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.

Issue Twelve will make you cancel your suicide
April 3, 2011

It’s Sunday. We know it’s Sunday. You’re wishing it was Saturday, aren’t you? Or better still, Friday night? You want your weekend back. You want it back badly. We’re right there with you — we hate Sundays. We hate them because it means the working week is about to start again, only one more sleep away. We can smell the odor of despondency, like a rat-infested open sewer just over the fence.

So we’re here to make Sunday better, to stop you attaching a stack of concrete slabs to your feet, shooting yourself in the stomach and then leaping into the harbor. We don’t want to oversell Issue Twelve of > kill author too much, but we truly believe it will save at least seventeen lives today. Or your money back.*

* Please note: this literary journal is brought to you free of charge and at the reader’s own risk. > kill author cannot be held responsible for any injuries, self-inflicted or otherwise, sustained during reading — unless those injuries are wide eyes, dropped jaws and amazed expressions, all of which are quite understandable responses to the prose and poetry within this issue’s pages.

#quakebook
March 28, 2011

Following the massive earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan at 2:46pm on Friday March 11, we’ve seen a few literary responses to the tragedy aiming to raise funds for the aid and reconstruction efforts. But for our money — and that’s what it’s all about in the end: money — the one we’re most interested in seeing is Quakebook.

First floated as an idea on Twitter on March 18 by ourmaninabiko, an English guy living in Japan, within minutes people were talking about it and pushing the idea forward using the #quakebook hashtag. Whatever your thoughts about Twitter (pointless waste of time, etc), this project really couldn’t have happened without it. In the space of just 15 hours they’d received 74 submissions — full list of contributors here — and a small army of volunteers offering to help with every aspect of putting a book like this together in such a short time.

Quakebook is very much about the stories and experiences of people who were actually there during the earthquake, rather than a collection of unconnected pieces put together to raise funds (though nothing wrong with that, of course). Over the couple of weeks since the earthquake struck, we’ve been bombarded with news pictures and analysis, with occasional input from survivors inbetween, but the chance to read words written by those directly affected by events makes this project even more compelling.

The book’s going to be released as a digital download any day now, with a print version coming later. It’ll be available to buy here, and all the funds raised from its sales will go directly to Red Cross Japan. Meanwhile, you can either get the latest developments on the Quakebook blog or follow @quakebook on Twitter.

If you’re here on this site, chances are you love words, love reading. So buy your copy of Quakebook as soon as it’s available.

Amorak Huey on xTx
March 25, 2011

Amorak Huey opened Issue Eleven with two poems. Here, he chooses his favorite piece from the (other end of the) same collection:

“First, I need to say that there’s much to love in this issue, and it wasn’t easy picking out one piece to write about. But the piece I want to talk about is xTx’s ‘Propelled by Nothing.’ It’s dark and mysterious and lingering. It’s weird-scary-sexy, all in a good way. Kind of like having an unpronounceable pseudonym for your internet poems. Unless that isn’t a pseudonym, because what do I know? Anyway, I am infatuated with the voice of this piece, the way it’s at once so sure of itself and also willing to confess its vulnerability: ‘I can admit to bestiality but not how much I love you’ is such a great line. It’s not the outrageous that scares this speaker; it’s sentimentality. This poem starts with lemons and makes language. It rocks.”

Michael Loughrey on Garrett Socol
March 15, 2011

Michael Loughrey appeared in Issue Eleven with the amazing tour de force of Colour plate No. 8: The (W)hole [kit and caboodle].

“Whilst the > kill author editors state that they are ‘strongly opposed to the persecution of writers’, their request to authors published in each issue of the journal to select and comment on their favourite piece from the collection necessitates the regrettable spurning of a host of other estimable writers in favour of one.

So my apologies to Amorak Huey, Brian Oliu, Caroline Crew, Darby Larson, Feng Sun Chen, Gary Moshimer, George Anderson, Greg Dybec, Helen Vitoria, Howie Good, Jonathan Callahan, Joshua Unikel, Joshua Young, Jules Archer, Matt Leibel, Peter Kispert Richard Chiem, Roan Vogan, Robert Alan Wendeborn, Rose Hunter, Sarah Rose Etter, Sean H. Doyle and xTx if they feel persecuted by my singling out Garrett Socol’s story as my druthers from Issue Eleven.

In his story Fame & Madness in America, Garrett Socol deftly satires the psychosis of a Zeitgeist which spurs unworthy mortals to celebrity status on a short-lease basis with such authenticity that the story could well be a fictional version of factual events ending with the hoary chestnut ‘Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent’.

In a wry, ludic and deliciously dark tale, Socol delivers a trenchant narrative which subsumes scalpel sharp social commentary and deadpan drollery. The story is told from the viewpoint of seven characters following the murder of a bridegroom by his wife in revenge for his infidelity on the day of their nuptials. Whilst the bride later claims that by poisoning him she only intended for him to become ill for a day or two, the reader is left pondering the possibility that her deed was an acte manqué.

Not only does Brenda, the cuckquean bride and murderess, ascend to superstar standing, but so too does Lisa, a peripheral player that Brenda allegedly tried to poison by pouring purple ink in her grape juice when they were eight years old, as Lisa’s devoilement of the incident sees her hired as a spokesperson for... a brand of grape juice. Brenda’s brother-in-law Byron also consummates Warhol’s prophecy as he too is propelled into limelight and lucre, his fifteen minutes of shame being to act as host of a dating game show with the mischievously sepulchral title of Mating After Murder.

Only Brenda’s sister Fern portrays a spark of sanity and morality in the unbridled post-murder mayhem. When bewildered by the raptor-esque avarice of the media and the public for minutiae surrounding the crime, she asks: ‘Were people this starved for entertainment?’ And wends: ‘What does this say about us as a species? Would most of us grab hold of fame like starving vultures? Is the possibility of stardom so powerful that it overshadows everything we value in our lives?’

My appreciation of Fame & Madness in America saw me seek out and read other stories by Garrett Socol, including the laudable All in a Name from Issue Three of > kill author, as well as other equally exceptional stories of his published by other fine journals.”

This is not a veiled comment on anyone or anything; it just made us laugh
February 28, 2011

[by Tom Gauld]

Neila Mezynski: Glimpses
February 27, 2011

Coming soon from Sacramento’s Scrambler Books, but available for pre-order right now, is Glimpses, a 90-page collection of flash/short fiction by Neila Mezynski. Neila’s twice been a contributor to our journal, first with Paranoia and Phobic, two short pieces from Issue Five, and more recently with Men In Bushes, which we published in Issue Ten. And Scrambler offers the latter piece as one of their recommended links for reading some of Neila’s work before you buy — complete with a quote from J.A. Tyler’s blog post about it.

Glimpses is 12 dollars and starts shipping from March 15, so get your copy now. It’s got a beautiful dark cover too, if you need more persuading.

Three in a million
February 26, 2011

In April last year, we were very proud to be chosen as the best new online magazine or journal by the judges of the Million Writers Award. That seems a long time ago — we’re older now, but no wiser, and gained ourselves a few wrinkles. Meanwhile, the 2011 edition of the award is here, open to stories of over 1000 words published online during 2010. Here are our three nominations from a list that, as if you couldn’t guess, was very difficult to choose from:

You Enjoy Myself
by Frank Hinton

Broken or Just the Facts
by Hazel Foster

The Excavations of Cobb Hannigan
by David Cotrone

You can see all the other editor nominations, plus the reader nominations too, on organizer Jason Sanford’s site. The list of notable stories will be released by April 1, with the top ten stories appearing on May 1. Voting for the winners of the Million Writers Award will then last another month.

Congratulations and good luck to our nominees.

Jonathan Callahan on Darby Larson
February 25, 2011

In Issue Eleven, Jonathan Callahan documented a duel between the Great and the Good. Here’s his take on his favorite piece from the same issue:

“Darby Larson’s ‘Pulse’ is the most extraordinary piece of short fiction I’ve read in some time. I wanted to say so as soon as I’d read it, spent a fair amount of time trying to locate the best metaphor to articulate how it works—vortex? canon? syntactical blender? lexical chairs?—then realized that the best description of the work is probably the work itself, as it ought to be.

Still: this thing is a language-combustion that pulses with the recursive heat of some of Beckett’s better passages, and if you haven’t read it yet (or started to do so but were intimidated by the admittedly forbidding scroll of text and opted to click away), you really should.”

And we’d agree. You really should, you know.

Caroline Crew on Joshua Young
February 22, 2011

Looking back on Issue Eleven, here’s Caroline Crew on her highlight — This Used To Be A City Of Glass by Joshua Young:

“I would like to walk around a city before the apolocalypse with Joshua Young. He could warn me of how things were going to happen and the best places to hide. This landscape, fiction or not, glass or not, is entirely alive in the poet’s juggled three-part sequence. When he asks, in the final line ‘did you hear it pouring from the survivors’ teeth?’ I shout YES YES YES!”

“These questions are getting harder”
February 19, 2011

Frank Hinton does our Indie Lit Community Survey and records the experience. Thanks Frank, we appreciate it — and sorry if it freaked you out.