Online Literature Calendar
July 12, 2011

Back in September last year, we were really excited about the launch of Zine-Scene and its focus on online literary magazines — so much so that we invited Richard Mocarski from their editorial team to write a guest post right here on our blog explaining more about the project. Since then, we’ve kept a close eye on their various zine and author spotlights, as well as The Reprint, Zine-Scene’s literary journal which “liberates” words from the printed page (just our little joke there, you understand) and puts them online for all to read.

Now they’ve introduced another innovation with the Online Literature Calendar. The name tells you all you need to know — this is going to be a fantastic resource to find your way around the various publication schedules of the ever-growing number of literary magazines, whether they unveil a new issue every month, every other month (like us), or even just once a year.

If you’re an editor of an online literary magazine, make sure you get your publication signed up. Email Richard at editor [at] zine-scene [dot] com with your release schedule, a link to your journal, a one to two sentence description of what it’s all about, and your logo. And if you’re a reader, Zine-Scene is on Twitter too, so follow them to get all those quick 140-character updates on new online literature.

David Tomaloff on J.A. Tyler
June 19, 2011

Three poems by David Tomaloff featured in our most recent issue. Below, he tells us about one of his particular highlights from the same collection:

***

I’m humbled to be included among the excellent authors featured in Issue Thirteen. I feel as though every piece is deserving of positive reaction; however, J. A. Tyler’s ‘[ the fourth house /// rebuilt ]’ stands out to me as being particularly enchanting. J. A. Tyler has a knack for authoring almost freakishly limber sentences that manage all at once to be fluid, dense, poetic, heady, and, despite all of this, lean and effortless to read. His use of repetition and cyclical language dances in all of the right places, propelling the prose forward, allowing it to gather steam as it goes.

“A bear crept into this fourth house, and I was standing in the darkness, an open knife, waiting to take guts in my fingers, to feel the warmth of once was living. In this fourth house in this cave in this mountain in these woods, smearing bear-blood on black walls, a brother mine-field in front of me.”

and

“I am in search of my deer-brother because I want to tell him what it means to be like this. I want him to see beneath my own deer-skin that there is a brother-core, that there are love-words and moments of sky unencumbered by clouds. I want my deer-brother to see his deer-brother, no matter. Instead it was a note of dying, the death he handed me, dear brother, and the lost woods always circling, fourth houses built and burned and built and burned.”

Tyler’s fluidity is often punctuated and carefully guided by terse verbal uppercuts—sentences which provide contrast and tension to the freefall.

“In these woods I burn down everything that I don’t understand.”

and

“In these woods, the always instead.”

The cumulative effect is both gut-wrenching and exhilarating. It’s the kind of writing that makes me forget I’m reading; which is about as much as any writer can hope for.

Second Saboteur
June 16, 2011

We’re really honored that > kill author — and specifically Issue Eight — has been awarded second place in the inaugural Saboteur Awards for literary magazines, which is run by Sabotage, the site that reviews “pamphlets, small presses, poetry and fiction magazines, manifestos, online journals, stapled pieces of paper, installation poetry, performed poetry.” Thanks to all the judges involved in this decision, and for all the reviews you’ve done.

We were in good company, too. In third place was Issue 24 of La Petite Zine, while Issue 7 of Moon Milk Review was highly commended for its integration with the web. We’ll admit, though, that he winner, Polarity, was a new publication to us, but we’re certainly going to be checking it out based on what Sabotage had to say about it.

With so many publications around, online and offline, all competing for our time, we certainly recommend checking out the comprehensive reviews on Sabotage to see what’s caught their eye.

Ori Fienberg on Anderson Holderness
June 15, 2011

Ori Fienberg, who brought ‘Night Hungers’ to our most recent issue, tells us about the piece that particularly caught his attention in Issue Thirteen:

***

Anderson Holderness’ ‘How to Eat an Oriole’ takes a heavy stone and heaves it into the air with such convincing certainty that wings emerge from the stone and it begins to fly.

This post office is an infinite dimension filled with mail slots, wood paneling, and birds which the mail clerk oversees with a strangely benign malevolence. His violence would be heart-rending if the birds had not developed a curious protective adaptation. The narrator comes to comfortably inhabit the strangeness of this world, and while at the end the action seems about to take a turn for the Hitchcockian, Holderness makes the macabre roll over and beg for its belly to be rubbed.

As with my favorite pieces of magical realism it leaves me yearning to explore the rest of this world, but also convinced by the unique truth of this sequence.

Donald Dunbar on Ras. Mashramani
June 10, 2011

Donald Dunbar, who featured in Issue Thirteen with ‘For a letter to be any good’, writes about his favorite work from the same collection:

“Much of the work in Issue Thirteen is explicitly sexual, but nowhere is that more saturated than in Ras. Mashramani’s pieces. Both ‘I get clean...’ and ‘little girls...’ are obviously awesome. A lot of this awesomeness comes from the construction of the speaker’s sexual identity.

Neither speaker in either poem has any sense of self-value, but is determinately working on attacking the self for the benefit of the other. In ‘I get clean...’ she scrubs her teeth and tongue ‘So your dick your tongue have a clean plate to touch.’ In ‘little girls...’ she lies to “each man who thought they loved me” and provokes them into some hard-cock rage by including ‘a school photo of me at age 12′. That what she’s offering to provoke their attentions is an earlier version of herself is not much different than the promise to ‘scrub until it bleeds’—trying to erase the skin of her pussy is trying to erase the years from her life.

These/this persona is the submissive end of a staple, prongs held backward, inviting the reader to enter her at his or her pleasure, but by making the methods memorable/shocking enough, controlling the placement. Who would try to barter with the woman whose just scrubbed her mouth out for that purpose? ‘Baby, thanks for that, but would you also inject my semen into your nipples?’ No. And after she’s gotten you all worked up, all angry, it’s only then will you race to her house wanting to ‘murder her for hours’. But she’s been waiting with her tennis uniform on.

The ultra-power bottom?

The lamentation of the martyr, who has found heaven, and now only needs to be burnt at the stake?

But I think it’s more than that too. Where does the speaker’s pleasure come from? From her self-annihilation for us, her idealized other. But also from her secret control over us. And it’s her pleasure in this that is so inviting to the reader, who has already submitted his/her/etc. mind to Ras.‘s poems. That she’s given herself to us so completely makes us warm to her. That she’s given herself to us in the terms of her desire—a desire that overwhelms her self—makes us functions of it.”

The Thirteenth
June 1, 2011

Issue Thirteen of > kill author is now online, named in honor of George Orwell and with a (fascinating and thought-provoking) guest introduction by Elaine Castillo.

Though containing about the same number of writers as usual, overall it’s perhaps a shorter issue than recent editions. No reason, just the way the work we chose seemed to go — these were the pieces that really grabbed our attention and fired our collective imagination. But this has its benefits too, because it means you could read the whole issue in one sitting. Then read it again the next day. And again the day after that. Well, you get the idea. Just read it lots, and revel in every word.

Our submissions never close, so get sending us your work for our fourteenth issue now. Over the next few days and weeks, we’ll also be hoping to bring you some blog posts by the writers in #13 in which they tell us about their favorite pieces from this collection.

Coming soon...
May 20, 2011

We’re in the last stages of putting together Issue Thirteen of > kill author, and choosing to ignore the final judgement possibly happening tomorrow. If the Rapture does occur, we’ll have to cling to the hope that heaven and hell both have internet so you can all still read it. In the meantime, check out the following by two contributors from the forthcoming issue (yes, it’s a kind of preview, because we like you).

Ori Fienberg has a piece called ‘Night Hungers’ in our #13, but before then you can catch him being interviewed over on Monkeybicycle about his piece ‘Clockwork Dog,’ which is included in Monkeybicycle8. He talks more about his useful advice for people trying to beat insomnia: don’t count sheep, count Iowans.

Following in the footsteps of xTx, Marcus Speh and Neila Mezynski, the guest introduction for our thirteenth issue is being written by Elaine Castillo, who made her first appearance in > kill author back in Issue Nine with a piece called Envoi, which references Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai. She recently made a 40-minute film by the same name, and it’s strongly based on that story. Watch it below:

Tuscaloosa Runs This
May 9, 2011

“After the tornado, ‘Tuscaloosa Runs This’ became a rallying cry amongst friends involved in the recovery process. In one sense, when everything happened we didn’t know what to do, but we knew that we needed to do something. And so, we played to our strengths—our counseling, our writing, our ability to haul, to swing an ax. As a result there was a lot of attempts: some more successful than others, but attempts nonetheless. The works in this anthology are attempts (essays, Montaigne would call them) to capture what it is we love about this city and what it means to us to repair and rebuild our home. The quality of the people of Tuscaloosa is only matched by the quality of their writing. Here, we have some amazing work from amazing people—all with our city on our minds and in our hearts. Some of the work has been written long before late April, other pieces written shortly after the storm.” — Brian Oliu

Put together in only a few short days as a response to the tornado which caused such terrible destruction, Tuscaloosa Runs This, an ebook featuring writers from the area, is definitely worth your time to read or download — and then, of course, to donate. Do it now.

Fifty short fictions
May 7, 2011

Take one Wigleaf. Add in their choice of the Top 50 (very) short fictions of 2011. Stir. Season to taste. Serve the starter: James Tadd Adcox’s The Gift Shop, from our seventh issue. Devour the remaining forty-nine courses without spoiling your appetite.

Saboteur Awards
May 4, 2011

Sabotage is a site out of the UK which, in its own words, reviews “pamphlets, small presses, poetry and fiction magazines, manifestos, online journals, stapled pieces of paper, installation poetry.” They’ve said some good things about > kill author in the past, and we’ve now made the shortlist of their 2011 Saboteur Awards — or at least Issue Eight, published back in August last year, has. This award is a little different from the others out there as it’s based on just one issue of a literary journal.

There are some well-respected names we recognized on the shortlist — FRiGG, Moon Milk Review and La Petite Zine — but equally there are plenty of publications we’ve never come across before, which can only be a good thing, right? Go take a look.

Sabotage’s jury should be making a final decision on a winner at the end of this month, but our thanks to them for including us on the shortlist.

Million Writers Award
April 18, 2011

This line-up of 2010’s Notable Stories in the StorySouth Million Writers Award has been announced, and we’re very proud to say that two pieces from > kill author made the cut. They are Rites of Spring by Finnegan Flawnt, who has since lost his pseudonym and is now better known as Marcus Speh, and You Enjoy Myself by Frank Hinton. Congratulations to both, and to all the writers nominated (including many former > kill author contributors like Michael Loughrey, Amber Sparks, Matthew Dexter, Roxane Gay, Robert Kloss, Elaine Castillo, James Valvis, Brian Hurley, J.A. Tyler and Matthew Dexter.) As for the awards, the top ten stories will be revealed on May 20, and the public vote for the top story will then open.

Daniel Bosch on Brandon Courtney
April 14, 2011

Issue Twelve contributor Daniel Bosch chooses his highlight from the same collection:

“For years now I’ve investigated the ways poets get things wrong when they describe paintings and photographs, but a passage in Brandon Courtney’s poem attracts me because of the ways it gets things right.

His ‘Ekphrasis of St. Sebastian is lyrical as opposed to dramatic or narrative. The speaker commands the reader to ‘see’ and to ‘look’ through the lenses of his diction and metaphor, and his poem is the song of these commands, a kind of prayer. Courtney has taken a leaf from the Lord’s Prayer (‘lord’ comes from Old English hlaford, something like ‘warden of the loaves’) when his speaker sees St. Sebastian’s pincushion body as a kind of (daily) bread.

So let me borrow a trope from Courtney and command you to look, with me, at lines 9 through 13, the passage from third to fifth stanza:

...the fletchings on the arrows

—each feather painted with a
single stroke—blur into birds
cleaning the meat from saintly

ribs,

To ‘fletch’ is to modify an arrow in order to stabilize its flight—‘fletchings’ are the feathers or other projecting fins near the notch end of an arrow. So there’s a concentration of meanings here that I appreciate, for ‘fletch’ comes from French fléche, meaning ‘arrow.’ The implication is that if it ain’t got fletchings, the thing you’re trying to shoot is just a stick—arrows have to be stabilized for flight, if one wants to hit one’s target.

Is this authorization enough for a flight of extravagant reading? Let’s see.

Look how Courtney ‘shoots’ an em dash from ‘arrows’ at the end of stanza three across the white space to stanza four, and again from ‘stroke’ to ‘blur’, and how neatly, and tacitly, these typographic tropes reinforce his assertion that El Greco’s ‘single stroke’ is alive with metaphor. And listen, if you can, to how ‘arrows’ sounds out the word ‘eros,’ a blurring of form and discontent, of ends and means. The brush strokes (em dashes—unfletched arrows) seen as birds, clean the meat (the meaning) from ribs (unfletched sticks, em dashes, elements of a heart’s cage).

That this fancy flight lands, as it does, on these birds doing decomposer’s work on the chest cavity grounds the whole poem for me. I see, though neither El Greco nor Courtney has drawn them for me, crows or grackles or obsidian blackbirds teasing gristle from each line of the cage. And when I return my gaze to the painting, I see the how the murderers of Sebastian prick his body with Eros’s arrows, which, like Courtney’s lines, added to body of El Greco’s work, were not asked for, and still may, at times, be necessary.”

Neil Addison on Lisa Marie Basile
April 12, 2011

In Issue Twelve, we were flown to the shores of Ruby Island, in the story of the same name by Neil Addison. Here’s his highlight from the same collection:

“Amongst a lot of strong work, I was much taken with ‘Crow Mouth by Lisa Marie Basile. Here is a poem which has sufficient resources to leave behind the speculative realm — and with it, idle fancy — without declaring where it’s going instead, or why, or what precisely this departure amounts to. I found myself admiring this headstrong disappearance.”

Mary Sharp and Hazel Foster on Brandon Courtney
April 9, 2011

Unusually, two contributors from Issue Twelve not only chose the same writer to highlight, but as their favorite piece they picked the same poem of his three works that we published. First, here’s Mary Sharp:

“Brandon Courtney’s writing, his subtle touch with language, style, and content, immediately elicited an emotional response, buried deep within me. He seems to be more than a writer, but a painter as well, using words to create lasting images, grasping the visual with the verbal, each one complementing the other at the same time. His perception is unique, beautiful, and insightful—leaving an untraceable line.

His poem, ‘My Sister’s Blindness,’ seems symbolic with regards to its’ content, and usage of the mother’s religious associations between ‘light’ and ‘good,’ to suggest that a daughter’s blindness could be biological. In this poem, the sister is a prisoner of darkness: ‘Diagnosed with childhood blindness, a permanent darkening of the world, she begged the devil to leave her body.’ And yet, it seems that it is not evil which possesses the sister, but the phantoms created by the mother, which are pumped into her heart from birth. The mother’s fears dominate the daughter. She removes the pages of the Bible which reference ‘vision.’ Words have no place in the dark, and what the mother is unable to control, she will blot out. The narrator sees past the mother: ‘The Bible seemed to weigh the same, even with the pages missing.’ The unlived life of the mother is a heavy burden for the daughter to have to bear. Will she, like Beckett, become ‘a speck in the void, in the dark, forever?’ The narrator senses the destructive nature of the mother: ‘My mother took my sister to the banks of the Mississippi River and told God to show Himself. If He were real, He would bless the river and the water would wash away the darkness. She took her own reflection as a sign without leading my sister to the water.’ The mother will exorcise her own demons at the cost of the daughter.

What I find most compelling with respect to Courtney’s writing, is his poetic mind. He refuses to evaluate—he only asks the questions. My reading of this particular poem may seem incorrect to the academic—yet my spirit soared when Courtney’s words cracked through the bone—and out flowed the marrow.”

And now Hazel Foster’s thoughts on this poem:

“I am bought and sold on these words: ‘After a year in total darkness, she began pressing both thumbs into her eyes, saying she saw lakes of light. She pressed harder and saw shafts, splinters. Still harder; the light brightened enough to induce migraines. Her hands left her eyelids a mess of yellow bruises. The optometrist split a ping-pong ball and taped halves over her eyes.’

Brandon Courtney plays with fact in ‘My Sister’s Blindness’. He bounces fact off of story, making each more true. This truth brings motion, density, and heft to each word. And the simple progression—the ping-ponging sections—pulls reality into each fold, pulls the dark sky over a sister’s eyes, rips pages from the Bible like an anti-keyword search, pairs religion with blindness: ‘the optometrist told her that Lucifer translates to light-bearer.’ ‘My Sister’s Blindness’ sinks its hands into a dark world with precision and angst-driven calm. Most importantly, this piece continued to float into my mind as I read through the rest of the issue. Excellent work.”

Caleb J Ross on Brian Hurley
April 7, 2011

So that was Issue Twelve, and this is the first of our blog posts in which its contributors write about their favorite piece(s) from the same collection. Kicking off, it’s the author of Evenson’s Tongue, Caleb J Ross:

“Brian Hurley’s ‘The North’ reads as a statement of anti-colonization from a racial segregationist perspective. I am careful not to read this story as the opinion of the author (God help all of us if anyone assumes ‘Stranger Will’ represents my personal beliefs), so I hope my absolute awe of this story doesn’t project acceptance of the story’s assumed message.

Hurley makes the grotesque beautiful. Like Brian Evenson. Like Matt Bell. Hurley approaches the misshapen and mangled in ‘The North’ with a level of specific intellect that enforces distance between the reader and the imagery. Similar to the way doctors have their own set of jargon to qualify an otherwise gruesome sight (‘morbidly obese’ instead of ‘fat enough to die any second’), Hurley treats his images with so much specificity that the reader actually falls more in love with the language than the characters.

‘We didn’t talk about it like two different species until the newborns began to die. Half-giant, half-not, they slid out with mismatched parts. A ribcage like a robin’s nest, and a watermelon heart. Necks that snapped under sandbag skulls. They just didn’t last.’

My one concern comes as a general warning more than a statement against ‘The North.’ Beware the clever twist ending. In the case of ‘The North,’ the brevity of the story makes the twist ending easier to digest. A lesser author may have depended too much on the ending to justify a comparatively poor beginning and middle. But Brian Hurley, he delivers consistently throughout the piece.”

Caleb J Ross is currently touring blogs as part of his ‘Stranger Will Tour for Strange’ blog tour. His goal is to post at a different blog every few days, beginning with the release of his novel ‘Stranger Will’ in March 2011 to the release of his second novel, ‘I Didn’t Mean to Be Kevin,’ in November 2011. Contact him. To be a groupie and follow this tour, subscribe to the Caleb J Ross blog RSS feed. Follow him on Twitter: @calebjross.com; friend him on Facebook.