to look at your oeuvre as one continually evolving and expanding "document" -- an inclusive and holistic pastiche that reflects a singular artistic life as it develops in real time? A career arc more akin to Whitman's or Sandburg's than, say, Robert Frost's?
AM: Interesting. There’s a kind of kinship between the work, a point of common departure for the diaspora, and a shared mythology being created that includes the idea of author, and "author", and text (and hopefully even expands the idea of the "book"; see also Neck Deep and the website extension of it). One of the pieces in Neck Deep, the big index, was originally housed in Other Electricities, though it has found its new home as nonfiction, and in a way that's what it always was. It's really not all that interesting being a writer who simply produces product. Not that I'd disclaim any individual book, or the book as a technology that we as a culture really enjoy -- it offers a whole lot of advantages and that's the medium I work in, mostly. But it's also limiting (as genre is in its way -- it provides a sort of pressure which can be responded to in a number of ways). And I am more interested, finally in creation, not exhaustion. Though that sounds totally pompous.
RMR: Ten Either/Or’s. (Explain or not.)
BALL OR DISC? Disc. See also: [this right here].
ONTARIO OR QUEBEC? Ontario.
SOUTH PARK OR THE SIMPSONS? Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
TIGER OR JACK? Jack. Though Tiger can compete on Xbox.
PAGEMAKER OR QUARK? InDesign. But not Quark. Definitely not Quark, though it's always had the better name.
PROSE OR POETRY? Hmmmm...
JEN OR ANGELINA? Who are these people?
POL POT OR MANUEL NORIEGA? I do not understand your modern ways.
CIA OR FBI? I’ve only met the FBI so am not qualified to decide.
SKITTLES OR M&Ms? Skittles blow.
RMR: You are poet-king for a day. Make a to-do list.
AM: Play Katamari Damacy for a while. Roll things into a large ball. Crunch it down and throw it in the sky, which makes people smarter.
RMR: Michigan's Upper Peninsula is...
AM: A place that I'm not even sure still exists. Is it there at all? Look at it on google earth and it's all blurred out. That's suspicious. Who's actually from there? Who goes there? Who makes it their home? And do they read? See also Tom Bissell. See also Catie Rosemurgy. See also Beth Roberts, and Jonathan Johnson. Did I tell you I killed Hemingway? Most people don't know that. I had to cut his heart out. I'm serious. I read about it on the Internet and it made me feel so good.
1.25.2007
ERRATUM: ALLOW US TO INTRODUCE...
Well, here's another example of us screwing up...
[- "Do you think we should be so forthcoming with our many missteps?"
- "Forget it, he's on a roll."]
Click here for the bio information on Mark Terrill's website. Seems we left it out of the contributors notes in RMR2. Sorry, Mark. Great poems, though. Here's one of them, for those of you who haven't had a chance to get your hands on the issue yet...
THE THIN LINE
The thin line of casualties
that runs accross your face.
The masks in the streets
and the panic they allow.
I only came
to pine in your woods
and now I'm lost here,
a hardened artery in
your radial grid.
Your countenance rusts
in televised anquish.
The medicine and the poison
look so much alike in this light.
Want to read the other two? Buy RMR2! And buy Mark's latest book while you're at it!
1.23.2007
MAILBAG: MEA CULPA, YOU-A-CULPA...
Wouldn't you like to be a-culpa too? As promised, here's a self-flagellatory post regarding RMR's til-now somewhat spotty turnaround times. With a tiny caveat and, as always, a call-to-arms...
We were going to print, verbatim, some of the letters we've received on this subject...but we lost them! (Sadly, that's the god's honest truth. Proof positive that we can't keep track of any correspondence, even when we want to use it. Not really, but the method in our madness is -- as it is with a lot of publishing venues -- only apparent to a very select few, and even that select few has trouble deciphering it sometimes. Alas, that seems to be endemic to the beast known as "Editor.")
Actually, maybe it's better this way, because all the correspondence hits a similar note. Allow us to paraphrase the letters in question: A few writers have railed against us for not returning their manuscripts even though they had provided return postage. One of them even threatened to badmouth us at all the writers conferences he attends and teaches -- "Don't send them your work!" Another writer gave us props for running a free chapbook contest but was disappointed that he had to discover on the blog that his manuscript didn't win the contest -- this after he sent us a SASE that we requested for notification purposes. There have been letters and e-mails -- even phone calls -- checking on submission status, some cordial and empathetic, some short and not-so-sweet.
And we have to plead guilty as charged. Our turnaround time has not been what we'd like it to be. There's no way to sugar-coat it.
All-in-all, we're very proud of what we've achieved in our first two years of existence: Our publications are beautiful, thanks to Russell and Travis at www.absnth.com. We've published first-time authors alongside writers who've been nominated for Pulitzers, Pushcarts, and National Book Awards. We've worked with friends and strangers and strangers-turned-friends. We've produced two great -- and very different -- chapbooks. We now publish a stand-alone version of the chapbook, and we've been able to double the contest honorarium and add a public reading to the award package. All while keeping the contest free to enter.
That doesn't mean that we haven't hit a few bumps along the way, and as far as we're concerned, the biggest bump has to be our inconsistent turnaround times. Our goal is to be writer-friendly, and this is the one area where we've made a few -- but vocal -- enemies.
Knowing what we know about publishing literary magazines, it's not a question of avoiding bumps. It's all about what you do once you hit them. So here's what we're doing:
Okay, so we promised a caveat and here it is: Writers need to step up to the plate with some personal accountability as well. Some uninvited advice and/or requests:
