Sherry Chandler

Sundress Publications has started a Best of the Net Anthology for creative writing.

This project strives to promote the diverse and growing collection of voices that are choosing to publish their work online, a venue that still sees little respect from such yearly anthologies as the Pushcart and “Best American” series. This collection will hopefully help to bring more respect to this innovative and continually expanding medium.

Subsequent issues of the anthology will appear each January with our submission period open from July 1st to August 31st each year. 2007 judges will be announced in the summer.

You should drop by and check them out. Not only is this an impressive collection of creative work but it also should act as a sort of road map to the best publications on the net — for you future submissions.

While you’re there, check out Sundress’s own fine web publications: Wicked Alice , 21 Stars Review, the multimedia Not Just Air, and Stirring (where Mosaic poet Valerie Loveland has a current entry: Aerogel.)

Steel Toe Books is holding an open reading period during the month of June 2006.

Submission process:

There is no reading fee, but we ask everyone who submits to purchase one of our existing titles directly from us. On the Steel Toe Books online Order Form, select one or more books to order and fill out the form. Print out the completed form, and send it, along with:

• a check or money order for the selected book
• a copy of your manuscript for consideration
• an acknowledgements page
• a cover page with your contact information
• a SASE for notification

Mail the packet to:

Steel Toe Books
c/o Tom C. Hunley
Department of English
20 - C Cherry Hall
Western Kentucky University
1 Big Red Way
Bowling Green, KY 42101-3576

Follow the link for information about the selection process.

I am delighted to announce that my poem “Walking Taft Highway,” has won first place in this year’s Joy Bale Boone prize from Heartland Review. The judge was Lisa Williams. Lisa is winner of the May Swenson Poetry Award, a Henry Hoyns Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Prize, an Elliston Prize, a Walter E. Dakin fellowship, and the 2004-2005 Rome Prize in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches at Centre College

This poem, a tribute to my 90-year-old uncle, is the only poem I’ve managed to generate from posts on this blog. The post in question, “Want of Imagination,” can be found at the link. It isn’t all that remarkable really. It just got me thinking about my uncle. My thanks to all the readers who pushed me to hone this poem beyond my usual capabilities.

But I digress. I will be reading at ECTC’s Morrison Gallery, along with Lisa Williams and the other two JBB winners Woods Nash and Christian Lund, on Thursday, April 20 from 7:00-8:30 pm.

There will be a short open mic and refreshments and the event is free, so come on down.

If you happen to live on the opposite end of the state, don’t forget the Hazard Community and Technical College Evening with Poets. Winners of the Kudzu prizes will be announced at this event. And don’t forget their Spring Writers Conference on April 21. It’s free and it looks wonderful!

Michael Czarnecki of FootHills Publishing will be reading at Artcroft on April 16 from 1- 4 pm. This stop will be Day 6 in Michael’s US Route 62 Border to Border Tour 2006, which will begin in Niagara Falls, New York and wind down through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oklahoma, and Arizona.

Michael is owner and operator of FootHills Publishing, a family affair that celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. From the About FootHills page:

FootHills Publishing was formed in 1986 for the purpose of getting into print the words of poets who found it hard to get their work out to the public other than at readings or in the occasional magazine. The first few books were published in conjunction with Great Elm Press, operated by Walt Franklin. Since then, FootHills Publishing has released more than 150 chapbooks or books.

We are a small family-run operation. I do the editorial work - Carolyn handles the book production and shipping and our two boys, Grayson (14) and Chapin (10), help with production. Grayson also assists with some design work. All of our books are now hand-stitched and we have received many compliments on the quality of the work, both in content and production.

Michael has brought many lovely poetry books into print, including my own My Will and Testament Is on the Desk and Lexington poet Ann Lederer’s Approaching Freeze. I can tell you that he’s a sweet publisher to work for.

Follow the link for some samples of Michael’s poems.

If you’re looking for a good way to spend your Easter Sunday afternoon, why not drive out and meet Michael. Artcroft itself, sitting high atop its Nicholas County hills, is lovely this time of year.

The Other Voices International Project has begun assembling the 20th volume of their anthology. Along with the Bulgarian-German poet Jonka Hristova, Lebanese-American poet Dima Hilal, Greek poet Dimitris P. Kraniotis, and the Californian Naia, you will find our own Wanda D. Campbell’s collection Dreams of the Raven. Several of the poems featured there are works that Wanda has very graciously let me reproduce on this blog, including “Tobacco Patch Princess” and “The Killin’“.

Wanda D. Campbell grew up in the Appalachian foothills, less than ten miles from the home of Mark Twain’s mother and in the shadow of the great Appalachian writer, Janice Holt Giles. Her influences have come from many sources, most notably Appalachian culture and her own Melungeon and Mexican-American heritage. You’ll find a link to her blog, Raven’s Shadow, on the sidebar. And she is the second member of the Kentucky State Poetry Society to be featured in this series. Not bad, huh?

Daddy’s Hope

Daddy broke his back
when a shaft caved in.
Took em three days
to dig him out.

It was Mommy’s picture
what kept him alive.
He held it to his breast
where it kissed

every beat of his heart,
him lying there
with his legs penned,
unable to move,

‘cept for his left arm.
Mommy and I stood
on the sidelines that day
when they hauled him out

One survivor, unconscious,
with a picture in his hand.

— Wanda D. Campbell

from The Guardian:

Baghdad Burning, by a 26-year-old author who has won an international readership under the pen name Riverbend, is longlisted for the £30,000 Samuel Johnson award. In the list, announced today, she is up against 18 other books including Alan Bennett’s latest bestseller, histories of the cold war and the great wall of China, and a biography of the 19th-century cookbook author Mrs Beeton. The Guardian carried an extract from Riverbend’s title last summer.

The small literary publisher Marion Boyars brought out Baghdad Burning last year, classifying it under biography and memoir. The publishing house says it knows Riverbend’s identity but respects her wish to remain anonymous.

It has already come third in the Lettre Ulysses prize for Reportage, winning £14,000, and was shortlisted for an Index on Censorship freedom of expression award.

Riverbend began the blog with the words: “I’m female, Iraqi and 24. I survived the war. That’s all you need to know. It’s all that matters these days anyway.”

If you’ve read here long, you know I’ve linked to Baghdad Burning several times over the last year. Although I wish the circumstances that produced this blog had never happened, I am pleased to see that the writing is getting attention.

Steven DaGama’s Passages (Wavelength/Albireo Press, 2005) is as cynical as Brooks Carver’s Pilgrim Heart is romantic. Passages is filled with terrorists and exiles, soldiers and travelers, music and lovers.

I feel too dull-witted to comment on the prosody – it is somewhat imagistic, very masculine, but clear and sure-footed. There may or may not be a woman’s poetry (see discussion of the question here), but I would characterize this definitely as man’s poetry, filled with mysterious women and exotic locations. Come to think of it, I’ll take back what I said. This collection is also romantic, though it’s the romance of noir.

I can appreciate Passages for its commentary on the modern condition. It is a poetry of witness. Here is a section from one of my favorite poems in the collection:

Sandstorm

Everything we see is something else.
— Fernando Pessoa

In the nightmare, deployment
is familiar, not so the terrain.
A shifting sandscape, male, never female,
women never — Women cook, Men assume

crucial tasks: they devastate.
Through sandstorm and heat shimmer
humps rise, sink, rise, sink. Everlasting
columns of boy-men, man-boys

sandblasted. …

DaGama is also a visual artist. He drew the cover illustration.

I’m not sure how this collection came to be in my mailbox on Christmas eve. I suspect because I subscribe to Wavelength. Nor am I sure how you would acquire a copy or how much it would cost. I’ll ask David Rogers and get back to you.

The Writer’s Almanac choice for today is a poem called “Anatomy” from Jennifer Gresham’s Diary of a Cell.

This is Tom Hunley’s second publication at Steel Toe Books. It was selected by Charles Harper Webb as the winner of the 2004 Steel Toe Books Prize in Poetry.

You can read and/or listen to the poem here. The Writer’s Almanac airs on WUKY at 7:00 pm, just before Fresh Air.

You can see the results of Steel Toe’s 2005 Open Reading Period here.

A reminder to all of you out there with booklength collections:

Rather than running a contest this year, Steel Toe Books is holding an open reading period during the months of June and July.

Send a full-length poetry manuscript (48-72 pages).

There will be no celebrity judge and no prize money, but we do plan to offer one author aroyalties contract.

There’s no reading fee, but we ask everyone who submits to purchase a copy of Diary of a Cell, by Jennifer Gresham, selected by Charles Harper Webb as the winner of the 2004 Steel Toe Books Prize in Poetry ($12).

Send manuscripts and checks to
Steel Toe Books
c/o Tom C. Hunley
Department of English
Western Kentucky University
20-C Cherry Hall
1 Big Red Way
Bowling Green, KY 42101-3576.

Good news by e-mail from Michael Czernacki of FootHills Publishing:

Monday, Memorial Day, our Amish neighbors are having a “Frolic” at our place – 20 to 40 Amish men will be here to raise our house out of the 2,000 foot elevated air of Wheeler Hill! … For years we have lived in housing that could very much qualify as “Appalachian, far-below-poverty-level, rural poor, how-can-this-be-in-20th/21st century America.” What was that influential book written by Michael Harrington??? (somebody help me here) that brought to the forefront the condition of America’s rural poverty? We could be a modern update of that book. But in a few days a house will rise a little further back from where this leaky-roofed mobile home sits. I can not adequately put into words the importance, the immensity of this upcoming frolic, this “house” that is being built for us. 21 years on Wheeler Hill – finally a house that is what we want it to be. Not that first trailer and 16 acres. Not the house on the corner that was not at all what we dreamed of. Not the trailer we’ve lived in for most of the last 10 years on this spectacular 50 acre hilltop land that we have almost paid off. Those other pieces of land on Wheeler Hill that we somehow worked out deals to purchase were not what what we really wanted, but what we could work out in our limited financial situation. This land, these 50 acres atop Wheeler Hill, are what we envision spending our aging years on.

If Michael can live poor for art’s sake and achieve this house (FootHills will be 20 years old next year), then perhaps we can at least achieve a roof and a raccoon-free attic (if Ursula has not by then become a cherished member of the family).