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...

Pollyanna All Grown Up

You know how irritating it is when you got up at 5:30 a.m. & someone complains about getting up before noon? That's how I feel about the "Go Green" and "Stop Global Warming" movements. See, in the summer of 2001 I was a 21-yr old bright-eyed canvasser for the Florida Consumer Action Network (FCAN) for roughly a month. We were trying to get TECO to upgrade the coal filtering system on a nearby power plant whose out-dated technology was exempt from EPA regulations because it had been grandfathered under the Clean Air Act. FCAN had science on our side, and the mission at hand was small, attainable (they did finally make TECO retrofit the plants), and non-threatening to the status quo. As a canvasser, my job was to educate the public, get them to write petition letters, and solicit donations preferably $15 or more. The "public" was different middle class neighborhoods in the Tampa Bay area, some of which were close enough to the TECO power plant that you could see smoke stack over rooftops. I thought the job would be a cinch.

I was cussed out, got doors slammed in my face, was called a liar, and even worse, I was educated that people can be so cold that even when they didn't attack message or messenger they were still not moved to do a darned thing about their own environments--an insight into how people can not vote in their own interest. On my last day of canvassing under the hot Florida sun my only donation and letter came from a teenage girl who worked at Pizza Hut. After four hours of solid "no's" and a particularly rude old lady who husband was on an oxygen machine, I was crying on a curbside. My lesson learned was that the adult world didn't want to hear an inconvenient truth. I had a little hope for the upcoming generation but concluded that if our parents and grandparents wanted to breath dirty air that increased sickness in the elderly and infants, then they deserved what they got.

Fast-forward to the present, and I feel like I did as a 2002 peace protester by the time the general population questioned the Iraq war in 2007. Sure, you are better late than never, but while I was arguing with you hard-heads, look how much worse the problem has become. What I have now is not hope but apathy. I'm glad the general population wants to go green and wants to save polar bears and virgin rainforests and water sources, and I believe that every small change we make has a small effect on the world (as a vegetarian I save roughly 100 animal lives a year), but for most people environmental issues are a sexy fad that environmentalists are wise to capitalize on to get as much change on the books as they can. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I won't be holding my breath. I will however be reading Fringe Magazine's environment issue!

the joys of composting

In honor of the upcoming Fringe Enviro-themed issue, I'm discussing a simple luxury San Franciscans tend to take for granted. The little green bin...


The little green bin is one of my favorite things about SF, but it's so trashy. Literally. Citywide (bay area wide, more specifically) composting allows businesses and residents the chance to turn any food scraps, paper food packaging, and compostable to-go ware into...wine.

That's right.

Green bins are provided by the city, and set out on the curb along with trash pickup. Restaurants usually have an equal number of compost and trash bins. It's in the restaurant industry that you can really see the impact composting has on waste disposal. At the end of a busy shift, the compost bins are jammed full, while the trash...maybe halfway, and that usually just plastic wrap.

The yard trimmings and unwanted leftovers of San Franciscans get turned into compost, which is used in the vineyards of Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino counties. While the thought brings a slight shift in meaning to the concept of terroir, the actual practice of composting couldn't be easier.


While composting isn't always perfect...and often kinda gross...it's one way to make a consistent contribution to living a green lifestyle and turning your own waste into something positive. If you're interested in composting but don't have a citywide program, check in with local community gardens. There are plenty of those in Boston, and most tend to have a compost pile that members contribute to. Or start your own compost pile in the backyard, and grow some food!

I will admit, we have a black composter in my yard, but 90% of the time I use the city's green bin (yes, because it's closer to the house). If you're interested in learning the hows of home composting, the New York City compost project has pretty comprehensive information on getting started.

Fringe 17: Large and In Charge

The last issue of Fringe for 2008 is live--check it out for your quarterly dose of innovative and evocative writing and art from our impressive list of contributors.

As winter begins its descent, we (Bostonians especially) often begin to feel imprisoned by nature, chained by the shackles of snow, ice, and bitter winds. Much of the work featured in this winter's issue deals in some way with our universal struggle to overcome those boundaries (whether it be our social phobias or a giant glass bottle) imposed by the world around us:

• Cati Porter's multimedia poem "Fructify" is a quiet, almost haunting, verse about a woman who "wants to scream/but her mouth has become a honeycomb"
• Jean-Michel Buche's artwork is clean and organic; tightly organized and meticulously detailed, it's reminiscent of cells and science--of the things it takes to build a life.
  
• In "Some Things I Just Can't Talk About," Casey Wiley tells the story of Tim, a man who can't quite seem to get over the pain a certain Uno's manager caused him, as he goes through his days railing at the world.
  
• It's no secret that small town America is becoming not much more than a fairytale our parents tell, but Kelley Calvert renders the gradual death of her hometown in her essay "Somewhere Between Everywhere and Nowhere" so poignantly that you find yourself yearning for a trip to the local drive-in after a burger and shake from the malt shop.
  
• Tisha Nemeth-Loomis's first in a series of 3 poems is titled "As if constriction was our first allegiance": "hankering I am little kernel too corpulent/for the husk"
• Following the nature theme, Geoffrey Detranis' 3 Electra poems also draw compelling parallels between our bodies and the natural world: "She coughs fruit, a plum in the larynx."
• Megann Sept's short short, "Flash Flood" intricately layers the story of a close call during a hiking trip, a mesmerizing painting, a childless art collector, and a young introvert who "would love to be known as the girl who says inappropriate things."
• "Notes from a Man Trapped Inside a Giant Bottle" is a chain of pleas for help from Robert Ebenhoe, a man who is quite literally trapped. Mark Brinker's story is at turns hysterical and pathetic, so much so that we don't quite know whether to root for Robert's rescue, or hope that he stays in there so we can read more.
  
• Anna L. Cates' criticism, "The World Comes Together: Dual Identity in the Poetry of Sam Hamod" examines the duality of the American immigrant experience as expressed by the poems of Lebanese contemporary poet Sam Hamrod. Even while immigrants may yearn for the quintessential American experience, they can never fully leave behind their roots, thus creating new dimensions in their writing.
  
  Remember: Fringe is here, to provide an escape when you're beginning to feel caged in by the cruel, cruel winter.
  

Art: "Mopti" by Jean-Michel Buche

Fringe 16 Rocks It.

We tried something new in Fringe 16. Now that we’re only publishing four times a year, we’re giving you more of that Fringey stuff you love. This issue features doubles – two poets, two short nonfiction writers and two short shorts, along with our first-ever audio pieces and some brilliant paintings.

This issue is all about small moments, from the moment a fish hits the sizzling oil to a fever dream to the decision whether to use that last vein (in the penis) to shoot a little heroin.

Watch for the theme of food, which appears in several of the pieces. We’ve got telling footnotes, bright colors and the strange taste of fake cheese in our mouths, so come experience the joys of Fringe 16!

• In An Ocean View, Brent van Staalduinen gives a lyrical account of the way Sri Lankan tourist culture changed after the tsunami in a piece of short nonfiction.
• Michael K Meyers uses audio collage to tell two strange tales in the (de)Classified section.
• Joe Clifford, a former heroin addict writes about the moment that the TV show Cops became about him in the short nonfiction piece Fear and Reality.
• In her four poems, Francine Rubin shows the reader sparkling moments – fish in oil, a pirouette and her life as a celebutante.
• Christopher A. Williams uses curvilinear bursts of color to create Rube-Goldberg machines.
• Siel Ju describes four people and one slice of veggie cheese in five poems.
• The short short Out by Munson Creek by Chuck Taylor explores man’s timeless desire to shoot things.

Joel Wright’s short short Fever chronicles the illusions and realities of a fever that came on the heels of a snowstorm.

Art: Dog Eat Dog City by Christopher A. Williams

Fringe 15 bursts onto the scene

Fringe 15, this year's second issue, contains two dominant thematic threads: the conflict between East and West, and the connection between past and present. As with so many issues, we didn't plan this, rather, the themes arose from the work we found most compelling.

On the East-West Tip:

• In East-West Encounter in Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle, Dr. N. S. Y. Ayengar speaks eloquently about the ways that Turkish author Orhan Pamuk bridges the gap between East and West and taps into universal humanity.

• Melissa Fiorentino's visual art of women in positions of ecstasy adds ambiguity and when I looked at them I felt excited, poised on the brink of discovery, like the women in her work -- twists on the conventional female nude.

• With acute observations and lyrical descriptive passages, Kathy L. Nguyen brings the reader into the world of Vietnamese sex tourism in Honda Dream, a short story that also deals with the relationship between east and west, colonizer and colonized.

• In the Problem with Having Too Many of the Same Letters in Your Name, a short-nonfiction piece Nina Mamikunian shows that the difference between Latina and Armenian is only two letters.

• The nonfiction piece This is Not Warm and Fuzzy by Noel Dunn shows the difference between the author's image and the reality of an eco-tourism camp in Laos.

On the connection between past and present:

• Barbara Crooker's poetry riffs on the connections between age and youth.

• Wendy Taylor Carlisle's longer poem, Decocted Life decodes small talk between old friends.

• The short short Dr. Krauss and the Worst Possible Universe by Anna Shapiro chronicles what will happen when our robot probes invade the land of our children.

So go forth, read, enjoy and post your responses here!

Picture: Leap of Discovery by Melissa Fiorentino

writing beyond the MFA

Before delving into the real topic of my post, I wanted to take a moment to join in the recent spate of holiday-gift-madness posts with some suggestions of my own.

We are artists after all, aren't we, writers? Why not make something for those you love? We owe it to ourselves and our careers to support art, our own medium and others. Giving something homemade is giving something of yourself. Write a story or a poem, knit something (if you knit), bake a cake (you don't have to be a pro) or some cookies, craft something. Or support other artisans. Gift-giving does not have to support the store-bought culture of our country.

Ok, that aside...what to do if you are graduating this semester with your MFA? Have you realized at this point or some earlier point what a useless piece of paper that diploma is? Do you think I'm a dick for suggesting so? Do you still hold hope that your thesis manuscript will get read by agents, editors, and you'll be offered a contract in a few short months? Pinch yourself, or pinch me, and take heed. Below are some suggestions for life after graduate school.

1. Keep writing no matter what. Even if it's only for ten minutes a day. Even if you think it's not "good writing." Because regular practice helps you maintain your commitment to writing.

2. Explore alternate form of writing and publication, whether it's journalism, essay-writing, screenplays, blogging, or hypertext. If there's something you wanted to try but never got around to, do it now while the enthusiasm (or world-weariness) and discipline of the student is still at least vaguely familiar.

3. Think long and hard about what you want to do for a living, if you are going to be getting a full-time job for the first time in 3 years. Or ever. How much time will it leave you for writing? Are you going into something you are passionate about or are you just trying to pay the bills? After all the time, money and debt you've gone into for the MFA it can be challenging to channel your energy into something that (unless you're teaching or working in publishing) is unrelated to writing. How important your writing is to you--and how good you are at managing your time--are the most critical tools for building a steady writing practice. But it helps to pick a job that feeds you and challenges you in ways that mimic writing (as my profession does all the time) or else are unrelated but still of interest to you.

4. Join a writer's group, find a writing buddy, etc. If you can, make it someone outside your graduate school circle. Some many voices sound the same as certain styles and voices are privileged in MFA programs. I often felt like I couldn't relate to the stories in workshop and I'm sure I was not alone. (While Emerson seems to have expanded its graduate-level queer population since I began, it could stand some ethnic diversity and an influx of students of various ages and backgrounds.) My San Francisco writing group is comprised of people who are gay, straight, Asian, white, 20something, 50something, commentators on NPR and short story award finalists and published authors in varying genres. And then there's me. While it's not as comfortable as the MFA community you're leaving, it's good practice to surround yourself with people at a higher level that you are, if only for teh advice they may have.

5. Create community in any way you can. Write to share your voice. Attend readings, poetry slams, art exhibits, movie screenings. Help edit a literary journal or volunteer at one of the big guns ( Ploughshares, McSweeneys, Storyglossia, or one of the 826 entities).

6. Know, first and foremost, that how you succeed or struggle with your writing at this point is entirely up to you.

I'd love to hear other suggestions. Sometimes we all need a little push to continue our commitment to the things we love.

Fringe 13 Now Live!

This month's issue of Fringe features sleek new web design, and chic new literature. Here's a gloss of the issue:

• In her series of poems Fragments from a Nonexistent Yiddish Poet, Jehanne Dubrow takes on the persona of Ida Lewin, and captures a nostalgia for a past where the social order was regimented, and therefore a little safer.
• Jackson Bliss transports us into the world of limo drivers, and then beyond, into the realm of the unexpected in the short short Change Gonna Come.
• Holly Anderson and Sev Coursen's series of poems The Secret Language of Flowers is, perhaps, the most formally unusual piece we've published -- click around and you'll see.
• Venus Envy tells the story of a woman who is done with beauty, who goes to extraordinary lengths to lift herself out of the status quo and into the heroic.
• Mihaly Flandorffer Peniche's work is graphic. His bold use of color and simply-rendered figures make his images feel mythical as cave paintings.
• In her excellent piece of criticism, Jaffney Rood explains what happens when academic culture collides with working-class students.
• Another Kind of Nigger, Matthew Haynes' nonfiction piece, riffs on the theme of Ethnos, which we will take up again in February. Haynes, half-Hawaiian, half-white, recounts devastating incidents from his childhood.

And just to keep your eyes on the horizon, remember to submit for our Ethnos issue -- the submission deadline has been extended to December 31. The polls for the 25 Books Project are still open -- so get your vote in soon!

Fringe 12 is Live

Issue 12 focuses on image and icons. We've got pieces on hair and teeth, AIDS, and myth. Read on, brave reader, and don't forget to vote as part of our 25 books project. A gloss of this month's issue:

• Brett Allen Smith's short story Needle! Now! Broken! takes what could be a horribly sentimental plot about AIDS and turns it into something subtly unsettling by fragmenting the short-story form. Is it any wonder that he likes David Lynch?

• Ponyboy, Brad Gayman's short short, negotiates the bizarre world of the Internet chat room, and the lies we've all told there.

• Tammy Ho and Reid Mitchell's collaborative dialogue, Perfect Teeth, explores a chance encounter in the dentist's waiting room, the ambiguities that lie behind judgements at face-value.

• Self Portrait in Three Hairstyles, a nonfiction essay by Carrie Jerell, shows how hairstyles, often dismissed as superficial, can change both self-perception and others' perception of oneself.

• Heather MacNeill's piece on Oulipos will surely introduce you to a new and avant-way of composing literature.

• Carol Dorf's poetry is playful, literally in Holiday Season: Playing Dictionary, and mythically in her other two poems, which play with the stories of Hansel and Gretel and Persephone.

• Craig McKenzie's work plays with image through photo collage, and the concentric circles superimposed over his figures brings to mind the halos of ancient religious icons.

• You've read about the 25 Books Project...now it's time to vote! Leave us your contact info in the poll, and we'll enter you in a drawing to win a copy of Fringe's top book.
  

Stay tuned Fringe fans, we'll be back with another new issue, featuring sleek fresh web design, in two more months!

Fringe's Ethnos Issue: A Comment on Racism

I'm pleased to announce that submissions for Fringe's second anniversary theme issue, Ethnos, writing about race and ethnicity, are open from now until December 15, 2007. You can read more about the theme on our submission guidelines page.

We had some hot debate about this theme. At first we couched it as "Racism," but that seemed too combative and in opposition to last year's Feminism issue -- racism is a problem while feminism is a movement trying to help people. We wanted to read empowering work. The less-slanted theme of "Race" was suggested, but discarded because it seemed American centric. Finally we arrived at "Ethnos," a Greek word that seemed geographically neutral, but likely to garner us the kind of submissions we want.

I think we discussed the word to be used so extensively, because at the editorial level, we're predominantly white (with one Chilean), and sensed we were treading on delicate and unfamiliar ground. Early on in our development, we all agreed that the struggles of feminism are linked with the struggle for racial equality. We felt and still feel empathetic to brown writers, many of whom face the same challenges as women writers -- the difficulty of early publication when so many niche journals have folded, and institutionalized racism at publishing houses. One acquaintance, a fresh Southeast-Asian-American writer with considerable publication credits is having trouble landing a book deal because of tokenism -- there's another new hot Asian writer of short stories out there, and publishers don't want two.

But it is problematic that we are, by and large, a white-run publication. We know we will face questions that have no easy answers:

• Is asking the brown community to send us work replaying our racist history? In a certain way, yes -- we, the largely white, will be selecting work for publication. We are going to do our best to be open to possible prejudices, to hear and appreciate work that expresses sentiments that may make us uncomfortable. Would it be better for us to do nothing, or to risk being insensitive but try to publish on political issues that are important to us?

• Do we have the right to judge such work? We think we are good aesthetic judges of literature and art. Since no ethnicity has a monopoly on good writing, and we can recognize good writing, we hope this issue will be full of awesome lit.

• Are we ghettoizing writers of color by printing them in a single issue? Good god, we hope not. Our record for publishing writers with a variety of backgrounds is pretty good -- take a look through our archives to see (within each archived issue, click on author's names to read bios and see pictures of them). In the same way that we love feminist submissions at any time of year, so too do we love to read writing by authors of color during any season. We are doing this to celebrate diversity and welcome it into our publication.

• Isn't it racist to exclude white people from publication? We are not excluding white people. The bottom line is that your writing must be on topic and excellent to be considered for this issue. We have a blind submissions policy for all our issues. This means the writer's name and contact information is wiped when our readers see it.

Through this issue, we hope we will do what Fringe does best -- take risks. We look forward to reading submissions.

Fringe 11 Is Live!

This issue of Fringe promises a plurality of postmodernisms, or perhaps (dare we flatter ourselves) post-postmodernism. Not, I hope, with the pretentiousness that "postmodernism" often means, but rather with a reader-accessible manner that tickles the brain in two layers -- a surface element of pleasure in meaning and language, and a deeper theoretical element evident to those who like to analyze.

• In "Tell Me If You're Lying," author Sarah Sweeney offers an honest portrait of her father in all his eccentricities, from his tales of alien abduction, to his obsession with seventies rock lyrics, to the simple fact of his marriage to her mother -- he had severe Crohn's and hid it. Presenting each personal myth her father built for himself, Sweeney seeks to distinguish reality from story, an impossible feat, perhaps, but then, luckily for us, it's the attempt itself that matters.


• Our poetry editor thinks that Pattabi Seshadri's poems use "concrete entities (chairs, birds) to convey something wistful and strange beyond the physical limits of the images." These playful and political images launch us into a space beyond reality. I particularly love the pregnancy of image of the papal throne in "Chairs," which compares the occupant to a child, but also, perhaps, to the opposite of "angel".


• Brian Parkison's longer poem, "Old Roman's Row" begins as a rather cinematic story poem, with Roman as epic hero, a trope the rest of the poem seeks to undermine, eventually ending with a tragicomic mishap. In between these two ends, Parkison suspends the reader in wonderful uncertainty of who Roman is, whether he is a hero or simply crazy.


• Our art editor accepted Jane Linders' X-Ray Terrestrial Series because these Polaroid transfers (of found animal skulls with illustrations of dental implants) positively haunted her, as they also do me. From the ordinary, fantastic beasts arise, made more macabre by the scientific diagramming. In a certain way, Linders has deconstructed her own images by playing on the expectations we have of the impartial scientific mind.


• Jen Michalski's story, "The Piano" is itself a deconstruction. X and Y literally uncouple when they break up, to become what my old metaphysics professor might call "a scattered relationship," in the same way that the piano also becomes a scattered object. Furthermore, in resisting names for her characters, Michalski deconstructs narrative meaning -- it is the positions of X and Y that matter in the story -- their names would be incidental. Perhaps these names also poke fun at our society's binary vision of gender, a system which a lesbian relationship necessarily disrupts, echoing Lois Gould's "X: A Fabulous Child's Story".


• William Walsh's "American Fried Questions" remixes portions of Calvin Trillin's text American Fried (1974). (Read it while it's here -- we'll be taking it down in a few months due to an agreement with Trillin's agents!) Walsh picks apart his source text, extracting Trillin's questions and rearranging them to make a wholly new collage, not fascinating because of the narrative the questions form, but for the textural (and textual) effect the disordering produces. The incompletness of questions without answers catapult the reader in and out of a hundred different conversations, lead the reader to marvel at Trillin's text -- after all, how can a unified work encapsulate so many questions?


• Doug Cornett's "Symptoms of the End" is, perhaps the most straightforwardly postmodern piece in the issue. After all, what is total deconstruction, but the end of the world?

So there it is -- Fringe 11 for your reading pleasure. Please enjoy, and let us know what you thought in the comments!

Fringe 10: Live!

Our new issue is live and kicking on the site, and chock full of fine writing.

Aside from our anniversary issue, we seldom solicit work surrounding a single theme, although happy accidents do arise. The pieces in this issue employ alienation, either at the formal or topical level to expose a greater personal truth.

*There is something unsettling about Johhny's assertion, "You're a whore" in Nancy Lynn Weber's flash Sugar Cone, and something true about the narrator's obsession with the dirty body.

*In Jon Stone's poems, violence is juxtaposed with ordinary past time, exposing the savagery of our culture, and the queer way in which this violence satisfies.

* Laurah Norton Raines' short story, Twenty-Seven, has a protagonist who is psychically uncomfortable with her new status as housewife, a role which is both too-familiar to her and incongruous with her conception of herself.

*In Invisible War, Lea Povozhaev negotiates the cultural and political differences between her own middle-class American upbringing, and her husband's childhood in iron-curtain Russia, and the implications these differences will have for their son, Viktor.

* Nancy Bauer's piece The N-Word explains the ways in which we are alienated from language, and how Don Imus' insensitive comments have exposed a cultural climate of intolerance that we must, willingly or unwillingly, participate in.

* Peter Schwartz's art nicely compliments this issue, with black and white representations of shock and morbid interest.

Please enjoy this issue, and feel free to post reactions to it in the comments below.