Category Archives: Arts & Letters News

Prize submission period February 1st – March 31st

25th Annual Arts & Letters Prize Judges Announced

2024 Prize Judges

Poetry: Chelsea Rathburn 

Creative Nonfiction: Beth Ann Fennelly

Fiction: Tiphanie Yanique

Poetry, Creative Nonfiction, and Fiction Winners will appear in next year’s Fall or Spring issue of Arts & Letters.

About the Prizes
For our prizes in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, we offer the winner a $1,000 prize and publication in the next year’s Fall or Spring issue. Our prizes are made possible through generous gifts to our prize endowments from Dr. Martin Lammon, Dr. Barry Darugar, Bahram and Fari Atefat, and other friends of Arts & Letters. If you are interested in contributing to our endowments, please contact us!

Submission Guidelines:

Please do NOT include your name on any part of the uploaded file you submit to any genre.  We accept most file formats (Word, .rtf, PDF).

We prefer, for the prizes, that your work not be simultaneously submitted. This helps us preserve the integrity of the contest(s). Our judges’ decisions are usually made by the end of May.

All fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction prize submissions will be considered for publication at regular payment rates.

All writers and poets writing in English are eligible to enter, excepting friends, relatives, or current and former students of the current-year judges.

The submission period for our annual prizes is February 1 – March 31st. The entry fee is $20.

Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction:

Submit a manuscript of up to 25 pages, typed, double-spaced

Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction:

Submit a manuscript of up to 25 pages, typed, double-spaced

Rumi Prize for Poetry:

Submit a manuscript of up to 4 poems, typed, single-spaced (poems need not be thematically linked, though it is fine if they are)

All submissions are through our Submittable site:

Submit

24th Annual Arts & Letters Prize Winners

Rumi Prize for Poetry Judge: Rodney Jones WINNER: Owen Lewis, for “Something’s Wrong,” “Waking This New Year’s Day,” and “More Than Twice”

Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction Judge: Francesca Ekwuyasi WINNER: Patricia Grace King, for “Pax Americana”

Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction Judge: Sue William Silverman WINNER: Jonathan VanBallenberghe, for “Winchester Street: Living with My Father’s Suicide”

Arts & Letters is pleased to announce that Issue #47 will be published as a special mid-year issue in celebration of the journal’s 25^th Anniversary. The 25^th Anniversary issue will feature the work of our 2023 Annual Prize Winners (Patricia Grace King, Jonathan VanBallenberghe, and Owen Lewis) and our Unclassifiable Contest Winner (Christy Sheffield Sanford). We are happy to share that Sanford’s “Wreck Tangles of Désirée Acking” will be printed in color for the occasion. The issue will also feature poetry by Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States, and Chelsea Rathburn, current Poet Laureate of Georgia, plus prose by New Hampshire Poet Laureate Alexandria Peary and Flash by Sophia Khan. Issue #47 will be available for purchase in January. We hope you look forward to this special issue as much as we do!

Come visit Arts & Letters at the AWP21 Virtual Bookfair! The bookfair is open from 3:30 – 5:00 pm EST on 4-5 March 2021, and open 3:30 – 6:00 pm EST on 6 March 2021.

Say hello to Editor Laura Newbern and Managing Editors Kelsie Doran and William Warren. Ask us about our Prize Competitions, submitting to Arts & Letters, or about purchasing a subscription!

Arts & Letters Contributor Rose Marie Kinder’s publication through Notre Dame Press of A Common Person and Other Stories, winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, has been released!

These sixteen stories capture a cross section of American life, complex, colorful, unsettling, and uplifting. Despite the ever-present threat of violence and the fragmentation of cultures and traditions, real heroism of everyday people is manifest throughout the collection.

“Reading a Rose Marie Kinder’s story is like plunging your face into a clear, cold, spring-fed stream. Everything is changed, refreshed, and revelatory. Her beautiful new collection, A Common Person and Other Stories, is a constant, thrilling reminder of magic and power that reside in the people—and the animals—that surround us every day.” —Whitney Terrell, author of The Good Lieutenant

Valerie Sayers, editor of The Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, interviewed Rose Marie Kinder here.

Here is a print interview with Rose Marie Kinder.

BOOK EVENTS for 2021

February 24 – 7:00 pm, Richard Sullivan Prize Virtual Reading – University of Notre Dame

March 18 – TBA, Participant – Unbound Book Festival, Columbia, Missouri

March 19 – 7:00 pm, Reading – The Writers Place, Kansas City, Missouri

April 1 – 7-8 pm, Book launch/Reading and Discussion, University of Central Missouri School of English and Philosophy and Pleiades.

April 14 – 3:00 – 4:00 pm, Reading and Discussion – Rolla Public Library, Missouri

Purchase the book here: https://www.edelweiss.plus/#sku=0268200068&page=1

R. M. Kinder is the author of three prizewinning collections of short fiction, including A Near-Perfect Gift, winner of the University of Michigan Press Literary Fiction Award, and Sweet Angel Band, winner of Helicon Nine Editions’s Willa Cather Fiction Prize. She has also published two novels, An Absolute Gentleman and The Universe Playing Strings. Her prose has appeared in Passages North, Other Voices, North American Review, the New York Times, and elsewhere.

Arts & Letters Contributor Joanna Pearson’s forthcoming short story collection Now You Know It All is set to release in October of 2021 (University of Pittsburgh Press). Her short story “A Lily, a Rose, a Rose”, featured in Arts & Letters Issue 39, will be included in the collection.

Pearson is racking up awards with this collection. She is the 2021 winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize, one of the nation’s most prestigious awards for a collection of short stories. Now You Know It All was selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward P. Jones.

Congratulations to Joanna Pearson and all the best of luck from the A&L community!

Checkout our latest interview in our Ampersand Interview Series with L.I. Henley

In the latest Ampersand Interview, Assistant Managing Editor, Kelsie Doran, spoke with L.I. Henley about Jim Morrison, pain, her dream car, upcoming projects, and her piece, “Drive! (You’re Lost Little Girl, You’re Lost)” which will be published in the forthcoming Arts & Letters Issue.

Kelsie Doran: First of all, us here at Arts & Letters are big Jim Morrison fans. Having Jim as a figure running throughout the piece was a fun fantasy treat; at what point in the writing process did you decide to bring Jim in? 

L.I. Henley: I’m glad to hear that! The decision to include Jim as a kind of imaginary friend in the essay came early on. At seventeen I was completely enamored with Morrison’s sultry voice, transgressive lyrics (and those black leather pants!), and I really did imagine him as my co-pilot. When I sat down and began writing notes about the experience of driving as a young female on the desolate roads of the Mojave Desert at a time without cell phones, iPods, or helicopter parents, my mind immediately went to the music that kept me company. I thought about albums by the Talking Heads, Frank Zappa, The Dave Brubeck Quartet, David Bowie, Annie Lennox…all of which I raided from my mom and stepdad’s CD collection. But The Door’s self-titled debut and their second album, Strange Days, really captured the tone of my long drives to school and my failed searches for house parties across the impossibly dark mesa. The existential and mythological implications mixed with blues and psychedelic rock that made up The Doors’ early sound (“no safety or surprise/ the end”) captured the volatile desert (and the west at large) and foreshadowed the even stranger days of early adulthood that were coming my way.  

KD: This piece is very vulnerable, was it harder to write the more personal scenes or was it therapeutic in some way?  

LH: Well, anything truly therapeutic is probably going to feel like hard or even painful work at times. Pain is pleasure’s wrestling mate, I think. Physical therapy hurts, lifting weights hurts, accepting and telling the truth hurts—but hopefully we get some sense of relief as well. I believe that by being open in regards to having chronic illness I can make others feel less alone, that I can do my small part to challenge the stigma associated with invisible disabilities. I do think that there is strength in being vulnerable, and that the essay shows how the rugged environment of my childhood made me more resilient and self-reliant.  

KD: Besides Jim Morrison, who else do you like to rock out to? Do you listen to any artists or albums specifically to get you into the writing mood?  

LH: I’m still a big fan of all the performers I listed above, but my heavy rotation now includes Run the Jewels, Scissor Sisters, Puscifer, Die Antwoord, and other contemporary artists. I like to listen to Massive Attack and The Knife when I’m working on my visual art. I listened to Tool and Marilyn Manson when I was writing my desert noir novella, Whole Night Through. I’m currently working on a novel set in my hometown of Landers during the early 80’s, and I listen to what I think my UFO obsessed, up all night, down-and-out characters would listen to: Patti Smith, Shuggie Otis, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed.  

KD: Where do you write most often? Do you like to have a specific writing space?

LH: When I’m working on an eco-poetic piece that is rooted in the experiential, I sit outside where I can observe and have experiences in real time and write about them in real time. I’ve written a few chapbooks sitting in the backyard of whatever desert house or cabin I was renting at the time, just going, “Oh, that jackrabbit is looking at me,” “Oh, that cricket lost a leg,” “Oh, the ants are devouring my toes.” But writing outside is not always practical (wind, sun, heat, fire ants on my feet) and I do find myself at my standing desk quite a lot, surrounded by corkboards covered in ephemera I’ve cut from Life Magazines and bookshelves full of field guides (which is where I am writing this right now).  

KD: What/who inspires you to write the most? 

LH: As an only child living in “the sticks,” I started writing stories and poems when I was old enough to read. I think it was partially because I wanted to feel less alone but also because I was critical of the world I saw and had a lot of opinions about the adult behavior that I couldn’t voice otherwise. I was born a critic, which makes me a true optimist, because I believe we can do better. My partner, JM, doesn’t necessarily inspire me to write but he does something better—he doesn’t get in my way. He is a dedicated percussionist and composer who is always cooking up something new; we both like to be in our work. He’s also a damn fine editor and has no problem giving me unbiased, no B.S. criticism.  

KD: What would you tell someone who has just started their writing career?  

LH: Well, I guess I’d have to ask the person what they mean by “career.” I once visited a graduate poetry class at USC and a student asked me what it was like for me financially now that I had “made it as a writer,” and my response was that I hadn’t gotten the memo that this was or could be true for me. If by “career” we are talking about a calling, a life’s work, an obsession, I’m more suited to give advice, but it’s not very fancy. Read as much contemporary writing in all genres as you can. Read work that is different from yours. Write as much as you can. If you can’t be content in life without writing, then you are a writer.  

KD: We read about your first car – the used, white, Nissan Altima. But we are dying to know, what is your dream car if money wasn’t a factor?  

LH: Great question! I’d love a fully electric car that still has some cargo space in it. A fully electric camper van—does that exist yet? I’d buy one of those. I have to say I’m pretty stoked on our used Dodge van we bought off Craigslist—my partner built a bed and drawers inside of it. There are even two small laptop desks that fold down off the double doors in the back so we can work and write on the road. When I have trouble falling asleep at night (i.e. the world currently being on fire) I just remember that we can live in our van with our dogs if we have to—and we may have to because we are both adjunct English professors who lost our classes for the spring semester due to low enrollment.  

 KD: What is next for your writing? Is there anything you can share about forthcoming projects or pieces?  

LH: I am nothing if not prolific. I have a brand new eco-poetic chapbook out with symbolist painter Zara Kand called From the moon, as I fell, which was written during quarantine. Through our book sales, we are trying to raise money for the California Fire Foundation, which gives aid to families displaced by California wildfires. I am also sending around a collaborative chapbook manuscript I wrote with my best gal Jennifer K. Sweeney called The Book of Questions. I am still hoping to do some readings and interviews for Whole Night Through, which JM has made a soon-to-be released soundtrack for that includes the voices of Marsha de la O, Kristin Bock, James Cushing and other writers. I’m continuing to write personal essays centered on my experiences with autoimmune diseases and have another one forthcoming in the fall issue of Ninth Letter. I’m also working nearly every day on collage, erasure, mixed-media artwork.  

L.I. Henley’s work has most recently appeared in Diagram, Waxwing, Tupelo, Diode, Zone 3, Tinderbox, The American Literary Review, Thrush, The Superstition Review, Ninth Letter, and The Indianapolis Review. “Drive! You’re Lost Little Girl, You’re Lost,” is part of a collection-in-progress documenting her struggles (and epiphanies) living with a triad of autoimmune diseases. She lives and teaches in the Mojave with her partner, musician and poet JM. Visit her at www.lihenley.com.  

Our Unclassifiable Contest has ended, and a winner has been chosen by our judge, Michael Martone!

Winner: Kat Mustatea, “Voidoplois”

“All of the finalists were terrific.  But I am going to go with ‘Voidopolis.’  It takes to heart and exploits the reality that a writer today is not simply a “writer” who writes, creating a text, but a media artist not using a 19th century typewriter but an extremely powerful typesetting machine now connected to the internet. I also was attracted to the ephemeral nature of the piece, its temporary-ness.  A piece about the virus infects itself with its own digital virus that rewrites then erases the living codes. Huzzah!”
-Michael Martone

Finalists:
Matthew Burnside, “Excerpts from Salutis in Solitudine: a Game of Language and Loneliness”
Kevin Callaway, “Obituary: A Still Life with Islands”
Christine Hamm, “*Gorilla”
Amy Long, “Hash Mark”
Genevieve Monks, “The Rohr Shocke Test for Writers or Readers”

Thank you to all those who submitted, for stretching our minds and engaging our imaginations! We hope to see your work again next year!

23rd Annual Arts & Letters Prize Competition Judges Announced

2021 Prize Judges

Poetry: Romeo Oriogun

Romeo Oriogun is the author of Sacrament of Bodies (University of Nebraska Press) and The Origin of Butterflies, selected by Kwame Dawes for the APBF New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Series and Burnt Men, an electronic chapbook published by Praxis. His poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and others. He was the 2017 winner of the Brunel International African Poetry Prize. He has received fellowships from the Ebedi International Residency, Harvard University Department of English, The Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. He is currently an MFA candidate for poetry at Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Creative Non-Fiction: Kristi Coulter

Kristi Coulter is the author of the memoir-in-essays Nothing Good Can Come From This, a 2019 finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, New York Magazine, Elle, the Believer, Vox, Alaska Quarterly Review, Columbia Journal, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan and is a former Ragdale Foundation resident and a 2020 Mineral School Fellow. She has taught creative writing at the University of Washington and Hugo House. Kristi’s next memoir, Exit Interview, is forthcoming from MCD x FSG in 2022. She lives in Seattle with her husband and dogs.

Fiction: Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

Novuyo Rosa Tshuma is the author of the novel House of Stone, winner of the 2019 Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award and the 2019 Bulawayo Arts Award for Outstanding Fiction, and listed for the 2019 Orwell Prize, the 2019 Dylan Thomas Prize, the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize and the 2020 Balcones Fiction Prize. She has been invited to give public lectures about House of Stone at Oxford University, the Nordic Africa Institute and Vassar College. In 2017, she received the Rockefeller Foundation’s prestigious Bellagio Center Literary Arts Residency Award for her work. Her collection, Shadows, was published by Kwela in South Africa to critical acclaim and won the 2014 Herman Charles Bosman Prize. A native of Zimbabwe who has lived in South Africa and the USA, Tshuma’s writing has been featured in numerous anthologies, including McSweeney’s, Ploughshares and Swallowed by a Whale: How to Survive the Writing Life. She serves on the Editorial Advisory Board and is an editor at The Bare Life Review, a journal of refugee and immigrant literature based in San Fransisco. Tshuma teaches fiction at Emerson College, and has previously taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

We hope you’re staying safe and doing well during these troubling times. Because of the current circumstances, our response times are a bit slowed,
but we will continue to read submissions for our annual prizes.
We have extended the prize submissions period to end on April 15th.
Please take care, physically and mentally.

Congratulations to past contributor Rebecca Foust, whose poems “Collaborator” and “Train Out of Altoona” appeared in Issue 37. Her new poetry collection, The Unexploded Ordnance Bin, came out this past November from Swan Scythe Press!

Congratulations to past contributor Kathryn Winograd, whose essay “Breviaries of the Ghost” appeared in Issue 30. Her new collection of
essays, Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, comes out this
March from Saddle Road Press!

Congratulations to our Pushcart nominees!

Our editors have reviewed all the work we published in 2019 to choose work to nominate for the Pushcart Prize. If you’ve missed these poetry and prose selections, we hope you’ll check them out in Issues 38 and 39. Thank you to all the authors who seek out Arts & Letters as a platform to publish your work!

Issue 38

Brian Crawford: “When We Were Liars”
Lee Peterson: “Election Day”

Issue 39

Carol Keeley: “Demon Feeding”
Anushah Jiwani: “No Space”
Elisabeth Murawski: “The Woman Unafraid of Tropical Diseases”
Greg Bowers: “Her Hair Smelled Like Rhododendrons”

Check out the latest interview in our Ampersand Interview Series with Wendy Rawlings.

In the latest Ampersand Interview, Creative Nonfiction Editor, Kerry Neville, spoke with Wendy Rawlings about her new collection of stories Time for Bed, advice for new writers, and replacing an old mattress that once belonged to Mark Strand. Rawlings’ essay “A Bad Sort of Industry” was published in Arts & Letters Issue 38.

Kerry Neville: Can you talk about your life as a writer? What got you started? Has your approach to craft changed? What keeps you writing?

Wendy Rawlings: This might be macabre, but I had a favorite cousin who lived in Connecticut, a couple of hours from Long Island, where I grew up. This was in the days before the Internet, and we wrote each other long letters in code that only we could decipher. She was stricken by leukemia and died when we were thirteen. Neither my family nor I knew how to process the grief, but my mother gave me a journal and told me to write in it whenever I felt sad or lonely. Thus, a writing life began.

Perhaps because I got started that way, I have always treated writing as intensely personal and have rarely (maybe never?) written anything “just for fun” or as a “formal challenge” (I put these in scare quotes because they’re things I’ve heard writers say). That’s not to say I haven’t had fun or experimented with form, but I’m always animated first by a need to explore a topic or emotion or experience that has troubled or been deeply important to me. That’s what keeps me writing. My approach to craft has changed in that I think I’m more aware, even in the early stages of a piece of writing, of needing to find a connection between form and content that makes intuitive sense to me. I used to see form and content as separate entities that I kind of needed to smash together. I don’t think that way anymore.

KN: You’ve written both a novel, two collections of short stories, as well as essays. Can you talk about the differences in your approaches to writing them (form and genre) and perhaps what remains the same?

WR: Fundamentally, I think of myself as a writer of sentences. My husband, who is a poet, says that interest in small units of language makes me more like a poet than like a novelist. The only thing that really interested me about writing a novel (and I’ve only written one published novel) is the narrative voice and how to sustain it. I love writing stories and essays because I can achieve what I think of as a kind of Persian Rug Perfection. A Persian rug is only a few feet long, but in it you can keep finding new designs and patterns and elaborations. And maybe the one flaw that makes it the product of human hands. I don’t think I’m really a novelist, but publishing one was on my bucket list, so there you have it. I chased the voice of the novel down until I could hear and follow it.

KN: Can you talk about the process of collecting together the individual stories in Time for Bed? Did you write any or all of the stories with the greater collection in mind? Or, if not, how did you select the individual pieces to include?

WR: Earlier iterations of this book had different titles; at one point it was called something like Varieties of Religious Experience in the Tri-State Area. I wanted the book to be kind of funny and to push up against some taboos that interested me, especially taboos around sex. I was also interested in how blended families navigate relationships. There’s a story in Time for Bed in which a woman and her new stepbrother (who is much younger than she is) end up getting involved with each other sexually. Blended families can be difficult to navigate for adult children.

I did have a few other stories in the collection that were more satirical and over the top. In one, a tampon and a maxi-pad sit on a dock and have a conversation about being roofied. My editor at LSU Press, Michael Griffith, suggested I replace those because they stood out as departing too much from the tone of the book. I think he was probably right about that.

KN: What advice would you give to beginning writers who are thinking of putting together their own collections or starting a novel?

WR: Ooh, that’s a good question!  Based on my own experience, I’d say, first, to try to be as fearless and authentic as possible. I wasted a lot of time trying to sound like someone else, and the results were kind of generic. I was looking to see what I thought a novel should sound like. That was the wrong approach. I think the right approach is to go look at someone who makes art in another discipline and see how fearless she/they/he is/are. One of my idols in this regard is the visual artist Kara Walker. She made this giant sphinx out of white sugar and gave it her own face. I won’t go into the symbolism, but whenever I am afraid to give myself permission to make a piece of writing that is big or transgressive or strange, I think of Walker’s work. Same with a musician like Philip Glass or Jay Z. For some reason, visual artists and musicians inspire me most, because their work is big or loud or both.

KN: What is the best thing (related to writing) that you have ever spent money on?

WR: You mean the best thing I’ve bought with money I made from my writing? In 1998, I think it was, I was awarded second place in the Atlantic’s Student Writing Competition. At that point in my life I was sleeping in a hand me down bed I was told had once belonged to the poet Mark Strand. It was so worn out that it dipped in the center, causing my boyfriend and me to roll toward each other as we slept. With the $500 from the Atlantic, I was able to buy a new Serta mattress. When you’re in graduate school and broke and have no health insurance, a new bed is the best thing in the world.

KN: What’s next for Wendy Rawlings?

WR: I’m working on an essay collection called Crying in Public that takes as its starting point a trip I took to visit my cousins in London that happened to coincide with the days after Princess Diana died. The public mourning was just staggering. Another essay explores the kind of public freakouts so many of us had during and after 9/11. So that’s in the works. Then I think I really would like to try an idiosyncratic inanimate object narrator like James Hannahan does in the novel Delicious Foods. Like narrate from the POV of a tampon. Maybe!

Wendy Rawlings is the author of a novel, The Agnostics, and two collections of stories, Time for Bed and Come Back Irish.  Her work has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Creative Nonfiction, Kenyon Review, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She’s a professor in the creative writing program at the University of Alabama.

Interview by Kerry Neville

Buy a copy of any of our issues, past or current, and we’ll send a free copy to whomever you’d like.

Once you’ve bought an issue, email us the name and address you’d like us to send the free copy to.

This sale will run from November 11th to January 31st.

We are so excited to announce the release of Issue 39!

Our 21st Issue features the 2019 Arts & Letters Prize Winners, Carol Keeley (Nonfiction), Karen Harryman (Poetry), and Lones Seiber (Fiction). Check out their work and the work of our other fine contributors! You can order your copy online in print or digital formats at the Arts & Letters Exchange.

Congratulations to past Contributor Joyce Hinnefeld has a book of stories, The Beauty of Their Youth, coming out in March 2020!

Congratulations are in order for John Sibley Williams, whose work has appeared multiple times in Arts & Letters! He has a collection of poems, Skin Memory, coming out this November from the University of Nebraska Press.

Check out the latest interview in our Ampersand Interview Series with Esteban Rodriguez.

In the latest Ampersand Interview, we spoke with Esteban Rodriguez about his writing journey, developing habits, and how he writes today. Rodriguez’s poem “Theophany” was published in Arts & Letters Issue 38.

A&L: Do you write with a lot of conscious awareness during your first drafts, or do you just try to get it out without overthinking?

Esteban Rodriguez: Each time I begin a new poem, I do so with the mindset that when the last word is written, the poem will be complete. Revision, however, is inevitable. My obligations to my ideas of what makes a poem intriguing and good compels me to go back to the work, changing whatever will bring the poem closer to where I feel it needs to be.

A&L: What sort of things did you write about when you first started writing?

ER: I wrote about the same things I continue to write today: the complexity of familial relationships, life along the border, the body, language, and the search for meaning in landscapes that aren’t always willing to share what exactly that meaning is. Although the topics and themes have remained relatively consistent, I’ve pushed the boundaries of my approach and style over the past few years, something I would have never conceived of doing when I first began writing.

A&L: How have you evolved as a writer over the years?

ER: As I mentioned previously, I’ve been more open to changing my style when a poem (or poems) calls for it. My first collection Dusk & Dust contains many narrative pieces that are two to three pages in length and that incorporate the landscape of the Rio Grande Valley (where I am from) quite prominently. Since then, my poems have been shorter, almost never going beyond a page, and the descriptive landscape of my youth only occupies a line or two if it’s necessary for the poem. Simultaneously, I’ve been writing poems that have a more surreal quality to them and my collection (Dis)placement explores hazardous journeys across terrains prone to violence, destruction, and the consequences of time and neglect. Recently, I’ve been experimenting with punctuation, or rather the lack of punctuation. I’ve found that writing a poem without commas or periods forces me to approach it differently, and that the lyricism of the poem is much more nuanced precisely because it allows me, as both a writer and a reader, the opportunity to examine the content of the piece with a different lens.

A&L: What is the toughest bad writing habit that you have had to break? Or do you advocate for embracing habits?

ER: A bad habit of mine is using certain lines and techniques that I’ve used in the past. I used to really like starting a poem with a one-word scene and transitioning the piece into the action that will take place. It would read something like “Nightfall, and the moon’s burden . . .” I remember writing about six poems back-to-back exactly like this and I knew, once I reviewed them, that I needed to break that habit. Occasionally, I still lean on this technique, but I’ve become much more aware of my habits and what it ultimately means if I cannot break them. For writers just starting their journey, however, I would recommend forming a habit, at least until they feel confident breaking from it. Writing, like anything, is about practice, and if that means doing the same thing over and over again until you get good at it, then that’s advice I think everyone can benefit from.

A&L: What is your writing space like? Where do you write most often? And what’s your routine?

ER: My writing space is whatever place I find myself in. I used to write in a notebook, but I’ve long abandoned that practice in favor of writing poems in the Notes app on my phone, which is much more convenient for writing on the go. I’m not burdened with having to find blank pages or reading through a labyrinth of messy handwriting. Because of this, my writing schedule is never consistent, but I do write throughout the day. And even if it is only for a few minutes, it’s time well spent.

A&L: Do you prefer to write in solitude or with some bustling around you?

ER: Both. If I am somewhere in public and a word, phrase, or line comes to mind, I try to write it down as quickly as possible, despite the commotion around me. Mornings on the weekends are where I find the most solitude, although I am probably cooking breakfast or playing with my dogs. What matters is being able to ponder the words that form the poem I am working on, and I try as much as possible not to let my voice get drowned out by my environment.

A&L: What is your guilty reading pleasure?

ER: I try not to read anything I feel won’t provide some form of knowledge in return, so I wouldn’t say I have a guilty reading pleasure. The books I choose to read are purposeful and if I don’t like a book, I don’t feel any obligation to continue reading it. Time is everyone’s antagonist, and because we are only here for a brief moment, I try to spend my days with books that will ultimately teach me what it means to be a better human being.

Esteban Rodriguez is the author of the collections Dusk & Dust (Hub City Press 2019), Crash Course (Saddle Road Press 2019), and (Dis)placement (Skull + Wind Press 2020). His poetry has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is the Interviews Editor for the EcoTheo Review, a regular reviews contributor for PANK, and a poetry reader for BOAAT. He lives with his family and teaches in Austin, Texas.

Congratulations to last year’s winner of the A&L Susan Atefat Prize, Megan Harlan! Her collection of essays, Mobile Home, comes out in 2020 from the University of Georgia Press.

Great reads for the beach, the porch, or anywhere you’ll be relaxing this summer.

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Monday, June 10 – Wednesday, July 31.

Check out our current issue (the 20th Anniversary Issue) as well as our back issues here.

Announcing the Winners of the 2019 Arts & Letters Prizes in Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, & Poetry!

Winners receive $1000 and publication in the upcoming Fall 2019 issue of Arts & Letters. 

Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction:

Lones Seiber, “Flight”

Judge: Peter Nichols

“The narrator Katie’s quiet voice is clear and confiding. Her eye throughout is sharp for the small, almost subliminal details of character and especially landscape that turn a generic American place that might so easily go unnoticed, into Katie’s own sharply etched world. As she journeys back into this world, and into her own past, her deeply buried responses provoke the subtle, but finally overwhelming change that alters her life. It is this profound change that comes at the end of “Flight” that tipped me in its favor.”

Finalist: Kartika Budhwar, “Last Walk in Assam”

Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction:

Carol Keeley, “Demon Feeding”

Judge: Pam Houston

“’Demon Feeding’ does at least three things really well at one time.  It raises our consciousness about PTSD among veterans and the personal hell our government’s decisions create in them; it has a compelling understory and a character we care about—the narrator—who is fighting demons of her own; and it braids those two really seamlessly, using plenty of sensory detail to keep us engaged and even giving us a moment of happiness amidst all the sad spoils of a difficult world.  It’s a beautifully made and important essay.”

Finalists: Gwen Ebert, “The Field”; Clinton Peters, “Love in the Valley of Death”; Daniel Rousseau, “Absent Joy”

Rumi Prize for Poetry:

Karen Harryman, “Theory”, “November”, and “Making”

Judge: GennaRose Nethercott

“These poems speak to the terrible banalities of violence, of life’s small, typical tasks that we carry on performing despite great sorrows. “Slicing a banana” at the breakfast table while learning of a night club massacre; selecting lemons at a grocery store before a shooting; combing through the hair of a childhood friend who will later fall prey to the drug epidemic. Brief, tender acts pressed against so many unthinkable sufferings. What is more horrifying than a violence so normalized that we no longer pause our daily motions in shock? And yet, what a strange loveliness, too, that our tenderness can survive alongside it, despite it all.”

Finalists: Samuel Hughes, Anushah Jiwani, Diane Louie, and John Sibley Williams

Many congratulations to all of our winners and finalists. 2020 Prize submissions will open in February. Look out for the announcement of the winner of the Drama Prize soon!

Check out the latest interview in our Ampersand Interview Series with George Singleton.

In the latest Ampersand Interview, we spoke with George Singleton about flea markets, the South, and comedians. Singleton’s “Spastic” was published in Arts & Letters Issue 27.

A&L: Flea markets are a recurring motif in your stories. What is it about this setting that attracts you as a fiction writer? Are flea markets a secret breeding ground for stories?

George Singleton: Flea markets showed up frequently in The Half-Mammals of Dixie, and in a number of stories between about 1998-2002 that didn’t make it into collections. I was more or less unemployed from 1996 until 2000, and I thought about how I wanted to write a story set at a flea market. That meant actually selling behind a table. Then, by weird coincidence, my father’s old shop got hit by a tornado sixty miles away from where I lived—he’d been dead for fifteen years, so this building had been a mini-storage warehouse unit, more or less, filled with tools and machinery. I scavenged what I could, took it to the Pickens County Flea Market, and got hooked. I talked to people from all walks of life—art collectors in Atlanta to down-and-outers from the area. The stories, mostly imagined, hit me fast. And in a way working flea market circuits is a lot like writing—always looking for a certain treasure, usually not finding one, but ecstatic when something decent appears.

By the way, those guys on American Pickers probably owe me some kind of royalty money…

A&L: Do you think you would have become a writer if you weren’t born and raised in the South? If not, what do you think you would have become?

GS: I was actually born in Anaheim, California. My father was in the merchant marines. We moved to South Carolina when I was seven—he’d fallen forty-five feet into the empty hold of a ship, became disabled, and we moved to be nearer his family. My father was a great, and ribald, storyteller, and in California I lived in a trailer, then an apartment. So I might’ve had writer-needs even if I stayed there. Who knows? I might’ve started writing earlier—it wasn’t like I had access to a slew of books in South Carolina, nor anyone to point me in a beneficial direction. And then, even after I started writing, in college, I tried my best to choose locales far from the textile towns I knew best. I wrote about Nice, France, and D.C., and then Memphis. I’d spent ten days in Nice, nine months in D.C., and had only a map of Memphis. It wasn’t until I read Flannery O’Connor that I went, “Oh, now I get it—that’s how to write about small towns, and small town denizens,” and so on.

I’ll take some of those random pieces and pair them up, see where I can strike sparks until I get a dangerous place, a character who’s hurting, an interesting problem to throw their way.

A&L: What is the toughest bad writing habit that you have had to break, or do you advocate for embracing bad habits?

GS: The bad habit of mine is coming up with slap-sticky ideas and not knowing to abandon them, to conjure up jokes that maybe I find funny that no one else finds funny. It’s the whole “kill your darlings” dictum of Faulkner.

A&L: In a recent interview, you mentioned you are a big fan of Rodney Dangerfield. As a writer, are there any tricks, techniques, or philosophies you’ve borrowed from stand-up comedians you admire?

GS: I admire, and borrow from, I hope, the comic timing of people like Bob Newhart, Dangerfield, Steven Wright, and Brian Regan, among others. I like the life-is-absurd notions of those comedians. In a way, they’re summoning Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco—two playwrights I read voraciously in college and later. Back to my favorite comedians: They seem to tell stories wherein they, or a character, is backed into an uncomfortable situation, and the listener/viewer wants to see how they’ll get out of it, or if they will. I’d bet that 90% of my stories are about everyday men and women stuck in an uncomfortable situation with an antagonist, and the reader—I am hopeful—wants to see how they get out of it. I know for a fact that in this last collection, Staff Picks, I started every story with a blank screen or page, and  my saying—usually out loud to myself, like an idiot—“Uncomfortable situation.”

George Singleton has published seven collections of stories, two novels, and a book of writing advice. Over 200 of his stories have appeared in magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Playboy, the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, the Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the Corrington Award for Literary Excellence. He lives in Spartanburg, SC, where he holds the John C. Cobb Chair in Humanities at Wofford College.

Interview by Caleb Bouchard

We are so excited to announce the release of Issue 38!

This is our 20th Anniversary Issue.  We are featuring three pieces from our very first issue: “Snow Blossoms” by Annie Dawid and “The Candle Flame” and “The Sword-Wound” by Ghalib, both translated from the Urdu by Robert Bly and Sunil Dutta. We are also featuring  the winner the Arts & Letters Unclassifiable Contest “A Villanelle by any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet” by Flint. Come check out their work and the work of our other fine contributors! You can order your copy online in print or digital formats at the Arts & Letters Exchange.

Blast off this spring with the Anniversary Issue of Arts & Letters!

If you’ve already read Issue 38, and you’re feeling inspired, remember that our Unclassifiable Contest opens May 1st. Send in your submissions here.

In honor of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference this year in Portland, which runs this coming week, we are extending our annual contest deadline until April 7th.

Send us your poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, or drama.

Take advantage of this unusual opportunity and submit something wonderful!

The AWP conference in Portland is approaching! If you plan on going, come see us at Booth #4064.

For all of you eagerly anticipating the 21st Annual Arts & Letters Prize competition opening, we have our judges lined up for poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction!

• Poetry: Gennarose Nethercott
• Fiction: Peter Nichols
• Creative Nonfiction: Pam Houston

Our regular submission period is still open through January 31st. The Prize Contest will open February 1st and continue through the end of March.

We are so excited to announce the release of Issue 37!

In this issue we are featuring the winner of the Rumi Prize for Poetry, Keith Wilson; the winner of the Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction, R. M. Kinder; and the winner of the Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction, Megan Harlan. Come check out their work and the work of our other fine contributors! You can order your copy online in print or digital formats at the Arts & Letters Exchange.

As the seasons turn, take a sip of the alphabet soup that is Arts & Letters Issue 37!

Issue 37 is now available

If you’ve already read Issue 37, and you’re feeling inspired, remember that we are currently open for general submissions!

Give the gift of literature this year.

Buy one subscription and give two free!
Monday, November 19 – Tuesday, November 27

Subscribe here and email us the two addresses for your gifts along with any note you’d like included.

Our Unclassifiable Contest has ended, and a winner has been chosen by our judge, Michael Martone!

Winner:
Flint, “A Villanelle By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet”

Finalists:
B. G. Firmani, “Wilmington, Delaware, in Eight Superlatives”
Theo Greenblatt, “La, La, How the Life Goes On”
John Harn, “18-PP”
Joan Michelson, “Chernobyl Reactor”
Christine Waresak, “Whamming”

Martone writes of “A Villanelle By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet,” this year’s winner, “They say the hardest images for computer animators to capture are human hair and ocean waves.  Reading the hypnotically lapping and texture tossed ‘A Villanelle by Any Other Name Would Smell as Sweet’ reminded me that I was walking through the uncanny valley of the animated body and the lamentation of the delaminating layers of applied desire. This writing floats like a red tide, stings like an anemone. The language is osmosic, the form sublime, plasmaic. There is everywhere the briny scent of the worried inland sea in red weather, the cracker-jacked smell of saving and savory poetry indeed. Moving, so very moving, by for and about moving.”

Thank you to all those who submitted, for stretching our minds and engaging our imaginations! We hope to see your work again next year!

Check out the latest interview in our Ampersand Interview Series with Micah Dean Hicks.

We spoke with Micah Dean Hicks about working in public (with headphones), prewriting, and redrafting novels from scratch in the latest Ampersand Interview. Hicks won the Arts & Letters Prize for fiction in 2016 with his short story “The Deer,” which appeared in Issue 33.

A&L: Do you prefer to write in solitude or with some bustling around you?

Micah Dean Hicks: I usually leave the house and work somewhere public—a coffee shop, a food court, a library. If I’m at home, it’s too easy to get distracted by housework or grading. There’s always something else competing for my time. By leaving home, I’m making a commitment to give a few hours over to just writing.

I carry a big pair of over-the-ear headphones with me everywhere, so the bustle and noise doesn’t distract me. There’s something nice, too, about working in an open, well-lit place that’s full of people. It feels energizing.

A&L: You’ve talked before in interviews about how unusual it is for writers of magical realism to outline their work as extensively as you do before you begin writing. Can you talk about your process of outlining your surrealist pieces? How does this affect the story as compared to finding where the story is going as you write?

MDH: I do a lot of listing, sketching out ideas, making random connections. I’ll think of things I’ve read recently that are exciting. Plot elements, images that have been stuck in my head, a setting I want to dig into. Character usually comes after that and out of it.

I’ll take some of those random pieces and pair them up, see where I can strike sparks until I get a dangerous place, a character who’s hurting, an interesting problem to throw their way.

Then I make several outlines in parallel, testing out the same story five or six different ways. By the time I come up with a list of key scenes that feels cohesive and has some emotional weight, then I’m ready to start writing. All this prewriting feels like my first draft.

There’s always some aspect of finding out where the story is going as I write. Things occur to me and I make connections in the moment. But I almost never just start writing without a plan. When I do, I usually end up with a mess, a story that’s pointing in too many different directions, something that feels more like three or four story fragments than a unified whole.

A&L: How have you evolved as a writer over the years?

MDH: The way I revise has changed the most. Now I come at revision as something creative and imaginative, trying to rethink all my assumptions about the story and conceive of a better version of it. I start and end by making blueprints, I guess. More and more, revision for me is outlining a more imaginative, more emotional version of the story and just writing it all over again, not keeping a single sentence from the previous draft.

I even did this with my forthcoming novel. I wrote and threw away two other complete manuscripts, alternate versions of the novel that didn’t work, before I figured out what the final story should be about.

A few years ago, I would start by revising the sentences and spend a lot of time polishing material that didn’t need to stay to begin with. I still care a lot about my sentences, but I don’t start fine-tuning language until everything else feels right.

Revising involves a lot of redrafting for me. And I’ve always liked drafting best, those moments where you slip into a trance and just fall into the story. I end up revising faster this way and end up with better work.

Micah Dean Hicks is a Calvino Prize-winning author of fantasy, fabulism, and fairy tale retellings. His writing has appeared in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The New York Times, Lightspeed, and Kenyon Review, among others. His story collection Electricity and Other Dreams is available from New American Press. Hicks teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida. His novel Break the Bodies, Haunt the Bones is coming February 2019 from John Joseph Adams Books.

Regular submissions for Arts & Letters are open from today until January 31st.

Thank you to everyone who submitted to the Unclassifiable Contest! We’re excited to start reviewing your work. Watch for finalists to be announced this fall.

As of today, we here at Arts & Letters are open for general submissions; you can read our guidelines and submit your work here. We look forward, as always, to seeing what you’ve got!

The Unclassifiable Contest deadline is tomorrow!

To all our weird and wonderful writer friends out there… don’t forget that submissions for the Unclassifiable Contest are set to close at the end of the day tomorrow!

This contest exists to give space to work which defies categorization. We look for work that blurs genres and labels, work that intrigues and challenges us. Be sure to submit your best genre-bending work by July 31st. The prize is $500 and publication in our Spring Issue.

Jenny King, “Reconciling”

Judge Iona Sun has selected Jenny King as the 2018 Winner of the Arts & Letters Prize for Drama.

“Reconciling is an expertly crafted tapestry that weaves three stories together in a manner that exposes the humanity of each one, challenging traditional structure. It will provide an excellent evening of theatre. From the first pages, it is evident that this playwright seeks to broaden the potential of storytelling; she succeeds in rendering an exploration of language that is sure to delight audiences whilst challenging actors.” 

King will receive $500 and her  one-act play will be produced on the Georgia College campus in the spring of 2019.

Finalists: Angela Davis, “Agathe”; Robert Daseler, “Apple Valley”; James Wade, “In Case of Fire”; Marshall Botvinick, “The Hero and the Scholar”; and Neil McGowan, “The Stain”

Check out the latest interview in our Ampersand Interview Series with Robert Campbell.

In the latest interview in our series, Ampersand, we spoke with Robert Campbell about literary influences, reading one’s work aloud, and dreaming. Robert Campbell’s poems, “Labor #12” and “Greek Rush,” appeared in Issue 33.

A&L: Who are some of your literary (or non-literary) influences?

Robert Campbell: I love Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Song is probably one of my favorite books. Also John Berryman, Dean Young, and Elizabeth Bishop. My favorite poet is Emily Dickinson, whose work, I believe, is still being taught to young people everywhere in a pitiful, belittling way that is really unworthy of her. Mary Ruefle writes about Dickinson really beautifully. Occasionally, I find myself influenced by folklore, landscapes, and horror films. All kinds of things. I’m drawn to images and topics that feel strange and lonely.

A&L: Describe your writing space. Where do you write most often? What is your routine?

RC: I do have a dedicated home office, which is an incredible privilege, but I can’t say I write there regularly. Honestly, I have written on my phone, on receipts, in the margins of junk-mail, anywhere. I usually begin a poem with an image or a line, and I try to keep a running “pool” of these self-prompts so that I can draw them out when I have sustained time to write. Some folks really benefit from regularly scheduled writing time, but it has never worked for me. In the early stages of a poem, I rarely sit down to write. That probably sounds strange, but I rarely write the first couple of lines of a poem until I’ve rolled them around in my head and in my mouth for a little bit to see how they feel.

A&L: Do you enjoy reading you work aloud? Centuries ago, poems, and stories were most often sung, not read. How’s your singing voice?

RC: Honestly, I usually do not enjoy reading my work aloud. I’m not sure why that is. I often feel as though my presence and voice lessen the impact the work might have without me. It’s unfashionable to admit to a lack of confidence, but there it is. My voice is kind of nasal, and it has a slight Southern drawl, sort of like drunk bees. As a gay man, I do worry about being perceived as having an “effeminate” voice and that affecting how readers hear my work. I don’t hear a lot of folks talking about this, but I think male poets with deep, burly voices are more confident as readers. Is there a service available to poets who want someone else to read their work for them? (Joking.) Seriously, though, there are some fantastic readers out there, and I’m often envious of people who shine in that way and enjoy performing their work. I feel that I have a lot to learn from them.

A&L: You seem to be interested in exploring dreams and the dreamlike in your poetry. What is the role of dreaming in the creative process?

RC: Wallace Stevens would say that the imagination is integral to the experience of phenomena, and I agree. I think we are always dreaming, by which I mean, we perceive the world in an associative, disjointed way. In that sense, to write in what we would call a “dream-like” way is really just expressing our actual, lived modes of perception, which are disruptive and non-linear by nature. By accepting ourselves as creatures who are, in a sense, always dreaming, I think we arrive at work that is not only interesting, but revealing and true, often truer than the “true” stories we tell about ourselves and our world.

Robert Campbell is the author of the chapbook In the Herald of Improbable Misfortunes (Etchings Press, 2018). His poetry and criticism have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, River Styx, and many other journals. Robert holds an MFA in poetry from Murray State University and an MS in library science from the University of Kentucky. He lives with his partner and animals on a winding country road in the Bluegrass Region of Kentucky.

Announcing the Winners of the 2018 Arts & Letters Prizes in Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, & Poetry!

Winners receive $1000 and publication in the upcoming Fall 2018 issue of Arts & Letters. 

Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction:

R. M. Kinder, “A Common Person”

Judge: Melissa Pritchard

“I found much to admire in ‘A Common Person.’ The story’s clever premise, the crosscurrents of humor and suspense in a well-paced narrative, the quiet, sophisticated use of language, and above all, the author’s compassionate but fierce portrayal of a woman who finds her life turned upside down because of a flippant online comment rescinded seconds too late. What ensues…brilliantly depicts the vague, ominous sense of surveillance under which we all live today.”

Finalist: Antonia Angress, “Pilgrim”

Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction:

Megan Harlan, “Mobile Home”

Judge: Joni Tevis

“I appreciated the writer’s skillful weaving of personal narrative, architectural history, place detail, and Wizard of Oz material, and I found the narrator’s voice to be clear and compelling throughout.”

Finalists: Bettye Kearse, “Visiting”; Jill Logan, “The People’s Exhibit”; and Keith S. Wilson, “Parable of the Lobster”

Rumi Prize for Poetry:

Keith S. Wilson, “letter begun to my future niece” and “Long Tail”

Judge: Alfred Corn

“Invention, passion, subtlety, thought, melody: these are the qualities I look for in poetry, and they are all found in Keith Wilson’s poems. Congratulations to him.”

Finalists: Jennifer Elmore, Justin Hunt, Mariana Lin, and Brandon Rushton

Many congratulations to all of our winners and finalists. 2019 Prize submissions will open in February. Look out for the announcement of the winner of the Drama Prize soon!

Check out the latest interview in our Ampersand Interview Series with Shawndra Miller.

In the latest in our Ampersand Interview Series, we spoke with Shawndra Miller about writing to women, creative spaces, and “madness.” Miller was the winner of the 2017 Unclassifiable Contest for the piece “Bleeding the Butterfly,” which appeared in Issue 36.

A&L: Describe your writing space. Where do you write most often? What is your routine?

Shawndra Miller: I write in a corner of our guest room, which is ground level with a nice view of our small back yard. I have my research books and notebooks right there for easy access. My desk faces the window so I can see my little garden and watch neighborhood cats traipse through the yard. Usually my big poodle Opal sprawls on the floor and my cat Edgar either provides entertaining distraction or curls up behind me on my chair.

As far as routine, I tend to work on my writing projects in a very nonlinear fashion, but in a framework of committed time. Mornings seem to be best for focused output in my case. So I will tell myself: This week I’m working on the manuscript 90 minutes a day, right after breakfast. Then my goal is to stay in the chair and keep at it—without distracting myself through email or social media. (I use a blocking program that keeps me from wandering too far into Internetville if I need to check a historical detail or word choice.) What I do during that 90 minutes can vary widely, from generating new scenes to smoothing structural problems to polishing and editing. But it all adds up to consistent work that, over time, yields a book-length work.

I also keep a small notebook handy when I’m out and about, for jotting ideas as they come to me, and a pad of paper for those nocturnal surprises (which are sometimes indecipherable in the morning!).

A&L: In blurring the boundaries of genre and form, how are you able to excavate your subject in ways that a single genre would restrict?

SM: I’m intrigued by the intersection of what we would consider known reality and the felt realities that are harder to quantify. So much truth lies buried, even in what we think we know for a fact. For example, how does a chronic illness arise, what are the reasons for it, and what role might the mind’s unseen workings play in sustaining or ameliorating illness? My book project, of which “Bleeding the Butterfly” is a part, imagines the lives of late 19^th-century women who were largely hidden away in the mental institution, in a building that was buried under ground after its demolition. To develop the fictionalized portrayals of “inmates” (yes, they were called that back then), I reviewed intake records from the state archives. From the sketchiest information, I let my imagination roam, informed by contextual research. This gave me the freedom to explore themes that connected to my personal history. The interplay between their fictionalized stories and my own true one created a different kind of tension and a broader window on women and “madness.”

A&L: Do you write with a lot of conscious audience awareness during your first drafts?

SM: Generally, I write to figure things out for myself. If there’s an audience in mind, it’s “women like me”—encompassing all the women I have been so far: the sick women, the impassioned women, the ones who feel “different” in some way, the geeks and lesbians and seekers, and women in midlife coming into their own.

Shawndra Miller is an energy worker and writer drawn to stories of redemption and renewal. A two-time recipient of the Indiana Arts Commission’s Individual Artist Grant, she has published in Confrontation Magazine, Topology Magazine, Lavender Review, and elsewhere. Her work also appeared in the anthology Goddess: When She Rules from Golden Dragonfly Press. “Bleeding the Butterfly” is excerpted from her current book project, a hybrid work linking her own healing journey to fictionalized stories from a nineteenth century women’s mental institution in her hometown.

Here at Arts & Letters, we are keeping busy! We’ve been eagerly combing through your submissions to our annual Prize Competition, and we’ll soon be posting the latest in our Ampersand Interview Series with Shawndra Miller, winner of last year’s Unclassifiable Contest for her piece, “Bleeding the Butterfly.”

Speaking of the Unclassifiable Contest… as of this morning, it is open for submissions!

This contest is for unclassifiable works: works that blur, bend, blend, erase, or obliterate genre and other labels. Works of up to 5000 words considered. Judged by Michael Martone. The entry fee is $8, and the winner will receive $500.

Check out the latest interview in our Ampersand Interview Series with Kristin Kostick.

In the latest interview in our new series, Ampersand, we spoke with Kristin Kostick about anthropology, artificial intelligence, and re-reading one’s own work. Kostick was the winner of the 2015 Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction for her essay “Hostage Situation,” which appeared in Issue 31.

If you are interested in submitting to the 2018 Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction, or to either of our other Arts & Letters Prizes, submissions are open until March 31st.

A&L: So, you’re a writer and an anthropologist. Do you find that there is much overlap? Both disciplines attempt to understand humanity, each in its own way.

Kristin Kostick: This seems like a straightforward question, because the similarities seem so evident. Anthropologists observe human behavior, customs, cultures, and attempt to document everything objectively, but from an “insider’s” point of view. More recent forms of anthropology since the ‘60s reject objectivity and attempt to write “thick descriptions” of cultural phenomena through the lens of their own subjective perspectives, because it is assumed that it’s impossible to escape subjectivity. Writers, of course, do all of these things too. We take what we see around us and, consciously or unconsciously, put some mélange of our surrounding influences as well as ourselves (our histories, our imaginations, our personalities, our desires) into our writing. That’s what makes it good. That’s what makes people want to read it. The stories we tell (or the poems we write) show the reader something that can’t be seen objectively—something that literally doesn’t exist in the objective world, as it is so intertwined with what the writer sees, is able to see, wants you to see.

But I think that the same impulse that encourages good anthropologists to be “true” to their observations (rather than, say, staging scenes of quotidian life among the “natives,” as the famous anthropologist Franz Boas did, to show to his colleagues and to the Western world back home), so does the writer feel the need to question the sincerity of every sentence. At least I do. I mean, I try to. Because it’s so easy to get wrapped up in your own flow of writing that you really have to go back through with a fine-toothed comb and extract the artifice—the parts where you got carried away with an idea, or with your own voice or style, or with your own presumed wit. There’s a censor there, a wiser you who, like a parent, lovingly removes the ticks from her kid’s hair. It’s arguably the most humbling part of writing. But it’s also the most essential feature of a good anthropologist, this honesty. There are so many unconscious agendas operating at once. Some anthropologists want to paint their study communities (or themselves) in a certain light, while writers likewise want to guide your understandings of a story through the tools of plot, character development, or language. There’s an element of control there that needs to be dropped in order to be true to a story or an idea.

A&L: What have you been up to since winning the A&L Prize? Are you working on anything at the moment that particularly excites you?

KK: They say that the perception of time passing is relative to how much you fill that time. If that’s true, then I can understand why it feels so long ago that I won the A&L prize! I had just moved to Greece, was pregnant with my first son, and was finishing up my third and final year of an MFA at the University of Houston. I was also working remotely from Baylor College of Medicine and splitting my days into “academic” versus “creative” hours, a crude distinction that didn’t give enough credit to the creativity involved in academic writing, nor the strategy and scholarship often involved in creative writing. These days, the two are joined in almost all of my current projects. Over the past three years, I’ve been publishing papers on decision-making related to accepting live-or-die medical solutions to heart failure that involve highly invasive surgery and some serious lifestyle changes for people who accept the treatment technology—basically a big hunk of metal that attaches to your heart. This research led me to becoming the analyst for a study about longevity technologies and what has been called the “longevity movement,” where science and technology come together in an attempt to extend the human life span by radical measures, often accompanied by transhumanist ambitions to merge man with machine. What was not long ago considered to be science fiction now seems an emerging reality. You can imagine the giddiness with which I write about these things. Technically, it’s my job. But to me, it’s as fun as any creative writing—because, in essence, it is creative writing, imagining what our world, our bodies, our societies will look like over the next 100 years.

Since getting the news from A&L, I moved to Rio de Janeiro for two a half years, and just recently moved back to Greece with my husband and son, pregnant again with another boy. I’m now trying to focus on reworking some older nonfiction essays from my MFA manuscript to send out. They’re mostly about how self-deception can be adaptive—variants on the theme explored in “Hostage Situation.”

A&L: What is usually your predominant emotion just after having completed a piece of writing? 

KK: I’d like to say it is one of humility, aware of the struggle involved in that journey from the blank page. But if I’m honest, what I feel after finishing a piece is usually one of great pride and shameless interest in reading and re-reading the piece over and over until the words themselves start to lose meaning, like when you say “bellyache” or “grasshopper” too many times as a kid and the words became an empty scaffolding for meaning. Part of this ritual of re-reading is surely a matter of self-indulgence; but I’m a strong believer that our proximate motivations (to self-congratulate, in this case) mask deeper, more adaptive agendas, and that this re-reading is actually a self-critical process to search for errors, sentences to rewrite, words to modify, conceptual blunders to fix.

A&L: What are you reading right now?

KK: I’m ashamed to say that I’ve nearly abandoned all poetry and fiction, and now seem to read only non-fiction, as a habit rather than a strict rule. Right now I’m reading Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension, by Stephen Hall, which offers an action-packed history of how life-extension technologies developed from discoveries with lowly lab worms and are now steeped in the labyrinthine world of political controversy and capitalistic ambition. I’m also reading Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape, not only for his admirable steady-keel approach to persuasion, but for a paper I’m writing about alternatives (like technology and science) to religion for pursuing things once only associated with religion—morality, salvation, and eternal life.

Kristin Kostick writes poetry and nonfiction, and is an anthropologist based in Athens, Greece. She received her MFA in nonfiction in 2015 from the University of Houston’s creative writing program. Her poetry and essays have appeared in The Washington Post, The Riveter, Blackbird, Forklift, Ohio, H_NGM_N, Drunken Boat and other journals.

For all of you eagerly anticipating the 20th Annual Arts & Letters Prize competition opening, we have our judges lined up for poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction!

• Poetry: Alfred Corn
• Fiction: Melissa Pritchard
• Creative Nonfiction: Joni Tevis

Our regular submission period is still open through January 31st. The Prize Contest will open February 1st and continue through the end of March.

In the latest interview in our new series, Ampersand, we spoke to Dawn Davies about writing spaces, writing habits, and guilty pleasures! Davies was the winner of the 2016 Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction for her essay “Mothers of Sparta,” which appeared in Issue 33.

A&L: What is the toughest bad writing habit that you have had to break, or do you advocate for embracing bad habits?

Dawn Davies: I could give you an alarming and deeply revealing list of my bad habits, but let’s not go there. I’m constantly playing Whack-a-Mole, beating them down to where I hope they give up and go away. Sometimes it works. Maybe some people have bad habits they can work around, or work with, but if I let a bad habit linger, it turns into a monster and derails my productivity/health/sleep cycle/insert-your-own-life-function-here. #OCD.

My bad writing habits tend to collect around lack of confidence. I have caught myself, while in the middle of writing, saying things like “This is bunk. This is too grubby. This is just no good. This idea is too much. Who will this matter to besides myself?” The insecure side of my inner voice tries to pull my creativity back, and it has gotten in the way, especially when making stylistic decisions that make my work identifiable as mine, and especially when I am at the beginning of shaping something new. My initial inclination is to take an idea just a little too far…the metaphor will be a little hostile, or an image will be a little violent or visceral, or a theme will be just a tad “out there.” That’s not bad, but my worry-wort inner voice likes to tell me it is. I used to be afraid of the raw stuff, but now I believe people respond to this when they read my work. If I do what the worry-wort wants, which is to question the “grubbiness,” I run the risk of beating the ideas themselves down, and not the bad habit of second-guessing them. I don’t want to tame my work to where it feels beaten down, or tepid, or over palatable to readers. I want my work to be a wild thing. Now I work on not questioning my “in the moment” decisions, and I am getting better at getting the ideas down as fast as they come, without questioning them. They are just ideas. Not tattoos on my face. 

A&L: What is the best thing (related to writing) that you ever spent money on?

DD: The best writing-related tool I ever spent money on was a tote bag, though it was my parents who spent the money on my first one. When I was three or four, we filled the tote bag with books from the public library and took the books home. I devoured them, then we went back to the library the next week and did it again. I read as many books per week as they would let me check out, and I did this for years. As soon as I got old enough to ride my bike to the library, I could go whenever I wanted, so I read even more. It was true freedom. I read all the time—in the shower, when cooking, in the car, on vacations, in the middle of the night when I should have been asleep, at school when I should have been studying. I did this long before I knew I wanted to be a writer. I think my exposure to so many books helped me when it was time to write. I still struggled when learning, but I may have struggled a bit less than others who had not been exposed to four thousand books. A committed reading habit makes writing easier, though honestly, I’m always learning. It’s not like you learn to write and then you’ve learned it. You must keep learning to evolve.

A&L: What sort of thing did you write about when you began?

DD: I was about nineteen when I first started “seriously” writing, though really, writing is always so entertaining that I enjoy doing it, so it doesn’t feel serious. When I’m working, I’m still playing. Before nineteen, in high school, I wrote parodies of writers I was reading (Brautigan, Poe, Vonnegut, Fussell, Irving), and before that, in middle school, I wrote radio show scripts that I produced alone on my cassette player, and before that, in elementary school, I wrote little jokes I tried to get published in Reader’s Digest. I now think the writing I did as a child was important, and it was all serious work, especially the parody writing, because it was good practice. I didn’t recognize it as work, though, because I had fun doing it and I had no expectations to fulfill. I try to remember that feeling when I write today. I try to keep my writing life like a playground, where I can mess around and try new things.

At nineteen, I would ride my bike to the library and hand-write stacks of pages that vaguely resembled novels. I threw most of them away, but recently found one, and it was full of ideas that college students might find interesting while drunk at a party. Young women with vague identity and life-purpose problems, or young women with unrequited, somewhat shallow love issues. Or quirky, dysfunctional families that represented interesting character studies, but had no identifiable problems.

I recently found some old poetry I wrote around that age, and realized two things: first, my past and my present have not much changed as I still should not write poetry, and second – that my poetry at the time was similar in content to the novels. A lot of unrequited love and “coupling” problems, the kind that a nineteen-year-old might suffer through. Not to demean anything that nineteen-year-olds experience, but I don’t think the angles I chose to write about were deep enough to be interesting to anyone other than me at the time. I hadn’t yet figured out how to write about universal things while writing about specific things. I did notice similarities, though. My tone is still the same, and my characters—both fiction and my nonfiction persona—are still often wrapped up in their own interior monologues. The inner voice (See Question #1) rears its head again.

A&L: What is your guilty reading pleasure? What is your non-guilty reading pleasure?

DD: The first thing you should know is I am a re-reader. For fiction, my guilty reading pleasure is plot-heavy genre novels. I love a good plot. I read legal thrillers, detective and spy stories, and police procedurals. I don’t feel guilty about reading genre fiction, though I suspect this is the type of secret plot porn about which others might feel guilty. I love commercial fiction. I think page-turners that whisk you away are fun, and fun is important.

My more lit-worthy reading is variable, though I am currently in a weird sort of masculine phase, which should imply nothing about my love for women writers. I read and support them. I’m just in a phase. I have recently been on a Colson Whitehead binge. I have a long-time obsession with The Intuitionist and Sag Harbor.

I read a lot of war books. I don’t know why. When I want to be blown away by tone, I read Paul Fussell, who is my go-to essayist, and who also happens to write very deeply about war. He is wry, and funny, and sad, and informative all at the same time, and he can sustain these feelings even within more academic essays. I have read most of Fussell’s work and he never fails to disappoint technically and tonally. His essay structures are masterful from the seed to the skin and all the flesh in between.

Lately, when I want to write sweetly, I read E.B. White. He can write beautiful observational essays that have very subtle conflict. I can’t do that yet. When I want to get out of an essay funk I read John D’Agata’s The Next American Essay anthology. It helps to remind me of all the ways in which the craft can be stretched, the risks mid- and late twentieth century essayists took with their work, and the ways these risks have changed the craft.

When I want to read essays that are like music, and I need to think about the art of weaving in an essay, I read James Baldwin. This is a constant for me; Baldwin is one of my go-to writers.

When I want to see how far I can bend something I am working on, in both fiction and nonfiction, I have lately been turning to Italo Calvino, usually Cosmicomics, or Fabio Morabito’s Toolbox, which is a lovely, weird book. For fiction, I have spent some time lately with Shirley Jackson, Carol Shields, Charles Portis, and Toni Morrison, though I have read and re-read Morrison and Shields for years. I feel a great comfort re-reading books I love, and I learn from the re-reads.

A&L: Describe your writing space. Where do you write most often? What is your routine?

DD: I try to write every day, but sometimes I don’t. I use non-writing days to think about what I’m working on. I roll ideas over in my mind, try things on for size, consider options. I play with my options so much in my head that when I finally do write, I think it is easier because I don’t have as much to try out on paper.

My writing space is dull. At home it is a small, plain wood desk that faces a wall. It’s not fancy It’s not decorated. There is nothing special on it. It’s in a common room. I sit on a wood chair with a blanket on the seat. I can block out sounds of the house if I don’t hear any actual words aimed at me. I learned to do this when my kids were little, because I didn’t have an office and I wrote either in the laundry room standing up with my laptop on top of the dryer, or in the bathroom, sitting on top of the toilet. Those were the only places I could go where no one would bother me, unless I wrote in the middle of the night, which I also did. After scraping out that kind of writing existence, a plain, wood desk that faces a wall feels like a luxury.

Now, in the mornings, I make breakfast, my husband and I take the dogs for a walk, then he drives to work, and I work out. Once I exercise, I can sit down and concentrate. I turn off my phone and try to get in two to three hours before lunch. Then my husband comes home, and we eat salad and walk the dogs again. Then I ride my bike to the public library and work there for another three hours, or for as long as I can stand to sit still. I wrote a terrible book there when I was nineteen. I wrote my most recent book there, and it turned out better. Even with progress, some things never change. I still like the public library.

A&L: Bonus question: Describe your writing life in 140 characters or less (the length of a Tweet).

DD: Writing is a #playground. An essay is #anotherplanet. Fiction is a #realworld. Art (yours and mine) is a #wildthing to be protected.

Dawn Davies is the author of the essay collection Mothers of Sparta: A Memoir in Pieces (Flatiron Books, 2018). Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in numerous journals, including Fourth Genre, The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, Narrative, and others. She is proud to have been the 2016 recipient of the A&L Susan Atefat Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Davies lives in Florida.

Our editors have reviewed all the work we published in 2017 to choose work to nominate for the Pushcart Prize. If you’ve missed these poetry and prose selections, we hope you’ll check them out in Issues 34 and 35. Thank you to all the authors who seek out Arts & Letters as a platform to publish your work!

Issue 34

Peter Schireson: “Immigration Policy”
Emily Wolahan: “The Direct Account of Frank Thomas”

Issue 35

Sophia Galifianakis: “In My Mother’s Kitchen”
Leslie Pietrzyk: “People Love a View”
Ivan Himanen: “The Architect Gets Grandfathered”

For the readers on your gift list this year (or for yourself!), check out our subscription and back issue sales. Buy a subscription to Arts & Letters for yourself, and receive a free gift subscription for a friend. Each subscription comes with the current issue, featuring the A&L Prize winners along with the upcoming spring issue when it’s released, which will include the Unclassifiable Contest winner. When you order online, send us an email (at [email protected]) with your friend’s address and a personalized note to include.

You can find all of these deals on our store website too:

• Gift Subscriptions
• $5 Back Issues
• Digital Issue Bundles with Issue 35 and two back issues of your choice.

Our Unclassifiable Contest has ended, and a winner has been chosen by our judge, Michael Martone!

Winner:
Shawndra Miller, “Bleeding the Butterfly”

Finalists:
Jolene McIlwain, “In All This Rain”
Julie Fisher, “Family Portrait with Trees”
Ted Mathys, “Ring Cycle”
Christina Olson, “The Pain Museum”
Brian Whalen, “Living Archive”

Martone writes of “Bleeding the Butterfly,” this year’s winner, “I always like when a piece of writing organically connects its content with form. Here, we have not so much a collage but more a delicate dancing decoupage of compositional bursts, mapping the bifurcated branches of consciousness and the unconscious, madness and sanity. The prose, dare I say, flits. It moves and darts, and its bleeding is arterial with its syncopated beats and repeats. I was impressed by the mess of it, the ordered disorder that replicates the subject at hand. That is to say: how does the mind think about itself? Answer: with such mirrors of reflection, with such surprising metamorphosis, with such delicate but startling beats of papillae, of Lepidoptera, of cocoon, of nymph—all the same old same old and yet remarkably different.”

Thank you to all those who submitted, for stretching our minds and engaging our imaginations! We hope to see your work again next year!

Issue 35 is out and we are eager to share it with you!

In this autumnal issue we are featuring the winner of the Rumi Prize for Poetry, George Looney; the winner of the Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction, Leslie Kirk Campbell; and the winner of the Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction, Courtney Zoffness. Come check out their work and the work of our other fine contributors! You can order your copy online in print or digital formats at the Arts & Letters Exchange.

This fall, Arts & Letters is all about triangles!

If you’ve already read Issue 35, and you’re feeling inspired, remember that we are currently open for general submissions!

The Arts & Letters staff was saddened by news of contributor Naira Kuzmich’s death two weeks ago. Naira’s short story, “Beginning Armenian,” from Issue 27 can be found here, and is also excerpted below.

Adjectives are steadfast; while the noun it’s describing may change in number, the adjective remains the same.

Illness in a family can either break or strengthen it and there was never a time that I thought we’d fall apart. My parents were, in their own ways, people of action. I kept them busy. Dad put in more hours to pay my bills, my mother worried. The summer I came home from school, after my failed dalliances in poetry and sex, I began my treatment.

Young women with breast cancer are treated aggressively. Doctors try to leave no chance for the human spirit to weaken, for it to play a part. They think that young patients aren’t as resilient, that they generally have not been tested. He recommended that I have my left breast removed. A mastectomy. The tumor clocked in at 1.96 centimeters, small enough to have a lumpectomy, a procedure that could’ve saved most of my breast tissue, but he didn’t want to risk it. Do you want to risk it, he asked. And what could I tell him—that a man had yet to touch that left breast with love, yet to stand quiet, in awe, of my body, at the foot of my bed? Of course not, I told him. Get rid of the whole thing.

Before the surgery, I told my father to buy a lot of plastic chairs, just in case, for all the mourners. Our apartment was too small and they’d have to remember me outside in the backyard, where I had first jumped rope without a bra. Months later, drunk and in the dark, I’d jump again, staring at the expanse where my left breast used to be, my vision blurring until I saw what I wanted. My mother had watched from the living room window.

The surgery went as planned, and as hoped. After a course of chemo, we can talk about reconstructive surgery, the doctor said. So I did that too, lost my hair at twenty, bought my first wig, then my second, wore chest expanders, got the implant. I was back in school two years later, finished with my treatment at twenty-two, college at twenty-four.

Looking back, I don’t want to say it was easy, but that it was merely easier than my mother thought it would be. It was easier than my mother’s long dying.

All that energy in our bodies, those magical neurons, the little synapses and nerves that shine and sparkle in recognition and memory, all of that is for the young, but for what? There wasn’t much I needed to remember.

*

The second person singular is used only among the common people.

It’s not easy to take care of someone who doesn’t know why she needs to be taken care of. At first, I only came home a weekend a month, sitting with my mother and telling her about my students, my new friends, describing the paintings I purchased in extraordinary detail. I called more often than I used to. I gave my father addresses for respectable homes that would take both of them in. He refused, as did my mother, in the beginning, when she still had choices, could still make them. She was only sixty when diagnosed. One time she left the house and came back seven hours later from God knows where. She certainly didn’t. I began coming home twice a month. My tickets were round-trips. I’d brush her graying hair­—though she still had plenty of black—and I’d tell her about my cat, Lola, the time she vomited on my shoes, my favorite restaurant on Mission Street, the bum on the bus beside me who hollered, “You think your shit doesn’t smell like shit?” when I asked him to stop touching my knee. Another time, my mother knocked over a vase and walked over the glass, feet bleeding, to get to the ringing phone. It was me on the other end. More than once she attacked my father with whatever she could get her hands on—a pen, a spatula, tweezers—thinking him a stranger. I started coming home every weekend.

And it’s not like it is in the movies. There are no happy endings, because there’s no real story, because you forget to ask for one. Because you forget, too, sitting there in front of your disappearing mother, that you’re not talking just to fill the silence. You forget that you should be listening, trying to piece together everything she says, every delusion and nonsense memory. Every strange thing, you should’ve written down, you should’ve recorded every scary laugh. You should’ve tried to keep her talking even as she started crying when she lost her train of thought. You should’ve asked more questions. But sitting there in front of your disappearing mother, you were thinking this is the hardest thing I have ever done and you were thinking, dear God, haven’t I been through enough?

The only one who believed in you was your mother. The doctor was right to take your breast.

*

The colon is not a colon, but a period. It is two fistfuls of dirt, one on top of the other. It is not a permission to speak or to sing.

If there is a God, then we deserve to be in sorrow only three times in our lives: at birth, at the weddings of our children, and then the minute before our passing. While I was undergoing treatment, my mother was trying to make deals with the devil. Ten years off mine for every extra year you give her. A wrinkle around my eyes for every month you keep her alive. My breast for her breast. Mind for her body.

My mother died a million deaths.

I want to say that I died right there along with her, but that would be a lie. Soot as we say in Armenian, like dirt, absolute shit. I’m back in LA, alive and well. I’m standing in front of a classroom, teaching middle-aged women how to read and write in a language they already know. My students claim to be from the village, all twenty-eight of them. Yes, Professor Chopuryan, we speak Hayeren, but mother and father never taught us how to spell our names or read letters. Cows to milk, floors to wash, wet clothes to hang, lots to do, so much. And I want to believe them, every single one. Nazik Chatinyan with her outlandish highlights and purple eyebrows, imitation Gucci blouses. Anahit Hagopyan, beautiful and quiet, graying hair and a purse-full of tissues and pictures. Gayane Poghosyan, mother of four, chipped nails and cheap mascara. Perhaps they are all from the village, maybe not the same one, but did I not pass many while in Armenia?

I listen to these women’s stories and nod in the right places. I smile and sympathize and take them for their word. I look at their faces and tell them, Go on, I’m listening.

Tell me everything. Soots or truths.

Talk. Say anything, anything at all. *

Kicking off the first interview in our new series, Ampersand, in which we ask former contributors about their writing lives, we spoke with Elisabeth Murawski earlier this week about juggling work and writing, amongst other things. A long time contributor, Murawski’s poems have appeared in Issue 27 and Issue 31, and we are excited to publish new poems from her in an upcoming issue.

A&L: What sort of thing did you write about when you first started writing?

Elisabeth Murawski: One of my first poems, written in college, dealt with rebellion and injustice. A forgettable line (which I haven’t forgotten!): “Convention, I defy you!” Another was based on one of my mother’s stories about someone who liked to set fires. The final line, verbatim from my mother, was “he grows pines.” The rest of the story hadn’t prepared me for that conclusion, but it made for a fine ending, quirky and blunt. Later, there were love poems when I met the man I married. And spiritual sonnets. I wrote fairly accessible stuff at first, but then I discovered Neruda and Vallejo and began to tap into the unconscious and dreams. I wanted that richness of language and imagery, but the results sometimes verged on the opaque and obscure. Eventually I balanced that tendency when I discovered the T’ang dynasty poets. Such clarity and simplicity! And then there was Plath. I resonated to those clipped, edgy lines. I saw her as a sort of oracle telling me you can do this, too.

A&L: What is the toughest bad writing habit that you have had to break, or do you advocate for embracing bad habits?

EM: For years I earned a living writing government training materials, which emphasize plain language and a logical “how to” style. The goal is to help the trainee learn a job; careful and clear explanation is prized. No place for ambiguity, for intuitive leaps. Still, years into retirement, I may find myself slipping into that flat, declarative mode. I’m not sure why it happens; maybe my brain defaults to a blow by blow approach when I’m tired or stressed. Maybe I’m afraid of being called obscure and inaccessible. In my efforts to be understood, I can and do get wordy, include too much, forgetting to give the poem space, the reader space to think and absorb. This even though I realize what is not said can be as important as what is. I admit that in my efforts to “make it better,” I may tinker too much and lose a poem’s magic. One of the ways I’ve handled this tendency is to let the draft sit a while. A few weeks away from what I thought to be complete can be illuminating.

A&L: Do you enjoy reading you work aloud? Centuries ago, poems, and stories were most often sung, not read. How’s your singing voice?

EM: I do enjoy reading my poems aloud. Not only at readings but while I’m working on them in the draft stage. In a way it’s writing for the ear, the equivalent of printing out the poem for the eye—I’ll often see that something isn’t working when I can hold the printed page in my hand. Reading aloud helps me catch the awkward places, the dead spaces, the clunky language not always evident on the page or screen. Hearing the words and their juxtaposition, I ask myself is there music, does it flow? Often I may associate to some other, better, image or word that improves the poem’s cumulative, overall effect. In workshops I’ve stressed to students the importance of this reading-aloud exercise. When I’m lazy, and don’t practice what I preach, I may end up with a poem that needs to be hospitalized. *

Elisabeth Murawski is the author of Zorba’s Daughter (Utah State University Press, 2010), which received the May Swenson Poetry Award, Moon and Mercury (Washington Writers Publishing House, 1990), and two chapbooks. Heiress will be published in the fall of 2018 by Texas Review Press. She is also a Hawthornden fellow. Publications include: The Yale Review, FIELD, The Hudson Review, et al. A native of Chicago, she currently resides in Virginia, in another Alexandria.

Thank you to everyone who submitted to the Unclassifiables Contest! We’re excited to start reviewing your work. Watch for finalists announced this fall. In the meantime, we’re reading fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and flash fiction starting today for our regular reading period. You can read our guidelines here and read digital back issues for only $3 for the rest of the month to acquaint yourself with the journal. Get to know us by reading authors we’ve published. For a limited time, a subscription includes a full year and a half (three issues) of Arts & Letters issues to peruse.

Congratulations to the winners of our 19^th Annual Arts & Letters Prizes. Winners in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction receive $1000 and publication in the upcoming Fall issue of Arts & Letters. The Drama Prize winner receives $500 and a travel stipend to see his one-act play performed at Georgia College and State University.

Rumi Prize for Poetry
Judge: Richard Garcia
WINNER: George Looney, for poems after photographs by Walker Evans

“’It Isn’t Always Classical’—the first line is a great opening for a poem, I can imagining a story or even a novel starting with those lines—‘Waiting it out is what those who live here/would say they’re up to, if asked.’ These are poems with complicated, nostalgic narratives, with many characters, some alive at the time of the photo, some absent or deceased. There is mention of music in the poems, and they seem to have a ghostly soundtrack. These poems are of a high achievement, complicated, intelligent, and lyrical.”

—Richard Garcia

Finalists:

Keith Wilson
Jennie Malboeuf
Lucas Jacob
Richard Widerkehr
Kateri Kosek
Samuel Piccone
Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley
Patricia Colleen Murphy

Fiction Prize
Judge: Amy Hassinger
WINNER: Leslie Campbell, for “The Tasmanians”

“I found this story rich with the heavy content of its characters’ lives, particularly Mariam’s, as she tries—and fails—to escape from a past that haunts her mercilessly. The narrative is as full of well-chosen objects as her own closet, and they seem to spill out into the story and take it over in a way that supports her drastic decision at the end…. I love how the story is weighted with a larger sense of history—the world pressing itself into the lives of these very specific characters in their very specific universe. Beautifully done.”

—Amy Hassinger

Finalists:

Wes Civilz, for “First World Problem”
Stephen Hundley, for “Dog”
Sarah Earle Záhořík, for “The Present Unreal”

Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction
Judge: Sonja Livingston
WINNER: Courtney Zoffness, for “It May All End in Aleppo”

“’It May All End in Aleppo’ is worthy of a prize for the language alone. A gorgeous meditation on place, the writing is lush and descriptive and brings together images of 1960’s Aleppo with the haunting images of modern Syria we’ve all seen. But it’s the added twist of the writer’s perspective as a ghostwriter—and her palpable association to her subject and his beautiful war-torn birthplace—that makes this piece so unique. The writer conveys not only the minarets and pomegranates and rug stalls of old Aleppo, but the ugliness, too, the history of intolerance, the fleeing families, the child washed ashore. More than anything, the essay illustrates the life-changing and tender connection that comes when we open ourselves so fully to another’s story.” 

—Sonja Livingston

Finalists:

Margaret MacInnis, for “Being Dorothy in Kuwait”
David Rompf, for “False Vertigo”
Elizabeth Mosier, for “From Scratch”
Kelly Bowen, for “Mystic Trinities”
Barbara Tran, for “The Living Room”

Drama Prize
Judge: Iona Sun
WINNER: Marc Aronoff, for “The Lantern Bearers”

“I chose ‘The Lantern Bearers’ because it has a simple elegance that unfolds the complex tale of a man and woman. The dialogue has a unique style that undulates and will be a great challenge to direct next spring.”

—Iona Sun

Finalists:

Cary Pepper, for “Death Does Larry”
Robert Daseler, for “Obelists at Sea”
Rachel Joseph, for “Stripped”
Joseph Eastburn, for “The Godhead”
Mark Fink, for “The Happy Place”
Kristin Hanratty, for “Wine”

Many congratulations to all of our finalists! 2018 Prize submissions will open in February.

The Unclassifiables Contest is officially open. This is our third year of reading manuscripts that don’t quite fit the rigid labels of prose or poetry. Send us work that blurs, bends, blends, erases, or obliterates genre and other labels. Holding onto a manuscript that vaguely resembles this beast?

Send it our way!

Michael Martone will judge the contest and select a winner to receive $500. The Unclassifiable work will be published in an upcoming issue, and finalists will also be considered for publication. Issue 34 includes last year’s winner and work from a couple of finalists if you want to see what we have published in the past.

Submit online between now and the end of July!

Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @ArtsLettersGC and use #Unclassifiable to tell us what genre-bending works you’re enjoying this summer!

Issue 34 just arrived, and we’re excited to show it to you! This issue features the Unclassifiable winner, Emily Wolahan, as well as a couple of finalists from the contest. If you’re interested in submitting to the Unclassifiable Contest next month, this would be a great issue to check out for some inspiration. It also arrived just in time for National Poetry Month. Our standard issue size wasn’t big enough to fit all the great poetry that landed on our desk, so it’s a little longer than our past issues! You can order it online in print or digital formats at the Arts & Letters Exchange.

We’re not the only ones who think it’s great, either–and we can assure you our managing editor’s cat has great taste in books.

The 19th Annual Arts & Letters Prize Competition will come to a close tonight at midnight. We are excited to review all of the great work you have sent us and to select finalists to send to our judges, Richard Garcia, Amy Hassinger, Sonja Livingston, and Iona Sun. There’s still time to send us your work today, but if you miss this deadline, the Unclassifiable Contest is coming up in May for work that isn’t defined by a single genre. And of course, keep checking back to hear the finalists announced!

Our managing editor, Abbie Lahmers, interviewed Micah Dean Hicks, last year’s winner of the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize. His winning story, “The Deer,” can be read in Issue 33.

Abbie Lahmers: It seems like you write a lot of magical realism/fabulism, or stories that take place in similar but slightly different universes than our own. How do you navigate world-building and coming up with, for instance, the idea of a deer boy?

Micah Dean Hicks: For this story, I’d been reading a lot of fairy tales. People being transformed into animals was a common theme. I started thinking about how sad it would be for the opposite to happen, for a wild animal to become trapped in a human body.

A similar thing happened when I read the Brothers Grimm tale “The Six Swans.” In that story, six brothers are transformed into swans for six years. It struck me that the youngest boy would have been very young when he was turned into a bird. How would it feel to live half your life as one thing and half as another? Would you even know what you were after that? Would you want to be human again? That grew into my story “Church of Birds,” which was recently published in Kenyon Review Online.

I usually start with a weird image or a magical conceit. That’s what gets me interested in the story to begin with. Recent images have included an old woman baking the dead back to life in her oven, a child clacking shed antlers together, a taxidermist making a wedding dress out of fur and fang, a place where seashells rain from the sky, and a boy with the swan wing. From there, I start asking questions. Why are these shed antlers important to the child? What is his life like? What is painful for him?

As far as the rest of the world-building, I draw pretty heavily from where I grew up in rural Arkansas. That palette of images and colors makes its way into everything I write. In a place like that, it isn’t hard to imagine fairy tales and fables crawling out of the woods.

AL: Tell me a little about your book, Electricity and Other Dreams—I recently ordered it and am looking forward to reading it! What should I expect?

MDH: That’s very kind of you! The stories are about things like plumbers who exorcise ghosts, jugglers who become criminals, and electricians who can bring light with a touch.

At the time I wrote them, I was reading a lot of Aimee Bender and Hans Christian Andersen. The stories have a flat, fairy tale quality. A lot of characters are unnamed—the plumber, the electrician, the old woman, etc. They’re very interested in mythmaking and archetype.

AL: What are you working on now that you’re most excited about?

MDH: I recently finished a new collection of fabulist and fairy-tale-inspired stories. The working title is Chant. With this new collection, I’m trying to dive much deeper into character psychology than I have before. I’m also playing more with voice, trying to make the language muscular and musical.

And I’m currently working on a novel about a poor Kansas town plagued by ghosts. The town is slowly collapsing, the only employer left a pork processing plant that maims and mistreats its workers. Generations of ghosts who have watched everything they care about wither, so they possess the living and try to reclaim what they lost. I’ve been working on it for a few years now. Each time I think it’s done, I realize something foundational isn’t working, and I end up rewriting it from scratch. It’s been a pretty humbling experience. I’m hoping to have a final version of it ready by late summer, though.

AL: What advice do you have for writers considering submitting to the A&L Prize contest or other contests and journals?

MDH: I just took up this question with my Editing and Publishing students. I had them look at contest-winning poems and stories from several journals and asked, “Why did these win? What’s special about them?” Aside from the fact that everything we read was so incredibly good—Mikayla Ávila Vilá’s “Trumpeteers” in Boston Review, Katie Knoll’s “Red” in The Masters Review, and Rochelle Hurt’s poem “Kaleidoscope” in Phoebe Journal, to name three—I think a lot of it comes down to voice. If you can tell your story in a way that hums and crackles electric, if you can make it sound like nothing else, readers will pay attention.

A good voice seems to make its own slang. The first line of Hurt’s poem reads, “We blow our paper on toe rings & studded spandex, then go all-pennies-in on who’s first to leave the / water undressed.” When I first read that poem, I was stunned by the phrase “go all-pennies-in.” What a great way to say that.

Voice was a major concern for me with “The Deer.” I kept rewriting the first page, over and over, until I liked the sound of the sentences. Using good verbs and images was important. I wanted the speaker’s world to feel like a very tactile, physical place, sticky and sharp.

The hard thing about writing an aggressive, pop-the-reader-in-the-eye voice is that you still have to be as clear as possible. If reading the story is a chore, we’ll put it down.

AL: What are you reading right now? And, the unavoidable question—who are some of your literary (or non-literary) influences?

MDH: Right now, I’m working through Lauren Groff’s Delicate Edible Birds and Ken Liu’s The Paper Menagerie. Liu is so inventive and a great storyteller. With Groff, I’m amazed at how layered and rich her stories are. She’s so masterful at character, too. I think about characterization a lot, because it doesn’t come naturally to me. In the last few years, I’ve worked really hard on character from the standpoint of the reader: How do you make the reader fall in love with your character? Groff is great at that, but what’s more impressive is how she manages character vs. character relationships. Any two people she puts on the page have so much history, so much conflict, so much messy and strange love between them. I’m in awe of that.

As far as influences, there have been so many. They stack up like geologic strata. If I had to pick one moment that was formative for me as a writer it would be reading the stories of Gabriel García Márquez. He had this perfect way of marrying the supernatural—winged men, women who pass through walls, alchemy, ghost ships—with rural poverty. Because of where I grew up, that resonated so strongly with me. His stories felt like home, even though he and I come from very different places. I’d never seen anyone do that before, and it showed me how to blend my interest in magical narratives with my own experience. Before reading him, I never really wrote about where I came from. He showed me how to do that. *

The 19th Annual Arts & Letters Prize Competition is still open for submissions through March 31st!

Micah Dean Hicks is a Calvino Prize-winning author of fabulist fiction. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Kenyon Review Online, EPOCH, and Arts & Letters, among others. His story collection, Electricity and Other Dreams, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. He teaches in the BFA program in creative writing at Arkansas Tech University.

One of our editors, Alexandra McLaughlin, interviewed Kirun Kapur, winner of the 2013 Arts & Letters Rumi Poetry Prize. Her poem, “From the Afterlife,” can be found here and in Issue 27.

Alexandra McLaughlin: I see that you’ve lived and traveled all over the world—growing up in Hawaii, living and working in North America and South Asia. How has this influenced your poetry?

Kirun Kapur: When I began assembling poems for my first book, I showed one of the earliest manuscript drafts to a poet I trust and admire. He said, “I love the poems individually, but when I read them all together they give me whiplash.” He meant that the book was constantly shifting—without warning—across the world, across time, and he found it jarring. One minute the reader is in America, the next in India or Pakistan, then back again; it’s 1947, then the present day, then in some mythical time, then, suddenly, 1947 again. Looking back, it makes perfect sense that he would notice that motion and I would not. Like many people who grow up between countries, languages and cultures, I’ve spent my entire life crossing back forth. It’s so instinctive I hardly notice it. “Whiplash” has been a way of life for me, and rather than jarring, I find it a marvelous source of energy and inspiration. I realized then that I wanted to preserve the qualities of motion and plurality. But I also understood the criticism. I needed to work more to make the experience fruitful for the reader. I wanted the “whiplash” to add to the poems and the book. Some of the hardest work I did on the manuscript was figuring out how to move the reader meaningfully through history, culture and geography. So, I think it’s fair to say that my wanderings have been at the center of my poems, even when I couldn’t see it.

AM: Can you describe the time when you first realized that being creative and writing poetry was what you wanted to do?

KK: I’ve wanted to make poems for as long as I can remember—even before I was entirely sure what a poem might be. My father was (and is) a wonderful storyteller. When I was little, he would tell stories to put us to sleep. We’d all pile into my parents’ bed with the lights turned off and listen. For me, a beloved voice in the dark is still a moving and profound experience. So, perhaps the impulse and interest came from there. I’m not sure. In any case, wanting to make poems didn’t seem like the sort of thing you could admit out loud. On a school trip to the Big Island, we’d watched a volcanologist walk on crust of cooled lava, step over a stream of molten rock, and use special instruments to draw liquid fire from inside the earth. This seemed just as exciting and far more practical than poetry! For a long time after I told everyone I wanted to be a volcanologist.

AM: Do you have any creative patterns or rituals?

KK: I love the idea of rituals. I’ve always wanted to have creative rituals, but, these days, it’s not feasible. I fit my writing around other obligations (work, family etc.). Every day is different. Once in a while I have whole, beautiful, blank hours in which to read and write and think, uninterrupted. Other days I work on two lines in the parking lot before a meeting or edit a stanza while I’m waiting for water to boil on the stove. Someday, though, I’ll have special (admirable!) rituals involving long walks and tea.

AM: Tell me about your debut collection, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist. What was the process of putting that together like? What inspired it?

KK: Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist is a collection of poems that ricochets from 1940s India to Biblical pastorals, from American bars to the battlefield of the Bhagavad-Gita. The book explores history, family ties, personal identity and the harrowing collisions of love and violence that force us to reinvent our culture and ourselves. The poems are populated by an array of characters—mothers and fathers, princes and soldiers, daughters and lovers—who struggle to understand our most fundamental stories and our most enduring human bonds.

Part of Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist is inspired by Partition, the 1947 division of British India into the modern nations of Indian and Pakistan. Partition led to the largest human migration in modern history. Close to 20 million people lost their homes and livelihoods; almost 2 million lost their lives. The story of Partition was something I really wanted to address in this book. It was a story that was always present in my house (my father lived through it), though it was rarely talked about out loud. In part, I wanted these poems to respond to those silences, to be the voices I sensed but didn’t hear.

I began publishing poems in journals immediately after I finished grad school, but it took me some time to publish my first book. I edited the poems relentlessly, cutting out large sections, writing and rewriting. Convinced the poems weren’t good enough—or maybe that I wasn’t good enough—I gave up a number of times. Finding a structure that could accommodate multiple cultures, landscapes, historical events and mythological worlds was daunting. But, somehow, I just couldn’t stop. I kept working on it. Eventually, I did send the manuscript out. In 2013, it won the Antivenom Poetry Prize and was published by Elixir Press in 2015.

AM: What have you been working on recently?

KK: At present, I’m procrastinating! I’m getting myself ready to begin assembling a new manuscript. I’ve printed everything out. The pile of pages is sitting on my desk, reproachfully, held together with a massive binder clip. Somehow, I’m not up to facing them quite yet. So, I’ve been writing a series of ghazals. Procrastination ghazals. I love the ghazal form. They are difficult to do well in English, so it’s the perfect mind-absorbing project.

AM: Any advice for writers?

KK: Don’t give up. Read more and write more. Then revise again, even when you think you can’t.

Follow your interests and your instincts, especially the weird ones.

Try to remember that nothing is wrong with you if you are plagued by self-doubt. You can learn to write with it (or from under it).

Find a true friend or two. Your friends will tell you (gently) when your work isn’t what it should be and will have faith in you when you doubt yourself. Your friends will prop you up and cheer you on, talk you off the ledge and read your thousandth draft. Their miraculous work will inspire you.

AM: What are you reading right now?

KK: I just finished The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch and A Pillow Book by Suzanne Buffam. They’re very different books, but both are lyrical, economical and beautiful. I’m now knee deep in a fine biography of photographer Dorothea Lange and I’m re-reading the excellent Pakistani poet Kishwar Naheed.*

The 19th Annual Arts & Letters Prize Competition is still open for submissions through March 31st!

Kirun Kapur is the winner of the Arts & Letters Rumi Prize in Poetry and the Antivenom Poetry Award for her first book, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist (Elixir Press, 2015). Her work has appeared in AGNI, Poetry International, FIELD, Prairie Schooner, The Christian Science Monitor and many other journals. She has taught creative writing at Boston University and at Brandeis University and is currently a visiting writer at Amherst College. Kapur has been awarded fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center and MacDowell Colony. She is the director of the New England arts program, The Tannery Series, and serves as Poetry Editor at The Drum Literary Magazine. She was recently named an “Asian-American poet to watch” by NBC news. Kapur grew up in Honolulu and now lives north of Boston.

Left to right: Ernestine Montoya, Amy Hassinger, Teri Grimm, Julia Wagner

Ernestine Montoya, one of our assistant fiction editors, spoke with our A&L Fiction Prize judge, Amy Hassinger:

On Tuesday, March 7^th, Amy Hassinger visited Georgia College to read from her latest novel, After the Dam. The book tells the story of Rachel, a new mother who travels back to her grandmother’s farm in Maine, where she spent her childhood summers and met her first love. Though she initially returns to care for the ailing Grand, Rachel also hopes her time there can be spent reclaiming herself. I had the opportunity to meet Amy and her friend and colleague, the poet Terry Grimm, who also read from her latest poetry collection, during their time in Milledgeville. In the flesh, Amy is bright-eyed, insightful, and well-spoken. Perhaps most notably, she is wise in the ways of the writer, both as a career and an art. Don’t worry. I took some notes.

1. Fictional females are easy fodder for criticism. Consumers of any genre, be it prose, television, film, or celebrity gossip, are quick to judge the actions of women, especially when those women are mothers. After spending time with book groups that read the novel, Amy realized a similar theme: they were most infuriated by Rachel’s decisions when those decisions affected her newborn, Deirdre. This is understandable, of course, but it does lead to a recurrent conundrum: expecting women in fiction, mothers or not, to be above reproach. Luckily for us, Amy’s novels, which all feature a female protagonist as the central character, are not concerned with painting a portrait of the perfect woman, but rather, a sometimes wise, foolish, relatable, infuriating, lovely, complicated, and yes, at times unlikable, human.

2. The P-word is alive and well— but not unbeatable. For any female professional, there is one word that, if we allow it, can wield immense power: pushy. The P-word can be innocuous and deadly. The P-word can keep us from asking for job opportunities or favors. But the P-word is largely gendered. Men do not often experience such anxiety when they are simply asking for what they want. After discussing this odd phenomenon with Amy and Terry, I was reminded of a simple fact: it is okay to ask for things.

3. Be nice. To a young writer, the writing world can at times feel impenetrable and daunting, but it is a small one, after all. Make connections, be genuine, and do what you can to help other writers succeed. Ask magazines if they’d like to publish book reviews that you’ve written about up-and-coming writers’ novels. Be honest about your experience with the book, but your goal is not to be the Renata Adler of small press book reviews. (Though if there were such a person, I confess I would be curious.) You are, rather, sharing with other readers what can be gained from the work, making a connection with the author of the book, and adding to your own professional experience. No nastiness required.

Though I am happy to share what I learned, I must express regret that you did not hear the words directly from Amy. Her presence in person is difficult to describe, but I will say this: she has that rare quality, quickly vanishing from modern times—when Amy listens to you, it is impossible not to feel interesting. And considering the kind, intelligent source, that is saying quite a lot.

It’s not too late to submit to the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, judged by Amy Hassinger – the contest closes March 31st!

The 19^th Annual Arts & Letters Prize Competition opens just in time for AWP. Our staff of readers and editors will be at booth 311 all day Thursday through Saturday to talk about the contest and recommend some of our personal favorite stories, essays, and poems from the last few issues. Issue 33, our most recent, will be available for a discounted price to browse through past winners of the A&L Prize: work by Micah Dean Hicks, Jude Nutter, and Dawn Davies. The best way to know what we’re looking for is to read what we’re publishing. We’ll be reading contest entries through the end of March.

If you’re at the conference, say hi to us at booth 311. If you’ve contributed to A&L, stop by for a picture with our editors and a pin!

Our New Year’s resolution is to read more of your great work—help us out by submitting to Arts & Letters while you still can! Our reading period will only be open until the end of January, and we’ll be busy reading through the end of the month. If you’re feeling really ambitious, wait until February when the Arts & Letters Prize contest opens in all genres, including drama! The new judges will be announced soon, so keep checking back. Guidelines can be found here: http://artsandletters.gcsu.edu/submit/annual-prize-contest/

If you’re looking for holiday gifts for your literary friends, look no further! From now until the end of December, when you order a subscription of Arts & Letters, we’ll send one to a friend too. After you order through the Arts & Letters Exchange, send us an email ([email protected]) with your friend’s address and a message to send to them with the journal. A subscription includes our most recent issue, Issue 33, and will be followed by Issue 34 when it comes out in the spring. It only costs $20 to receive two subscriptions—one for yourself, and one for your friend!

All our other products are on sale too. Digital issues are only $4 and our most recent issue, featuring Arts & Letters Prize winners in all genres, is going for $8!

Issue 33 hit the press last month, and we’re looking forward to having the new issues in our hands soon! If you’re excited too, head on over to our store, The Arts & Letters Exchange, to pre-order print copies at a discounted rate. They’re available for only $8 if you order now before it comes out! The issue will feature the Arts & Letters Prize winners: Micah Dean Hicks, Jude Nutter, and Dawn Davies along with great work from the rest of our contributors. We can’t spoil everything, but the cover is perfect for lovers of old linoleum flooring…

Congratulations to Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas on receiving a 2016 Writer’s Award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation! Her essay, “BOG-MIA-CID,” appears in Issue 30 of Arts & Letters from Spring 2015. Her nonfiction book, Don’t Come Back, which will include the essay, comes out in January 2017 from Mad River Books, an imprint of the Ohio State Press. The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards program was established to support women writers who have shown exceptional talent at early stages in their writing careers. We are thrilled to hear they have chosen Lina for the award and encourage you to check out her book and read her essay from Issue 30!

We are excited to announce the winner of the second annual Unclassifiable Contest, judged by Michael Martone! Congratulations to Emily Wolahan with her winning Unclassifiable piece, “The Direct Account of Frank Thomas.” Her work will appear in the Spring 2017 issue of Arts & Letters.

Finalists:

Jessie van Eerden, “The Whole Painting”
Erik Hoel, “Higher Education”
Kirsten Imani Kasai, “A Snail Without its Shell is a Snail”
Tom Sheehan, “Letter Across Open Waters to Lost Comrades”
Penny Perkins, “My NPR Interview with Terry Gross”
Elizabeth Robinson, “Vulnerability Index”

Michael Martone writes of the winning piece: “What struck me about this solid and solidly articulated collage was the stuffness of all the stuff deployed here. This is the nominative on steroids. Nouns away! Subjected to subject. I like that the material nature of the piece, its artifice, was not just so much material but that it was also, part and parcel, connected to the content. This collage was cantilevered, a through truss bridge I could trust to carry me across the current of genre. It wears its brutalist architecture on its sly sleeve. It is engineered to move and is itself quite moving.”

Of the first finalist, Jessie van Eerden’s “The Whole Painting,” Martone also writes: “…painters have it easy. That wall of paint can be taken in all at once. This piece wants that all-at-onceness, goes all aerosol, creating an atmosphere more than a mean meaning, installs an instillation of words, does not simply re-create on a two dimensional space the illusion of a three dimensional world but throws in one or two more dimensions just for fun.”

Thank you to all who sent us their Unclassifiable work, and we hope you will consider us again for next year’s contest!

We are now reading for regular submissions in fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and flash fiction! Check out our guidelines here and send us your best work through Submittable. If you’re looking for some examples of what we publish, all our issues are still on sale for half off through the end of the month, but only through the Arts & Letters Exchange. Flip through a print journal or download the digital version to see what we’re all about.

We can’t wait to read your work!

Here at the A&L office, we’re taking part in spring cleaning a little bit late. We want to get journals off our dusty shelves and into your hands…and also clear out some space for us to work on the upcoming fall issue! From now through August, everything in the Arts & Letters Exchange is going for half-price. That includes digital and print issues as well as subscriptions. Back issues are only $3, so stock up! Our regular reading period opens in August, so now is a great time to read up on what we’re publishing and get ready to submit your own work.

Follow the link above to get to our new store, and feel free to browse the issues for names you know or upcoming writers you’ve been wanting to read. The full indexes are included for each available issue.

Happy reading!

Congratulations to Matthew Minnicino, winner of the 2016 Arts & Letters Prize for Drama for “Funny Voices, or a Thing I Cannot Name.”

Judge Iona Holder Sun noted that the quality of play entrants this year was remarkable.

Minnicino will receive a prize of $500, as well as travel expenses to the Georgia College campus, where his winning one-act will be produced in the spring.

Finalists:

James Hutchison
Bara Swain
Rikki Schwartz
Scott Sickles
James Brown
Lynn-Steven Johanson

If Arts & Letters isn’t already on your summer reading list, now we’re making it easy to have the most recent issue sent to your email right away! From now until the end of July, you can order a digital subscription for only $6—that’s the same cost as a single digital back issue. We recently opened up the Arts & Letters Marketplace, a convenient way for you to order digital and print issues online.

If you order a digital subscription this summer, it will include a PDF of Issue 32, which features the 2015 Unclassifiable winner’s work in color, sent immediately. Issue 33, which will include the 18^th Annual Arts & Letters Prize winners, will also be emailed to you when it comes out this fall.

Regular submissions open in August, and reading our most recent issue would be a great way to see what we’re looking for!

Get your digital subscription here!

Watch for Drama Prize winners to be announced July 1st!

Congratulations to the winners of our 2016 Prize contests, each of whom will receive $1000 and publication in the upcoming Fall issue of Arts & Letters:

Rumi Prize for Poetry
Judge: Carol Frost
WINNER: Jude Nutter, for “Ianua: Day Zero Plus Three” and “Ianua: Day Zero Plus Twenty-One”

“The poems in every [finalist] group show evidence of a poet’s passion for the sounds of words and for the art and imagination in varying mixtures that may result in that prickling feeling on the back of the neck that a reader feels when the poem is that good; but in [this] entry, the achievement is most through and through. I like the poems very much, not only for the elements I described but also for their heart. Congratulations to the poet.”

—Carol Frost

Finalists:

Jessica Guzman Alderman
Leeya Mehta
Laura Sobbott Ross
Emily Cole
Gayle Kaune
Sally Derringer
Roy Mash

Fiction Prize
Judge: Kate Christensen
WINNER: Micah Hicks, for “The Deer”

 “‘The Deer’… is breathtaking and original and gorgeous. Striking, unerring, weird. I was so glad the writer didn’t tip his or her hand, ever: the reality of the story is unbroken. ‘The Deer’ is a riveting fable in its own right, but it also leaves me with a larger sense of a profound human struggle, something universal and shared having to do with our lost connection to our animal natures, our need to dominate and domesticate, because we can’t go back, we can’t regain what we gave up to be human.”

—Kate Christensen

Finalists:

Anne Holbrook, for “Tink’s Town”
Adrienne Bernhard, for “A Fable in Two Parts”
Laine Cunningham, for “The Butterfly Tree”

Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction
Judge: Faith Adiele
WINNER: Dawn Davies, for “Mothers of Sparta”

“‘Mothers of Sparta’…is sprawling, tackling topics that seem impossible to write or even contemplate. The author searches medicine, social policy, psychology, ethics, history, mythology and literature for answers. Demonstrating fearlessness and narrative control through repetition, questions and dry wit, she starts humorously and light, then ramps up the horror and dread.” 

—Faith Adiele

Finalists:

Cate Hennessey, for “Chasing Rabbits”
Clinton Peters, for “Giving Fire”
Kelly Allen, for “Some of Us Are Dogs on the Verge of Speaking”

Congratulations to all of our finalists! Prize submissions will reopen February 2017.

The 18th Annual Arts & Letters Prize Contest closes March 31st. That means you still have nine days to send us your best, polished work! We can’t wait to read your poetry, prose, and plays! Our judges this year are:

Poetry: Carol Frost
Creative Nonfiction: Faith Adiele
Fiction: Kate Christensen
Drama: Iona Sun

All contest entries will also be considered for regular publication, and winners receive up to $1,000 and publication. Don’t miss your chance!

ERRATUM: In our current issue (Spring 2016; Issue 32), María Isabel Alvarez’s “War” is incorrectly listed as Creative Nonfiction in the table of contents. “War” is a work of fiction. We sincerely regret the error. An updated table of contents can be found online as well as in the digital issue, once available.

Carol Frost’s latest collection was published in 2014 by Tupelo Press (Entwined – Three Lyric Sequences). In 2010, The Florida Book Awards gave her their gold medal for Honeycomb. She has new work in Poetry, Kenyon Review, The New Republic and Shenandoah. Frost teaches at Rollins College, where she is the Theodore Bruce and Barbara Lawrence Professor of English, and where she directs Winter With the Writers, a Literary Festival. We’re very pleased to welcome her to the Georgia College campus on March 15th to read from her most recent collection. Frost is also our poetry judge for this year’s Arts & Letters Prizes. Read “Lucifer in Florida” and “Man-of-War” from her new collection on our Featured Archives page.

On February 1st, the 18th annual Arts & Letters Prizes will be open to submissions. This year’s judges are Carol Frost (poetry), Faith Adiele (nonfiction), and Kate Christensen (fiction). Prize winners will receive $1000 and publication in the upcoming fall or spring issue. We look forward to reading your work!

For more information, visit Arts & Letters Prizes.

From now until the end of February, the Arts & Letters digital issues are available for purchase at discounted prices. Our digital back issues are only $4, and our current digital issue is available for just $5! And remember, our Arts & Letters Prizes Competition begins on February 1st. What better way to prepare than reading up on what we’ve been publishing? Purchase the current issue here and our back issues here.

It’s a great time to order an Arts & Letters subscription. From now until the New Year, you can receive upcoming Issues 31 and 32 in the mail and have them sent to a friend for free! Purchase two subscriptions for the price of one: only $20. Don’t forget to leave a message and a second address in your order. Or, if you’re interested in reading up on our back issues, pick one up for only $6!

Todd Davis’ poems “Burn Barrel” and “By the Rivers of Babylon” hold images that heavily contrast with each other to create a stimulating tension. Davis builds the environments in his poems with great purpose. Of his poetry, Davis writes: “Much of my poetry grows out of my lived experience in central Pennsylvania. This is an area of the country that has been abused: clear-cut several times; mined for coal; polluted with the growth of industrialization; and then left to try to heal itself. Sadly, it now finds itself being injured once again with the radical shift to fracking for natural gas. There is poverty here, both in the flesh and in the spirit. There is also great beauty and resilience. I hope that my poems, when taken together, offer glimpses of the people I love and live among the places that sustain our lives.” We are grateful that Davis chose to share his work with us again—two of his earlier poems appear in Issue 14 of Arts & Letters.

Davis is the author of five full-length collections of poetry—Winterkill, In the Kingdom of the Ditch, The Least of These, Some Heaven, and Ripe—as well as of a limited edition chapbook, Household of Water, Moon, and Snow: The Thoreau Poems. “Burn Barrel” and “By the Rivers of Babylon” are from of his fifth book, Winterkill, which Michigan State University Press will publish in January 2016. He edited the nonfiction collection, Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, and co-edited Making Poems: Forty Poems with Commentary by the Poets. His poetry has been featured on the radio by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac and by Ted Kooser in his syndicated newspaper column, American Life in Poetry. He is the winner of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize and the Chautauqua Editors Prize. He is a fellow of the Black Earth Institute and teaches creative writing, American literature, and environmental studies at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College.

We recently added a flash fiction category on our submittable page. We are excited to discover the surprising and moving pieces that arise from this new addition to our magazine. Send us your work!

Join us to celebrate the best in contemporary writing! Georgia College’s Flannery O’Connor and Southern Women Writers Conference 2015 will take place September 17-19. The conference will include presentations on Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Caroline Gordon, Carson McCullers, Katherine Anne Porter, Lillian Smith, and Eudora Welty. For a look at the full schedule, accommodation details, and other important information, visit Georgia College’s O’Connor Conference 2015 webpage.

We are pleased to welcome Michael Martone to Georgia College on September 15, 2015. Martone recently published a collection of essays, Racing in Place. He has been awarded two fellowships from the NEA and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His works have earned him numerous awards from magazines like The Florida Review and Story. More information on Michael Martone and the Georgia College visiting writers schedule can be found on the Georgia College webpage here.

The Arts & Letters Drama Prize (for a one-act play) is for $1,000, a production at Georgia College, and domestic travel expenses to attend the production (usually mid-late March). The preliminary judge will be Eddie Zipperer, an award-winning playwright whose most recent full-length published play is Beware the Licorice Vines (Dramatic Publishing Co, 2014). His play Nicolas the Worm was part of the 2012 Nuestras Voces Reading Series at Repertorio Espanol (Off-Broadway).

The final Judge will be Iona Holder, the Arts & Letters Prize play director since 2009. So get your One Act Play polished up and send it in to our contest!

Arts & Letters has undergone a full restyling, and Issue 29 also marks our triumphant return to color (as opposed to our black and white tuxedo designs). The journal has been updated all the way down to the paper stock and typography. A physical copy of our new issue can be purchased through our secure Submittable store for only $12.

Arts & Letters works hard to stay relevant and accessible to computer, tablet, and even phone readers. To make our journal convenient and easy to read for our digital users, we have made Issue 29 available as a digital copy that can be purchased through our Submittable store for the discounted price of $8.

DAYBREAK

On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
dozens of starfishes
were creeping. It was
as though the mud were a sky
and enormous, imperfect stars
moved across it as slowly
as the actual stars cross heaven.
All at once they stopped,
and, as if they had simply
increased their receptivity
to gravity, they sank down
into the mud; they faded down
into it and lay still; and by the time
pink of sunset broke across them
they were as invisible
as the true stars at daybreak.

Get to know this year’s Arts & Letters Prizes Poetry judge: Stephen Dunn.

It’s a great honor to have Stephen Dunn as this year’s poetry judge. His work has appeared in countless journals, including The Atlantic, The Nation, the New Republic, the New Yorker, The Georgia Review, the American Poetry Review, and so many more.

Mr. Dunn has been recognized for his work with many prestigious awards including the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his book Different Hours in 2001, the Academy Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts & Letters, Fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, three NEA Creative Writing Fellowships, a Distinguished Artist Fellowship from the NJ State Council on the Arts, and too many more to fit into this post.

We are extremely excited to have such a prestigious poet as Mr. Dunn serving as this year’s poetry judge. To learn more about Mr. Dunn or his publications, please visit his website: www.stephendunnpoet.com.

We welcome you back after a long summer which had you checking and checking and checking our website, and the moment has finally come where we open the doors, roll out the red carpet, shake your hand and cordially, happily, and spiritedly invite you to submit to our regular submissions.

But don’t be fooled. Just because they’re called “Regular Submissions” doesn’t mean we want regular work. What we should do is call them “Extraordinary Submissions” No matter what you call them, submitting to Arts & Letters is now something you can do.

It’s time to brush off your laptops and desktops, polish up your poems, stories, and essays and submit them to us. We are reading submissions daily, and our turnaround rate is very quick! We try to be as speedy as possible because we know how maddening it can be to have your writing locked up for most of the year.

Also, simultaneous submissions are fine with us. Just add a note on Submittable if you need to withdraw anything.

So just click the big blue button on our submit page, and I’ll see you in Submittable!

As of January 1, 2015, Arts & Letters will no longer be accepting print submissions. While we have had great luck with print submissions in the past and value all of our print submitters, we are simply getting too many submissions to keep up with the legwork print submissions requires. Happily, this move will allow us to keep better track of our submissions and move toward a quicker response time.

All submissions as of 2015 will be done through our online submissions managers through Submittable. We chose to go this route because we and a majority of our users have found our online manager to be quick, convenient, and easy to track.

We appreciate all of our submitters who prefer print submissions, and we hope that they will continue to submit their work to us online. We’re confident the the time we save from ending print submissions will allow us to improve all aspects of the journal for our readers.

Thanks and we look forward to seeing your submissions framed in Submittable orange!

Congratulations to the winners of our 2014 Prize contests, each of whom will receive $1000 and publication in upcoming issues of Arts & Letters:

Poetry/Rumi Prize (Final Judge: Beth Gylys)
WINNER: Emma Hine, “Distortion for Afterwards”
Finalists: Carolyne Wright, Amy Woolard, Kim Garcia, Jennie Malboeuf, Ashley Lumpkin, Jenny Molberg

Fiction Prize (Final Judge: Jayne Anne Phillips)
WINNER: Holloway McCandless, “Motu Tapu”
Finalists: Morgan Harlow, Sophie Monatte

Creative Nonfiction/Susan Atefat Prize (Final Judge: Bret Lott)
WINNER: Leonora Smith, “Blood Sick”
Finalists: Jeffrey Schneider, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, Alexandra Newton Rios

Drama Prize (Final Judge: David Muschell)
WINNER: Drew Katzman, “A Rare and Fleeting Thing”
Finalists: Ariadne Blayde, Wendy Dann, Bruce Hoogendoorn, Arnold Johnston, Dan Morra, Cary Pepper, Bridgette Portman, Carolyn Nur Wistrand

Congratulations to all finalists as well. We begin reading for next year’s prizes in February, 2015.

Ask Alice is a video program where Alice Friman, Georgia College Poet-in-Residence, addresses your questions about the writing life. Submit a question through Submittable and she’ll choose the best questions to answer in future Arts & Letters PRIME Ask Alice videos. Previously, Alice has answered questions on publication, revision, overcoming your inner critic, and writing good love poetry. Past programs are available on the Ask Alice page.

Check it out and then submit your question through our free Submittable category; if your question is selected, you will receive a free subscription to PRIME! Submit here.

We’re excited to announce that Alice Friman has a new book of poems, The View From Saturn, forthcoming this year from LSU Press. Also, a new version of “Ask Alice” will be in the forthcoming Prime 3.2.

Open soon: PRIME Poetry Prize submission period is May 1 to July 31. 

Closed: Regular submissions. Reading period: August 1st to January 31st.

Closed: Arts & Letters Prize submissions. We are now in the blind review of submissions; finalists will be submitted to our final judges late April/early May, and we will announce winners in June.