Keeping up with Thoreau

Fringe's Special Enviro Issue debuted today, featuring literary selections with a special focus on green and environmental topics. Fringe isn't the only journal looking toward the environment for inspiration, though.

Ever since Henry David Thoreau famously "roughed" it on the shores of Walden Pond, writers have used their natural surroundings as fuel for their creative fires. Lately, though, this environmental concern seems more omnipresent than ever. While staffing my company's table at AWP, I was surprised by the number of people who asked if we published any nature writing anthologies. We don't, but it got me thinking that it's a good avenue to consider pursuing, since it's obviously a hot button issue that's in demand and in the forefront of our global consciousness.

I also came across two literary journals while at AWP that focus primarily on the natural world. The Fourth River is a journal run out of Chatham University in Pittsburgh, and "welcomes submissions of creative writing that explore the relationship between humans and their environments, both natural and built, urban, rural or wild. We are looking for writings that are richly situated at the confluence of place, space and identity, or that reflect upon or make use of landscape and place in new ways." Instead of the ubiquitous pins and postcards, they were giving away envelopes of wildflower seeds, which I found smart and charming as a marketing tactic.

flyway journal is affiliated with the MFA in Creative Writing and Environment program at Iowa State University and has just recently devoted the journal exclusively to publishing writing about the environment, though the journal is 15 years old and has always been linked to the unique environmental writing program.

One thing I find myself wondering about these two journals is if they are so dedicated to the environment, then why are they both print journals? Shouldn't they consider becoming online only, thus saving the paper, ink, and other environmentally-destructive resources traditional media necessitates? Just a thought...

What a Difference a Year Makes: Reflections on AWP 2009

I returned from my second AWP conference exhausted, laden with lit journals and assorted swag, and feeling a mixture of inspiration and disappointment. I promptly took a long nap, and only after I woke up the next morning was I able to properly begin processing the 4-day hurricane known as AWP.

This is not to say that this year's conference was somehow more tiring than years past--AWP is always a hectic weekend full of readings, panels, drinking, and dancing, but this year's conference came with many added dimensions for me: responsibilities.

I attended the 2008 conference in New York City as a student--a Publishing student, no less. I had nowhere to be other than the panels and readings I had painstakingly circled in the official program. In my free time, I perused the Bookfair, but I was quickly overwhelmed by all of the smiling lit journal editors asking "What do you write?" It's a seemingly simple question, but for me, it's always been a loaded one. Having attended Emerson, where the dual-focus writing program is both a blessing and a curse, my identity as a writer has gone through more than a few crises. Since students in the Publishing program are not widely regarded as writers (most MFA Creative Writing candidates forget the "& Writing" part of the "Publishing & Writing" concentration), I tend to deny that I have any kind of writing talent. When too tired of responding "I write nonfiction," and feeling like a liar (though I do write, I do so primarily for myself), I would head back to the hotel I shared with 4 other Emerson students or go for a walk around the block to see where I could find the cheapest sandwich Midtown Manhattan had to offer (it wasn't always the least sketchy option). I saw readings by Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Safran Foer, Billy Collins & Frank McCourt, and Mary Karr.

This year, I flew to Chicago to attend AWP in a more official capacity: the company I work for paid for me to go, to represent them at the bookfair. We publish college textbooks, and a first edition creative writing book, Creative Nonfiction, had just published a month ago. In addition to my official post at the Bookfair, I was to take the author to dinner and meet with one of our freelance contributors to discuss a project.

Beyond my official capacity, it was my first AWP as a Fringe editor. Though I wasn't able to represent at the Fringe table, I dutifully schlepped a duffle full of swag (shot glasses, samples, pins, magnets, and the banner) to Chicago and back to Boston, and stopped by the table as often as I could.

I was surrounded by friends and colleagues, I was representing my company, and I was part of a literary journal I believe in. But I left AWP this year feeling somehow less inspired and less part of the literary community. Why was this? I collected my fair share of free pins, journals, and temporary tattoos; I attended every dance party; I signed up for a subscription to Gulf Coast, bought a back issue of Barrelhouse, and subscribed to Paper Egg books. I chalk it up to a combination of things: I didn't attend a single reading, I was working the bookfair the entire day with a smile pasted on my face, and I got more than a few scorned looks from people walking by my table. I was there representing "the man," despite the fact that many of the conference's attendees are professors who use our books to teach classes and the panel offered on textbook writing was so crowded that I had to sit on the floor.

This post is pretty disjointed. A week later and I still can't quite decide how to feel about AWP. I am also suffering from a nasty case of the dreaded "post-AWP plague," so my head is foggy with cold medicine and congestion. I don't know if I'll be in Denver for AWP 2010, but if I am, I hope to find a balance between representing "the man" and myself.



*Cross-posted to Vernacular*

The Herd Mentality Prevails in the Windy City

Having read Eliot Weinberger's 1983 essay, "The Bomb," in his classic Works on Paper, published on New Directions, I started immediately looking online for more. There is an article in Bomb Magazine, a conversation between Weinberger and poet Forrest Gander on why "they are confounded by the astounding absence of the role of poet as a public cautionary figure."

The essay "The Bomb" is a must, especially with these next few days seemingly everywhere devoted--from Facebook, to blogs, to poets' invitational emails--to the AWP Conference in Chicago. As early as 1983 Weinberger is pointing out the poet's "recently acquired status as a wage-earner" and its necessary complications involving literature in the affairs of the state (i.e., university chairs, federal grants, and the like).

Amiri Baraka, who took part in the (now-largely forgotten, I think) May 26, 1982 "Poets Against the End of the World" reading at NYC's Town Hall, thought that the long shadow of The Bomb would lead to "dynamic, socially relevant poetry" which, to Weinberger at that time, remained to be seen. Naturally, this hasn't come to pass, at least in the large-scale poetry "movements" of contemporary America, aside from small pockets here and there.

Political thought in poetry, aside perhaps from Marvin Bell's Mars Being Red, is largely absent. After the Town Hall reading, Poetry East quoted Maxine Kumin as saying "Poetry is too fragile an art for polemic" and this attitude has remained indelibly marked on the contemporary consciousness. But why?

Weinberger draws a distinction in the identity of the poet: that they are not only poets, but also citizens (a thought Socrates would have appreciated) and, as far as writers go, capable of writing something other than poetry. Like essays, for example. Whether they recognize this is something else entirely. One would be hard pressed to find political poets of the caliber of Neruda today (forgiving him, and others, for their misguided rhetoric, all things considered) though you could find Vallejo's at a discount in any online publiction, wearing a political sensibility on their sleeves, perhaps, but certainly not a solid stance.



Poetry, for all its pretensions to "gnosis," is rather a series of "communities of like souls in remote mountain fastnesses" and "communities addicted to whimsey, nostalgia, preciosity" according to Weinberger. It's hard not to quote at length from this essay of this contemporary poetic "longing for Dada or Surrealism" that results in most of the poetry published in the online journals from the aesthetic left consisting largely of "a talking in tongues" where "fleeting insights are netted and pinned to the page." But if today's poets were living, let alone understanding, a true gnosis they would realize the impact of Herakleitos: "You cannot hide from that which will not go away."


So what will not go away? Human suffering, war, poverty. The hysteria of anticommunism of Weinberger's time has been replaced by the hysteria of anti-terrorism, but where are the answers from our poets? As Weinberger suggests, (and correctly, particularly if one reads the plethora of "bios" on poets) today's American poets are entirely dependent on the military state. How many are feeding the university system, both with their tuition and their energy, whether as students or teachers? Poets have become, essentially, "wards of the state."


And this weekend they are gathering in droves to congratulate themselves in Chicago. To sell their books, to give their readings, to meet and shake hands and to drink, as one poet put it, "over-priced drinks." Like an island in the midst of a public that one poet once claimed to me "had no taste."


As Weinberger notes in a footnote, "a magnificent half-century of American poetry ended when the poets allowed themselves to be organized and controlled by the two traditional enemies of poetry: the university and the state."


(all quotes from Eliot Weinberger's Works on Paper, published by New Directions Press in 1986; photo credit: Nina Subin)

AWP Live-Blog

Well, we were going to do a real-live live-blog this year, but were sadly unable to, due to the Hilton's outrageous prices for Internet.

The convention hall was not rigged with wireless. Fringe was told that it'd cost $870 PER DAY to get a hard line into the convention hall. Clearly, the Hilton is stuck in the stone-age.

I went around and asked other online journals if they'd like internet, then found the conference director to try to lobby for Internet for the convention, but to no avail. However, the woman I spoke to handled my complaint gracefully and said she'd do her best for next year's convention in Chicago.

All the same, the lack of Internet felt like a slight toward the already-marginalized online magazine. Maybe next year things will be different.

AWP 2008 Begins

I sidled up to the AWP registration desk in the Hilton at 11:35 am and was told folks couldn't give out any passes till noon. People milled in the ever-filling lobby, hearing the same line from AWP's workers.

After nabbing my badge, I headed into the book fair to find Fringe's table. The bookfair is HUGE this year, with three separate floors of booths. Fringe is on the 3rd floor, in Hall of the Americas II at table 429. The exhibition hall was empty, lonely. I can't wait to see what it will look like tomorrow when hordes of writers descend.

Can't wait to see you.

Countdown to AWP

We've got our fliers printed, our mystery freebie in hand, and of course, our Fringe T-shirts pressed and ironed. We're ready for AWP 2008.

This year the writing conference is at the New York City Hilton, with 7,000 passes sold, according to the conference website.

Can't make it? Bummed that it was sold out? Never fear -- Fringe's staff of crack writers will be live blogging the conference for your reading pleasure.

Alternately, you might try to make it to these off-site events. On Saturday, the book fair is free and open to the general public.

Read Fringe? Come by our table in the book fair and pick up colorful samples of Fringe work, submission guidelines, and shot glasses($5), or just shoot the breeze with a few of our editors. We may even extend the 25 Books deadline to allow passers-by to vote in our poll.

Anything is possible -- it's AWP. We hope to see you there.