Posts Tagged ‘Issue 8.2’

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Swan Song: Final Contributor Comments from 8.2

Thursday, May 24th, 2012

The days during which Issue 8.2 can be proud of its status as newest, youngest issue are waning: Issue 9.1 is at the printer and will make its debut in the next few weeks. We don’t want to overlook the amazingness of 8.2, though, so we’ll celebrate it one last time with a series of comments from contributors about their pieces:

Tara Bray (on “Doubts of a Striving Contortionist”): This poem grew out of my fascination with the body and with anyone who strives to push against the body’s limits. Also, I am interested in the flip side of passion for anything, be it art, sport, hobby, or matters of the spirit. To give oneself completely to what requires so much of us is at times a source of doubt and discontent, yet often we keep on without knowing why. The ending image was inspired by the ta∂åka mudra, which involves drawing the front of the waist toward the back of the waist.  Ta∂åka, in Sanskrit, means pool.

Todd Hearon (on “Mnemosyne”): Mnemosyne, mother of the muses, is the goddess of memory. Ironically, I have no memory of what inspired this piece or how it was composed. I think it grew out of a fragment—some form of advice a father (or business tycoon) might give:

ON MEMORY

Forget it.  There’s no future in it.

I do remember that it came quickly, and surprised me in the form of a sonnet. I also remember being surprised during the writing that it came out on about two rhymes. But that shouldn’t surprise, rhyme being one of the best forms of mnemonics.

Glenn Shaheen (on “Public Works” and “Sensationalism”): For a week or two I had this restructured grammar running through my head, something that had a distinctive rhythm but was “wrong,” but not wrong in a common way or a way we’d look down on to give our pity (both actions, of course, “wrong” as well). The wrongness was distinctly musical, and obeyed its own rules of structure and sound but maintained the specific communicative goals of normalized grammar, not eschewing clarity, not of idea at least. So it was stuck in my head, and over a week or two I wrote out four poems in a loose first-person plural, trying to create this character of a chorus that spoke about community, in the sense of a city, a nation, a people, in this grammar. Then I had these four poems, and I liked them enough to figure I’d come back and write more, but whenever I tried to a few weeks later, I couldn’t find the same sound, and only those first four (two of which appear in The Cincinnati Review) ended up surviving edits, revisions, hacks, and slashes. So I guess that’s a lesson about running with the muse whenever it calls, right? Well, I doubt I could have put a whole manuscript of these together anyway without a certain degree of tedium, so it’s probably for the best, as much as anything is for the best.

Faith Shearin: My poem “Dogs Waiting for their Owners” was written after a few spring days at the local dog park. I had been thinking about waiting, and the images of dogs tied to trees or standing in the backs of trucks offered themselves to me. The more I thought about the dogs, the more I also thought about the waiting I had done in my own life and the waiting I had read about in myths.

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Posted in From our Contributors |

Collaborative Feature—Soapbox and CR

Tuesday, May 1st, 2012

For our second collaborative feature with Cincinnati’s own online magazine Soapbox, we’re featuring Lili Wright’s short-short story “Handyman” from issue 8.2. Soapbox tells the new Cincinnati story—a narrative of creative people and businesses, new development, cool places to live, and the best places to work and play. And every other month, Cincinnati Review will contribute some of the best lit—poetry, fiction, and nonfiction—in the country. Here, we’ve reprinted Wright’s “Handyman” in full as well as “bonus material” in the form of comments from the writer and our staff, including the editor who accepted the piece for publication—also on the Soapbox website.

Handyman

I am walking down to the beach in Maine to see if my husband is having sex with our friend Levi. It’s an idea so crazy it makes sense. Sex would be the culmination of what I’ve been feeling all summer: that my husband likes Levi more than he likes me. Daniel slips out of bed at six a.m. so he and Levi can climb twenty-foot ladders and reshingle our house. All day long, the men work shoulder to shoulder, making jokes I can’t hear. Daniel tells Levi about his hemorrhoids. They sing “Penny Lane.”

Levi is like Jesus. A carpenter who builds things and fixes things and never loses his temper. Levi rolls his own cigarettes and never wears sunblock and plays War nicely with our children and sleeps in a tent and grows bean sprouts and is thinner than a cricket. He isn’t gay as far as I know. His partner is a Mexican woman, Ana, but he hasn’t seen her in months, and men being men, needing sex as often as they do, something may have bubbled to the surface.

All summer, Levi has taught Daniel the construction skills he never learned because Robinson men are lawyers, tax lawyers, estate lawyers, loophole lawyers, men in wool suits who call people like Levi to fix whatever is broken. The more cocky Daniel becomes, flexing his biceps, swinging his hammer, the more he expects me to play wife: produce cookies, applaud progress, take photographs documenting each miracle. And I did this for a while until the whole setup got on my nerves. Everything slid into two against one.

Recently, the men started taking a midmorning break to eat peanuts and skinny dip. They call it “refueling.” They walk to the beach, strip down, and dunk themselves in the ocean, which is freezing. You can hear the screams. Later, they come up all doggy grins, hair dripping salt water, ready to shake. Daniel tells me to stay up at the house.

But it occurs to me now that something else is going on. I march past the daisies like the commander-in-chief I’ve felt like ever since I became a mother. I can’t be as nice as Levi, and Daniel knows it. Gravity pulls me to the shore like the moon pulling tide. Things feel weighted, inevitable, a movie I’ve already seen. The wind blows past my ears. The spruce don’t budge. Old trees rarely turn around.

Getting closer, I brace myself to see what I can’t imagine: my husband, the former Catholic choirboy, making out with our houseguest. How will I tell the kids—years later—about this summer, the summer of reconstruction, the summer where their father learned how to cover old siding with fresh shingles, learned to snap a plumb line, learned that male friendship is easier than marriage?

I can see the little changing house now. The bluff above the shore. Compass Island. The view. Everything that happens happily ever after depends on what happens next. But this is always true. Every minute of your life.

Lili Wright is author of the travel memoir, Learning to Float. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Florida Review, Southern Indiana Review, Cream City Review, The Normal School, and other publications. She won the Mary C. Mohr Nonfiction Award in 2008 and the inaugural nonfiction prize given by Wag’s Revue. Her work was noted for distinction in Best American Essays 2010 and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010. A graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program, she teaches writing at DePauw University in Indiana.

Lili Wright: I wrote “Handyman” in one short blast. A friend of mine had recently learned her husband was having an affair, a discovery that reminded me of the precariousness of marriage. We also had a house guest for the summer, a wonderful man who was far more patient and kind than I am. One day, I walked to the beach and had a rush of “what if” thoughts. So I took these elements and told the story in a voice not my own. As I was writing, I felt I was channeling Grace Paley, though the story probably doesn’t sound like her at all.

“Handyman” is essentially a travel piece, though it’s only a walk to the beach. A walk to the beach might change your life. I knew the story had to be short because I wanted to leave the ending ambiguous. The reader’s wondering would mimic the wife’s wondering, her fear about what she might find, her fear that she might deserve it. Most of the editing I did was designed to heighten the drama and select details that carried the greatest metaphoric weight. This is the fun stuff: Compass Island, Penny Lane, the card game War—all there for the taking.

Recently, I’ve fallen in love with the short form. I am not a poet but this is the closest I can come. Moments like this one bubble up, unannounced, usually when I am traveling, when I’ve left my heart ajar.

Becky Adnot-Haynes: Lili Wright’s “Handyman” encapsulates a moment both small and large: small, because it is one afternoon in a woman’s life; large, because it may be the moment that changes everything. It accomplishes what flash fiction does at its best: captures something on the cusp—a brief but important point in time, a moment which may or may not transform the course of her marriage. It’s a statement on the precarious state of our happiness, on how close we may be to the beginning of our worst-case scenarios—or how far.

The story’s sentences are both economical and incisive, describing richly the narrator’s feelings toward her husband’s newly developed bond with their handyman without rendering the subject matter sentimental. The narrator tells us that “Levi isn’t gay, as far as I know,” but that “men being men, needing sex as often as they do, something may have bubbled to the surface.” These are the facts as she sees them; these are the facts as she delivers them to us. Levi is the man who may or may not be sleeping with her husband, but he is also a man who plays war nicely with her children and who never loses his temper. The story doesn’t attempt to incite anger or pity on behalf of the narrator—there are no villains, no martyrs, only people—and it is all the more emotionally resonant for that.

Nicola Mason: The short-short, as it’s known, has really taken off in recent years. There are even e-zines and print mags devoted to exclusively to this compressed mode of storytelling. The fun thing about the short form is its surprising versatility. It’s often unclear whether a given piece is poetry (a “prose poem”) or fiction—and even when the category is clear, the work can go in any number of directions. The most successful short-shorts are often ones that present an intriguing, offbeat idea and then elaborate on it, building a meaningful context for the idea to inhabit. Thomas Israel Hopkins’s three short-shorts in our Winter 2012 issue are delightful examples of surreal scenarios that are grounded in real emotion. For Soapbox’s feature, however, we chose to highlight Lili Wright’s “Handyman” (from the same issue), in large part because it is the hardest kind of short-short to pull off. Often such submissions feel like half-baked entrees, missing a crucial ingredient, cold in the center. Wright’s offering, however—though only a page and a quarter in the journal—manages to complete an arc of story that could well spool out in a dozen pages, but is even more fulfilling as a swift dive into a charged moment.

One of the accomplishments of the piece is how efficiently it settles us into the physical and emotional landscape using recognizable tropes: the “cocky” lawyer proud to conquer new territory, the bromance, the wife-become-mother who, in her role as commander-in-chief, feels she “can’t be nice.” Wright smoothly joins the physical and psychological, imbuing concrete details with a shrewd significance: “How will I tell the kids—years later—about . . . the summer when their father learned how to cover old siding with fresh shingles, learned to snap a plumb line, learned that male friendship is easier than marriage.”  The story ends inconclusively by design, the moment’s potent uncertainty exemplified by the “changing-house” near the water as well as the view of “Compass Island.” In the last line we, like the speaker, are poised at the brink, not knowing which way the needle will swing.

Michael Griffith: What I love about “Handyman”: the bracing directness of our entry into the story; the way it establishes immediately that its length does not doom it to simplicity or lack of range (by the end of the second paragraph, we’ve encountered Jesus, the Beatles, hemorrhoids, bean sprouts, a Mexican woman, male lust, sunburn, and feats of carpentry); the easy self-assurance that lets the reader know straight off, “I am in good hands. I trust this writer.” But best of all, from my point of view, is the sense of rich, complex uncertainty Wright conveys here. Is there an affair? Consider the evidence. Pop duets and bathroom confidences? Hmm. “Refueling” with peanuts and a skinny-dip together? Uh-oh. But what her suspicion proceeds from is not facts, but rather the sense that what’s gone wrong with their marriage has to have a name, a proximate cause, lest it be just a slow, inexorable, terrifying slide toward unintimacy and indifference. Does she hope to catch them making out? At least a little . . . because that’s a narrative she knows, “a movie I’ve already seen.” What she fears most, it seems, is not so much that she’s lost her husband to this other person (which would be awful, but she can deal with it) as that she’s doomed now, for the rest of her life, to keep losing him minute by minute, day by day.

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Posted in Soapbox and CR, Uncategorized |

From Our Travel-Minded Contributors: DeWitt, Collins, Harmon, Klatt, Nieves

Friday, April 27th, 2012

Since today is the 40th anniversary of Apollo 16’s return to Earth after a manned voyage to the moon, we wanted also to celebrate travel and experiencing new places. Conveniently, our following 8.2 contributors revealed that their work in our journal was influenced by various voyages (though none lunar):

Anna Carson DeWitt (on “On Nighttime Lawn”): I’d just moved back from Honduras and was living in my childhood home with parents and school-aged sisters. During my time away I’d become interested in landscapes for the first time—probably because it was a way for me to revel in the different-ness of my surroundings without fetishizing human beings (a real fear of mine). When I returned to North Carolina, I was surprised to find that I was almost equally enthralled with the autumn landscape of my childhood—the light, the woodland creatures, the different shapes of leaves. I would come home from work at night, keep the brights blazing in my car, and watch my parents’ yard come alive for a few moments. My father was having health problems at the time, and for some reason this moment of the day was especially poignant for me—watching hidden life play itself out over one patch of grass and thinking about my family, eating dinner inside. All the poems I was writing at the time seemed to be about Honduras, and so I was very pleased when I finally wrote “On Nighttime Lawn”—I had finally broken away from ‘foreigner poems’! It was only in revision that I realized that, in my process, Honduras was deeply present in the piece, if only as an opposite, or a tension in my own imagining. I think I’m trying in this poem to make sense of a world that is both familiar and uncharted, and to depict my growing realization that home—the place and the body—is just as ‘wild’ as abroad.

Martha Collins: Ngo Tu Lap (Ngô Tự Lập) was born in Hanoi in 1962, just as the American military presence was escalating into what we would eventually call the Vietnam War.  He spent his childhood in Vinh Phu, about sixty miles from Hanoi, from which he and his family were evacuated.  He now lives in Hanoi.

Our collaboration began in 2004, while Lap was working on a PhD in Illinois; that summer he came to Boston for the annual Joiner Center Writers Workshop and asked me to help him with an English version of one of his poems. That was the beginning of a collaboration that has resulted in a co-translated volume of his poems called Black Stars; it includes the poems in this issue, and will be published by Milkweed Press in 2013.

Joshua Harmon (on “The Annotated Mix-Tape, #17″): Two years ago, I became what has become termed an “extreme commuter,” someone who spends at least ninety minutes a day driving to and from work. I set my iPod to shuffle during my drive time—and for the first year I commuted, I listened most often to my iPod’s vast 1975-1983 playlist. One morning, as I drove down the Taconic State Parkway, the iPod spun up Section 25’s instrumental track “Trident”—an old favorite by a favorite old band—and it suddenly occurred to me how much of Section 25’s music involved nuclear dread. I spent the rest of that commute listening to that band, then spent the rest of the winter terrifying myself by researching the specifics of the Trident submarine program, ICBMs, the construction of the local Strategic Air Command bunker, and many related things that had, since the early ’80s, been crowded out of my mind. When I had my first nuclear-war nightmare since childhood, I figured it was time to move on to a new song.

L. S. Klatt (on “Waterway”): I often, in my work, probe the illusion of stability, so the fact that I was living on a houseboat on Lake Union during a recent sojourn in Seattle only amplified my sense of vulnerability to sudden movement—whether that be a houseboat rocking on its moorings or the wild fluctuations in weather that can bring a snowstorm to an otherwise temperate climate. This poem also is interested in the ways the mind, perhaps language itself, tries to stabilize and restore order to an unpredictability that may be outside the domain of words.

(on “A Natural Museum”) This particular rendering of a river in winter, like all landscapes, is artificial and imposed. There’s a playfulness here in the framing of the scene and the taking up of different perspectives. Light, as it does for the landscape painter, creates a changeability that I am trying to capture in the poem. I suppose I am asking: what makes metamorphosis possible? And how is consciousness—illumination—significant in the natural world?

John A. Nieves (on “Suppose Us South” and “Cartograph”): When I first arrived in Missouri from Florida to enter the University of Missouri PhD program, I started to notice the differences almost immediately. I grew up in New York City and Connecticut, and contrary to popular opinion, Missouri is much more “Northern” than Florida, which is often billed as the “Northern” southern state. Aside from culture and politics, the geography of climate had an immediate impact on me. The poems in the issue deal with the musings on geography that came from this. “Suppose Us South” figures physio-geographical changes in a brief, intimate, and immediate gesture. “Cartograph” takes on the larger idea of borders and the depictions of geography. The poem is concerned with the faith we put into symbol and delineation as opposed to people and land. The ghosts of history and historiography also play heavily on the poem because maps give far more information than location. They tell us who we are, who we were, who we aren’t. This poem attempts to subvert some of those powers by allowing the living to repopulate the map’s flat surface.

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Posted in From our Contributors |

“The Carousel Thief”: Why We Like It

Monday, April 23rd, 2012

Volunteer Luke Geddes is a bit of an enigma. In the office, he’s quiet, yet at home writes stories involving things like Wonder Woman, in an airport bathroom, finding herself short of feminine hygiene products. Things like castaways from a destroyed Earth traveling through space with only reruns of Gilligan’s Island to entertain them. He has a collection of such comi-tragic pieces coming out from Chomu Press (I Am a Magical Teenage Princess). However, to our knowledge he does not himself possess an invisible plane or a large starship. Further, he does not sport Robinson Crusoe–type (or Tom Hanks–type) rags. He wears a bow tie. Regularly. Which puzzles us. So, in order to better understand Luke, we decided to hire some private investigators to tap his phone and hack into his email. Unfortunately, we discovered nothing of an illuminating personal nature—but we did find this rather insightful confession (which resulted in disciplinary action).

Luke Geddes: I wish I could say otherwise, but my first read-through of David Yost’s “The Carousel Thief” was frustrating—but only because my cruel tormentors, the CR senior staff, had charged me with the task of entering their copy-edits into the story’s electronic file. I tried to stay focused on the editorial notations, but so seductive was Yost’s prose (deceptively straightforward and rife with surprising, vivid details—such as epic lists of regrettable QVC purchases including ostrich steaks and embroidered His and His bathrobes, and of equally regrettable extreme-eating competitions involving cow brains, SPAM, Ramen noodles, and pigs’ feet); so wittily and realistically developed were the characters (a quirky gay couple struggling to live above their means in the dreary Midwest); so unique, expansive, and expertly re-created were the cultures surrounding antique carousels and competitive-eating contests, with the latter’s bizarre but plausible rules about “chipmunking” (stuffing your cheeks without swallowing) and “reversal” (vomiting); so wry and hilarious was the first-person voice; so clever was the way the story combined and subverted the domestic and heist genres, I kept getting sucked into the drama and humor and could not concentrate on my editorial assignment. (In other words, the story was so good that only a long, self-indulgent, semicolon-abusing sentence can capture its greatness.) I hope my evil overlords in the CR offices will forgive my gross insubordination, but if they don’t, I blame author David Yost for writing a story that’s too damn engaging.

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Posted in Why We Like It |

Bonus Material: Bancroft, Browne, Longhorn, Schwartz, and Waldrep

Friday, April 20th, 2012

For today’s post our nameless blogoscribe has taken five comments from contributors to Issue 8.2 and arranged them into a surreal pseudo-mini-narrative. If you read it and then tonight wake up having dreamt of being chased by a tumescent elephant into the arms of an existential yet not unpaternal birch tree with a penchant for inappropriate laughter, well, you’re probably going to have a little trouble getting back to sleep. The anti-dote: order Issue 8.2 here.

Josiah Bancroft (on his poem “My Name”): I’m not one for out of body experiences or astral projection and the like, but I have experienced the occasional dissociative moment when some regular fixture of my life suddenly seems alien. Most remarkable is when this happens while I’m staring in the mirror or upon hearing my name called. That something so essential can become novel is wonderful and frightening. I think most people are familiar with that seasick feeling, that out-of-memory experience. It’s the quintessential American identity crisis: “This is not my beautiful wife.”

Ryan J. Browne: “Theory of must” is one in a series of “theory” poems in which I try to go by the words of Lucille Clifton: “Poems do not come from what you know; they come from what you’re trying to wonder about.” One day, I read somewhere about elephants hearing through their feet, not their ears, and, after some research, I had the bare bones of a new poem. During my reading, I saw the state of sexual arousal of bull elephants is referred to as musth. Well, I had a draft of a poem, “Must,” that was about a first date, not elephants, and had been set aside for some time. The next move seemed obvious. It was one of those happy coincidences—work giving life to work!

Sandy Longhorn: In June 2010, I set out to write a poem a day for 14 days and drafted “Litany for the Insomniac” on day 13 of that run. My journal claims “not sure there’s enough left for today and tomorrow” and states that I had slept poorly the night before. The poem went through many rewrites over 6 months, as list poems can be tricky and must be crafted not only for sound, meaning, and image but also for pacing in the movement toward closure. The opening couplet remains intact save one word change.

Lloyd Schwartz: I once got a review that compared me to the comedian Henny Youngman, which delighted me, because I want people to find humor in my poems (though not just). One of my favorite essays is Thomas De Quincey’s “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” in which he writes about Shakespeare’s use of comedy, the famous drunken Porter scene in Macbeth, not to soften but to heighten the surrounding tragedy. I’ve been working on some poems recently that are trying to explore the relation between the comic and the serious. “Cut-Up” is based on a true story. My oldest friend, one of the funniest people I know, told me a horrendous story about one of his sons. So awful that it made me want to scream—or laugh. The way we sometimes laugh at the scariest horror movies.

Thinking about my reaction to what my friend was reporting reminded me of a production I was in—in fact, the American premiere of Ted Hughes’s translation of Seneca’s Oedipus. It’s a much grislier affair than the greater and more famous Sophocles version. I was a member of the Chorus. The director, Laurence Senelick, was trying to figure out how the townspeople would respond to the horrible news about Oedipus. He had the inspired idea to have each of us begin with a little chuckle or snicker, as if this had to be a joke. Then as each Chorus member heard the others, the laughter increased until it virtually exploded into a kind of mass hysteria. People in the audience told me afterward that it was one of the most chilling theatrical moments they’d ever experienced. And we on stage were feeling the same thing. It was much more powerful—and seemed more “real”—to laugh at a situation that was too horrifying for predictable tears. I’d wanted to get that experience into a poem for a long time.

G. C. Waldrep (on his poem “Common Prayer”):  Friendship is also a harrow, one of the more complex scars experience leaves on a body. Track or trace, both from the Latin trahere, to drag. To cultivate, in an open field: one imagines an open field: and this is the nub of it, the crux, the punctum: one imagines. The field itself; one’s place in it; the harrow’s sharp teeth or revolving discs (pick your century), each a miniature Klein bottle, a dream-planet’s silhouette bright in the noonday sun. To disturb keenly or painfully, as the mind, feelings, etc. Sometimes, when I read my poetry aloud—I mean to others—I’m asked, “who is the you that keeps showing up in the poems?”

In Tolkien’s Smith of Wootton Major, the enchanted Smith “put his arms about the stem of a young birch and clung to it, and the Wind wrestled fiercely with them, trying to tear him away; but the birch was bent down to the ground by the blast and enclosed him in its branches. When at last the Wind passed on he rose and saw that the birch was naked. It was stripped of every leaf, and it wept, and tears fell from its branches like rain. He set his hand upon its white bark, saying: ‘Blessed be the birch! What can I do to make amends or give thanks?’ He felt the answer of the tree pass up from his hand: ‘Nothing,’ it said. ‘Go away! The Wind is hunting you. You do not belong here. Go away and never return!’” The birch is right. We do not belong here. And yet in this world there is no “away.” And no return.

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Posted in From our Contributors |

Dispatch from California

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012

CR’s own prodigal editor, Don Bogen (who also goes by the monikers “The Bogues,” “Bogedy,” and “Dr. Bojangles” ) was in San Francisco last Monday for the CR reading at the Stable Cafe. Here’s Don’s account of the event:

By sheer coincidence, I had a chance to attend the first Greetings from Cincinnati Review reading last Monday, March 26, in San Francisco.  Thanks to the imagination and tireless energies of Nick Johnson, a poet and contributor to our most recent issue (8.2), I found myself among some sixty people huddled around space heaters in the courtyard of the Stable Cafe–things cool off at night in San Francisco.  Nick read along with two other poets in 8.2—Dan Bellm and Rebekah Bloyd—and the evening came to a close with some short prose sketches by Ian Tuttle, who, though not yet a contributor, cajoled his listeners with some satiric looks at the yuppified cafe crowds at various spots in the city, including the Stable itself.  We kept warm with wine, beer, snacks, and great writing, and though the outside lamp failed as the sun set, Dan Bellm’s trusty pocket flashlight saved the day—or the night.  Many books sold, much conviviality, and many toasts raised to the magazine and its contributors.

There are more writers than you can shake a stick at in the Bay Area, and a good number of them have been in The Cincinnati Review.  Rebecca Foust, who was in issue 5.2, made the trip down from Marin, and others sent regrets:  D. A. Powell (7.1) and C. S. Giscombe (5.2) were out of town doing visiting stints at the University of Iowa and Temple respectively, Randall Mann (7.2) was flying to Zurich for his job, and Dean Rader (7.2) was in the blurry time zone of life with a newborn.

Fortunately, there are rumors of a repeat event on the Berkeley side of the Bay sometime later this year, and, further north, talk of taking the show to Seattle, another hotbed of contributors.  Jeff Von Ward, who came up with the truly great Cincinnati poster for the reading—postcard, technicolor stripes and all—has been kind enough to offer it as a template for later events.  So contributors and friends beyond the West Coast who wish to do their own version of a Greetings from Cincinnati Review reading have things all set up.  It’s a great way to get the word out about the fine work we publish from all over.

Also, there are videos of the reading on youtube. Here’s one of event organizer and CR contributor Nick Johnson:

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Posted in Editors' Dispatches, From our Contributors |

Cincinnati Review Reading in San Francisco!

Monday, March 26th, 2012

Our contributor Nick Johnson was generous enough to set up a reading for our latest issue that will feature fellow 8.2 contributors Rebekah Bloyd and Dan Bellm. This is going to be the biggest thing to hit San Francisco since the Dirty Harry movies. If you live within a 300-mile radius of San Francisco and leave right now, you should be able to arrive in time. And if you’d like to set up a CR reading in your very own burg, just let us know. We’ll put you in touch with other contributors in your area—and we’ll even send you a bunch of copies gratis!

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Posted in Uncategorized |

The Blue Pencil Prize

Monday, February 6th, 2012

A lot of blood, sweat, and tears go into the copy-editing and proofreading of each issue of CR (and mustard . . . we blame associate editor Matt McBride for the mustard stain on our copy of The Chicago Manual of Style). And now that our newest issue is officially available, we want you, readers, to get in on the fun: Did we miss anything? Scour our pages and find one legitimate typo (subject to editorial review) in issue 8.2, and we’ll post the results on our blog.

Leave your comments by clicking the post title above. First five to respond get their choice of free issue, thermos, or slingpack, along with a blue Col-Erase pencil, the old-timey editor’s tool of choice. (We have to warn you: Your friends won’t like it when you return their correspondence with the comma splices corrected).

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Posted in Contests, Games, Contests, & Diversions |

At Long Last: The Arrival of Issue 8.2!

Friday, January 27th, 2012

Volunteer Nick Story, Associate Editor Matt McBride, and Assistant Editor Becky Adnot-Haynes brave paper cuts to send you Issue 8.2

We’re thrilled to announce our latest arrival: Issue 8.2! Although slightly overdue, this edition of the Cincinnati Review is chock-full of good literature and art; the extra gestation time was worth it. Though we can’t throw a cigar in with the journal (media mail regulations and all), it’s headed out to you via the United States Postal Service! (If you’re not a subscriber, you can become one here). Issue 8.2 includes Steve De Jarnatt’s award-winning story “Mulligan,” art by Antonio Carreño, and poetry by Ngo Tu Lap, Kevin Prufer, and G. C. Waldrep, among others.

Stay tuned for our Game of the Month, which is likely to involve a blue pencil . . .

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Posted in Uncategorized |

Bonus Material from Issue 8.1

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

Any day now, we’re going to receive a number of large, ridiculously heavy boxes full of Issue 8.2. As we wait, we’re doing core-strengthening exercises and reminding ourselves to lift with our legs. Managing editor Nicola Mason leads us in calisthenics to start each day, periodically shouting: “Knees higher! Come on, people, an ampersand has better form than you!” We’re also checking every entry in the subscriber database and periodically sandpapering our fingerpads to encourage calluses. Fun Fact: the manila-envelope papercut rates a 10 on our papercut scale (whereas 60 lb. white offset comes in a weak 6) and surprisingly produces a larger quantity of the red stuff than the occasional, accidental letter-opener incident.

Before we shed blood to bring you great lit, though, we want to look back wistfully at a strong issue, 8.1. For one last time, we take a closer look at what some contributors had to say about their pieces in that issue. In fact, we’ve waxed enthusiastic on all three of these pieces in our “Why We Like It” feature!

Steve Amick: Initially, I was asked by the writers Keith Taylor and Laura Kasischke to write a contemporary Michigan “ghost story” for an anthology they were editing for Wayne State University Press—Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them. But I was more interested in doing something that could also be explained as just a psychological glitch. Harry Bennett was very much real and lived (before I was born) in a “castle” about a mile from the house where I grew up. Yet I had no idea, till I did much more research than I probably needed (I even spoke to an elderly woman who babysat for his kids), that he was born in Ann Arbor and had what one might consider fairly “enlightened” influences in his early years. The layers made him infinitely more interesting to me, and I am now working on expanding “Not Even Lions and Tigers” into a short novel. As a villain, his union busting is of course incredibly timely today. Michigan’s new infamously anti-union governor even lives in a high-security mansion in the very same small township as Bennett’s Castle.

CR volunteer Brian Trapp’s take on “Not Even Lions and Tigers”

Julie Funderburk: These two poems, “Landscape of the Young” and “Landscape of the Careful,” belong to a series of landscape poems. I was happy to discover this structure, because it enabled me to embed narratives, widen the poems’ sense of relevance, and speak authoritatively through imagery, which is perhaps what I seek to ultimately do when I write poetry. I found the titles could give the poems immediate purpose. The structure even became an opportunity to breathe new life into some temporarily abandoned drafts that did not function well as more straightforward narratives. Once I had the right abstraction in the title, the hard part was done, and I found much pleasure in crafting the images.

Associate Editor Matt McBride’s take on “Landscape of the Young”

Laura Eve Engel: I have a terrible memory, but I recently discovered that if you ask me about where I was when I wrote what draft of which poem, I can tell you exactly. The first line of “Reciprocity” arrived in its entirety as I was falling asleep, so I got out of bed and typed it. I do this a lot, but I get distracted or choose sleep instead, and the lines end up lost in a graveyard of untitled documents. Maybe it’s the way this particular line began with “and” that made me want to follow it somewhere; all I know is this time I stayed up until I’d done something I liked with it. I think I’d just read Chelsea Minnis’s Poemland, which has, if I remember rightly, many sweet drinks. It’s likely I’d been realizing again, too late, that I was disappointed in something.

CR volunteers Joe Dargue and Ruth Williams’s takes on Reciprocity

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