The Georgia Review Blog

Harry Crews online

2012-01-23T11:02:00.001-05:00

Available now on the official website of The Georgia Review (though for a limited time only), an excerpt from We Are All of Us Passing Through, an autobiographical piece by the inimitable Harry Crews. There's more from that work plus some of Crews' fiction from The Gospel Singer in print now -- and for the first time anywhere -- in the Winter 2011 issue of The Georgia Review.

To take advantage of our great subscription deals and have the best in contemporary American writing delivered to your mailbox four times a year, visit our online store.

The Winter 2011 issue is now out!

2012-01-10T15:43:00.001-05:00

New Sharon Olds poem on our website and in our just-out Winter issue--which also features a previously unpublished Harry Crews essay, stories by Ann Pancake and Marguerite Sullivan, poems from Carol Frost, Elton Glaser, James Applewhite, and Albert Goldbarth, and a beautiful cover and full-color interior art spread by Eugenie Torgerson...to name just a few. You can purchase the issue at fine booksellers across the USA or order single copies, subscriptions (one-year, multi-year, or gifts), back issues, t-shirts, and more at our online store. Come join our literary party!

Winter 2011 update

2012-01-05T11:04:00.000-05:00

Our Winter 2011 edition ran a bit late but should arrive in subscribers’ mailboxes soon (if it hasn't already). The issue is available for purchase online right now, so follow the link and treat yourself, a loved one, a friend, or a colleague to some of the very best in contemporary American writing -- whether by buying a single issue or (better yet) by taking advantage of our great deals on subscriptions.

The Winter 2011 GR features a previously unpublished essay by the inimitable Harry Crews plus new work from Coleman Barks, Carol Frost, Gary Gildner, Albert Goldbarth, Judith Kitchen, Sharon Olds, Ann Pancake, and many more. We think it was worth the wait. Thanks so much for your patience.

In the meantime, enjoy this vintage video clip of Harry Crews on the Dennis Miller show. Crews says his unusual haircut is in honor of "freak the citizens month" and Miller describes the coiffure as "a G.Gordon Liddy meets Vanilla Ice type thing."

The Boomerang v. the Right Angle

2011-11-15T13:58:00.003-05:00

Kent Meyers’ “The Makings” begins where Meyers grew up—on a “family farm,” that cultural memory, mostly extirpated in its purest form and a term now wrongly applied to corporate food-growing factories. These small farms comprised a chaotic mix of pastures, crops, outbuildings, and yards, woodlots and fencerows, ponds and marshland. They were homesteads where place names, as Meyers says, “sprang from the nature of the land itself.”

As farming changed, Meyers began to see “acres sucked dry of their mystery”: a squared off and tidied up world with streams dredged into ditches, wetlands drained and tiled, crop rows straightened so a boy could never get lost. And he recalls, “I wanted to journey, not merely to get there.”

Some farm children dreamed. Meyers made boomerangs and learned how to throw them. A boomerang was possibility, and throwing one successfully created a wondrous curve that was about the journey rather than the destination. It was, of course, an escape.

As a teenager, he read a book called A Sporting Chance, which set him to making primitive hunting weapons—not just boomerangs but spears, atlatls, bolas. Guns bored him: “They didn’t inscribe instantly vanishing lines on the air, didn’t shape French curves or trace time and happening.” Guns are for efficient killing, which is a “rote and repetitive thing.” The destination is a dead animal; the journey, well, there is no real journey.

His hunting would aspire to imitating and entering the natural world as the Inuit in sealskin kayaks play at being seal. He describes examining such a kayak in a museum in Alaska:

As I stood there, it was as if generations of murmured dialogue between human and seal took on physical shape, impressed into the kayak’s structure and curves. Even the flex and fat of the seal are there. . . . [T]he sealskin kayak’s frame is tied together so that it sways and gives, like seal, or water itself. Imitating waves, it absorbs them.

And of course, the tying together is an ingenuity formed by the available makings.

The catalyst is the “makings”—those things in the Inuit’s world, the leftovers and cast-asides on Meyer’s boyhood farm. He couldn’t have cared less what those leavings had been used for or how they got there; all that mattered was their “particular imagined future.”

With help from a picture of the biblical David, he made a sling. “A slung stone thins, melts, disappears. After a while you may hear it falling through the trees in the grove past the cattle yard—though sometimes you throw it so far there’s silence, and the stone, for all you know, has left the farm, or the earth, or the universe.” Indeed, Meyers saves some of his more ecstatic prose for the curve of the missile released, as in this description of a trebuchet experiment. “[We] tossed an eight-inch rock from here to way, way, way over there in one of the loveliest arcs I’ve ever seen on a thing tossed, the rock fleeing the trebuchet’s sling at the end of its long arm so liltingly it seemed melodic. I was hard-pressed to say whether the world gave that lilt and curve to us or we gave it to the world.”

“The Makings” moves in curves and arcs through various weaponry as well as topics as disparate as early nineteenth-century verse and S&H Green Stamps. But it always finds its way back to the idea of possibility—possibility and the simple assertion that anything made with care and used well can be linked to a deeper truth and a larger good.

Alice Friman and Ecstatic Pragmatism

2011-09-12T08:49:00.003-04:00

From poet Alice Friman, I have learned many things about the arts, including the domestic arts—how to iron a silk skirt, for example, among other housewifely confidences. Equally likely to share wise advice or a comfortably dirty joke, on the page or in person, Friman is good company, earthy company in the concrete, literal sense of being at ease with the physical earth and its accoutrements. Friman sometimes expresses exasperation with the physical world, using the intimate, even gossipy tones with which one might dismiss a frustrating family member: in “The Birthmark,” for example, she calls the moon a “naked rock in borrowed clothes.” Yet Friman’s exasperation originates in familiarity, in closeness, not in distance from visceral experience. Friman’s poems give the impression of a writer comfortable working with her hands—she’s no airy fumbler—and on her pages we meet speakers accomplishing the day’s ordinary needs, such as “whomping up / a mess of vittles,” as the speaker’s son jokes in “How It Is.” If you were wrapping a package in a room full of poets, struggling to get the bow right, Alice Friman is the one you would intuitively know to gesture toward with your chin, requesting council and a steady hand.

To enter a poet’s stanza is to walk into a room (stanza’s Italian derivative) built by that poet. Guests entering Friman’s stanzas are invited to enjoy designs characterized by her specific and comforting species of competence: Friman attends to the day’s physical demands alongside its spiritual ones. Her stanzas balance and juxtapose physical and metaphysical forces as they collide and diverge—air and earth, mind and body, desire and loss—so that we see how these forces pull on each other, orbit each other, crash together, blow apart, then do it all again. On Friman’s pages, we meet the body in thought. Her multi-layered design sense creates a multi-layered vocal tone one recognizes anywhere it appears, like a familiar melody played in many places. Ever a celebrator, a jovial host, she is never a fluttering one: at Friman’s poetic parties for the page, one enjoys a billowy welcome spiked with briny appetizers.

Friman is a celebratory writer of odes to Beauty with a capital B, and she deals in The Big Subjects. To borrow a gag from Marilyn Hacker, most of Friman’s work, too, engages Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons. Yet in her approach to her elevated subjects, Friman is a pragmatist with the, poetically speaking, broken nose and crooked smile to prove it. Therefore, Friman’s understanding of Beauty incorporates its threat; as she described in our recent interview, “There is something in ‘beauty’ that’s a little terrifying . . . beauty isn’t necessarily pretty. They aren’t synonyms for each other. Pretty is pleasing; beauty shakes you up.” Thus, she says, “I strive usually . . . to undercut myself in order to, hopefully, raise ‘pretty’ to a degree of ‘beauty’ . . . sometimes it means a quick switch from lyricism to starkness.” We experience this “quick switch” tactic working on us throughout her poems in the Summer 2011 Georgia Review. Friman’s salty bon mots enhance her celebrations by reminding us of what those celebrations are in spite of, or in addition to—disappointment, betrayal, grief, plain stupidity. In other words, Friman reminds us what the stakes are.

The briny flavor circulating within Friman’s poetic interiors is, for me, exemplified by a bit in “Sonic Boom,” from her collection The Book of the Rotten Daughter (BkMk Press, 2006): “I come from a family of Russians / stubborn as stumps. Crabby, but we live.” There is something of resignation in “Crabby, but we live,” but also a lively variety of self-deprecating humor, and something pugnacious besides. This is one of those small, crisp bites circulating on platters within all of Friman’s stanzas that ground the poet’s flights of lyric celebration. This tinge of bitter in the vocal tone allows me to trust Friman’s tender moments as well as her flights of fancy, for every balloon must have its ballast: something heavy must be dropped in order for the poem to go soaring, and it could whomp on someone’s head. At first, it might seem unwise to trust a poet who is as like as not to drop a sandbag (or an olive pit?) on your noggin, but it’s Friman’s honesty in the acknowledgment of existing threat that allows me to trust that she’s not holding knives I can’t see.

Among the poems featured in the latest Georgia Review, Friman’s pugnaciousness is most immediately apparent in “How It Is,” a poem of natural cycles—their beauty, but also the cruelty of their inevitability. “Late October, / and the pitiless drift / begins in earnest,” the poem begins, yet that “pitiless drift” is preceded by a frenzy of fertility. The speaker’s mimosa, which endured “death fingering the leaves / all summer,” still “plumped its pods, spending / all July squeezing them out, / going about its business, as did / the slash pine and loblolly, spraying pollen—coating / windows, cars, filling every / idle slit with sperm.” Affection and exasperation vie for prominence in this depiction; the speaker seems resigned to, even amused by, the lack of dignity afforded by the compulsory cycles of desire and death. Happily, Friman isn’t the sort of poet to tell us what to do with our own resignation, but neither does she leave us blowing in the breeze with no direction at all; she settles on a middle approach, offering, “Who am I to write the user’s manual / for a life, except to say, / Look at trees, dug in and defiant. / Be like the river. Stick out your tongue.” This tongue image sets a mocking child among the defiant trees, but also shows a fevered child saying “aah” for the doctor. Here, the rascal’s mischief rides with the understanding that mischief is, partly, a response to lack of control over rules—in this case, the incontrovertible rules of mortality. Friman’s whistling is a whistling past the graveyard.

The note of resignation when responding to the natural world’s spectacular shows is quieter in “Red Camellia,” but ever present: it’s woven into the image fabric of the piece. The poem begins, “The bush has reaped her reward: / she cannot hold up her arms.” By “arms,” the poet indicates the camellia’s branches, here personified as human arms, but also the bush’s arms as in her armaments, her weapons. Thereafter, the lines are suffused with martial diction. We encounter the camellia’s arms in a “salute” during a spring season that is “primed,” as a gun ready to fire. Images of imprisonment also catch our attention: “the wasp tending its cells” precedes an image of the camellia waiting “all year / locked in her thin verticals / for the sun’s first hot speech.” Desire, or at least the biological imperative to reproduce, is figured throughout this lush poem, full though it is of “lascivious plumpings,” as a prison in a war zone. So, when we arrive at the speaker’s direct address to the beloved—“Love, I want to talk camellia talk”—it feels fitting that this conversation must happen “quick, before summer’s endless / conscription in a green uniform— / that stifling march into fall.” Meanwhile, the lover is implored to “juice me up red and barbarous: / a phalanx of redcoats, a four-alarm fire.” So even as the speaker says, warmly, “I’m tired of pork roasts and ease / in an easy chair,” we know that when she’s asking her lover to “Bring me one more / season. A reason. Bring it in your hands,” what she’s asking for is no idyll, but the lived experience of passion, with its tirades and restraints. If we were looking for this poem’s kindred spirit in popular love songs, we’d be better off listening to Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” than Sinatra’s “The Way You Look Tonight.”

Even the most somber poem of this trio, “The Birthmark,” throws sparks of Friman’s characteristic insouciance into the heartfelt mix. Set during the small hours in a bedroom where the speaker is watching her husband sleep, “The Birthmark” turns around its apostrophe to the moon. This address begins romantically (Romantically) enough: “Come, I say to the moon, meet the new / Endymion . . .” But the poem proceeds directly to the contemporary shepherd’s snoring, the lover’s insomnia beside him, the daily grind of making syllabi and grading papers. The speaker acknowledges her fall from the vatic poet’s more elevated role: “Forgive us,” she asks the moon, “We serve a shabbier world.” But knowing that “we serve a shabbier world,” that we are “crabby,” that our passions imprison us and do harm to our beloveds, that our most basic tasks are a little silly, does not diminish the felt power of our needs, or the scale and power of the world in which those needs often go unmet. As Friman says in “How It Is,” “What does life mean / but itself? Ask the sea. / You’ll get a wet slap back- / handed across your mouth. / Ask the tiger. I dare you.” Yet Friman seems to be delighted by, and delights us with, her daring, bringing dangerous creatures into the comfortable rooms she’s designed, where we meet both her artistry and her recognition that all artistry must go the way of the camellia’s blooms before the sun’s “hot speech.” Friman’s work serves up both “the tedium of suffering” and the incontrovertible urge to address the moon in the presence of one’s beloved, asking her to “Shine on him nonetheless.”

—Dorine Jennette

“Oh, no . . . not another nursing home story!”—a note on “Paolo’s Turn” by Karen Laws

2011-08-31T10:52:00.002-04:00

All editors and most readers have had their brains imprinted with variations on the desperate cry above. In place of “nursing home” some lovers of good writing may substitute “divorce,” “ruined childhood landscape,” “faithful dog,” “hospital deathbed,” and/or a number of other popular subjects—but some readers will, I know, keep nursing home on their lists.

Subjects become popular because they carry important emotional or other weight for writers, as they do for most of the rest of us. So, to cry out for fewer dying-and-death tales, or less recounting of torrid affairs and lost children and faraway wars, is counterintuitive for human beings. However, we can ask . . . can expect . . . can demand of writers that they recognize the heightened stakes they face when they deign to approach a ring already filled to overflowing with hats from around the country and the world.

I can’t help but suspect that Karen Laws, whose story “Paolo’s Turn” is the lead prose piece in our Summer 2011 issue, has read Bel Kaufman’s novel Up the Down Staircase, wherein the annoying and irascible high school principal counters all complaints about difficult situations with “Let it be a challenge to you!” And I know that Laws knows E. M. Forster’s deservedly famous dictum from The Art of the Novel: “bounce the reader into it.”

“It was time, Jeffrey Ingalls told his roommate Fred Robinson, for Paolo to steal Francesca’s thunder.” Three sentences after this opener to “Paolo’s Turn,” we learn that Ingalls and Robinson live at Guardian Oaks Care Center—but almost before we can mutter, “Oh, no . . . not another nursing home story!” we hear Ingalls declaim two wild questions that let us know we are not in any Kansas of run-of-the-mill writing: First, he asks of the Alzheimer’s-slowed Robinson “Why shouldn’t Paolo sing of how he straddled the great bull of lust, grasping the horn of pain in one hand and twirling the lariat of pleasure with the other?” Then, after eliciting only a head shake from his roommate, Ingalls says, “An opera about Hell performed by the inmates of a nursing home—what could be more appropriate?”

Indeed.

Through the middle of September you can read “Paolo’s Turn” in its entirety while the story occupies the featured spot on our website, and thereafter you can read or reread it—and all manner of other distinctive prose and poetry—by subscribing to (and thereby crucially supporting) The Georgia Review.

--Stephen Corey

The (Sometimes Stupid) Reality of Becoming a Grown Up

2011-08-22T14:02:00.003-04:00

Athens has made the transition from summer to fall—or at least from summer break to school year. The students are back at UGA, which means more traffic, increasing numbers of submissions to read at the Review, and a heightened sense of industry in the town. Suddenly everyone has to-do lists, and that includes me, even though I will no longer be a resident of Athens come August 31. With the closing of summer, I’ve acquired an ample number of things to worry about, and a hearty sense of purpose to go along with them.

When I first came into this internship, I felt iffy about the future but, at the same time, nonchalant. I had the whole summer to think about nothing beyond working or hanging around Athens. It’s been all well and good, but summer is ending, and I find myself feeling iffy again. And suddenly, nonchalance isn’t an option. I have to do things like take the GRE and research potential grad school curricula. And in these last two weeks in Athens, I know I’ll be preoccupied with thinking about the upcoming fall in Northampton, even though I should just focus on my priorities right now—like making sure my old car will survive all the way back to Ohio and spray-painting graffiti so I’ll leave a mark on Athens before I leave for I don’t know how long.

I’m coming back to the busy reality of being a student—I can’t float around relatively carefree anymore. But that’s okay, because even though I’ve got a lot to think about, I now have a goal that will help guide me in making important decisions about what to do with the rest of my life: to work in the literary magazine industry, preferably as an editor. I can thank my internship for this goal, and even though it might not lead me quite where I expect it to, it’s a better starting point than none at all.

The business of literature has always seemed to me like a big, fuzzy entity somewhere separate from the real world, where people make money off intellectualism and get paid for doing the same things that they did in a university English class. Working at the Review hasn’t necessarily contradicted this impression, but getting into the business doesn’t seem quite so illusory anymore. And more importantly, it seems like the kind of scene where one can partake in many different opportunities while still maintaining one position, which is important to someone like me who’s afraid of getting into a rut in anything I do.

The most illuminating thing I’ve learned from working at the Review might also be the most confusing: this business is simultaneously easy and hard to get into. Knowing people is important, but talent also matters. Except when the only thing that matters is talent. Or when the only thing that matters is who you know.

Maybe that’s actually how lots of career fields are, and I’m just learning for the first time what the real world is like. Which is fine—I’m still young enough that this epiphany hasn’t come too late. But what’s scary about the real world isn’t the prospect of being in it; it’s the idea of how hard it is to push your way into it, into a place you actually want to be, and not to settle for something less. At the Review, I’ve learned that there are way worse things than to settle into the world of literary magazines because there is always a way up and out. I just have to figure out how to dive in.

A Summer 2011 Tag-Team Match: Dunn and Kitchen vs. Sullins and Laws

2011-08-12T08:56:00.017-04:00

Ladies and gentlemen . . . in this corner, Pulitzer Prize–winner Stephen Dunn—weighing in at fifty-plus Georgia Review poems across the past three-plus decades—and Judith Kitchen, the heft of whose semiannual essay-reviews of new poetry for GR since 1990 would fill a brace of 400-page books. And in this corner, Karen Laws—a newcomer to our pages—and Jacob Sullins, a newcomer to GR and to just about every other publishing outlet as well . . .

Even before the match begins, I can assure you that it will result in a draw—because continuity and change form the best duo in this literary realm, where writing excellence always bounces reputation and past achievement over the ropes.

We are thrilled and honored to have gathered new work by and about Stephen Dunn, whose many appearances in our pages attest not to some abstract notion about the quality of his writing, but to our belief in the strength of each individual piece we have presented—including his five new poems for Summer 2011. Judith Kitchen—I have said this before and reassert it here—writes poetry criticism whose breadth, intelligence, and heart are unexcelled by that of anyone else around. (Some enterprising press would do well, for itself and the American reading community, to bring out at least a selection of her GR essay-reviews in book form.)

Still, no one should bet against the on-canvas styles and wiles of the Laws-and-Sullins fiction-writing team. In “Paolo’s Turn,” Karen Laws (a finalist for this year’s Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award) needs only a few sentences to change any “Oh, no, not another nursing home story!” reactions to marveling (and laughing) at the zany but true-feeling world she creates. And Jacob Sullins’ “12 Rounds” reinvigorates “the cop story” as a subtly smart, humane, and complex genre.

As you’ve probably realized by now, I’ve jammed myself up against the betting window in such a way that I’ve got to wage my literary capital on everyone in the ring—a square space with a round name—of Summer 2011: Sydney Lea and Greg Johnson, whose frequency of appearance in our pages (with poems and reviews, respectively) reasonably rivals those of Dunn and Kitchen; poets Alice Friman, Lola Haskins, and Dave Smith, who have been with us a number of times; Robert Cording and former United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins, each of whom has also been with us before—but not often enough; Jed Rasula, whose long, sweeping essay on the broad artistic and cultural influence of Richard Wagner will send you hungering for his earlier big-time essay in our pages, “Jazzbandism,” from Spring 2006; Kathleen Graber and George Looney for their keen but radically different appraisals of Stephen Dunn’s writing—and Laura McCullough for her one-person tag-team effort in the form of an essay about and an interview with Dunn; Sarah Gordon, the noted Flannery O’Connor scholar whose poem “Acta Sanctorum” is her second with us—and follows thirty-nine years after her first in Fall 1972; and, last but by no means least, the never-before-featured Date Farmers, with their wildly irreverent visual art that, in the words of Mindy Wilson, “celebrates an ethic that values the homemade, the salvaged, the collaborative.”

Collaborative . . . that’s the key descriptor for this full-to-bursting ring of a Summer 2011 issue. Everyone wrestling with his or her art . . . and everyone winning. If you haven’t yet had your admission ticket punched, now’s the time to step forward.

—Stephen Corey, Editor

Congratulations to Philip Levine, the next Poet Laureate of the United States

2011-08-12T07:00:00.002-04:00

Photo credit: Frances Levine

On Wednesday, August 10, the Library of Congress announced that Philip Levine will be the next poet laureate, succeeding W.S. Merwin.

Levine is a longtime friend of The Georgia Review, having published over twenty poems with us, beginning with "Everything" in the Spring 1978 issue. His essay "A Day in May: Los Angeles, 1960" appeared in the Spring 2005 Georgia Review, and our Fall 1998 edition included a special feature gathering four previously unpublished poems that were subsequently published in his book The Mercy (Knopf, 1999). In May 2008, Levine participated in a Georgia Review-sponsored public reading held at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan.

Hit this link to read the full text of Levine's poem "The Two Tinos" -- first published in the Spring 2008 issue of The Georgia Review. Enjoy!

The Library of Congress has assembled an impressive collection of Levine material that's available online -- including audio and video recordings, reviews of the poet's work, interviews, full-text poems, and more. In the wake of Wednesday's announcement there's been widespread coverage in the national print and online media, including two pieces in the New York Times (one by Charles McGrath and the other by Dwight Garner), an article in the Huffington Post, and much more.

To subscribe to The Georgia Review and receive four issues per year of the finest contemporary American writing available anywhere, click here. As always, your support is very much appreciated.

Writing and Suffering

2011-08-11T11:32:00.002-04:00

I worked recently on collecting information for biographies of past contributors to the Review and found it the spectrum of backgrounds the Review’s writers come from very interesting. I researched writers from all over the U.S., and a few from outside it. There was the fair share of women writers, a few non-white writers, and the standard chunk of white male writers. During my research, I gathered information for the biography, and then I would read the story by the author to see if I thought it was the kind of literature that would be resonant fifty or one hundred years from now. In the end, I had no way of knowing; for all I know, the stories that I found to be closer to kitsch, or to be more clever than affecting, could be the ones that really matter in fifty years.

But comparing the quality of the story with the type of life the author had led intrigued me, and it brought to mind the question of to what degree suffering is connected to writing, a question that has dogged me in the past as I’m sure it has many other writers. This glossary of authors seemed like a list of evidence for why some people believe you can’t be a true writer without having suffered; the more dramatic lives the writers appeared to have led, the more obvious it was why and how their writing was so exceptional.

For example, Ernest J. Gaines, who wrote a thoughtful story with strong, ominous undercurrents of racial tension, grew up impoverished in rural Louisiana. His story was energetic, and it had a sharp awareness that’s hard to imagine another author, who had lived an easier life, possessing. Harry Crews grew up in the back woods of Florida and Georgia, suffering from poverty, disease, and abuse as a child. Crews’s story might have been one of my favorites, as it set a new standard for the phrase “quiet intensity.” The narration was at once controlled and charged with wild emotion.

Then there were authors like Joyce Carol Oates, who on the surface seems to have lived a largely privileged life, suffering losses and setbacks that could be called more conventional than overwhelming. Her story was a good example of how quiet tragedies can be as weighty as dramatic ones, and how inner pain matters as much as visible suffering. T.E. Holt, a Ph. D and M.D. who grew up in a family of doctors, wrote a deeply touching, saddening yet realistic post-apocalyptic story. His story was also one of my favorites, although I’m probably biased, as I’m a sucker for slightly sci-fi, otherworldly stories that are emotionally driven.

How suffering is connected to writing is a personal question for me, as writing is important to me, but I can’t say too much about suffering based on my personal experience. After all, I’m white, upper middle class, attend a private liberal arts college, and can safely say that I’ve experienced nothing truly bad. In some ways, I subscribe to possibly one of the worst clichés—I sometimes suffer about not having a whole lot to suffer. How the Georgia Review contributors have brought suffering into their writing, or left it out, is evidence of their talent as writers, but in some cases it seems evident to me that how they pair suffering with writing is also strongly tied to their backgrounds. Those whose quiet tragedies aren’t readily or publicly apparent probably don’t bring those tragedies into their writing in obvious ways; at the same time, it is undeniable that suffering on a dramatic scale makes for good writing, if it’s the right author. In any case, what this research has ultimately taught me is that you don’t have to suffer to write, but in some cases, it might help to make the writing better.

Our Summer 2011 issue is available now, highlighted by a special feature on Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn

2011-08-09T14:10:00.001-04:00

The Summer 2011 issue of The Georgia Review is just out, and includes a lengthy special feature on the remarkable poet Stephen Dunn as well as poems by Billy Collins, Alice Friman, Lola Haskins, Sydney Lea, Dave Smith, and others; short fiction by Karen Laws and Jacob Sullins; Jed Rasula's expansive, provocative essay "Wagnerism: A Telephone from the Beyond"; book reviews by Greg Johnson and Judith Kitchen, and a full-color art portfolio by The Date Farmers, otherwise known as Armando Lerma and Carlos Ramirez.

The Dunn feature, titled Many a Beautiful Strangeness, gathers together five new poems by Dunn himself, Brief Answers to Unspoken Questions -- an innovative "intraview" with Dunn by Dunn, an interview with the poet by Laura McCullough (who also contributes her essay Between Worlds, Refuge: Stephen Dunn and the Creative Writing Workshop), and prose pieces by Kathleen Graber and George Looney. This and other Dunn material will be posted on The Georgia Review website in the coming days and weeks, so bookmark the link and check back often.

If you already subscribe to GR, the issue is either on its way to your mailbox or has already arrived. If you aren't yet a subscriber, there's no better time than now to begin receiving four issues a year of the finest in contemporary American writing. Click here for to order your subscription online or to purchase single issues. Enjoy!

A Question of Location

2011-07-25T12:48:00.005-04:00

Living in Georgia these past weeks, I’ve been reminded of American regional misconceptions, which I was able largely to avoid when studying in England. At the Review, I’ve had the chance to read some interesting perspectives on conceptualizations of different American regions. The Georgian writer Mary Hood distinguishes between northern and southern storytelling in a good-hearted but provocative way. Her thoughts have made me question how much stock we put in the idea that the North and South are really so different. More specifically, Barry Lopez’s essay “A Dark Light in the West: Racism and Reconciliation” (Fall 2010), which is largely about the history of racism in Oregon, has reminded me of the dangers of assuming that prejudice changes across state lines. Issues of regionalism have been particularly present in my mind because I will be writing a senior thesis exploring these issues in the upcoming school year.

In high school, southerners annoyed me when they generalized about the North; I thought they sounded ignorant. But since I decided on my senior thesis topic, I’ve become more interested in southern generalizations, and realize that based on ignorance or not, these pervasive opinions still influence the way southerners relate to their heritage. And this cultural spread of impressions and stereotypes is just as present in the North, even if it’s not as outspoken.

I’m neither a southerner nor a northerner, and when it comes down to it, I don’t think my parents, who created lives on both sides of the Mason Dixon line, subscribe to those labels either. They met in Florida, where I was born, and spent a few years in Michigan before settling in Athens for about ten years. They’re Americans—they don’t define themselves according to where they happen to live within America because they’ve lived all over. And I, who felt so at home in England, try not to characterize myself according to wherever I am. But in America it’s impossible to avoid people who limit themselves and others according to region. I’ve encountered this attitude everywhere, but over the past two weeks I was bluntly reminded of two overarching and troubling southern opinions about the North that are opposite but equally presumptuous.

The other day a young woman from Atlanta, who had asked me how I liked the North, said she loved visiting but would hate to live there, citing the familiar reason: “People just aren’t very friendly up there!” When I replied that there are rude people everywhere, she agreed, but said that you couldn’t find the kind of small-town friendliness in the North that you do in the South. I’ve heard this before, though I’ve never quite understood it. I’ve encountered unfriendliness in small southern towns, and friendliness in northern towns.

A few days later, a friend’s dad, who had asked me about living in Massachusetts, complained about how the southern way of thinking was so narrow in comparison with the North. I wouldn’t have expected this kind of statement to make me uncomfortable, but it did. I had to keep myself from telling him about opinions of the South that I had heard from fellow Smith students, young women who’d spent their whole lives in New England. Being in New England, it’s become clear to me that many northerners have as restricted an impression of the South as many southerners do of the North. In an extreme example, one student from Vermont talked about how backwards people in Atlanta were—she’d presumed that they didn’t even get cable TV. In a pre-Civil War history class, where we’d had an open and considerate conversation about the n-word, another student had said she didn’t think such a thoughtful conversation could occur in the South outside of a university classroom. I realize now what I should have said to her: that anywhere in America such a conversation is unlikely to occur outside of a university classroom. If New England is so progressive, surely it would be more aware of its southern neighbors, and less willing to apply stereotypes automatically. To assume that an entire region is riddled with ignorance is ignorance in itself.

One thing I want to do in my senior thesis is explore the readiness with which people think of different regions of America as something “other,” as something almost intellectually separate. No matter where I go, I’ve encountered people with the same resistance towards thinking of and accepting other regions and cultures as just as complex as their own. But I’ve found that the same kinds of people settle themselves into the same kinds of circles. Rednecks exist everywhere, even in New England, as do artists and suburbanites. What I’m really trying to do is figure out how similar and how different the North and South are, and the more I think about it, the less sure I am what exactly those similarities and differences are.

"Dog brains are not allowed on the air": Frederick Busch's "The World Began with Charlie Chan"

2011-07-14T09:33:00.007-04:00

My father once told me a story about a troubling performance he saw over twenty years ago. The act starred a comedian who singled out audience members to stand and be mocked. What confused my dad was that the people who were being mocked seemed to enjoy themselves as much as the people laughing at them, which raised the question of whether the comedian’s derision was really such a bad thing Twenty years later, audiences’ love for this potentially cruel form of entertainment has not waned; for some reason, we love not only to watch people calling people stupid, but also to be called stupid ourselves.

It’s a curious phenomenon, the subject, I’m sure, of plenty of journal articles, and the idea behind Frederick Busch’s short story “The World Began with Charlie Chan,” which first appeared in the Spring 1989 issue of The Georgia Review [This story is no longer available online. To purchase this issue click here or call 1-800-542-3481 for more information]. The story features Malcolm Pitkin, a successful radio personality whose late night show consists mostly of ridiculing his callers. Malcolm’s audience of less-than-intellectual toadies are fooling themselves—but then, so is Malcolm, who proudly calls himself “King of the Fools.” Indeed, he embodies that title when an old flame decides to reconnect with him on his radio show “in front of how many millions—well, not in front of, let’s say in ear shot.” Her name is Lisa, and Malcolm calls her “dumb as ever,” but he clearly still cares for her. However, in his moment of utter surprise at her calling, he is overwhelmed by other calls and cannot handle the technical difficulties. So in order to compensate for a love reconnection lost, he tells himself, “She could not have been that Lisa.”

Although Malcolm seems smart, which is more than can be said about some radio jockeys, the reader gets satisfaction in watching him lose his composure and his control of the conversation. But what Busch’s story really calls attention to is something we might not be so ready to admit: the degree to which we like to see others suffer. When Malcolm squashes his insipid callers’ egos, it’s just as fun as when he squirms like a salted slug. To act repelled by the idea of mockery as entertainment is easy, but when we’re actively participating in that entertainment, do we stick to our moral guns? Reading Busch’s story feels like listening to a sleazy radio talk show—not to observe the inanity, but to revel in the dirt being flung. This ambiguity of the reader’s role leads to questioning whether one is at all justified in passing judgment on the situation. Thus, the reader, instead of feeling guilty or dirty, isn’t entirely sure what to feel.

Malcolm makes asides about his millions of listeners and about Frank, his producer, hidden in the production booth. But as the story goes on, it becomes clear that there aren’t millions of people listening to him, and there probably isn’t even a producer, although Malcolm seems convinced that there is. At one point, he exclaims, “You don’t think it’s fun up here at night, do you? You think somebody sits up here and talks to people at night because he wants to?” The joke’s on Malcolm, who is at least smart enough to realize it. But Busch also leaves the lingering possibility that the joke is really on the reader, which is a more ambivalent and deliciously uncomfortable matter.

An Intern's Introduction

2011-07-12T12:31:00.005-04:00

I may as well be honest from the start—I wanted more to return to Athens, Georgia, than to spend the summer working. I attend Smith (a women’s college, not a girl’s school) in Northampton, Massachusetts, which is a great town, but I always looked forward to coming back to Athens. I grew up here. Then my family moved to southeast Ohio two years ago, so when I returned home for breaks and the summer, I wasn’t really returning home. Athens, with its heat and music, Confederate flags and peace signs, magnolia trees and kudzu, left a tangy-sweet taste in my mouth that I haven’t been able to find anywhere else. Southern Ohio is a lovely place, but it can taste a bit like stale bread.

Last fall, I decided that I wanted to spend this summer working at a literary magazine. I’m an English major who loves poetry, and magazine publishing has always appealed to me more than book publishing. Magazines seem to be a livelier scene, and I’m thinking there’s more money for poetry in magazines than in books because people don’t seem to buy books of poetry as often as they subscribe to literary magazines. When I discovered through the Poetry Center at Smith that The Georgia Review is published at the University of Georgia, I saw a double opportunity: I could get internship experience at a literary journal, and I could spend the summer in Athens. So I bothered Doug Carlson (an editor at the Review) with enthusiastic e-mails until I found out I had scored an internship. One spring semester later, here I am.

As I mentioned before, I love poetry—in fact, I just got back from studying at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, because it has one of the best creative writing programs in the UK. It was a rewarding experience; I learned as much about beer as poetry. However, as much as I love poetry, I’m always looking for motivation. I usually find it by taking workshop classes, but those are hard to come by over the summer. At the Review, by reading poetry submissions, back issues, and exchange journals, I’ll be surrounded by poetry every day—which, two weeks into it, has been energizing. The good poetry makes me want to write more to improve, and the bad poetry is equally, if not more, useful because it shows me exactly what not to do in my writing.

I’m thrilled to be back in this odd place, where I can see my friends again and have Athens adventures. But I’m also thrilled with my internship, reading all day and thinking critically about what I’m reading. It’s like being an English major—but without the grades. I have yet to find a serious downside to this.

I’ll be making regular blog contributions about my experiences at the Review and in Athens during the summer. I hope to publish blog entries about once a week or so, so check back soon.

“The hope of another version”: the short fiction of Marjorie Sandor

2011-06-06T10:00:00.008-04:00

We’re pleased to offer – for a limited time only -- the full text of Marjorie Sandor’s short story “Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime,” originally published in the Fall 1997 issue of The Georgia Review and reprinted in our current issue (Spring 2011), “A Home in Other People: Selected Stories and Art, 1984 – 2007.” The story is also the title piece of Sandor’s 2003 collection published by Sarabande Books.

As is the case with Sandor’s larger body of work, “Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime” concerns itself with family histories, family stories, and the ways in which the imagination can bridge the gap between the factual and the fanciful. Rachel, the story’s as-yet-unborn narrator, spins a speculative tale regarding her mother Clara’s youthful, brief friendship with Lev, a Russian painter, and his wife Manya, who are recent arrivals in Clara’s hometown. Manya is “quite ill” with what Clara’s mother describes as “a female disease.” On her second visit to the couple’s home, they ask Clara to pose for an odalisque, a request she quickly accepts. The portrait, which Rachel never sees and which Clara refuses to describe in any detail, ends up becoming the crucial lost artifact in the daughter’s detailed imagining of her mother’s early life during the closing days of the Second World War. Because the painting is missing, Rachel’s story (and by extension, Sandor’s) comes into existence; its absence transforms what might have been a merely ekphrastic description of an actual portrait into a richly imagined tale of the ways in which secrets shape families. As Sandor writes, “It’s late, Mother, but listen anyway, while I tell my children that somewhere in the world there is a painting of you and me, and in that painting your womb is not stark white and humanly cursed, but a whole dazzling universe, the burning blue-white of bones and stars.”

Marjorie Sandor has published four essays and eight short stories in The Georgia Review since 1984. Her memoir The Late Interiors is just out from Arcade/Skyhorse Publishing. Her story collection Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime won the 2004 National Jewish Book Award in Fiction. A previous essay collection, The Night Gardener: A Search for Home (the Lyons Press), won the 2000 Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize XIII, Twenty Under Thirty, Best American Spiritual Writing, and other anthologies. She directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

Home Is a Place in Time: “Stories About the Boys”

2011-05-17T14:14:00.011-04:00

In one of his many affecting essays about rural Minnesota life from Grass Roots, Paul Gruchow begins the story of his mother’s death and funeral by asserting: “To plant a garden is to enter the continuum of time. Each seed carries in its genome the history that will propel it into the future, and in planting it we stretch one of the long threads of our culture into tomorrow. A home, like a garden, exists as much in time as in space.” This could preface, equally well, Jim Heynen’s stories of growing up just over the border in northwestern Iowa, several of which we gathered in our Spring 2011 fiction retrospective as “Stories About the Boys.”

Gruchow understood, and Heynen demonstrates, that remembered stories are the seeds of home and place; both are essential to the preservation of what is worthy in a past culture and vital to a healthy orientation in a present one. If Gruchow had grown up with brothers, these stories would have also been his to tell. He, like Heynen, would be the youngest boy, the introspective one with all that innocence and wisdom. And he would be reminding us that we have little chance to know where we are if we don’t know where we’ve been.

“Stories About the Boys” encompasses wonder and acceptance, beauty and danger. In short, these compact narratives are about people living with each other, the animals, and the land. They maintain and continue a way of life before agribusiness took the culture out of agriculture, before, as Gruchow once said, we made “the countryside safe for machines.”

Moreover, Heynen’s carefully composed tales amount to much more than rural reminiscence. Gary Snyder wrote that Heynen’s fictional farm is a “universe of myth.” Considered singly, the stories carry the attributes of metaphor. They contain moments of revelation that can’t be reduced to mere nostalgia, moments that open, beyond description and narration, to a sense of home and place.

Photo credit: Wayne Gudmundson

Elevator World, Atlanta Baby, and Me

2011-05-16T13:37:00.008-04:00

by Stephen Corey

As I have done for many a year now, I recently (on 5 May) made the ninety-minute drive from Athens to Atlanta for the GAMMA Awards ceremony—sitting down for standard banquet lunch fare amidst a very nonstandard group of editors and other magazine staffers from such publications as Atlanta Parent, Oconee Living, Professional Photographer, Habitat World, Elevator World, and Garden and Gun. I have a particular fondness for this contest—I’ll explain the acronym GAMMA later—for the very reason that it sets such a diversity of publications in competition with one another.

The Georgia Review is known as “a literary journal,” an appellation that can be construed as a badge of honor by some readers but that, I’m sure, strikes many a potential reader as a marker for “specialized,” “elitist,” or—worse, from a marketing standpoint—“boring.” What the GAMMAs do is toss all the strange bedfellows into a room marked “Best Essay” or “Best Feature” or “Best Single Issue” or “General Excellence,” and then ask the competition judges to consider the magazines’ writing and editorial perspectives and designs in a broad, nondiscriminatory (and I am tempted to say “absolute”) way: “We don’t care whether you are writing about poems or elevators,” these judges seem to say. “We care about how well you do it for caring readers like us.”

Within this democratic (and admittedly a bit weird-seeming at times) arena, The Georgia Review picked up seven honors at the 2011 ceremony and has earned many dozens over the years—dating back to the time when the honoring organization, the Magazine Association of the Southeast, was the Magazine Association of Georgia. (GAMMA was a sort of reverse, inside-out, and inexact acronym that someone with a decent ear forged from the GA abbreviation of Georgia, the MA of both Magazine and Association, and the . . . well, you see what I mean about “inexact.” For better or worse, the Magazine Association of the Southeast folks decided not to throw out the acronym baby with the organization bathwater.) Among these seven were gold awards for Best Single Issue (Fall 2010) and Best Feature—won by a long poem, for Pete’s sake: “Cadaver, Speak” by Marianne Boruch from Summer 2010. We took home “only” the silver for General Excellence—the category in which we had earned the gold for the past three years straight—but we’ll try to improve. (For a complete rundown of our 2011 GAMMAS, click here.)

Yes, there’s a bit of an odd feeling in having to think such things as “We beat out Garden and Gun” or “Dang, we just barely lost out to Atlanta Baby,” but—as I said—I like it: some smart readers proclaiming that The Georgia Review is doing some top-notch work that all kinds magazine aficionados can and should take up, enjoy, and support. What’s not to like in that?

The Devil in Angela

2011-05-11T09:44:00.021-04:00

One signal moment in the education of many literature aficionados is their first encounter with the Satan of John Milton’s Paradise Lost—that headstrong rebellious angel who can’t manage to be satisfied with the beautiful perfection that is Heaven, and who seems to get nearly all the best lines of dialogue in the poem. William Blake, who always knew to listen to the writing rather than the writer, summed up this blasphemous situation better than anyone else, before or since: “Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”

Most of us, for various reasons, have a long and usually unacknowledged fascination with the bad boys and bad girls of the world. When “Angela Perfidia” first crossed my desk about fifteen years ago—its author, Margaret Benbow, had not previously submitted work to The Georgia Review, nor had I encountered her writing anywhere else—I was gripped by the story’s fulminating narrator from the opening sentences: “The big garlic-breathing snake of penitents whips its coils up and down the church aisles. Whew, this parish has to be God’s funkiest ever. I’m one of the snake’s links, and like everyone else I back with tiny steps toward the confessional.”

When Angela reveals her young age the raucous goings-on become even more perversely enticing, as does the fact that her attitude and actions grow ever darker throughout the tale—which Benbow manages to render both taut (at just over seven pages) and fully developed.

Not all the best short stories are primarily character driven, but many are. After all these years, “Angela Perfidia” continues to haunt and amuse me—Angela is wickedly, shamelessly funny—not only for its grand titular figure and her much beleaguered mother, but also for its handful of deftly carved cameo characters such as the confession booth’s Father Len, who “studies the macerated design of my life with such quiet hopelessness. It lies there, vibrating, and he pokes it sadly, like a voodoo spook hired to harvest potent truths from chicken guts.”

—Stephen Corey

"I've seen a man die, but not like this": Robert Olen Butler's "This Is Earl Sandt"

2011-05-03T14:30:00.012-04:00

“I lifted my camera and I tripped the shutter, and here was another amazing thing, it seemed to me. One man was flying above the earth, and with a tiny movement of a hand, another man had captured him. . . . Earl Sandt was about to die, but he was forever caught there in that box in my hand.”

When we were trying to pare stories from our too-long list for The Georgia Review Spring 2011 fiction retrospective, Robert Olen Butler’s “This Is Earl Sandt” refused to budge. We were drawn to the story’s historical setting—a rarity among the 300+ works we considered—and especially to how it makes palpable the conflicting fascination and anxiety its unnamed narrator feels about the emerging technologies of his moment and the transformations they signal. Set in 1913 and inspired by a vintage postcard from Butler’s extensive collection, the story is told in the voice of a small-town banker who gathers with his young son and fellow citizens after church one Sunday “to peek into the future and cheer it on”—to watch a man fly—and ends up witnessing the aviator’s death when the fragile biplane falls from the sky—a violent and, until this moment, barely imaginable end. “I’ve seen a man die, but not like this,” the narrator begins. “There was silence suddenly around us when he disappeared beyond the trees, silence after terrible sounds, that hammering of his engine, the engine of his aeroplane, and the other sound, after.” Shaken, the narrator begins to identify with the dead aviator, to try to experience what Sandt did and to understand its implications.

What you won’t know from simply reading this story is that its coming-to-be is itself a story of spectating, exhibitionism, and the never-entirely-risk-free use of technology. Robert Olen Butler created “This is Earl Sandt,” from conception to final draft, during a live webcast in seventeen two-hour episodes over a two-week stretch in fall 2001. That is, Butler assigned himself a writing exercise and then invited anyone to watch him succeed or fail. The potential consequences of his act were hardly as grave as Sandt’s, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to point out a family resemblance between the one instance of audacity and the other.

As Butler explains in a 2004 essay “A Postcard from America,” he intended the webcast as a sort of extended teaching moment, an opportunity for students to witness, as intimately as another can, one artist’s creative process. Shortly after the project was done, he told the Guardian that “A dancer can watch her mentor move in a rehearsal studio. And a painter can watch their mentor at work, over their shoulder. But what can a writer do?” The webcast is still available for free download (search for “Inside Creative Writing” at iTunes), and in it you can watch Butler do the things a writer does—stare awhile at a blank white expanse, type words, delete words, type some more, consult a dictionary, and so on. But he also does things most writers would never think of doing: he talks to an audience about the choices he is making, and, in the last half hour of each session, answers questions viewers e-mail to him. Listening to Butler talk and watching his words appear on his screen, which is in fact your own computer screen, you’re getting closer to inhabiting the mind of the writer, to becoming Robert Olen Butler . . . all while Butler himself is trying to inhabit the mind of the postcard’s photographer, creating a character who is also obsessed with entering the experience of another.

Butler chose the Earl Sandt postcard as his writing prompt the morning the webcast began, he says, and while he’d always expected to write a story about it, he imagined he would tell it in the voice of the aviator. He decided instead to tell the story “in the voice of the man who watched.” It was barely two months after 9/11, and Butler, like the rest of us, was still shaken by the most profound and terrible moment of collective witness for any of us who were alive to see it. At the center of that horror was our discovery of some terrible truths: that a passenger jet can be a missile, that technology can be turned against us in ways unimaginable to most, and that such knowledge can and will be graphically articulated to us, over and over, “forever caught there in that box.”

“We each of us viewed the fall of an aeroplane under stunning circumstances for which we had no frame of reference, and as a result, the event got around certain defenses that we all necessarily carry within us,” Butler writes about 9/11—again in “A Postcard from America. “And we confronted—one by one by one—in a way most of us never have—our own mortality.” Those words might just as easily have come from the mouth of the narrator who watched Earl Sandt lift into the sky, “defying the trees, defying the earth,” and then fall from it.

It’s fitting that a story set during a turn-of-the-century transitional moment, in which people were realizing how planes, cars, cameras, and other newfangled contraptions might dramatically alter physical and metaphysical landscapes, was composed at a similar moment of upheaval. In the still-rippling wake of 9/11 and its awful new lessons in ways to die, we were beginning to understand and exploit the Internet’s seemingly limitless opportunities, to educate, interact, build, to self-promote, spy, deceive.

When I think about how Butler wrote this story, using the Internet to create community and promote creativity, I’m struck by how deftly “This Is Earl Sandt” embodies the multiple personalities of any technological beast; and how the story achieves the unity of form and content, purpose and means I think all artists want in their best work. His narrator’s anxiety over technology’s conflicted nature, its power to create and bewilder, to better our lives and to destroy them, is our own. No wonder this story feels relevant and resonant a decade after its creation, and no wonder it held firm its claim on our minds and our pages—not once (Winter 2003 originally), but twice. Order your copy of Spring 2011 here.

GR comes to NYC May 6 - 12

2011-05-03T13:13:00.000-04:00

The Georgia Review, one of the country’s most highly regarded and longest-lived literary journals, has more subscribers in the New York City area than in any entire state other than its home base of Georgia. So, to honor those readers and some of the many Review contributors who also live in and around the city, the journal is presenting four programs around Manhattan and Brooklyn in early May -- all free and open to the public.

On Friday May 6 at 7:00 p.m., essayist Martha Graham Wiseman, fiction writer Anna Solomon, and poet Jane McKinley will read in the Kaufman Dance Studio of the Juilliard School, located at 60 Lincoln Center Plaza.

On Sunday May 8 at 4:00 p.m., poet/playwright/humorist Louis Phillips, poet Kyoko Uchida, and poet/essayist Stephen Corey—who is also the editor of The Georgia Review—will read at Union Hall, 702 Union Street (at Fifth Avenue) in Brooklyn.

On Tuesday May 10, from 6:00-7:30 p.m., The Georgia Review will be the featured publication for the monthly “Periodically Speaking” series, co-sponsored by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) and the New York Public Library (NYPL), in the periodicals room of the library's main branch. The topic of discussion, “A Mag in the Hand Is Worth Two on the Screen—Or Is It?,” will be explored by Review editor Stephen Corey, assistant editor David Ingle, and Review contributors William Giraldi, Kathleen Graber, and Lynn Schmeidler. These three authors will open the program with brief readings from their work, and the panel conversation will follow.

On Wednesday May 11 at 7:00 p.m., the award-winning poets Margaret Gibson and Michael Waters will read for the Review at Poets House, located at 10 River Terrace in lower Manhattan.

More about the readers for 7:00 p.m. Friday, May 6, at the Juilliard School:

Martha Graham Wiseman has published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her essay “In Rehearsal,” about growing up in a family and family circle of professional artists, appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of The Georgia Review, and a new essay is forthcoming in the journal later this year. In the past, Wiseman has been a dancer and choreographer, a theater student, and an editor; currently she teaches English at Skidmore College.

Jane McKinley’s poetry collection, Vanitas, came out from Texas Tech University Press early in 2011 as the latest winner of the prestigious Walt McDonald First-Book Prize. A handful of the poems in the book, including the title piece, appeared first in The Georgia Review (Fall 2009 and Fall 2010). McKinley is also a professional oboist serving as artistic director of the Dryden Ensemble, a Baroque chamber music group based in Princeton, New Jersey.

Anna Solomon, a former Brooklyn resident now living in Providence, Rhode Island, has published two stories in The Georgia Review as well as essays and other stories in the New York Times Magazine, Harvard Review, One Story, and elsewhere. Winner of a Pushcart Prize and the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize, Solomon has a novel, The Little Bride, coming out in September from Riverhead Books.

More about the readers for 4:00 p.m. Sunday, May 8, at Union Hall:

Louis Phillips, a longtime Manhattan resident, is a widely published poet, short-story writer, humorist/satirist, and playwright, two of whose one-act plays have been printed in The Georgia Review. The most recent of his many books are Fireworks in Some Particulars (Fort Schuyler Press), The Woman Who Wrote King Lear (Pleasure Boat Studio), and The Kilroy Sonata (Word Audience).

Kyoko Uchida’s poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Grand Street, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other magazines, as well as the anthology Stories in the Stepmother Tongue (White Pine Press). Reared in Japan, Canada, and the United States, Uchida currently lives in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University.

Stephen Corey, editor of The Georgia Review, has published nine poetry collections as well as numerous individual essays, poems, and reviews in such periodicals as American Poetry Review and Poets & Writers. His most recent book is There Is No Finished World (White Pine Press).

More about the readers and panelists for CLMP’s “Periodically Speaking” at 6:00 p.m. Tuesday, May 10, at the main branch of the New York Public Library:

William Giraldi was reared in New Jersey and currently lives in Boston, where he teaches at Boston University and is senior fiction editor of AGNI. He has published essays on fiction writers Lee K. Abbott and George Singleton in The Georgia Review, and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many other periodicals—among them the New York Times Book Review, Yale Review, and Salmagundi. Giraldi’s first novel, Busy Monsters, will be out from W. W. Norton in August.

Kathleen Graber’s second book of poems, The Eternal City (Princeton University Press, 2010)—a portion of which appeared in The Georgia Review—was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and other organizations, Graber teaches creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Lynn Schmeidler’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Chelsea, Mid-American Review, Brevity, and other journals. Her short story “The Speed of Dark,” from The Georgia Review, was a Pushcart Prize nominee. A former faculty member of the Writers Studio in Manhattan, Schmeidler now teaches workshops in Westchester.

Stephen Corey is the editor of The Georgia Review, with which he has worked in various capacities since 1983.

David Ingle has served as an assistant editor of The Georgia Review for the past decade.

More about the readers for 7:00 p.m. Wednesday, May 11, at Poets House:

Margaret Gibson is the author of ten poetry collections, all from Louisiana State University Press. They include Long Walks in the Afternoon, the Lamont Prize winner in 1982; Memories of the Future: The Daybooks of Tina Modotti, co-winner of the Melville Cane Award in 1986; The Vigil, a finalist for the National Book Award in 1993; One Body, winner of the Connecticut Center for the Book Award in 2008; and her latest, Second Nature (2010). Gibson, who lives in Preston, Connecticut, has also published a memoir, The Prodigal Daughter (University of Missouri Press, 2008). Her work has been appearing in The Georgia Review with regularity over the past thirty-plus years.

Michael Waters’ most recent books, all from BOA Editions, are Gospel Night (2011); Darling Vulgarity, a 2006 finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001). He has also served as co-editor for two anthologies, Contemporary American PoetryPerfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003). Waters teaches at Monmouth University and in the Drew University MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation. (Houghton Mifflin, 2008) and

For more information, visit The Georgia Review website, phone 706-542-3481, or email ingle.david@gmail.com.

Robert Olen Butler story full-text now available from The Georgia Review

2011-04-26T08:18:00.003-04:00

Read a story from the Spring 2011 retrospective . . .
	“I've seen a man die, but not like this. There was silence suddenly around us when he disappeared beyond the trees, silence after terrible sounds, that hammering of his engine, the engine of his aeroplane, and the other sound, after.” —Robert Olen Butler “This Is Earl Sandt” (originally published Winter 2003)

Barry Lopez live in Athens one week from today!

2011-04-12T09:40:00.003-04:00

The Georgia Review proudly presents
its third annual Earth Day Celebration:

“The Writer and Social Responsibility”
A reading by Barry Lopez, National Book Award–winning author

7:00 p.m. Tuesday, April 19: 2011

State Botanical Garden of Georgia Visitor Center & Conservatory
Reception to follow

$8 general public
$4 students
ORDER TICKETS
or call 706-542-3481

Barry Lopez is the author of many books, among them the National Book Award winner Arctic Dreams (1986); Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited with Debra Gwartney (2006); and eight works of fiction. His honors include the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the John Hay Medal; Guggenheim, Lannan, and National Science Foundation fellowships; and Pushcart prizes in fiction and nonfiction. The San Francisco Chronicle has called him “arguably the nation’s premier nature writer.”

Barry Lopez’s distinctive essays and stories have graced eight issues of The Georgia Review since 1993—most recently, in Fall 2010, “A Dark Light in the West: Racism and Reconciliation.” This essay is an example of the sustained attention Lopez applies, throughout his work, to the complex ethical problems of our social, environmental, and political systems.

Meet Lopez at a reception after his presentation, which will include readings from new fiction and nonfiction. Tickets for the Barry Lopez program are $8 for the general public and $4 for students; seating is limited and advance purchase is strongly recommended. For ticket information and purchase, call The Georgia Review office at 706-542-3481. This event is presented by The Georgia Review with vital support from the State Botanical Garden of Georgia, the UGA President's Venture Fund, the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, the Department of English, the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications, the Office of International Education, the UGA Press, Big City Bread Café, Terrapin Brewery, and Byhalia Books.

The Mappist

2011-04-11T08:46:00.011-04:00

The second full-text offering from our fiction retrospective to be posted on www.thegeorgiareview.com is “The Mappist” by Barry Lopez, who will be in Athens on 19 April for our third annual Earth Day celebration.

All of us own books that we'll always need to have nearby. One of mine is Barry Lopez’s essay collection Crossing Open Ground. One essay in particular, “Landscape and Narrative,” I have read so often that I’ve nearly committed it to memory. In it he refers to Beautyway, one of the sung ceremonies of the Navajo people. “In the Navajo view, the elements of one’s interior life—one’s psychological makeup and moral bearing—are subject to a persistent principle of disarray. Beautyway is, in part, a spiritual invocation of the order of the exterior universe, that irreducible, holy complexity that manifests itself as all things changing through time.”

Within this ritual, he identifies the purpose of storytelling: “to achieve harmony between the two [interior and exterior] landscapes, to use all the elements of story—syntax, mood, figures of speech—in a harmonious way to reproduce the harmony of the land in the individual’s interior.” The truth in stories, then, “reveals itself most fully not in dogma but in the paradox, irony, and contradictions that distinguish compelling narratives—beyond this there are only failures of imagination: reductionism in science; fundamentalism in religion; fascism in politics.”

Viewed in this light, “The Mappist” becomes a narrational metaphor about an extraordinary mapmaker, whose work ascends, as well, to the level of metaphor. And as Lopez reminds us, our best source of truth is metaphorical, a story. Or, in “The Mappist,” a map—but not a map limited to political boundaries and human constructions. A map, for example, of the relationship of predators and prey in North Dakota, or of the movement of natural and municipal water in Djakarta. Maps that reveal, as the mappist himself says, “what gets erased and what comes to replace it . . . the foundations beneath the ephemera.”

In his fiction and essays, Barry Lopez is a storyteller of probity, skill, and humility. His stories are “maps” of precision, beauty, and revelation. The words Lopez gives the mappist to describe his maps apply as well to Lopez’s stories. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking you, or I or anyone, knows how the world is meant to work. The world is a miracle, unfolding in the pitch dark. We’re lighting candles. Those maps—they are my candles.”

Introducing our Spring 2011 short-fiction retrospective with a full-text peek at a Joyce Carol Oates story

2011-03-31T11:55:00.007-04:00

We are trying something different on our website (http://www.thegeorgiareview.com/) to spotlight our special Spring 2011 issue, "A Home in Other People: Selected Stories and Art, 1984-2007," so we hope you'll want to go there right now--and invite lots of other folks to do the same. For a limited time we are making available the full text of one story from the issue, "Three Girls" by Joyce Carol Oates, in the hope that it will move you to subscribe, or to renew, or to give a gift subscription or an issue to one or more fellow readers. Then, after about two weeks, the Oates story will come down and another of the nineteen works from Spring 2011 will go up--again for a brief period. By the time we move on to the Summer issue, our website visitors will have been presented with several good arguments for signing up (or re-upping) as regular members of the Georgia Review audience. I began reading Joyce Carol Oates's work more than forty years ago, making my way through such books as Upon the Sweeping Flood (1966), Wonderland (1971), and Marriages and Infidelities (1972)--and I even reviewed this last title for my hometown newspaper, claiming that Oates's stories explored the dilemma of "the shifting inner personality, the never-stable Self which finds itself bearing the gift of Proteus reversed into horror." (I was probably pretty proud of my self for that rather purple statement.) I took up Oates's books not only because she was a hot new literary property but also because she was a "neighbor" born and reared in Lockport, New York, just outside Buffalo--the city where I had been born, and to which I still traveled from time to time from nearby Jamestown, where I did my growing up. My initial jolt as a brand new member of The Georgia Review's editorial staff--in 1983--was to read a short story submitted by Oates and to have to tell my boss Stanley Lindberg that I didn't think it good enough to accept. He didn't either, and so he returned that particular submission. However, the Review has proudly published Joyce Carol Oates numerous times in three genres over the years--fiction, essay, and poetry--and she is one of only three writers to make it into our first short-story retrospective (Spring 1986) and into this new one. (Lee K. Abbott and Mary Hood are the others.) "Three Girls," originally published in Fall 2002, is typical Oates in its stylistic mastery and its emotional perceptiveness, but atypical for its innocent-seeming perspective and its near-giddy tone. Of course, there is that final sentence, with its almost O. Henry-like revelation . . .

Brian Turner in Athens Friday -- live, free, and good for the soul

2011-03-30T10:01:00.000-04:00

7:00 p.m. Friday, April 1: Brian Turner Reading (Georgia Poetry Circuit)

Ciné

234 West Hancock Avenue

Athens, GA

Brian Turner is a soldier-poet whose debut book of poems, Here, Bullet, a harrowing, beautiful first-person account of the Iraq war, won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, The New York Times “Editor's Choice” selection, the 2006 Pen Center USA "Best in the West" award, and the 2007 Poets Prize, among others. Turner served seven years in the US Army, to include one year as an infantry team leader in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division. Of Here, Bullet, The New York Times Book Review wrote: “The day of the first moonwalk, my father's college literature professor told his class, ‘Someday they'll send a poet, and we'll find out what it's really like.’ Turner has sent back a dispatch from a place arguably more incomprehensible than the moon—the war in Iraq—and deserves our thanks.” Turner's poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review, and other journals, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary film of the same name. Turner was also featured in Operation Homecoming, a unique documentary that explores the firsthand accounts of American servicemen and women through their own words. He earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and has lived abroad in South Korea. His second poetry book, Phantom Noise, was released by Alice James in the Spring of 2010. Turner has recently been selected as one of 50 United States Artists Fellows for 2009.

For more information call 706-542-3481 or visit The Georgia Review's website or Facebook page.

GR staffer Ida Stewart wins the 2011 Perugia Press Prize!

2011-03-01T09:20:00.002-05:00

Ida Stewart, who works at The Georgia Review as this year's graduate assistant, has been chosen as the winner of the 2011 Perugia Press Prize for her manuscript Gloss.

In addition to her ongoing work at GR, Ida is a doctoral student in creative writing at the University of Georgia. Gloss, which will be Stewart's first book, is set for publication in September, 2011.

Like the Appalachian mountain setting from which Gloss arises, the language in this collection is in flux, full of paradox and thresholds, each word and line a peak or a range. The poems are mined from the ruptured and fragmented rock and dirt of the colloquial, creating a kind of "landguage" or "langscape." Indeed, the poems (mis)behave like little ecosystems, in which wordplay, rhyme, and enjambment simultaneously make and break sense, join and repel—evoking the tensions between progress and resistance. Embedded among the strata of Gloss is loss: many poems respond to mountaintop removal coal mining, which is literally flattening the rich complexity of the Appalachian landscape and culture. As the poems give voice to the mountaintop, they consider the delicate relationship between humans and nature, lover and beloved, as well as the natural complexity of communication and utterance, the struggle to say the unsayable.

Praised by the judges for its remarkable sense of sound, syntax, and meaning, Gloss continues to surprise on subsequent readings. The poet is engaged, playful, and curious, and so therefore is the reader.

The Perugia Press Prize is given annually for a first or second unpublished poetry collection by a woman. The prize is $1000 and publication by Perugia Press. Visit www.perugiapress.com for complete guidelines.

George Singleton, Jack Driscoll, Fleda Brown, Chris Forhan, and many more featured in the Winter 2010 issue of The Georgia Review

2011-01-05T15:05:00.002-05:00

The Winter 2010 issue of The Georgia Review came out just before the GR offices closed for the holiday break, and should be arriving daily on newsstands, in bookstores, and in subscribers' mailboxes. If you're aren't yet a subscriber, click here to have some of the finest contemporary American writing delivered to you four times per year.

The new issue offers a special feature on the George Singleton -- two new Singleton stories plus an essay on the inimitable South Carolinian by William Giraldi; a second special feature on longtime GR contributor Gerald Weales that includes an interview as well as some of the best moments from "American Theater Watch," the annual essay-review Weales published in GR from 1977 - 2010.

Winter 2010 also contains a new short story by Jack Driscoll; poems by Fleda Brown, Andrea Hollander Budy, Chris Forhan, Albert Goldbarth, Bob Hicok, Melanie McCabe, Michael Waters, and Robert Wrigley; book reviews including Jeff Gundy on "activist poetry," Greg Johnson on recent short fiction by Richard Bausch, Joyce Carol Oates, Suzanne Rivecca, and Tracy Daugherty, Patrick Lohier on Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters, and Myles Weber on a new biography of the enigmatic Tillie Olsen; and art by Walla Walla, Washington-based painter and bookmaker Ian Boyden.

The GR website is loaded with exclusive, web-only content: more on George Singleton and Jack Driscoll, interviews with Ian Boyden and poet J. Allyn Rosser, plus a treasure trove of online videos including Singleton and Alice Friman on "The Comedy of Survival," recent readings by poets Cleopatra Mathis and Nicole Higgins, various panels and readings recorded during October's "Once Upon A Time in Athens: The Legacy of Raymond Andrews" event, and more.

The wind that bends the pin oak to the bedroom glass,

that pries my porch roof jagged from the torn flashing
to betray how little stands between me and rain, will be

your wind tomorrow.

-- from Melanie McCabe's "Forecast," Winter 2010

Rick Campbell and Stephen Corey read at Ciné tonight...live and free!

2011-01-04T08:33:00.001-05:00

Tonight The Georgia Review and the Georgia Poetry Circuit are sponsoring a reading by touring writer Rick Campbell beginning at 7 p.m. at Ciné Bar/Café/Cinema (234 West Hancock Ave., Athens). Stephen Corey, editor of the Review and author of several poetry collections, will open for Campbell. The event is open to the public and admission is free..

The Georgia Poetry Circuit is a nine-member coalition of colleges and universities that annually supports statewide tours by three nationally recognized poets; Cleopatra Mathis read in Athens in November (click the link for video proof!), and Brian Turner will read on April 1. The Georgia Review, the quarterly journal of arts and letters founded at University of Georgia in 1947 and published there ever since, has been the circuit’s UGA sponsor since the inception of the tour in 1985.

Rick Campbell’s latest book of poems is Dixmont (Autumn House Press, 2009). His earlier collections are The Traveler’s Companion (Black Bay Books, 2004); Setting the World in Order (Texas Tech University Press, 2001), which won the Walt McDonald Prize; and a chapbook, A Day’s Work (State Street Press, 2000). Campbell’s work has earned him a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and two fellowships from the Florida Arts council.

Campbell also is the long-time director of Anhinga Press, one of the leading all-poetry publishers in the country. He teaches English at Florida A&M University.He lives in Gadsden County, just west of Tallahassee, with his wife and daughter.

For more information, call The Georgia Review at 706/542-3481, visit the official GR website, or follow the Review on Facebook.

“Meditation on Today’s Limit of Pleasure”

Sometimes the cicadas come riding in wild
and grow loud in the trees, like a tide
that surges every few seconds.
We could call it a cycle of cicada song
rising from the creek, rattling
the hardwood leaves, and soaring
into the loblollies until they seem
to take off, each one a jet
engine on full, flying into the sun
and a universe that hovers in the blue
tomorrow, the promise early October
makes. I want to be the man,
the God, the recording engineer
who sits far off in the lost bower of harmonics
turning the knob marked CICADA, turning it
past four, past five, to seven and eight –
then backing off, somewhere in my heart
the hint of mercy saying We can’t stand anymore.
This song. This sun. This blue. These cicadas.

[By Rick Campbell, first published in The Georgia Review, Fall 1999]

“Legend”

He came from a land that didn’t need words.
Fire singed the sky, soot and ash
settled on the tongue. Speech
was furred and superfluous.
He grew older and left, crisscrossed
America, sat silent and stranger
in the loud seats of cars. Salesman
and truck driver wove their special language,
piston driven to talk and brood.
He listened and thought his shadow
saved them from their lost dreams.
Throughout his land he became legend,
Buck’s boy who never talked. No one
at the Legion or VFW, no one
at the hundred Bohunk and Italian bars,
no one at J&L, Armco, Coppers,
Phoenix Glass, or American Bridge,
no cops, no railroad dicks,
no coaches named Maccalini
ever heard him speak. He saved it.
It’s for you, and you haven’t come yet.

[By Rick Campbell, first published in The Georgia Review, Fall 1984]

Congratulations to Deirdra McAfee!

2010-12-16T14:12:00.001-05:00

Deirdra McAfee of Richmond, VA, is the winner of the latest New Millennium Writings Short-Short Fiction Prize for her story "Hydroplane," a piece of flash fiction about lethal jealousy among brothers. McAfee's work has previously appeared in Confrontation, Willow Springs, and The Diagram, and her short story "The Shield of the Norns" was published in the Fall 2009 issue of The Georgia Review.

Congratulations, Deirdra!

[photo: Bob Thomas]

GR writeup on Essay Daily

2010-12-09T08:19:00.000-05:00

Ander Monson and the good folks at the Essay Daily blog posted a nice overview of GR ("Bringing the Finest Writers to the Best Readers") earlier this week -- check it out here.

Reading by poets Cleopatra Mathis and Nicole Higgins tonight, 7pm, Cine, free!

2010-11-09T14:03:00.000-05:00

Cleopatra Mathis reads in Athens tonight as part of her Georgia Poetry Circuit tour, and UGA graduate student Nicole Higgins opens the show. The event begins at 7pm at Cine and is free and open to the public. Full details can be found in the blog post directly below this one. Y'all come!

Cleopatra Mathis and Nicole Higgins reading in Athens, Tuesday November 9

2010-11-05T11:25:00.004-04:00

On Tuesday November 9, beginning at 7 pm at Ciné Bar/Café/Cinema (234 West Hancock Avenue in downtown Athens), Cleopatra Mathis will give a free, public reading presented by The Georgia Review and the Georgia Poetry Circuit, a nine-member group of colleges and universities that supports statewide tours by nationally recognized poets. Nicole Higgins, a University of Georgia MFA student in creative writing, will be the opening reader.

The Georgia Review, a quarterly journal of arts and letters founded at UGA in 1947 and published there ever since, has been the circuit’s Athens sponsor since the tour’s 1985 inception.

Cleopatra Mathis was born and reared in Ruston, Louisiana. Her first five books of poems , including Aerial View of Louisiana and The Bottom Land, were published by Sheep Meadow Press in New York City; her sixth, White Sea, came out from Sarabande Books of Louisville in 2005. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, among them The Georgia Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Southern Review, and The Extraordinary Tide: Poetry by American Women. Her honors and awards include two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the 2001 Jane Kenyon Award, the Academy of American Poets’ Peter Lavin Award, two Pushcart Prizes, the Robert Frost Resident Poet Award, and many more. Mathis is the Frederick Sessions Beebe Professor of the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College, where she has directed the creative writing program since 1982.

Nicole Higgins has been a Callaloo and a Cave Canem fellow, and she holds an MA from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Some of her recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Moon City Review, Natural Bridge, and Passages North.

This event is the first of three Georgia Poetry Circuit readings scheduled at Cine for the 2010-11 academic year; the others will feature Rick Campbell (January 24) and Brian Turner (April 1).

For more information, call The Georgia Review at (706) 542-3481, visit our website at www.thegeorgiareview.com, or check us out on Facebook.

Here's a fine poem Cleopatra Mathis published in the Spring 2009 issue of The Georgia Review:

Survival: A Guide

It’s not easy living here, waiting to be charmed

by the first little scribble of green. Even in May

the crows want to own the place, and the heron, old bent thing,

spends hours looking like graying bark,

part of a dead trunk lying over opaque water.

She strikes the pose so long I begin to worry

she’s determined to be something ordinary.

The small lakes continue their slide into bog and muck—

remember when they ran clear, an invisible spring

renewing the water? But the ducks stay longer, amusing

ruffle and chatter. I can be distracted.

If I do catch her move, the heron appears

to have no particular fear or hunger, her gaunt body

hinged haphazardly, a few gears unlocking

one wing, then another. More than a generation here

and every year more drab.

Once I called her blue heron, as in Great Blue,

true to a book—part myth, part childhood’s color.

Older now, I see her plain: a mere surviving

against a weedy bank with fox dens

and the ruthless, overhead patrol.

Some blind clockwork keeps her going.

The Georgia Review Sponsors Inaugural Literary Program, “The Comedy of Survival,” at Bowers House Writers’ Retreat in Canon

2010-10-21T11:16:00.000-04:00

The Georgia Review is pleased to announce its sponsorship of “The Comedy of Survival,” the inaugural literary event at the newly opened Bowers House Writers’ Retreat and Center for Lifelong Learning in Canon, Georgia, on Saturday, October 23, from 10 a.m.- 5 p.m.

South Carolina fiction writer George Singleton and Georgia poet Alice Friman will give readings, conduct workshops, and participate in a panel discussion of the program topic with Georgia Review editor Stephen Corey.

Check-in and informal tours of the beautiful 90-year-old, 4000-square-foot, seven-bedroom Bowers House will take place from 10 - 11a.m., with Singleton and Friman reading from their own work between 11 a.m. and noon. Lunch (included in the registration fee) will be from noon to 1 p.m.

Workshops in fiction (Singleton) and poetry (Friman) will take place from 1-2:15 p.m., with the discussion focusing on the art of weaving humor into all kinds of material—even the most serious and difficult. Participants are invited to bring for discussion multiple copies of a short poem or the opening page of a story in which they are trying to employ humor.

Following a break, Singleton, Friman, and Corey will conduct their panel—with audience participation—from 2:45-4 p.m. The day will conclude with a reception from 4-5 p.m.

George Singleton, a Georgia Review discovery some twenty years ago, has since published four collections of short stories, two novels, and an irreverent how-to book titled Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds: Indispensable Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers. His other titles, which in themselves provide an intriguing introduction to his worldview, include The Half-Mammals of Dixie, Why Dogs Chase Cars, Drowning in Gruel, and Work Shirts for Madmen. A recent recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Singleton has had work published and reprinted in many magazines, including the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s, and in anthologies such as New Stories from the South and Surreal South. He lives in Easley, South Carolina, and teaches at the Governor’s School for the Arts in Greenville.

Alice Friman’s eight poetry collections include The Book of the Rotten Daughter, Zoo, and Inverted Fire; her ninth, Vinculum, is forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in 2011. Professor Emerita at the University of Indianapolis, Friman has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Indiana Arts Commission, the Arts Council of Indianapolis, the MacDowell and Yaddo colonies, and the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest. Like George Singleton a frequent contributor to The Georgia Review, Friman is currently poet-in-residence at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville.

The registration fees on the day of the program will be $90 and $80. The Bowers House is located just off Georgia highway 17 at 100 Depot Street in downtown Canon—thirty miles north of Athens, four miles north of Royston, and five miles from the Lavonia exit (#58) off I-85. Easily accessible from Atlanta, Greenville/Spartanburg, and Charlotte, the Bowers House offers rooms for working writers at modest weekly rates as well as spacious common areas for readings and other literary gatherings.

For more information, contact the Bowers House Program Director Beth Stormont at beth.stormont@gmail.com or 706-245-6086, or the Bowers House owner Laura Foreman at laura.foreman@gmail.com, or visit www.thebowershousewriters.com.

Jane McKinley and The Georgia Review featured on Poetry Daily

2010-10-18T10:59:00.006-04:00

"It was a perfect language— / rarefied, precise, and all my own."

Jane McKinley's "Speaking Gillican," from the current, Fall 2010 issue of The Georgia Review, is featured on today's Poetry Daily.

For the back story on how McKinley, a professional musician and artistic director of the Dryden Ensemble ("which specializes in performing music of the 17th and 18th centuries on period instruments"), became "a publishing poet in middle age," click here -- it's one of The Georgia Review's recently-launched series of web-only special features.

Her poetry manuscript "Vanitas" recently won the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize and will be published in early 2011 by Texas Tech University Press.

Fred Chappell wins the 2010 John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities

2010-10-18T10:34:00.002-04:00

Fred Chappell has been given the John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities, with which the North Carolina Arts Council “recognizes those exceptional individuals who throughout their lives and careers have strengthened the educational, cultural, and civic lives of North Carolinians.” The late Dr. John Tyler served as chancellor of North Carolina State University and was a founding member of the North Carolina Humanities Council. For more information, visit www.nchumanities.org.

Fred Chappell is a long-time member of The Georgia Review’s board of advisory and contributing editors, regularly wrote essay-reviews of new poetry collections for our pages from 1989-97, and has published his own short stories and poems with us as well.

Congratulations, Fred! The honor is well-deserved.

“Once Upon a Time in Athens: The Legacy of Raymond Andrews” now just two days away!

2010-10-11T15:12:00.001-04:00

“Once Upon a Time in Athens: The Legacy of Raymond Andrews” begins this Wednesday, October 13, with an opening reception at 6pm, followed by a screening of Jesse Freeman's film Somebody Else, Somewhere Else: The Raymond Andrews Story and a post-movie discussion featuring participants Gary Gildner, Shirley Andrews Lowrie (Raymond and Benny’s sister), Jesse Freeman, Judy Long, Philip Lee Williams, and Georgia Review editor Stephen Corey -- all free and open to the public, and all happening at Ciné, 234 West Hancock Avenue in downtown Athens.

Events continue on Thursday, October 14.

You can find pre-event coverage of “Once Upon a Time in Athens: The Legacy of Raymond Andrews”in Flagpole, the Athens Banner-Herald, and of course at the website of The Georgia Review.

2010-09-22T10:03:00.001-04:00

On Thursday, September 23, at 7:00 p.m., Georgia Public Broadcasting will present Somebody Else, Somewhere Else: The Raymond Andrews Story, an independent documentary film about the life of the Georgia-born novelist. The film will air on GPB’s statewide television network.

Somebody Else, Somewhere Else: The Raymond Andrews Story will also be screened at Ciné BarCaféCinéma, 234 West Hancock Avenue in downtown Athens on October 13 beginning at 7pm. The Ciné showing is part of The Georgia Review's two-day celebration of Andrews' life and work, “Once Upon a Time in Athens: The Legacy of Raymond Andrews.” For full details on “Once Upon a Time in Athens," click here.

Raymond Andrews (1934-1991) was one of ten children born into a sharecropping family. Though his family was identified as African American, he also had Scotch-Irish and Native American ancestry, which gave rise to the ambiguous racial self-identity that he often explored in his writing. Andrews was part of the Great Intellectual Migration of African Americans away from the rural South to the urban North. After fighting in the Korean War, Andrews studied at Michigan State University and later moved to New York City, where he wrote his Muskhogean Trilogy. After an amicable divorce and the dissolution of Dial Press, where his work had been published, the writer relocated to Athens, Ga., in 1984. Andrews lived and worked there until November 1991, when he died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Raymond Andrews was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame at a ceremony in Athens in March 2009.

Somebody Else, Somewhere Else features archival footage of interviews with the writer, as well as original interviews with his friends, family members and literary experts. The film includes an interview with Raymond’s brother, Benny Andrews, who was a world-renowned visual artist. Benny and Raymond shared a close but complicated relationship that informed each of their bodies of work. Other interviewees include the novelists Philip Lee Williams, Terry Kay, Tony Grooms, Richard Bausch and Gary Gildner.

Andrews is best known for his novel, Appalachee Red, a riotous tale of racial redemption set in the fictional Muskhogean County, a location modeled after Andrews’ birthplace, Morgan County, Ga. The book won the James Baldwin Prize for Fiction after Baldwin endorsed it. Appalachee Red was followed on the Dial Press roster by Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat TennesseeBaby Sweet’s, a group of novels known collectively as the Muskhogean Trilogy. Andrews later published a memoir, The Last Radio Baby, and a collection of novellas called Jessie & Jesus and Cousin Claire. and

Please check local listings for the GPB channel in your area. Watch GPB TV on these nine digital stations across Georgia: Atlanta – Channel 8.1; Albany – WABW/14.1, Augusta – WCES/20.1, Chatsworth – WCLP/18.1, Columbus – WJSP/28.1, Dawson – WACS/25.1, Macon – WMUM/29.1, Savannah – WVAN/9.1, Waycross – WXGA/8.1.

All hail Laura Newbern, winner of a 2010 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award!

2010-09-21T14:19:00.004-04:00

Longtime GR friend and world-class poet Laura Newbern has been named as one of this year's winners of the prestigious Rona Jaffe Writers' Foundation Award!

The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards identify and support women writers of exceptional talent. The emphasis is on those in the early stages of their writing careers. This unique program offers grants to writers of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry to make writing time available and provide assistance for such specific purposes as child care, research and related travel costs.

Laura Newbern is an associate professor of English at Georgia College & State University. She received a B.A. from Barnard, an M.A. from N.Y.U., and an M.F.A. from Warren Wilson College. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2007, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and Triquarterly. Her collection Love and the Eye was selected by Claudia Rankine to receive the 2010 Kore Press First Book Award and will be published this fall.

Ms. Newbern’s new manuscript, tentatively titled Nightfall, focuses on her current home of Milledgeville, Georgia—her neighborhood and a local state hospital that was once the largest asylum in the world. She says of her project, “Presently, I live in a small town, and I find myself, many evenings, on my porch, watching the movements of my neighbors. But I also mean ‘nightfall’ in the sense of mental darkness. My interest lies in the notion of ‘asylum’ as inviolable refuge, in the salubrious environments created for sometimes terrible isolation.” Ms. Newbern will use her Writer’s Award to take a semester off from teaching to work on this book.

The recognition is well-deserved -- congratulations, Laura!

Congratulations to prizewinner Melissa Morphew!

2010-09-01T15:59:00.002-04:00

We've just learned that Melissa Morphew's Bluster has been named the winner of the 2010 Sacramento Poetry Center Manuscript Contest. Melissa is a former graduate student assistant at The Georgia Review and is a graduate of the University of Georgia's PhD program in English. Morphew is the recipient of several national and international poetry prizes, including: The Academy of American Poets College Prize, The Randall Jarrell International Poetry Prize, The Cecil J. Hackney Literary Award in Poetry, The W.B. Yeats' Society Poetry Prize, and several Pushcart Prize nominations. In 2006, her full-length collection of poems, Fathom, was published by Turning Point Press. Morphew's poems can be found in the pages of the most respected U.S. literary journals. Her work has been included in The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is currently a professor of creative writing at Sam Houston State in Huntsville, TX.

Congratulations, Melissa!

17 Literary Journals That Might Survive the Internet

2010-08-23T16:28:00.000-04:00

Over at The Huffington Post, GR contributor Anis Shivani is at it again, this time with his list of 17 Literary Journals That Might Survive the Internet. GR comes in as number 14, but I'm not sure what the logic behind the sequencing might be. In any case, Shivani's comments and those of the seventeen editors make for interesting reading and discussion.

Anis Shivani's "15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers"

2010-08-11T12:57:00.000-04:00

GR contributor Anis Shivani ("Just How New is the Terror Paradigm?" from our Winter 2008 issue) has a piece in the August 7 edition of The Huffington Post that's causing quite a stir -- "The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers." I won't name names here -- follow the link and read his list (complete with photos!) yourself. I will say this, however...I completely disagree with one of his choices, and partially disagree with another, but that's to be expected. I'm sure Shivani wouldn't have it any other way, since all such lists are by definition reductive...and because I take it that he fully expected to provoke controversy and discussion.

The internet is bursting at the seams with comments and reactions. Lincoln Michel discusses it all on Faster Times (and gathers some helpful links as well), and on the Publisher's Weekly blog Craig Morgan Teicher, another GR contributor, responds with a list of underrated writers.

Readers of this blog should by all means use the "comment" function at the bottom of this post to name their own most overrated/underrated contemporary American writers, or to register their opinions on the matter as a whole.

Happy listing!

NewPages Blog takes notice of the Summer issue of The Georgia Review

2010-08-11T11:25:00.001-04:00

Thanks to Denise at the NewPages Blog for her nice words about our Summer 2010 issue, available at retailers and via online ordering now!

Stunning Covers :: The Georgia Review

The Summer 2010 front and back covers of The Georgia Review feature photography by Connie Imboden, whose work is also beautifully reproduced in a full-color, glossy, center portfolio - "Danse Macabre" - introduced by Susan Ludvigson. The Georgia Review website shares several images along with Ludvigson's intro.

2010-08-02T10:16:00.000-04:00

Today, Monday August 2, the Poetry Daily website features Coleman Barks' poem "Lightning Bugs and the Pleiades," which is also part of the lineup of the just-released Summer 2010 issue of The Georgia Review.

Thanks to Don Selby, Diane Boller, Jim Gibson, and all the good folks at Poetry Daily.!

Join The Georgia Review's email list!

2010-07-30T11:28:00.000-04:00

GR has just launched its email list -- sign up by visiting the official GR homepage and clicking the "Join Our Email List" link located on the right hand side of the page.

By signing up for this service you'll automatically receive announcements concerning issue releases, special events, and other GR news from time to time -- we promise not to deluge you with information, however, and all email addresses will be held in the strictest confidence.

Hilda Raz selected for the 2010 Stanley W. Lindberg Award for Literary Editing

2010-07-30T10:55:00.003-04:00

Professor Hilda Raz, Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, is the recipient of the 2010 Stanley W. Lindberg Award for Literary Editing. This award is presented to someone who has labored to uphold the highest literary standards in a magazine or small press. It is given in honor of the late Stanley Lindberg, a well-known man of letters who brought The Georgia Review to national prominence.

This is one of many honors that Professor Raz has received during her distinguished career. Professor Raz will retire from UNL and from the editorship of Prairie Schooner in August.

Former GR staffer L.S. Klatt wins Iowa Poetry Prize

2010-07-30T10:51:00.000-04:00

Congratulations to L.S. Klatt, whose Cloud of Ink was selected as one of the winners of the Iowa Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Iowa Press in March 2011. Klatt was the 2000-2001 assistant to the editors at The Georgia Review. He teaches American literature and creative writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His poems have appeared in such journals as the Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Chicago Review, FIELD, Cincinnati Review, jubilat, Colorado Review, Iowa Review, Eleven Eleven, and Verse. His first book, Interloper, won the Juniper Prize for Poetry. Klatt is a graduate of Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, and holds advanced degrees from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, St. John’s College, and the University of Georgia.

Poets House Showcase, NYC!

2010-07-14T15:51:00.001-04:00

New York City's Poets House is once again offering its annual Showcase, a wide-ranging exhibition that features "close to 2,200 books of, and about, poetry: anthologies; chapbooks; translations; poetry-related prose (essays, memoirs, academic works, biographies); poetry objects (poetry baseball cards, a series of poetry postcards); and multimedia titles published in the 14 months since the 2009 showcase," according to the New York Times. The collection will be open to the public through July 31 during normal library hours (Tuesday–Friday, 11:00am–7:00pm, Saturday, 11:00am–6:00pm). Admission is free!

I'll be in NYC for a couple of days starting in a week or so, and will definitely visit the Poets House to check out the showcase as well as their beautiful new building located at 10 River Terrace, New York, NY 10282. Poets House can be reached by phone at 212-431-7920.

Once I've eyeballed the showcase myself, I'll report my findings right here on The Georgia Review blog.

Congratulations to GR contributor Robin Black

2010-07-12T15:23:00.004-04:00

Congratulations to Robin Black, whose new short story collection, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (Random House), has been shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor Short Story Prize and is also a Summer Reading Pick in the July issue of O Magazine. One of the stories, "Tableau Vivant," appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of The Georgia Review -- read an excerpt here.

For more information on the Frank O'Connor award, click here -- plus here's a link to Robin Black's own site.

Scott Russell Sanders lands a big one!

2010-07-08T11:00:00.002-04:00

Scott Russell Sanders, a frequent contributor to The Georgia Review, has just been named the National recipient of the 2010 Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award -- click the link for full details!

Sanders' "Simplicity and Sanity" was the cornerstone of GR's Spring 2009 special feature "Culture and the Environment -- A Conversation in Five Essays," which also featured work by Reg Saner, David Gessner, Lauret Edith Savoy, and Alison Hawthorne Deming.

Of the Glick Award, Sanders says:

“My wife and I moved to Indiana in 1971, and ever since our arrival I have grounded my writing in this place, hoping through my books to reach my neighbors as well as readers across America. So I feel deeply honored to be named this year’s national winner of the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award. Like many writers, I entered the world of books through the doors of public libraries. So it gives me special pleasure that this award comes from the Indianapolis-Marion County Public Library Foundation.”

Visit Scott Russell Sanders' own website here -- and for more world-class writing from Sanders, Saner, Gessner, Savoy, Deming, and many, many more, subscribe to The Georgia Review -- we'll send four beautifully produced issues straight to your mailbox each and every year!

Congratulations, Scott!

The Georgia Review Earns Ten Honors at GAMMA Awards Ceremony, Including Fourth Consecutive General Excellence Prize

2010-05-03T11:42:00.000-04:00

For the fourth straight year the University of Georgia’s Georgia Review has won a gold for General Excellence in the Magazine Association of the Southeast’s annual GAMMA Awards competition. During the award ceremony held on April 29 at the W Midtown Atlanta Hotel, the internationally known quarterly publication also earned three other golds and a total of ten citations from the various judging panels drawn out of a national pool of professional editors and journalists. The 2010 awards are for issues published during 2009.

The judges’ statement for the General Excellence award asserts that “The Georgia Review thrives in a no-man’s land between books and magazines, a place the Internet has yet to find and that television could never envision. The foundation for its eclectic compilations of poetry and essays, fiction and art, is not what has happened yesterday or today, or even predictions for tomorrow, but timelessness.”

In the Best Feature category, The Georgia Review swept the top three spots: The bronze award went to Whitney Groves for her first-ever publication anywhere, “O Taste and See,” which recounts a cross-country road trip both physical and spiritual—in Groves’s words, “the search for transcendence at seventy miles an hour.” Mary Cappello took the silver award for “Getting the News: A Signer among Signs,” a highly personal account of battling breast cancer combined with this intellectual feminist’s take on the related language games played by the medical profession and society in general.

Best Feature gold went to “Music From,” a multipart section of writings by and about the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet Albert Goldbarth published in the Winter 2009 issue of The Georgia Review. “Full of wonder, information, and wild metaphors,” said the judging panel, “this packaged feature honors the beauty, power, and mystery of words and soars with imagination and humanity.”

The Review also earned top ranking in the Best Profile category with Judith Kitchen’s “True Heart,” the author’s detailed examination of, and meditation on, a journal her mother kept as a young woman during a 1930 trans-Atlantic ship crossing and tour of Europe. The judges term the work “spellbinding” and note that “thanks to her daughter’s smooth biographical transitions and asides, the subject of the profile emerges less from what she included in the journal’s pages, more from what she left unsaid or crossed out.”

The Best Essay gold went to Alison Hawthorne Deming’s “Culture, Biology, and Emergence,” which was one part of the Review’s Spring 2009 issue feature titled “Culture and the Environment—A Conversation in Five Essays.” Characterizing Deming’s study as “a wise, profound, anecdotal, far-reaching, and truly philosophical account of many seemingly disparate topics,” the judges also observe, “How comforting it is to know that there is a periodical out there that consistently publishes essays this thoughtful.”

Best Essay bronze went to the distinguished literary and social critic Ihab Hassan for “The Way We Have Become: A Surfeit of Seeming,” and the Best Single Issue bronze went to the Summer 2009 Georgia Review—which included, among many others, the Hassan, Cappello, and Kitchen pieces already cited.

Finally, two honorable mentions came to the Review: in Best Series for the abovementioned “Culture and the Environment” essays and in Best Profile for “Why All This Music?”—Albert Goldbarth’s ingeniously conducted self-interview that was part of the gold award-winning feature “Music From.”

Stephen Corey, current editor of The Georgia Review and a member of its staff since 1983, accepted the awards on behalf of the journal, its writers and artists, and the University of Georgia.

For further information, or to arrange an interview with one of the editors of The Georgia Review, phone (706) 542-3481 or email garev@uga.edu.

Also, please join us on Facebook, where we can be found simply by searching for "The Georgia Review."

Come celebrate Earth Day this evening with your friends from The Georgia Review and their special guests!

2010-04-22T10:54:00.000-04:00

Today's the big day -- the 40th anniversary of Earth Day! As we hope you've heard by now, The Georgia Review is sponsoring a celebration at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia this evening (Thursday, April 22) from 5:30 to 7:30 pm. The whole shebang is free and open to the public, and the weather is going to be perfect, so make plans to be there!

The first part of the program -- readings by our friends Judith Ortiz Cofer and George Singleton -- will take place in the beautiful Cecil B. Day Chapel (pictured above in a snapshot from our 2009 Earth Day event), and will be followed immediately by a reception on the patio downstairs from the Chapel. The reception will include food and drink from Athens' own home.made catering and Shiraz Fine Wines and Gourmet, who along with the Friends of the State Botanical Garden of Georgia have graciously agreed to serve as co-sponsors for the festivities.

Photographs by Michael J. Marshall, the Review’s Winter 2009 featured artist, will be on display and local musical duo Hawk Proof Rooster will perform their distinctive old-time tunes.

The just-released Spring 2010 edition of The Georgia Review will be available for purchase, both singly and via subscription. It's a particularly outstanding issue featuring new work by renowned artist Kara Walker, essays by Reg Saner, Anne Goldman, and Laura Sewell Matter, and a new poem from Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, along with many other fine poems, short stories and reviews.

For more information, contact The Georgia Review at 706/542-3481 or garev@uga.edu, or see www.thegeorgiareview.com, tgrblog.blogspot.com or Facebook.

For full details on Cofer, Singleton, and more, see the blog post of April 15 at tgrblog.blogspot.com.

Barry Lopez hits the airwaves courtesy of Bill Moyers and PBS

2010-04-16T14:51:00.001-04:00

Photo by David Liittschwager

Acclaimed writer Barry Lopez, who since 1993 has published five essays and two short stories in The Georgia Review, will soon be featured on the nationwide PBS television show Bill Moyers Journal. The broadcast is set for Friday, April 30 at 9pm, though as with most nationally distributed PBS shows the date and time may vary depending on your local station's schedule. To check the time and date for your area, follow this link and enter your zip code.

Lopez's most recent appearance in our pages was in the Fall 2009 issue -- an essay titled "On the Border," an excerpt from which is available online here.

Here's a link to Lopez's own personal website which should tell you anything you ever wanted to know about the man and his important, expansive body of work.

All of us here at GR will be watching -- will you??

Announcing The Georgia Review's Second Annual Earth Day Celebration and Spring Issue Release Party -- April 22

2010-04-15T13:41:00.003-04:00

The Georgia Review will present its second annual Earth Day Celebration and Spring Issue Release Party on Thursday, April 22, 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia. Acclaimed writers Judith Ortiz Cofer, a 2010 inductee into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and George Singleton, a 2009 Guggenheim fellow, will read in the Cecil B. Day Chapel. A reception will follow on the patio. The event is free and open to the public.

Photographs by Michael J. Marshall, the Review’s Winter 2009 featured artist, will be on display; local musical duo Hawk Proof Rooster will perform; and copies of The Georgia Review will be available for purchase, both individually and via subscription.

Cosponsors of this Earth Day event are the Friends of the State Botanical Garden of Georgia, home.made catering, and Shiraz Fine Wines and Gourmet.

Cofer is the Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. A widely anthologized poet, fiction writer, and essayist, her books include A Love Story Beginning in Spanish: Poems (2005), The Meaning of Consuelo (2003), Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer (2000), The Latin Deli (1993), and Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990)—whose title essay was first published in The Georgia Review.

Singleton has published four collections of short stories—Drowning in Gruel (2006), Why Dogs Chase Cars (2004), The Half-Mammals of Dixie (2002), and These People Are Us (2001)—two novels, and most recently Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds: Indispensable Wisdom and Cautionary Advice For Writers (2008). His short stories have appeared in The Georgia Review nine times since his 1989 debut, and he has also published in other prominent magazines, including Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Southern Review, and Kenyon Review. He lives in Pickens County, South Carolina.

Marshall is an associate professor and area chair of photography in the UGA Lamar Dodd School. His work has been exhibited widely, including recently at Krause Gallery in Atlanta, Definition Gallery in Baltimore, and the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Nancy and Charlie Hartness of Hawk Proof Rooster play “old-time” music and songs featuring fiddle, ukulele, guitar, banjo and vocals. They have performed on WUGA’s It’s Friday and at the Folklife in Georgia Festival, the North Georgia Folk Festival, Athfest and elsewhere.

The Spring 2010 issue of The Georgia Review features new work by renowned artist Kara Walker, essays by Reg Saner, Anne Goldman, and Laura Sewell Matter, and a new poem from Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, along with many other poems, short stories and reviews.

For more information, contact The Georgia Review at 706/542-3481 or garev@uga.edu, or see www.thegeorgiareview.com, tgrblog.blogspot.com or Facebook.

The Georgia Review's Spring 2010 issue is now available!

2010-04-01T16:58:00.003-04:00

Kara Walker, Atlanta-reared and internationally revered, heads up the cadre of creative artists in the just-released Spring 2010 issue of The Georgia Review who forcefully remind us that even in times of economic crisis we must not lose sight of fundamental human concerns, needs, and values.

Walker’s stark shadow-and-fire image, Bureau of Refugees: Mr. Alexander, colored preacher brutally beaten and forced to leave, results in what the editors believe to be one of the most striking Georgia Review covers in the sixty-three year history of the University of Georgia’s National Magazine Award-winning quarterly journal of arts and letters. Ten Walker pieces in all illustrate the validity of her self-described artistic mission: “I’m interested in the continuity of conflict, the creation of racist narratives, or nationalist narratives, or whatever narratives people use to construct a group identity and to keep themselves whole—[and] such activity has a darker side to it, since it allows people to lash out at whoever’s not in the group.

Essayists Reg Saner, Anne Goldman, and Laura Sewell Matter engage in similarly vital dialogues. With “My Fall into Knowledge,” the well-known environmentalist Saner argues that the inexplicable mysteries of the earth and the universe are far more miraculous than the narrow religious certainties we often try to paste onto them. Saner’s centerpiece is a detailed recounting of his public debate with an anti-Darwinian fundamentalist preacher.

In “Questions of Transport: Reading Primo Levi Reading Dante,” Goldman claims a sanctity for the act of reading by looking at—among other things—the way Levi helped himself to survive the Nazi concentration camps by remembering and quoting from Dante’s great Divine Comedy. And in “Franz Schubert Dreamt of Indians,” Laura Matter explores the strange implications of the early-nineteenth-century composer’s deathbed request for the “comfort” of James Fenimore Cooper novels.

The short fiction in the Spring 2010 Georgia Review does not shy from ethical issues, either. In Anna Solomon’s “The Lobster Mafia Story,” a well-meaning New England fisherman becomes a party to murder—and his wife, the story’s narrator, becomes complicit in her husband’s crime. Jack Driscoll’s “Sky Riders” looks at two struggling and crumbling lower-class families in the upper Midwest, with a teenage boy from one of them charged with trying to make sense of the mess.

Nobel Prize-winning poet Derek Walcott recalls “The Spectre of Empire,” and in doing so he provides a powerful lead-in for Kara Walker’s art portfolio. Lola Haskins puts scientific inquiry under an ethical microscope in her poems “Drosophila” and “The Dew-Tasters,” while Pulitzer Prize-winner Stephen Dunn takes on moral ambiguity via both humor and solemnity in “The Good News,” observing that “The good news is that I know who I am; that’s the bad news, too.”

Single copies of this issue and subscriptions can be purchased online at the official website of The Georgia Review, or by calling (706) 542-3481 or 1-800-542-3481. Many bookstores and newsstands across the nation also carry the magazine -- if you don't see it on the shelf of your favorite local store, keep pestering the owners until they begin to stock it!

Robert Morgan and Ida Stewart tonight at Cine!

2010-03-29T11:06:00.000-04:00

Poet, novelist, and short story writer Robert Morgan will give a free, public reading tonight, Monday 3/29, beginning at 7pm at Cine in downtown Athens. UGA graduate student and local poet Ida Stewart will open. Morgan's books will be available for sale and signing.

For full details on Morgan, Stewart, and tonight's event, see the blog post below.

Distinguished writer Robert Morgan reads in Athens on Monday, 3/29

2010-03-26T10:25:00.000-04:00

The Georgia Review presents acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and poet Robert Morgan reading from his work at 7 p.m. on Monday, March 29, at Ciné in downtown Athens. Morgan’s appearance is the last of this year’s trio of Georgia Poetry Circuit events, and is free and open to the public. Athens-based poet Ida Stewart will open.

Robert Morgan has published many books in multiple genres. His poetry collections include The Strange Attractor: New and Selected Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), Topsoil Road (LSU Press, 2000), Sigodlin (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), and At the Edge of the Orchard Country (Wesleyan, 1987). Among his many novels is the bestseller Gap Creek (1999), which Oprah Winfrey selected for her book club in 2000. In both his poetry and prose, Morgan explores Appalachian culture, often drawing on strange and haunting family legends as a starting point. His work forms an extended portrait of the Blue Ridge Mountain region in which he grew up, with its unique ways of life, its dedication to hard but honest labor, and its close connection to the earth.

Of Morgan’s Topsoil Road, the Southern Humanities Review said: “It is such a pleasure to rest on the fertile banks of [his] imagination, engaged by a steady current of haunting images and carefully chiseled phrases, that when the final poem comes, the reader feels as if the power company dammed the Green River without putting it to a vote.”

Robert Morgan has lived most of his adult life in central New York state, where he has taught at Cornell University since the early 1970s.

Ida Stewart holds an MFA in creative writing from The Ohio State University and is currently pursuing her PhD in creative writing at The University of Georgia. Her poems and short fiction have been published in The Laurel Review, The Country Dog Review, and Staccato, and new work is forthcoming in MAYDAY Magazine. Her poetry manuscript Gloss was selected by Claudia Rankine as a finalist for this year’s Kore Press First Book Award. She is a native of West Virginia.

The Georgia Review is the local sponsor for the Georgia Poetry Circuit, a consortium of schools around the state who cooperate in touring three notable poets across Georgia every year. Founded in 1947 at The University of Georgia, where it remains headquartered today, The Georgia Review is one of the nation’s top publications of arts and letters, as evidenced not only by the continuing quality of its contents but also by the numerous national and regional awards it has received over the years.

Robert Morgan published the following poem in the Spring 2000 issue of The Georgia Review:

SNAKE FENCE

A fence will plant a row of trees

it’s said, just like an orchardman

had set them. Birds that rest on rails

or wire or posts do all the work.

And as the fence falls down or rots

and disappears the trees reach up

and march into maturity

in line. But where a snake fence zagged

like splintered lightning through a field

and pinked the edge of pasture lot,

the trees the birds set out are staggered.

The line tacks folded in its stretch

across the ridge or peneplain,

but still articulates where rails

lay angled, meshed with rails this way,

that way, in rhythm and in rhyme

across the open field beneath

the larger measure of the mountains.

For more information, please contact The Georgia Review at (706) 542-3481 or garev@uga.edu, visit our website (www.thegeorgiareview.com) and blog (tgrblog.blogspot.com), or become a friend through our Facebook page.

A lament for the passing of Barry Hannah

2010-03-05T17:22:00.000-05:00

Barry Hannah, novelist and short story writer extraordinaire, died Monday, March 1st at his home in Oxford, Mississippi. There are lots of folks in Oxford and beyond who are in mourning over his passing. Count me among them. Though my personal association with him was brief -- a couple of weeks at a summer writer's retreat in Vermont about 15 years ago -- I never forgot the kindness he showed toward me and the genuine interest he took in our conversations and interactions. With a few direct and honest words he offered me advice that led me here to Athens, Georgia, instead of to a couple of other destinations I was considering at the time. I'm quite sure he didn't intend for anything he said to me that day to be life-altering, but sometimes that's how things play out. I miss him already, though it's been years since I've seen him.

Here's a link to the obituary the NYT ran on Wednesday.

Hannah published but one story in The Georgia Review -- "Ride, Fly, Penetrate, Loiter" (Spring 1983). It's classic Barry. Here's a brief quote: ". . .the last thing of any note I saw with my right eye was a Dalmatian dog run out near the road, and this was wonderful in rural Mississippi -- practically a miracle -- it was truth and beauty like John Keats has in that poem. And I wanted a dog to redeem my life as drunks and terrible women do."

And here's what he scrawled on the title page of my paperback copy of his short story collection Bats Out of Hell: "For David Ingle, C.S.A. May you prosper, and you will." He was more accurate than he could have known.

Al Maginnes's Between States

2010-03-01T10:35:00.003-05:00

Georgia Review author Al Maginnes has a chapbook, Between States, that will be issued in May as part of Main Street Rag Press's Author's Choice series. Main Street Rag is taking advance orders for the chapbook now. It is available for the unbelievably low price of $3.50 (plus shipping and handling) now. The following links will take you to Maginnes’s author's page, with sample poems: http://www.mainstreetrag.com/AMaginnes.html.

The more pre-orders, the better, as the number of copies published is based on the number of pre-orders. This will be a limited edition, so get it while you can!

Please note that Between States may also be ordered by check or credit card directly from the publisher; however, the discount is not as much if ordered off-line. Send to: Main Street Rag, PO BOX 690100, Charlotte, NC 28227-7001. Credit card orders, call 704-573-2516 (M-F 9am-5pm EST).

Congratulations to 2010 PEN/Faulkner Fiction Finalist Lorraine Lopez!

2010-02-26T10:47:00.000-05:00

Here at GR we're thrilled to learn that former staffer Lorraine Lopez has been named as a finalist for the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her short story collection Homicide Survivors Picnic. Full details here!

[Lopez photo courtesy of Vanderbilt University]

2010-02-22T08:33:00.003-05:00

The award-winning poet Keith Ratzlaff will read from his work on Wednesday, February 24, at 7:00 p.m. at Cine on Hancock Street in downtown Athens. His appearance is sponsored by The Georgia Review, the University of Georgia’s internationally known quarterly journal of arts and letters, and is open to the public free of charge.

Ratzlaff won the 1996 Anhinga Prize for Poetry for Man under a Pear Tree. His other books include Across The Known World (Loess Hills Press, 1997) and two more volumes from Anhinga Press: Dubious Angels: Poems after Paul Klee (2005), based on the artist’s late drawings and paintings; and Then, a Thousand Crows (2009). (Copies of Ratzlaff’s works will be available at the reading, courtesy of Judy Long’s Byhalia Books.)

Of the generously illustrated Dubious Angels, Georgia Review editor Stephen Corey has written, “Keith Ratzlaff’s long-established and distinctive voice—gentle, playful, yet snap-your-head-back incisive and moving—is both present in and altered by his deep confrontation with Paul Klee’s complex simple renderings of offbeat angels. To have these poems side by side with the artworks is a visceral pleasure and a boon to both artists.”

Ratzlaff’s poems and reviews have appeared in Poetry Northwest, which gave him its Theodore Roethke Award, and in many other journals, including The Georgia Review, McSweeney’s, New England Review, and North American Review. Also, his poems and essays have been included in such anthologies as The Best American Poetry 2009; The Pushcart Prize XXXI (2007); A Cappella: Mennonite Voices in Poetry (2003), and In the Middle of the Middle West: Literary Nonfiction from the Heartland (2003).

Keith Ratzlaff is professor of English at Central College in Pella, Iowa.

Excerpts from “Hammock Knot” by Keith Ratzlaff, originally published in The Georgia Review (Spring 2009):

I went at it first with my teeth

the way a squirrel would,

the second time with two sets of pliers

the way a mechanic would, and now

I’m thinking about the knife

as a samurai or chef would—

or Alexander the Great—

the way a field hand would

walking beans, or a man

with a machete in a canebrake,

or a surgeon, a hunter

gutting a deer, a farmer with twine

gone haywire in the baler . . .

. . . Who could do anything

but gnaw at the ropes—

what from the kitchen window

must have looked like a kiss,

a hard one with the passion

of ropes coming together,

my lips mashed against my teeth?

Who could deny it was a kiss

when the knot was the last thing,

the only thing I own, holding on?

National Magazine Award-winning essayist Michael Donohue live and in person tonight, 7pm, at the Hotel Indigo in beautiful downtown Athens, GA!

2010-02-18T12:51:00.002-05:00

A reminder that The Georgia Review is presenting creative nonfiction writer Michael Donohue at 7pm tonight in the Rialto Room of the Hotel Indigo, 500 College Ave, just north of Dougherty St. in downtown Athens.

Donohue's "Russelll and Mary" is the "biography" of the title characters that he pieced together from the deceased couple's papers and letters that he found in their Brooklyn apartment after Mary, his landlady, died without leaving a will and with no known heirs. The essay was first published in the Fall/Winter 2006 double issue of The Georgia Review and went on to win the 2007 National Magazine Award for Essays, beating out several other finalists including The New Yorker and Smithsonian. "Russell and Mary" also won that year's prize for best essay given by the Magazine Association of the Southeast.

The event is free and open to the public. Donohue is a very engaging, entertaining speaker -- a young writer whose work has broad appeal and genuine depth and feeling. Tonight's appearance is the last of three readings he's given in Athens over the previous two days -- the other two happened yesterday, one in the morning at the Athens Council on Aging, and the other in the afternoon in the Miller Learning Center.

Donohue should be enough of a draw on his own, but tonight's event has the added appeal of taking place at the Rialto Room of the Hotel Indigo, a venue that is well worth checking out in general.

It's Michael Donohue week here in Athens, GA!

2010-02-16T08:58:00.000-05:00

Catch this exciting young creative non-fiction writer at one or more of three events!

The Georgia Review is pleased to announce a two-day visit to Athens and UGA by Michael Donohue, whose “Russell and Mary” was published in the Fall/Winter 2006 issue of The Georgia Review and went on to win both the 2007 National Magazine Award in Essays (beating out other finalists that included The New Yorker and Smithsonian) and the Gold Award in Essays presented by the Magazine Association of the Southeast.

February 17, 10:30 a.m.
Athens Council on Aging, 135 Hoyt St: “Re-creating Lives”—The making of “Russell and Mary,” an essay in which Donohue writes a “biography” of a deceased couple based on a box of found letters and other papers. Q&A to follow.

February 17, 3:30 p.m.
Room 0348, Miller Learning Center, UGA: “Starting with a Bang”—The experience of getting into print for the first time . . . and then having that work win a major award. Q&A to follow.

February 18, 7:00 p.m.
The Rialto Room at Hotel Indigo, 500 College Ave. (www.indigoathens.com): readings from “Russell and Mary” and other works.

Read "Russell and Mary" here:http://www.uga.edu/garev/fallwinter06/donohue.pdf.

See our special Donohue event page here: http://www.uga.edu/garev/donohueevent.html.

All events are free and open to the public.

More from Our West Coast Correspondent

2010-02-15T11:27:00.006-05:00

California Loves Its Georgia-Affiliated Writers

Q: What do Athens, Georgia, and the Bay Area of California have in common?

A: Two Rona Jaffe Award–winning writers--one of whom is a Georgia Review contributor--with fresh books from the University of Georgia Press, and one former assistant to the editors of The Georgia Review and current University of Georgia Press copyeditor who loves their work.

On February 1, the Sacramento Poetry Center’s reading program featured Lori Ostlund, author of The Bigness of the World (2009) and Robin Ekiss, author of The Mansion of Happiness (2009). As host of the event, and to celebrate the Georgia connection that I share with the writers, I served red velvet cupcakes, a southern specialty that goes over well anywhere.

Ostlund, whose story “Dr. Deneau’s Punishment” appeared in the spring 2009 Georgia Review, gave a debut reading of “All Boy,” the story of eleven-year-old Harold, a smart, introverted observer who struggles to decode conversations. He is often mystified by his peers, but he astutely tracks his parents’ words, sifting and analyzing to find the causes of their estrangement. One of the hallmarks of this poignant story is its sly asides, and though Ostlund had been concerned that the story would be hard to track when read aloud, her dry wit prevailed, and the story was a hit. Ekiss read assorted poems from The Mansion of Happiness, giving them context by sharing tidbits from the weird history of doll making, the development of moving pictures, and her family’s hijinks.

Many delighted listeners purchased the writers' books after the event, bringing a little bit more of Georgia to the Sacramento Valley and the Bay Area. A good time was had by all.

Tim Kahl, vice president and hosting coordinator of the Sacramento Poetry Center, filmed the event and has kindly shared his footage.

Lori Ostlund reading "All Boy"