tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64428541240122308912024-03-13T18:25:45.586+01:00Versal Journalin, at or to this place or positionDaniel Cecilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08636538755565594279noreply@blogger.comBlogger208125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-41705637904661513002013-07-25T19:13:00.001+02:002013-07-25T19:18:27.528+02:00Contributor's Notes–Kristen Gleason<i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">Interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of Versal 11.</i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><i>Kristen Gleason lives in Grass Valley, CA. Her work can be found online and in print. </i></span></span><br />
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<b>Tell us about your writing process. Make sure to lie about at least ((two)) things. </b></div>
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To be able—one must—wrote August Strindberg—“be like a hunter, who in his need chops off his dog’s tail, and after eating the flesh himself, offers the dog the bones, his own bones.” He may have been lying a little as I am when I say that this is what it’s like. But it is.<br />
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Or—to be able—I must—be like a grandfather bursting over and over again into my own room, uninvited.<br />
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Or—hey—blackhole crutchsink and send it to my twin.<br />
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<b>What's the longest you've ever gone without sleeping? Why (if you can share...)? </b><br />
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Two months in the midnight sun, bees big as cotton balls.<br />
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<b>What's one well-known and one little-known lit mag currently doing ((amazing)) work? </b><br />
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Caren Beilin: http://www.dzancbooks.org/the-collagist/2011/9/14/two-short-fairy-tales-for-children-or-adults.html<br />
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Farnoosh Fathi: http://www.inknode.com/piece/1716-farnoosh-fathi-memory<br />
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<b>What can you tell us about Holland other than ((tulips)), clogs, red lights, and drugs? </b><br />
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Wim, I hope I’m not betraying you, but you asked me to believe that Holland is crowded and loud and that everyone living there dreams of a countryside that does not exist!<br />
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<b>If your piece in Versal could be paired with any art work, what would it be? </b><br />
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Britta Marakatt Labba’s 25-meter-long embroidered mythology of the Sami people, which used to hang on the wall of a wide passageway at the University of Tromsø in northern Norway.<br />
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<b>What dirty secret would you like to tell us? </b><br />
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((There’s a spot in the mountains where a tube is swallowing a waterfall. The mouth of the tube is thrust against stone and bolted there. A pig lives in the shadow of the tube in a pen made of rebar and string.))<br />
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<b>Most unbelievable place you've ever been to? ((Why?))</b><br />
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These photographs of Tromsø were taken by my friend Ryan Johnson.<br />
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<b>Do you have a philosophy of writing? Can you condense it into 30 words? </b><br />
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Dooitt for Deep Dent.<br />
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<b>What's your playlist look like these days? </b><br />
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Bernie Krause’s Distant Thunder (Nature Company)<br />
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<b>What book is so unbelievably mind-blowing that it makes you want to stop writing?</b><br />
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I often want to stop writing, not because of books.<br />
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Adventures in the Skin Trade by Dylan Thomas; The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector; Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles; The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene, etc.<br />
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<b>On The Newlywed Game, contestants were asked what vegetable they think they are. What's your totem vegetable? </b><br />
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Not my spirit, but my spouse: cauliflower.<br />
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<b>Why did you send work to Versal? Be honest. </b><br />
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I don’t remember! But I can speak up about doughnuts. Nabil Kashyap had a poem in Versal 6, which Brandon read while eating doughnuts in Seattle. When I lived in Montana, Nabil and I lived in the same house. Early one morning while I was sleeping, he entered my room holding a bowl of mini-doughnuts, fresh and hot from their fat bath, and a little dunker-tub of maple, and I was not as happy as I should have been because I was asleep. Thank you, Nabil. And Versal.<br />
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<b>Tell us what you're working on right now.</b><br />
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A novel, stories, and poems.<br />
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Daniel Cecilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08636538755565594279noreply@blogger.com255tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-34904107823165001582013-07-18T20:01:00.000+02:002013-07-20T09:58:57.517+02:00Contributor's Notes–Joey de Jesus<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">Interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of Versal 11. </i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><i>Joey De Jesus has a B.A. from Oberlin College and a M.F.A. in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. His work has appeared in Antiphon, The Cortland Review, Dislocate, Kin Poetry Magazine, LUMINA and The Nervous Breakdown. He currently lives in New York. You can find more info at <a href="http://dejesussaves.wordpress.com/">dejesussaves.wordpress.com</a> or follow Jesus on <a href="http://twitter.com/DeJesusSaves">Twitter</a>. </i></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><i><br /></i></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh3H4MrfhJYBi32WhQoIk_yj4p3Oc3aBy0j4cqjpSMzTa2GN62R2HD-hYXFkZSwq04STcmoPLI9Tl9TG4bhH1TJY8lksz3DlK9aBd4bDRhkzAnRFmhdvoIA7xTXijsn-XW-HZlMZlcNro/s1600/11754_3247315946672_443187317_n.bmp" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh3H4MrfhJYBi32WhQoIk_yj4p3Oc3aBy0j4cqjpSMzTa2GN62R2HD-hYXFkZSwq04STcmoPLI9Tl9TG4bhH1TJY8lksz3DlK9aBd4bDRhkzAnRFmhdvoIA7xTXijsn-XW-HZlMZlcNro/s320/11754_3247315946672_443187317_n.bmp" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
Photo by: Thomas Sayers Ellis</div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><b>Tell us about your writing
process. Make sure to lie about at least two things. </b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Most of the time I spend
writing is underground, either on the subways or in my basement bedroom. I tend
to write soon after waking up. I read a lot of poetry that I do not like so as
to know what not to do. My poems are all hanging on my bedroom walls so that
I’m always ‘in the zone.’ I have a very difficult time determining when a piece
is finished. I’ve edited many into oblivion. I share almost every piece I write
with a posse for critique.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><b>What's the longest you've
ever gone without sleeping? Why (if you can share...)? </b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">I came a bit unhinged one
January. I slept for maybe a couple hours every couple days for 18 days. I
remember the number of days precisely because on the 18<sup>th</sup> day I
slept.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><b>What's one well-known and
one little-known lit mag currently doing amazing work? </b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">I have to shout out to the
friends at <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kin Poetry Journal</i>. I
think they are doing a great job highlighting work you wouldn’t find in
journals coming out of MFA programs or with school affiliations. I don’t know,
I just have deep respect for formalists because I can’t do that—and their
features on Wendy Videlock and John Whitworth I thought were pretty
extraordinary. They’ve introduced me to a few poets I don’t think I would have
come to learn of otherwise, whose work I really admire. And a well-known
journal… hmm, I guess that is relative. I like do like Conjunctions and A
Public Space. Those two journals tend to feature poets I’m really into. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><b>What can you tell us about
Holland other than tulips, clogs, red lights, and drugs? </b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">I can tell you there is an
amazing young queer shaman living in Rotterdam. His name is Jasper Griepink. Seek
him out. Tell him I sent you. He is really special. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">I<b>f your piece in Versal
could be paired with any art work, what would it be? </b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">You know, I loved the
photographs that preceded the poem so much that I would have to say you made it
happen.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><b>What dirty secret would
you like to tell us? </b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">I can be shady.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><b>Most unbelievable place
you've ever been to? Why? </b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">The Makgadikgadi Pans. The
Makgadikdagi Pans of Botswana are a region of salt pans larger in size than
Switzerland. They were once the bed of an enormous saline lake. The ground is
composed of white soda-ash salts. Sua Pan is flat and grassless in every which direction
for as far as one can see. It feels like standing on another planet entirely. I
mean, it was nuts. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><b>Do you have a philosophy
of writing? Can you condense it into 30 words? </b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">I try not to have a
philosophy toward writing. I have approaches that I know work for me. I’ve
actively tried not to worry myself over the work or celebrity of other writers.
I try not to hold my standards to others too much (unless a writer is just
absolutely terrible). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><b>What's your playlist look
like these days? </b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">I’m living for
Junglepussy. I feel like I had been waiting for the Knife to put out <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shaking the Habitual</i> for a long time and
I’m loving the album—that Shannon Funchess is on it is an extra treat.
“Raghupati” and “Golden Glow” by Prince Rama have the highest play counts on my
iTunes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><b>What book is so
unbelievably mind-blowing that it makes you want to stop writing? </b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Caroline Bergvall’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Meddle English</i>, Cathy Park Hong’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Engine Empire</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Horse in the Dark</i> by Vievee Francis are all so mind-blowingly
phenomenal they make me want to quit it. There are a number of books I think:
D. A. Powell’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Useless Landscape or a
Guide for Boys</i>, d g nanouk okpik’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Corpse
Whale</i>. And I have to praise Marie Howe’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kingdom of Ordinary Time</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><b>On The Newlywed Game,
contestants were asked what vegetable they think they are. What's your totem
vegetable? </b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">I would want to say
“yuca,” because the word is so fun to say and it’s all cool and from my mother
island, but in all honesty my totem vegetable is probably the red bean—as in
rice and red beans. Maybe you can’t choose your totem, maybe your totem chooses
you. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><b>Why did you send work to
Versal? Be honest. </b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">The glitter. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">No. I really loved volume
IX, which had Alice Notley in it. But, you know, aside from her, I didn’t
really recognize many of the poets. I remember the pieces to me were so
engaging and different from anything I’d really seen elsewhere, that I thought
‘this is a journal that prioritizes quality of the work over celebrity around
the poet’s names.’ I also remember feeling that the order in which the works
were presented seemed really curated even though they spanned various mediums,
genres and forms. That spoke to me. So, I believe I submitted to volume X and
then again to volume XI. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;"><b>Tell us what you're
working on right now.</b><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Right now I’ve got a few
projects in the works. I’ve got the first manuscript of poems that I am working
on, which includes the piece you all took. As of right now it’s looking like it
will be in three sections maybe, but I don’t want to talk to it too much but I
can sum it up maybe with “poems of bewilderment and rage.” Then, I have a
collection of spells, incantations and such titled “Hoax.” I’ve begun working
on a web project with an artist to make an interactive poem/website. And I’ve
been journaling ideas for a collection that takes place entirely in a video
game in the future. The idea of writing landscape poems (which is maybe my
comfort zone as a writer) for—like—virtually constructed landscapes presents a
number of possibilities to me. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--StartFragment--><!--EndFragment-->Daniel Cecilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08636538755565594279noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-15670492234605001222013-07-11T17:37:00.000+02:002013-07-11T17:37:41.587+02:00Contributor's Notes–John Vanderslice<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">Interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of Versal 11. </i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><i>John Vanderslice teaches writing at the University of Central Arkansas. His short fiction has appeared in dozens of journals, including Seattle Review, Southern Humanities Review, Laurel Review, Red Booth, Sou’wester, and Crazyhorse. “The Dealer’s Brother” is a chapter from his forthcoming novel, Days on Fire. You can check out further work on John's <a href="http://www.blogger.com/:%20http://creatingvangogh.blogspot.com">website</a>, where he discusses all matters Van Gogh and historical fiction related, or you can follow him on Twitter <a href="https://twitter.com/JohnvanderJohn">@JohnvanderJohn</a></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Tell us about your writing process. Make
sure to lie about at least two things. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">You mean
daily process or larger process?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve
always been a morning person, so I write in the morning, fueled by way too much
coffee and the knowledge that before too long the world wakes up and I’ve got
parental obligations to tend to.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If the
coffee doesn’t work, I find that holding my palm over a match “fires” my
creativity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve always been a writer
who drafts first in longhand and then enters the draft into the computer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s how I wrote “The Dealer’s
Brother.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s how I still write short
stories.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Basically, I prefer that
sequence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I like the no pressure feeling
of writing with pen on paper.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes
I even use crayon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You feel crayon on
paper in a tactile way that you don’t feel pen or paper.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Plus, I’m pretty sure research has shown
that crayon opens up the right brain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>However, I should say that the last three novels I’ve written—including
my post-apocolyptic/mixed species quadruped nightmare—have been straight from
the imagination to the keyboard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">What's the longest you've ever gone
without sleeping? Why (if you can share...)? </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">If you mean voluntarily, my answer would be pretty dull.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve never been good at pulling
all-nighters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the other hand, I’ve
suffered bouts of insomnia off and on in my life and once, a long time ago, I
think I may have been up something like sixty hours straight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The last time I spent a sleepless night I got
in a car accident the next day after falling asleep at the wheel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Trying not to let that happen again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">What's one well-known and one
little-known lit mag currently doing amazing work?</span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"> As for well-known mags, I really like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">One Story</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve subscribed to it for years.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They make some really interesting, eclectic
choices, regularly publishing stories in drastically different genres and
almost always of noticeably high quality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I also like that they publish utter newcomers, very established people, and
everyone in between.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">As for little
known mags, I have to give a shout out to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angel
on the Freeway</i>, a poetry magazine started just last year by one of our grad
students: John Mitchel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This thing is
John’s baby. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s some really
startling stuff in there: razor sharp imagery and naked honesty.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">What can you tell us about Holland other
than tulips, clogs, red lights, and drugs? </span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Funny you should ask!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One of
the best experiences of my life was spending six weeks in Maastricht in the
spring and early summer of 2001.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(It was
the genesis of my interest in Van Gogh.)<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></b>I adore the city and felt deeply
comfortable there.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I really liked how close it was to other
countries—if you wanted to, you could take a bike ride to Belgium or German
y—and I enjoyed strolling the banks of the river Maas: crossing the bridge;
doing some window shopping; buying frites or a postcard or a waffle; coming
back across.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I remember there was a
fantastic, and very cheap, gelato stand at the center of the old part of town. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We bought a lot of gelato at that stand. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My wife and I were there with our young
children and we feel like we got an especially unique view of Maastricht
life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We hunted out the parks and the
playgrounds; we happened once into a fundraising event for a local school.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Places where nary an American could be
found.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">If your piece in Versal could be paired
with any art work, what would it be?</span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">I guess I
would have to say something by Toulouse-Lautrec, perhaps <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">At the Moulin Rouge</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not
that that painting literally reflects any of the developments in my story, but
it suggests a social environment that I am trying to resurrect in my story: the
underbelly of late nineteenth century Paris, the center of the art world, a
place where too many painters and would-be painters were trying to compete for
the attention of too few dealers and forced to find comfort where they could
get it, whether that be at the Moulin Rouge or an overcrowded party or the arms
of a mistress.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">What dirty secret would you like to tell
us? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">I watched a <u>lot</u>
of bad tv as a kid.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m talking stuff
like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">McHale’s Navy</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Most unbelievable place you've ever been
to? Why?</span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"> I’d have to
say that no place has affected me quite as much, at least on first glance, as
the Camargue in Provence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s not just
that it’s beautiful—beautiful in way that you won’t find in the United
States—but that it’s so purely rural.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This isn’t upscale, movie star Nice; this is farmland dotted by very old
houses, and it’s almost magically peaceful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Do you have a philosophy of writing?</span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"> <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Can
you condense it into 30 words?</b> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You
should work as hard as hell, and never make excuses for why you can’t, and
never stop trying to make your next book better than your last.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">What's your playlist look like these
days?</span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;"> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Well, I listen to a lot of Pandora, and as a
result I have bought a bunch of CDs in the last couple of years: mostly old
favorites that I want to reconnect with: Neil Young, John Hartford, Bob
Marley.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On my iPod I mainly listen to
podcasts while I run every day.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There’s
an awesome language-learning one I love called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Coffee Break French</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s
produced in Scotland.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Since I started
researching Van Gogh, I’ve been trying to learn French.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also listen to NPR’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Selected Shorts</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">This
American Life</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And a lot of audio
books.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">What book is so unbelievably
mind-blowing that it makes you want to stop writing? <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></b><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">A couple come to mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One
writer who regularly blows my mind is John Barth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I think his collection <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On With the Story</i> might be my favorite collection of all time and
his single best book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The story “Stories
of Our Lives” might be my favorite ever story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The narrator’s vantage point in that story is both unstoppably broad and
fiercely specific.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Obviously ironic,
but also perfectly sincere, even sentimental.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There’s a moment in the story in which a character picks up a wadded
piece of paper thrown by another character.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I remember gasping when I realized that the piece of paper he just
picked up was a page torn from the very short story collection—in fact, the
very short story—in which he was presented as a character!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only Barth can get away with stuff like that,
but it leaves me speechless when he pulls it off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Another book
I was so impressed by was Michael Chaban’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kavalier
and Clay</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His imagination is second
to none, and the man is <u>never</u> afraid of words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some people I know detest him for that
reason.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My reaction?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Get over it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We’re writers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Words is what we
are about.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you don’t think so, maybe
you need to find another profession.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(I
actually think they are just jealous.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><o:p></o:p></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">On The Newlywed Game, contestants were
asked what vegetable they think they are. What's your totem vegetable? <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">First thing
that came to mind is red bell pepper.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(Is that a vegetable?)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s sweet
at first taste and when eaten raw, but it’s not overly sweet.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most important, it’s a versatile
ingredient—good as an addition to almost anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It also picks up a supple, surprisingly
complex flavor when you cook it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
“real” red bell pepper takes some time to get to know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Why did you send work to Versal? Be
honest. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Because you
guys are based in Amsterdam, and the protagonist of my story is one of the most
famous Dutchman of all time, it seemed like a natural fit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">Tell us what you're working on right
now.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Helvetica;">I recently
finished the second draft of a novel that I started in January in a class I
teach called Novel Writing Workshop.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
ask the students to produce the first draft of a novel in one semester, and I
agree to do the same thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To put
myself through what I make them do.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Anyway, as a result I’ve written a novel about a man who, having lost
his own daughter when someone kidnapped, raped, and killed her, decides to get
his revenge on the world by kidnapping and killing someone else’s
daughter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He kind of chooses a girl at
random, and it turns out to be the daughter of a local Episcopal priest, a
woman whose life is already complicated enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><o:p></o:p></div>
Daniel Cecilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08636538755565594279noreply@blogger.com53tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-63941819228418772882013-06-20T10:15:00.000+02:002013-06-20T10:15:24.309+02:00Contributor's Notes–Phil Sawdon<br />
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<i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">Interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of Versal 11. </i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><i>Phil Sawdon is an artist, writer and sometime academic. He lives and works in the UK, where he is an Honorary Fellow at Loughborough University in the School of the Arts. He publishes and exhibits in a wide variety </i></span></span><i style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">of formats, including academic, scholarly, and pedagogical texts, essays, moving image, sound works, creative fictions, and artworks. Phil maintains a blog at http://philsawdon.tumblr.com.</i><br />
<i style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 11px;"><br /></i>
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh-F__ybPyg_s-ncu9kf1dXhJzvkRIPZUK13oW58681W2DOkx2Z0EdRHhB1IQCDiXunnThlneRg5sQCgeb7trg53SfAUbJnKNmmH-1NRAYNbQa_XXXmvQvaHD1JkGRzG4-AXFkyG5BSTM/s1600/Phil+Sawdon+i.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh-F__ybPyg_s-ncu9kf1dXhJzvkRIPZUK13oW58681W2DOkx2Z0EdRHhB1IQCDiXunnThlneRg5sQCgeb7trg53SfAUbJnKNmmH-1NRAYNbQa_XXXmvQvaHD1JkGRzG4-AXFkyG5BSTM/s320/Phil+Sawdon+i.JPG" width="319" /></a></div>
<i style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 11px;"><br /></i>
<br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><i><b>Tell us about your writing process. Make sure to lie about at least two things.</b></i> </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">My writing is best conducted early in the morning after at least a 6k run on the elliptical trainer. I gather various odds, ends and scraps of source material together in anticipation of the bricolage and response that will emerge. I draw with text through a keyboard and digital screen.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><i><b>What's the longest you've ever gone without sleeping? Why (if you can share...)? </b></i></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">36 hours. Once upon a time I was involved in a charity walk, strolling and struggling for 54 miles or 87 kilometers.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><b><i>What's one well-known and one little-known lit mag currently doing amazing work?</i></b> </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">Stimulus Respond and Danse Macabre. I leave it to others to decide on the status of their familiarity. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><b><i>What can you tell us about Holland other than tulips, clogs, red lights, and drugs?</i></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">I can tell you that I visit Amsterdam at least once a year. I can tell you that my favorite footballer is Dennis Bergkamp and I can tell you that Holland has very fine Warme Chocolademelk.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><b><i>If your piece in Versal could be paired with any art work, what would it be?</i></b> </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">I am fortunate enough to have three contributions in Versal. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">The pairings would be Drawn and Rendered with George Grosz, Sanatorium, 1917.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">The Drawing Frame with Richard Dadd, Songe de la Fantasie, 1864, and This Is Not the Drawing. This Is the Exact Imitation of One with Georges Seurat, Study for La Parade, 1887. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><b><i>What dirty secret would you like to tell us? </i></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">I wouldn’t so I haven’t.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><b>Most unbelievable place you've ever been to? Why? </b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">The Fictional Museum of Drawing</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">It is a heuristic architecture of found words … readymade propositions, parlance and bricolage for no such place in the middle, the furthest place from fixed points of view.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><b><i>Do you have a philosophy of writing? Can you condense it into 30 words?</i></b> </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">Yes I do. Yes I can. Writing is playing with words.</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><b>What's your playlist look like these days? </b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">Some of it looks like this:</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">Away Towards: Hookworms</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">The Boy with the Jigsaw Puzzled Fingers: Karl Hyde</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">When the Fire is Dead in the Grate: Wolf People</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">Hang ‘em High: Booker T. & the M.G.’s</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">Planet Caravan: Black Sabbath</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">In Bluer Skies: Echo & the Bunnymen</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">Solid Air: John Martyn</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">Arc-Lite (Sonar): Loop</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">Love Fade: Tamaryn</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">Arm’s Length: Zaza</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><b><i>What book is so unbelievably mind-blowing that it makes you want to stop writing?</i></b> </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">None, however particular favorites that I can read over and over are The Little Grey Men, BB, the Gormenghast trilogy, Mervyn Peake, Perfume, Patrick Suskind and The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot.</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><i><b>On The Newlywed Game, contestants were asked what vegetable they think they are. What's your totem vegetable?</b></i></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">Plum tomato</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><b><i>Why did you send work to Versal? Be honest.</i></b> </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">I think it’s a very cool project and journal. I wanted to be read alongside the range and creative quality that the journal is known for. </span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><b><i>Tell us what you're working on right now.</i></b></span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">I’m working on several writing projects and preparing work for an exhibition in November. The writing includes two books: Drawing Ambiguity (with Russ Marshall) and Drawing Difference (with Marsha Meskimmon). I am also working on an article for an exhibition catalogue, an academic journal paper, a chapter for a book, and a collaborative installation (with Deborah Harty as humhyphenhum) for an exhibition November 2013 (drawology).</span></span><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><i>
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Daniel Cecilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08636538755565594279noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-56512528350980020422013-05-25T21:01:00.000+02:002013-05-25T21:01:00.221+02:00Contributor's Notes–Laura-Eve Engel<br />
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<i>Laura Eve Engel's work has recently appeared or is forthcoming from Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, The Southern Review, Tin House and elsewhere. She blogs sporadically </i><a href="http://hoostown.wordpress.com/"><span class="s1"><i>here</i></span></a><i>. You can follow her on Twitter </i><a href="https://twitter.com/#%21/hoostown"><span class="s1"><i>@hoostown</i></span></a><i>.</i></div>
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<b>Have you been to Amsterdam? What did you do while you were here? If you've not been yet, what do you think you'd do in our fair town?</b></div>
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I've never been, or really done much traveling at all to speak of. I'd probably arrive on your doorstep looking confused and ask you to hold me.</div>
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<b>What is the first creative thing you ever did?</b></div>
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I remember writing a story in 2nd grade about some fairies on an island that I "self-published" in whatever remote room in my elementary school held all the cardboard and construction paper—in my mind, it looks a little something like a janitor's closet. I was convinced even then that I'd ripped off the plot wholesale from something I'd seen on TV, and having at this point no recollection of the story but a pretty good sense of where I stand as a fiction writer, I'd say I probably did. I'm still not sure what I stole from, though. I want to say it was a precocious 2nd grader's reinvention of <span class="s2"><i>A Midsummer Night's Dream</i></span>, but it was probably more like a fan-fiction approach to <span class="s2"><i>Fern Gully</i></span>.</div>
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<b>What is the dumbest thing anyone has ever said to you about being a writer?</b></div>
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When I showed my self-published fairy story to my mom she probably said something like "You should be a writer!" Maybe that isn't dumb. Maybe more like tragic, or sabotage.</div>
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<b>If you were an angle, what kind of angle would you be?</b></div>
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O boy, are you ready for this? A Laura Eve Engel. </div>
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<b>If you could meet a writer from the 15th, 16th or 17th centuries, who would it be? And what would you talk about?</b></div>
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I'd like to sit down with William Shakespeare and ask him if he's just one dude or, like, a bunch of dudes.</div>
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<b>Tell us something few people know about you.</b></div>
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This is probably more like something I think only a few people know about me and actually everyone does, but I love Justin Timberlake. And Top 40 radio generally. I love <span class="s2"><i>the radio</i></span>. I can't help it. As a kid first "discovering" listening to music that way, it made me feel intensely connected to everything else and I've never stopped feeling that way about it, even though now I couldn't disconnect myself from everything else if I wanted to.</div>
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<b>Other than Versal (which has clearly been awesome), what's one great place you've been published?</b></div>
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I'm grateful to have a chapbook called <span class="s2"><i>[Spoiler Alert]</i></span>, co-written with Adam Peterson, that's out from <span class="s2"><i>The Collagist</i></span>/Dzanc Books. Those are some great folks publishing great things and I feel lucky to be included.</div>
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<b>Why did you send work to Versal? Be honest. </b></div>
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I noticed a bunch of writers whose work I really admired citing Versal in their bios, and that's always a good sign. That's been the most reliable way I've found to get turned on to great, newer journals like you guys. I've also never had work published anywhere outside of the US, so that was a draw; it's exciting to know there are now two countries I owe some apologies to.</div>
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<b>What has lasted you ten years?</b></div>
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I was vegetarian for 10 years. I've played guitar for 10 years. I guess, now that I think about it, this year was the 10-year anniversary of my getting a driver's license. Ten is the tin/aluminum anniversary which, I'll be honest, I've never really understood what that meant but I guess I'll be getting my license some campfire cookware or siding or something.</div>
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<b>Tell us what you're working on right now.</b></div>
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I have a couple of manuscripts in...the fire? Like irons? One is a collection of poems called <span class="s2"><i>Things That Go</i></span>, and the other is a long poem called <span class="s2"><i>I Write to You From the Sea</i></span> that is growing more bloated and stubborn by the day. I just started a third thing that feels separate but hasn't quite defined itself for me yet. Otherwise, I'm getting pumped to spend this summer at the Young Writers Workshop, where I'm Residential Program Director, and which is my favorite place on earth.</div>
Daniel Cecilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08636538755565594279noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-85920846244165728572013-05-21T20:57:00.000+02:002013-05-21T20:58:10.907+02:00Contributor's Notes–Luke Andrew Geddes<i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">Interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of Versal 10. This edition features Luke Geddes. Luke Andrew Geddes's stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, Conjunctions, Mid American Review, and other journals. </i><br />
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<b>Have you been to Amsterdam? What did you do while you were here? If you've not been yet, what do you think you'd do in our fair town? </b></div>
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Never been, sadly. If did go to Amsterdam, I’d probably have the Elvis Costello song “New Amsterdam” stuck in my head the whole time, and no matter what I did, I’d board the plane home feeling like I did the wrong things and missed out on all the stuff I should have done. </div>
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<b>What is the first creative thing you ever did?</b></div>
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From a very young age I wanted to be a cartoonist and liked to draw, but I didn’t have the talent or patience for it. Writing is what I do now instead, and although I find it marginally easier and the results better, the process isn’t nearly as fun—is usually not much fun at all, in fact.</div>
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<b>What is the dumbest thing anyone has ever said to you about being a writer?</b></div>
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Pretty much everything my MFA workshop professor/thesis director ever said.</div>
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<b>If you were an angle, what kind of angle would you be?</b></div>
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Acute.</div>
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<b>If you could meet a writer from the 15th, 16th or 17th centuries, who would it be? And what would you talk about?</b></div>
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I’m hoping Chaucer counts (born in the 14<sup>th</sup> century, died in the 15<sup>th</sup>) because he tells better dirty jokes than Milton or Donne and probably Shakespeare, too.</div>
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<b>Tell us something few people know about you.</b></div>
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When I first found out my book was going to be published, I didn’t tell anyone—not my partner, friends, or closest family—until about ten days or two weeks after I’d gotten the news. The joy and sense of accomplishment I felt when no one knew besides me (and my publisher) was purer than anything I’ve felt since. I loved being able to think about it all that time, knowing no one else knew. Now I’m never totally satisfied with any praise or congratulations I receive about it; it all seems facile, not sincere or glowing or enthusiastic enough. </div>
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I’ve felt this way about a lot of my successes, that, while I want the world to know about my every minor and major achievement, the recognition only ends up cheapening it.</div>
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<b>Other than Versal (which has clearly been awesome), what's one great place you've been published?</b></div>
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<i>Hayden’s Ferry Review </i>was a turning point, and the story they published I considered at the time (and still do in some ways) my very best. Beth Staples, the editor, is awesome.</div>
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<b>Why did you send work to Versal? Be honest. </b></div>
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I felt like “Mom’s Team v. Dad’s Team” was a weird length—longer than a short short but still shorter than my average story—and it seemed like that was just right for <i>Versal</i>. Also, I noticed in Alissa Nutting’s book that one of the stories was published in <i>Versal </i>so I wanted to publish a story here, too.</div>
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<b>What has lasted you ten years?</b></div>
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An increasingly unhealthy sense of cynicism and growing mistrust of everyone I meet.</div>
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<b>Tell us what you're working on right now.</b></div>
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At this very moment—as I answer this question—I’m working on promoting my book, <i>I Am a Magical Teenage Princess</i>, a short story collection about teenagers, rock ‘n’ roll, cartoons, the 1960s, cavemen, sex, and other things, and about which <i>Publishers Weekly </i>has said, “In a lesser writer’s hands the work would come off as puerile, but Geddes’s sure prose, empathy, pop cultural knowledge, and stoner wit make for a rewarding and unusual collection.” It comes out July 18<sup>th</sup> and you can go to my website (www.iamamagicalteenageprincess.com) to find out more and marvel at the glowing blurbs from such luminaries as Chris Bachelder, Alissa Nutting, and Michael Griffith.</div>
Daniel Cecilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08636538755565594279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-67298690380952129222013-04-10T14:20:00.000+02:002013-04-10T14:20:05.887+02:00Contributor's Notes–Jessica Young
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<i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 11px; text-align: left;">Interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of Versal 10. This edition features Jessica Young. </i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><i>Jessica Young currently teaches at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. She completed her Master's of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (poetry) at UofM, where she held a Zell Fellowship, and received two Hopwood awards and the 2010 Moveen Residency. Her undergraduate work was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she received four Ilona Karmel prizes for her poetry and essays.</i></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic8tu30t6-t3rtTDW383EevMeDCCDbjJm3P0riaNQNyatGqzQ2TT_6VHPcg_gkX9aIIIw0rAbCaNNtaSXWjDdEbdS4kebdCO8Ge_v0OEPadJ2OKuHavoWN5eNrFlHJvpr7uio9WVHLyAk/s1600/P8100031.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic8tu30t6-t3rtTDW383EevMeDCCDbjJm3P0riaNQNyatGqzQ2TT_6VHPcg_gkX9aIIIw0rAbCaNNtaSXWjDdEbdS4kebdCO8Ge_v0OEPadJ2OKuHavoWN5eNrFlHJvpr7uio9WVHLyAk/s320/P8100031.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></i>
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></i>
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br /></span></i>
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b>Have you been to Amsterdam? What did you do while you were here?
If you've not been yet, what do you think you'd do in our fair town?</b><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b><br /></b></span></i>
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I haven’t yet visited, but would
really like to. In fact, the current idea is to visit in October. First on the
To Do list is the Van Gogh museum. Recommendations are very much welcome!<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b>What is the first creative thing you ever did?</b><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b><br /></b></span></i>
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I remember doing experiments with
household items. For example, after
seeing a bouquet of roses decay over the course of a week, I was curious what
could sustain them longer. I remember buying a fresh rose, carefully removing
all of the petals, and then on this rather organized and labeled grid, coating
the petals with different materials. I had a control (uncoated) petal, one slathered
with Vaseline, another with lemon juice, another with oil, etc. And I watched them
over the next few days to see what happened.
I also remember subjecting my parents to “coffee bags,” after
discovering tea bags and questioning why only certain beverages could be prepared
like that.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b>What is the dumbest thing anyone has ever said to you about being
a writer?</b><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b><br /></b></span></i>
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I don’t believe anything has been
outright dumb, though I’ve certainly come across misunderstandings. People who suggest, for example, that art
isn’t difficult to do, or isn’t useful. These statements lack an awareness or
generosity about the difficulty of creating a world out of words and evoking
emotions and images, or the idea that lives are affected and changed by art. I find these ideas troublesome—do people
think I’m wasting my time in la la land?
But I also understand, as I certainly don’t know what theoretical
mathematicians do all day, or what their practical contributions to society
are. So I just try to respond, briefly,
with what art has meant to me, as a way to suggest that its impact is very
real.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b>If you were an angle, what kind of angle would you be?</b><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b><br /></b></span></i>
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Scalene. No question.
And for no other reason than this is the angle that people seem to forget
most, and it’s just a nice word… scalene.
We should say it more. Say it
with me—<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b>If you could meet a writer from the 15th, 16th or 17th centuries,
who would it be? And what would you talk about?</b><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b><br /></b></span></i>
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Not a writer in the conventional
sense, but I’d love to do a chitchat with Galileo. He was doing astronomy, of course, but
writing was an integral part of his career because (a) he needed to secure
funding, and (b) he needed to write a certain way so as not to upset the
Church. After he found proof of
Jupiter’s moons (the first person to do so), he wrote a letter to the Grand
Duke of Tuscany requesting funding for a better telescope. In various versions of the letter you can see
him trying out the wording… telescopes are good for warfare since we can see an
approaching army, no, then, they are good for science, etc. Words mattered. And ultimately, as we all know, they resulted
in his house arrest. What we’d talk
about—I’d love to tell him what came of his research and name, and what the
current ideas and questions in astronomy are.
Maybe we’d even build a little telescope together.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b>Tell us something few people know about you.</b><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b><br /></b></span></i>
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">That’s a dangerous question. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">My grandmother died almost two
years ago, and I still haven’t really reconciled that as fact. I still know her phone number by heart. That I’d dial that number and the voice on
the other line wouldn’t be hers—I just can’t grasp that. Let alone the idea that she’s not here
anymore, that she doesn’t exist in that sense. I’m sad about it every day.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b>Other than Versal (which has clearly been awesome), what's one
great place you've been published?</b><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b><br /></b></span></i>
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">Massachusetts Review—I really
enjoy the mix of poetry and essays (among other genres!).<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b>Why did you send work to Versal? Be honest.</b><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b><br /></b></span></i>
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">This is my second time being in
Versal. I submitted this time because I
was stunned by the quality of the issue that first time—the level and range of
the work, the book as an object of beauty.
So much energy, talent, and splendor in one book—cover to cover (covers
included!). To be a part of that, as a
writer, means so much—community, hope, and warmth.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b>What has lasted you ten years?</b><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b><br /></b></span></i>
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I had a stick of deodorant that
must have had a trapdoor into an alternate dimension made entirely of
deodorant. I used it, day in and day
out, for years and years… twisting the little knob at the bottom to push more
up… and it just kept going. Eventually I
just threw it away. It wasn’t even done
(I saw I had at least an inch more still in the tube), I was just that weirded
out by it.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b>Tell us what you're working on right now.</b><o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><b><br /></b></span></i>
<div class="MsoNormal">
On the individual poem
scale, I’m just writing the poems that come to me without any particular goal
or constraint. On the book scale, I’m
gearing up toward assembling my next collection. My first one was very structured—it’s a
re-envisioning of <i>Alice in Wonderland,
called “</i>Alice’s Sister,” that is due out in Summer 2013 with WordTech. This next one will be a compilation of
individual poems, hopefully including the two currently housed in Versal. Now, I just need to figure out how to put 60
poems together and find some sort of coherent theme…<o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />
<br />
<br />Daniel Cecilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08636538755565594279noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-81340983577975089162013-03-27T13:21:00.000+01:002013-03-27T13:21:07.349+01:00Contributor's Notes–John Pluecker<i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 11px;">Interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of Versal 10. This edition features John Pluecker. John is a writer, interpreter, and translator. His work is informed by conceptual poetics and cross-border cultural production and has appeared in outlets in the U.S. and Mexico, including the Asymptote, Picnic, Third Text, Animal Shelter, and HTML Giant. He has published more than five books in translation from the Spanish, primarily by Mexican authors. There are two chapbooks of his work, Routes into Texas (<b>DIY, 2010</b>)<b> </b>and Undone (<b>Dusie Kollektiv, 2011</b>). A third chapbook, Killing Current, was published by <b>Mouthfeel Press </b>in 2012. </i><br />
<i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 11px;"><br /></i>
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<br />
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>Have you been to Amsterdam? What did you do while you were here? If you've not been yet, what do you think you'd do in our fair town?</b></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Never been to Amsterdam. If I went, I think I'd sit near some water, some canal, on some dike and drink a coffee. Then stay out all night.</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>What is the first creative thing you ever did?</b></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Made a dam in a creek.</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>What is the dumbest thing anyone has ever said to you about being a writer?</b></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b><br /></b></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">"If you're not selling your work, you're doing something wrong. I have a friend that sells all his poems and stories and makes good money. You should talk to him."</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>If you were an angle, what kind of angle would you be?</b></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Acute.</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>If you could meet a writer from the 15th, 16th or 17th centuries, who would it be? And what would you talk about?</b></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Álvar Nuñéz Cabeza de Vaca. His years wandering through the land we now know as the state of Texas.</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>Tell us something few people know about you.</b></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b><br /></b></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">But then everyone would know.</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>Other than Versal (which has clearly been awesome), what's one great place you've been published?</b></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
Animal Shelter.</div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<b>Why did you send work to Versal? Be honest.</b></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">My friend K. Lorraine Graham had mentioned the magazine to me, I think. I checked it out, bought a copy, liked it and sent in some of my work.</span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>What has lasted you ten years?</b></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">My relationship with my man.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"><br /></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"><b>Tell us what you're working on right now.</b></span></div>
<div class="p3">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1">A continuing collaborative experiment around language justice and language experimentation with my co-conspirator Jen Hofer: <a href="http://www.antenaantena.org/"><span class="s2">Antena</span></a>. Last year, we did an installation at Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas—a temporary bookstore, reading room and literary experimentation lab—and we recently wrote <a href="http://theconversant.org/?p=2500"><span class="s2">a chapbook reflecting on our experiences</span></a>.</span></div>
Daniel Cecilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08636538755565594279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-47296951950422447512013-03-12T15:40:00.000+01:002013-03-12T15:40:00.940+01:00Contributor's Notes–Bess Winter<i>Interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of Versal 10. This edition features Bess Winter. Bess Winter's fiction has won a Pushcart Prize, and has appeared in American Short Fiction, Bellingham Review, Paper Darts, PANK, and elsewhere. She's the Podcast Editor at The Collagist, and currently lives in Toronto, Canada.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><br /></i>
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<i><br /></i>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>Have you been to Amsterdam? What did you do while you were here? If you've not been yet, what do you think you'd do in our fair town? </b></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Have not been to Amsterdam yet, but would love to go. Wish I could say I’d do something romantic, but realistically I’d probably fill up on chocolate and beer and fret about the possibility of bedbugs at my hostel. </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>What is the first creative thing you ever did?</b></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Honestly, play with dolls. I made paper dolls as a kid. Mostly out of old magazines and vintage book illustrations, which I’d take to Kinko’s, color photocopy, cut out and cover with clear tape like they were laminated. These made up a huge percentage of my toys. And because I was an only child who played alone quite often, I never bothered with making my dolls move or walk around or anything when I played. I just stared at them and made up stories. </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"><b></b></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>What is the dumbest thing anyone has ever said to you about being a writer?</b></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">When you write that bestseller you can support your family.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>If you were an angle, what kind of angle would you be?</b></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">I failed math in high school. Therefore, I would be a circle.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>If you could meet a writer from the 15th, 16th or 17th centuries, who would it be? And what would you talk about?</b></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">The Earl of Rochester, pre-syphilis. He was like the Hunter S. Thompson of the 17</span><span class="s2"><sup>th</sup></span><span class="s1"> century. I’d probably just listen to whatever he had to say, rather than talk.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"><b></b></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>Tell us something few people know about you.</b></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">My online cribbage ranking is Princess. It took me 2 years to get there. Once I hit 1700 points I’ll be a Lady.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>Other than Versal (which has clearly been awesome), what's one great place you've been published?</b></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"><b></b></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">Paper Darts, coming out soon.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>Why did you send work to Versal? Be honest. </b></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">I grew up in Canada, so I’m in love with international journals. That was part of it. Also, the fact that you’re not an academic journal appealed to me. That Versal is your brainchild. I love that.</span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>What has lasted you ten years?</b></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"><b></b></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">A pair of Camper shoes with soles made of tire tread. </span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>Tell us what you're working on right now.</b></span></div>
<div class="p2">
<span class="s1"><b></b></span><br /></div>
<div class="p1">
<span class="s1">A collection, and a novel.</span></div>
Daniel Cecilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08636538755565594279noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-78150227716499106162013-03-01T16:30:00.000+01:002013-03-01T16:30:00.568+01:00Versal @ AWP: Editors Edition<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Here's a secret. Prose team editor <a href="https://twitter.com/danielcecil" target="_blank">Daniel Cecil</a> is an AWP virgin, y'all. Hit him up with weird and alcohol. He likes beer.<br />
<br />
Want a private reading from <i>Versal</i>'s pages? <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/133820673457095/" target="_blank">It's called Red Light Raffle and it's sexy all the way from Amsterdam.</a><br />
<br />
If you're still wondering what panels to go to, check out these with our very own editors in tow. <br />
<br />
<br />
<b>THURSDAY</b><br />
<br />
9:00 a.m. to 10:15 a.m.<br />
Room 102, Plaza Level<br />
R105. Trying on New Bootstraps: Self-Sustaining Models for Literary Magazines. (Steph Opitz, Jennifer Woods, <b>Megan M. Garr,</b> Halimah Marcus) As the university-supported literary magazine increasingly becomes a less viable model, literary magazines must find new methods for generating support. Publishers from Electric Literature, Versal, and the Lumberyard Magazine share their secrets. <br />
<br />
4:30 p.m. to 5:45 p.m.<br />
Room 204, Level 2<br />
R259. Beyond Ekphrasis: The Pedagogy and Practice of Other Art Forms in the Creative Writing Classroom. (Rachel Marston, Caitlin Horrocks, Shena McAuliffe, Nicole Sheets, <b>Robert Glick</b>) Whether a text/image hybrid, such as the paintings of Frida Kahlo, or a photo/text novel like W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, the combination of artistic media can create an emotional and intellectual power greater than its individual parts. Techniques used in painting, sculpture, and music can be invaluable in teaching the creative writer new ways to think about his or her work. In this panel, we’ll show you how, without outside expertise, you can bring other arts into the creative writing classroom.<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>FRIDAY</b><br />
<br />
1:30 p.m. to 2:45 p.m.<br />
Room 306, Level 3<br />
S204. How to Lose Friends and Alienate Loved Ones: Exploitation vs. Documentation in Creative Nonfiction. (<b>B.J. Hollars</b>, Roxane Gay, Marcia Aldrich, Ryan Van Meter, <b>Bonnie J. Rough</b>) Not every story is flattering, nor is every character. Nevertheless, nonfiction writers continue to document their lives and the lives of others, often at the risk of violating personal relationships. How should writers navigate between revealing the true nature of their subjects without alienating the people themselves? Join four writers as they explore the fine line between documentation and exploitation, among other ethical dilemmas inherent in writing of friends, family, and loved ones.<br />
<br />
<br />
If you missed it, check out our <a href="http://versaljournal.blogspot.nl/2013/02/versal-awp-contributor-edition.html" target="_blank">Contributors Edition</a> of what AWP panels we think you'll enjoy.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Megan M Garrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17177325304418811047noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-35474960645111035602013-02-28T16:05:00.000+01:002013-02-28T16:31:37.588+01:00Versal @ AWP: Contributor Edition<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Everyone everywhere has a "guide to AWP" already, so no need for that here. But we would like to give you two pieces of advice:<br />
<br />
1. Jetlag is your friend.<br />
2. Come to Versal's table (J20) and eat licorice with us.<br />
<br />
More Versal-AWP shenanigans? <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/133820673457095/" target="_blank">It's called Red Light Raffle and it's all yours.</a><br />
<br />
In the meantime, if you're still not sure what panels to go to, we've gathered a list of panels our past & present contributors will be shining on. Which means: these panels will kick ass.* <br />
<br />
Tomorrow, stay tuned for a list of panels our editors are on. Which means: more ass kicking. <br />
<br />
<br />
<b>THURSDAY</b><br />
<br />
9:00 a.m. to 10:15 a.m.<br />
Room 206, Level 2<br />
R117. Writing Masculinities. (<b>Samuel Ace</b>, Thomas McBee, Farid Matuk, Rickey Laurentiis, Brian Blanchfield) This panel will offer a cross-genre/cross-sexuality/cross-gendered reading, with discussion to follow, about the interweave of the (other than) masculine in one’s work by writers who use “he” but put the “he” in question. Panelists will read from work that reimagines the landscape of the masculine, directly or obliquely, through a dense exploration of subject matter and language, while raising important questions about how masculinity is defined and what it represents.<br />
<br />
12:00 noon to 1:15 p.m.<br />
Room 312, Level 3<br />
R184. Prose and Verse Consubstantial: The New Mixed Form. (Peter Streckfus, <b>Joshua Marie Wilkinson</b>, C.D. Wright, Carole Maso, Julie Carr) Prose is our culture’s default for narrative. Writing organized by the poetic line is our default for lyric expression. This panel presents writers who, in lieu of erasing the boundaries between the paragraph and the line, alternate both forms in the same work. Authors will read from their own mixed-form work and discuss precedents from the rich history of the mixed form, ranging from Zukofsky’s “A” to Basho’s Narrow Road. How can mixed form serve the poet? The novelist?<br />
<br />
4:30 p.m. to 5:45 p.m.<br />
Room 204, Level 2<br />R259. Beyond
Ekphrasis: The Pedagogy and Practice of Other Art Forms in the Creative
Writing Classroom. (<b>Rachel Marston</b>, Caitlin Horrocks, <b>Shena McAuliffe</b>,
Nicole Sheets, Robert Glick) Whether a text/image hybrid, such as
the paintings of Frida Kahlo, or a photo/text novel like W.G. Sebald’s
Austerlitz, the combination of artistic media can create an emotional
and intellectual power greater than its individual parts. Techniques
used in painting, sculpture, and music can be invaluable in teaching the
creative writer new ways to think about his or her work. In this panel,
we’ll show you how, without outside expertise, you can bring other arts
into the creative writing classroom.<br />
<br />
3:00 p.m. to 4:15 p.m.<br />
Room 110, Plaza Level<br />
R224. Larkin to Love or Hate: British Poetics in Conversation. (<b>Carrie Etter</b>, Carol Watts, Lytton Smith, Tim Liardet, Zoe Brigley Thompson) Four leading British poets of distinctly different styles discuss the current state of British poetics by beginning with the common dividing line of Philip Larkin’s importance for contemporary poetries in the UK. Together, their talks will bring to light and explore the exciting array of recent developments in British poetry. <br />
<br />
<br />
<b>FRIDAY</b><br />
<br />
9:00 a.m. to 10:15 a.m.<br />
Room 111, Plaza Level<br />
F113. 1913 10th Anniversary Reading. (Sandra Doller, Ben Doller, Srikanth Reddy, Charles Bernstein, Ronaldo Wilson, <b>Jane Lewty</b>) Celebrate ten years of innovative cross-genre publishing with 1913, a journal of forms and 1913 Press! Indebted in name and notion to the radical early modernist spirit, 1913 publishes emerging international writers and artists alongside some of our most renowned. 1913’s 10th anniversary is the 100th anniversary of the year 1913—the year Rosa Parks is born and Harriet Tubman dies; Malevich’s Black Square and Stein’s Tender Buttons; and the movies move to Hollywood and Russian Futurist books proliferate.<br />
<br />
9:00 a.m. to 10:15 a.m.<br />
Room 206, Level 2<br />
F118. The Colloquial Baroque: Productively Deploying the Arcane. (Lisa Russ Spaar, Brenda Hillman, <b>Joanna Klink</b>, Gregory Pardlo, Brian Teare) How do damasked registers of diction and syntax contribute more than dazzling surface texture to poems of erotic, religious, aesthetic, and psychological complexity? What are the risks and pleasures of working in mixed modes of difficulty? Five aesthetically diverse poets discuss their use of Keatsian fine excess and their relationship to Hopkins’s statement that “Obscurity I do and will try to avoid so far as” is consistent with excellences higher than clearness at a first reading.<br />
<br />
10:30 a.m. to 11:45 a.m.<br />
Room 313, Level 3<br />
F160. Yoga and the Life of the Writer. (Krista Katrovas, Melissa Pritchard, Pam Uschuk, Suzanne Roberts, <b>Andrea England</b>) We’ll give brief testimonials regarding our Yoga practices and discuss how meditation as well as physical aspects of Yoga enhance writing/reading lives. The session concludes with demonstrations of chanting and chair Yoga, the latter offering practical, safe techniques, for counteracting the effects of sitting still for long periods. The audience is encouraged to participate. Career status is irrelevant to this panel, which will consist of writers/Yoginis at different stages of their careers.<br />
<br />
12:00 noon to 1:15 p.m.<br />
Room 101, Plaza Level<br />
F161. Experimental Fiction Today. (John Parras, Daniel Green, <b>Alissa Nutting</b>, Ted Pelton, M. Bartley Seigel) Editors, writers, critics, and teachers discuss recent trends in experimental fiction and how such work enriches the publishing landscape, the creative writing workshop, and the direction and function of literature itself. What are some of the more exciting trends in innovative fiction? What are the special challenges and rewards for writers testing fiction’s limits? How does fabulist work work? If all literature is innovative, what distinguishes the experimental from other types of fiction?<br />
<br />
1:30 p.m. to 2:45 p.m.<br />
Room 200, Level 2<br />
F200. Making the Case for Community Outreach / Service as a Part of the MFA Experience. (Eric Heald-Webb, Jessica Kinnison, <b>Dora Malech</b>, Nina Buckless, Amana C. Katora) As the role of graduate writing programs has expanded beyond the teaching of writing, service programs have become one way to offer graduate students experience in both teaching and community outreach. In this session, panelists who are closely involved with such community outreach organizations will reflect on the benefits to themselves, their graduate program, and their community, in order to make a case for formalizing Community Outreach/Service Programs as a part of the MFA experience.<br />
<br />
1:30 p.m. to 2:45 p.m.<br />
Room 306, Level 3<br />S204.
How to Lose Friends and Alienate Loved Ones: Exploitation vs.
Documentation in Creative Nonfiction. (B.J. Hollars, <b>Roxane Gay</b>, Marcia
Aldrich, Ryan Van Meter, Bonnie J. Rough) Not every story is flattering,
nor is every character. Nevertheless, nonfiction writers continue to
document their lives and the lives of others, often at the risk of
violating personal relationships. How should writers navigate between
revealing the true nature of their subjects without alienating the
people themselves? Join four writers as they explore the fine line
between documentation and exploitation, among other ethical dilemmas
inherent in writing of friends, family, and loved ones.<br />
4:30 p.m. to 5:45 p.m.<br />
Room 312, Level 2<br />
F278. Ready for Prime Time? The Future of Enhanced Digital Publishing. (Martin Lammon, Karina Borowicz, <b>Julie Marie Wade</b>, Benjamin Mitchell, Emily Chamison) Editors of the new digital literary journal Arts & Letters PRIME discuss the future of enhanced digital publishing, from start-up to design, from production to distribution. Designed for tablet readers such as the Apple iPad, Samsung Galaxy, and Kindle Fire, enhanced digital books and journals are changing the way we read. Joining the editors are two PRIME contributors, author Julie Marie Wade and poet Karina Borowicz, who discuss how digital media has impacted their work and literary exposure. <br />
<br />
<br />
<b>SATURDAY</b><br />
<br />
10:30 a.m. to 11:45 a.m.<br />
Room 107, Plaza Level<br />
S133. Lower Your Standards: William Stafford in the Workshop. (James Armstrong, Philip Metres, <b>Alissa Nutting</b>, Jeff Gundy, Fred Marchant) This panel considers how William Stafford’s complex and still-controversial approach to the poetry workshop can help overcome some of the pitfalls of that system (such as writing for the teacher or writing the safe poem). Panelists recount their own experiences using Stafford’s ideas in the classroom; they discuss how Stafford’s no praise, no blame stance towards the imagination, his notion of the centrality of daily practice, and his insistence on overcoming writer’s block through lowered standards can help students become fluent practitioners.<br />
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10:30 a.m. to 11:45 a.m.<br />
Room 303, Level 3<br />
S149. We Are Homer: A Reading of Collaborative Poetry and Prose. (Ryan Teitman, Traci Brimhall, <b>Laura Eve Engel</b>, Adam Peterson, Brynn Saito) In this reading of poetry and prose, two pairs of writers (Traci Brimhall & Brynn Saito and Laura Eve Engel & Adam Peterson) will read from their collaboratively written works. Ryan Teitman will also read from a set of poems cowritten with Marcus Wicker. After the reading, the writers will discuss their writing process, how they came together to write collaboratively, and the challenges and joys of writing with a partner.<br />
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10:30 a.m. to 11:45 a.m.<br />
Patricia Olson Bookfair Stage, Exhibit Hall A, Plaza Level<br />
BF34. Lynx House/Lost Horse: How Two Presses Collaborate. (David Axelrod, Greg Pape, Bill Tremblay, Ray Amorosi, <b>Dawn Lonsinger</b>) Lynx House Press and Lost Horse Press, both small, active literary presses based in the inland Northwest, have discovered that their missions are much the same: to publish the highest quality poetry and literary fiction in editions that are above trade standard in design and to achieve for these books the widest possible circulation and cultural impact. The terrific results of their collaboration, on display at this event, suggest a model that other small presses might consider.<br />
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12:00 noon to 1:15 p.m.<br />
Room 110, Plaza Level<br />
S162. Courting the Love Poem: Challenges of Sincerity and Sentimentality. (Alyse Knorr, Timothy Liu, <b>Joe Hall</b>, Beth Ann Fennelly, Nate Pritts) Who’s afraid of the big bad love poem? How does the contemporary love poem fit in today’s postmodern literary landscape? This panel discusses the poetics and politics of writing the love poem, including the challenges of evoking sincerity, avoiding sentimentality, and working with a theme as old as poetry itself. What are the current poetic modes of writing love poems, from the autobiographical narrative to intentional experimentalism? How do gender and sexual orientation influence poetics?<br />
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4:30 p.m. to 5:45 p.m.<br />
Room 103, Plaza Level<br />
S238. Winter in the Blood: Adapting Fiction into Film. (Prageeta Sharma, Alex Smith, Andrew Smith, <b>Ken White</b>) The screenwriting panel will discuss the methodology of adapting literature for the screen using the 2011 production of James Welch’s novel Winter in the Blood as a model. The directors and screenwriters will focus on strategies of adaptation, including writing in consideration of culture, geography, budget, and practical production elements in an ever-changing contemporary independent film market.<br />
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4:30 p.m. to 5:45 p.m.<br />
Room 204, Level 2<br />
S250. Celebrating Your Own Backyard: How Regional Literary Magazines Engage and Build Writing Communities. (Carla Spataro, John Henry Fleming, Chris Haven, <b>Maureen Alsop</b>, Christine Borne) This panel, with representatives from regional literary magazines from across the country, will explore the joys of celebrating what they know and how regionally focused literary journals help build writing communities through workshops, professional development events for writers, and readings.<br />
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*Apologies for any mistakes, oversights, or inconsistencies. We copied and pasted this off AWP's site. If you're a Versal contrib and we missed your panel, let us know! Also, feel free to add links to your offsite in the comments and we'll tweet it.Megan M Garrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17177325304418811047noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-34626430182702764032013-02-24T11:34:00.000+01:002013-02-24T11:34:05.537+01:00Contributor's Notes – Candy Shue
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<i>Interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of Versal 10. This week, we hear from poet Candy Shue, a poet and reviewer who can be heard online on Poet as Radio. A recent recipient of a Kundiman Fellowship, she holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco. Her work has appeared in Spiral Orb, Eratio, The Collagist, EOAGH, Switchback, Washington Square, and recently in Drunken Boat and the current issue of Mead Magazine. Right now Candy is putting together a chapbook titled "Whiskey, Water, and White Dwarves", which is looking for a home!</i></div>
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<span class="s1"><b>Have you been to Amsterdam? What did you do while you were here? If you've not been yet, what do you think you'd do in our fair town?</b></span></div>
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<span class="s1">Yes--I loved taking the trams to the outdoor markets and perusing the bookstores! I found a first British edition of Hemingway’s <i>A Moveable Feast</i> in a secondhand bookshop, which was exciting. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">When I was four, I turned my baby quilt into a magic carpet and sailed into the wild blue yonder. On one adventure, I journeyed into the night of the forest (my bedroom closet) where I fell asleep and missed dinner. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">People have actually been really great about it. I was filling out a medical form once and under “Occupation,” I decided to write “Poet”--the first time I had ever declared it officially. My doctor looked at the chart and said, “You’re a poet? That’s wonderful!” and told me about some Italian poetry he’d read, since he was Italian. It surprises people when you tell them you’re a poet. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">I’d be an angle fish. I mean an angel fish. An angel angler. An angle wrangler. I’m sometimes acute and often obtuse, but I’m not a right angle. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">If I could go back to the 9th century, I’d like to hang out with Hanshan, the Chinese hermit poet. He wrote <i>on</i> nature--bamboo, stones, wood, cliffs and even people’s houses. I expect we wouldn’t talk very much, but that would be ok. For a later era, I’d choose the Japanese Zen Poet Monk, Ikkyu. I think he’d get a kick out of hearing how his character keeps popping up in Japanese anime and manga. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">I grew up swimming and playing water polo, so I spent a lot of time in pools! The rhythm of swimming is something that I feel when I’m writing poetry, and I’m attracted to the imagery and dynamics of water in my work. </span></div>
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<span class="s1"><i>Versal</i> has been awesome! I was also happy to have my poem “Love Is a Weather of Body” hyperlinked to the other poems in the journal <i>Spiral Orb Four</i>. And I’m looking forward to have poems in <i>Drunken Boat’s</i> upcoming issue on Hypnopoetics. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">I was introduced to <i>Versal</i> when I was printing a poetry chapbook at the San Francisco Center for the Book. The SFCB is a fantastic place--they have drawers and drawers of old metal type and three vintage Vandercook printing presses. I was drawn to <i>Versal’s</i> crisp design, especially the contrast between the bold title type (DIN1451 Engschrift) and the seriphed body type (Bauer Bodoni). I loved the crispness of the writing as well, so I was excited when my poems were accepted for the journal.</span></div>
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<span class="s1">I have an 11-year old station wagon, but I’m not sure it counts because I had to replace the engine a few years ago when it died as I was driving up the Grapevine (in California) in 113 degree heat. Books last, though! I was just re-reading my copy of W.S. Merwin’s <i>The Miner’s Pale Children</i>. Here’s the first line from his story, “Ends”: “When a shoelace breaks during use the ends do not always indulge at once in their new-found liberty.” I love that. </span></div>
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<span class="s1">I recently finished a syllabus for a poetry workshop and now I’m writing poems and working on book reviews for Poet As Radio. I’m doing a series of poems on hypnogogia, which is the transitional state between being awake and asleep. </span></div>
Daniel Cecilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08636538755565594279noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-38937515199976285392013-01-10T16:11:00.000+01:002013-01-10T16:11:33.376+01:00Contributor Notes: Dora Malech<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><i>Interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of Versal 10. This week, we hear from <b>Dora Malech</b> he author of Say So (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011) and Shore Ordered Ocean (Waywiser Press, 2009). Her poems have appeared in publications that include The New Yorker, Poetry, American Letters & Commentary, and Poetry London. A graduate of Yale and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she has been the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, a Writer's Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy, and inclusion in the International Writing Program's "Life of Discovery" creative exchange in China. She has taught writing at institutions that include the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop; Victoria University's International Institute of Modern Letters in Wellington, New Zealand; and Saint Mary's College of California, where she served as a Distinguished Poet-in-Residence. She lives in Iowa City, where she writes, creates visual art, teaches, and directs the Iowa Youth Writing Project, an arts outreach program for children and teens.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">Have you been to Amsterdam? What did you do while you were here? If you've not been yet, what do you think you'd do in our fair town?</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">I have. I visited the amazing Jane Lewty and Wade Geary at Thanksgiving 2011, and it was most likely the best Thanksgiving of my life. I ate my weight in stroopwafel, had my mind blown across the spectrum of human emotion and ideas by art and history (visiting the Anne Frank house, going to the Rijksmuseum, taking a tour of the canals), and met some incredibly welcoming and brilliant writers and artists (including the Versal crew!). I also gave a reading at the English Bookshop and gave a Q&A with Jane's students at Universiteit van Amsterdam. I felt so grateful to have had the chance to see Amsterdam through the eyes of a tourist, but I felt even more grateful that Jane and others allowed me to simply live their Amsterdam lives with them for a few days.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">I was also on a deadline to finish a piece as part of an International Writing Program collaborative exchange and performance. I went to Amsterdam with all of my thoughts and notes, and I spent most of my mornings there writing and revising in Jane and Wade's spare room. I ended up finishing the piece there and reading it for the first time at the English Bookshop reading. The piece is not "about" Amsterdam, but it deals with travel and flight and distance, and it will forever be linked to Amsterdam for me.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">What is the first creative thing you ever did?</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">I know that when I made colorful crayon scribbles as a very small child, and my mother asked me to tell her what I was drawing (a house? a dog?), I would cryptically tell her that they were "designs." I hope that doesn't make me sound like I was a pretentious toddler. I also think that playing pretend was (and still is?) a big part of my creative life. I have an older sister, so for a long time, my creative life was collaborating with her on imaginary identities and worlds.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">What is the dumbest thing anyone has ever said to you about being a writer?</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">I can't say the dumbest, but I can say the most obnoxious. When I finish giving a reading, I always feel very raw and pretty vulnerable and dazed. Whether or not it shows to the audience, I feel like I put it on the line emotionally when I read. It is, therefore, the worst possible moment for someone to play weird power games with me (intentionally or not), because I am off balance and overly receptive. Multiple times, someone (and yes, it's usually a man, and yes, he's usually older than me) comes up to me and says "Can I give you some advice?" Rather than saying, "Buzz off. Who just gave a reading, me or you?" I say "Sure." Then I get a lecture on what he would have done differently (I've gotten everything from "Don't give any context for your poems; leave the audience wondering" to "Don't look at your watch; it's distracting.") I always wonder if these folks give lectures to everyone, or if I have some kind of "kick me" sign on my back. Perhaps they're well-intentioned, and it's obviously not a huge deal in the greater scheme of things, but I keep hoping I'll come up with a witty retort for the next such occasion. I suppose it falls right into Rebecca Solnit's "Men Explaining Things" paradigm. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">If you were an angle, what kind of angle would you be?</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">I would be my Chihuahua mutt. Backstory: I named my dog "Angel" in a moment of pure, unadulterated sentimentality when she came into my life. She was a puppy that fit in my hand, and I was a weepy 20-year-old college student. She is my favorite creature on earth, but she is not angelic. At a certain point, we stopped calling her "Angel" and started calling her any number of different names, including "Angle," which is a much more accurate name. So, yeah, I'd be that Angle. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">If you could meet a writer from the 15th, 16th or 17th centuries, who would it be? And what would you talk about?</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">Oh lord it would be Shakespeare. We'd talk about everything. Everything. Everything. And then we'd spoon for a while. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">Well, I just told you that I want to spoon with Shakespeare, so my fantasies about other dead writers won't seem that revelatory now. I'll go less personal: I have an extra vertebra in my spine.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">Other than Versal (which has clearly been awesome), what's one great place you've been published?</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">I've loved being published in Anti-, because it seemed like the editor, Stephen D. Schroeder, really believed in my work at a point when I didn't necessarily believe in it myself. I'm also just in great company with the other writers and artists he publishes, and I was psyched that Anti- included both my poetry and my visual art at different points.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">Why did you send work to Versal? Be honest.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">I met the Versal editors in Amsterdam and also got to spend some quality time with Versal 9. I felt like it was an aesthetically gorgeous and exciting publication, and it felt "curated" like a good art show, not just kind of thrown together. Megan Garr encouraged me to send work, and I was more than happy to do so. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">What has lasted you ten years?</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">My red Schwinn bicycle. A brown corduroy jacket with a fake-fur hood from TJ Maxx. Some amazing friendships (I started grad school in 2003, so I'm coming up on the ten-year anniversary of some of my dearest poetry-friendships).</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #999999; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;"><i>Tell us what you're working on right now.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 11px;">I'm working on a third book of poems that's still in flux, and on a number of other projects. Bringing my visual art and text together. Exploring anagrams as heuristics. Working on longer poems. Trying to find my way from one word to another.</span></span></div>
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Daniel Cecilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08636538755565594279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-13180189143340794702012-12-03T19:00:00.000+01:002012-12-03T19:00:04.855+01:00Versal 10 Bakfiets nominations!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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We are pleased to announced this year's <strike>Bakfiets</strike> Pushcart nominations from <i>Versal 10</i>:<br />
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Selections from <i>Interface</i>, Erin Costello<br /><i>Audio Tour: The Paintings You Missed</i>, Gerald Fleming<br /><i>Who We Are Beneath the Glass</i>, Roxane Gay<br /><i>With Distinction(s),</i> Dora Malech<br /><i>Dear Mutated Gene in my Daughter’s DNA</i>, Bill Neumire<br /><i>The Garnet Cave</i>, Bess Winter<br />
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Congratulations to the nominees! Maybe this year we get lucky!Megan M Garrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17177325304418811047noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-34755613415832412422012-10-24T18:35:00.000+02:002012-10-29T19:00:25.826+01:00Contributor Notes: Ben Merriman<i>Interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of </i>Versal 10<i>. This week, we hear from <b>Ben Merriman</b>, whose
story/stories "A Hard Place to Love" rock out starting on page 121. Ben's the fiction editor over at the </i>Chicago Review<i> and you can tumble with him <a href="http://benmerriman.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">here</a>.</i><br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">Have you been to Amsterdam? What did you do while you were here? If you've not been yet, what do you think you'd do in our fair town?</span><br />
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I have not yet been to Amsterdam, but I spend my time in most large cities the same way: visits to art museums and bookstores, followed by gossip or chatter with writers and artsy types.<br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">What is the first creative thing you ever did?</span><br />
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This seems like an invitation to offer some kind of origin myth about my creative life, or retroactively square my early experiences with my current life, but in fact there is very little from my childhood that feels my own. I once compared the recollection of my own life to watching a poorly edited student film.<br />
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To say something dull that comes closer to answering the question: I began to make serious efforts at writing fiction in 2008, around the time I started graduate school. <br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">What is the dumbest thing anyone has ever said to you about being a writer?</span><br />
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I am not sure anybody has yet said this to me so directly, but in conversations about writing I have often sensed that many people I have met want to be writers because they want to be personally loved for having written appealing words. This desire is not “dumb,” but it strikes me as quite possibly unhealthy: a writer may hope that people will love one's writing, though there is no assurance of this, but there is no reason why a reader should love a writer for what they write, and given that the best writers are so often unpleasant, or at least badly flawed, human beings, loving a great writer, by virtue of their being a great writer, could be a wounding and unsatisfactory kind of love, just as being loved for what one has done, rather than being loved for what one is, would certainly be a hollow kind of love, a mixture of tinny adulation and a fear, probably correct, that to continue being loved would require that one continue to earn it by new creative exertions. The psychic misery of celebrities demonstrates the basic pathology of this logic.<br />
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I hope that there may be a sincere and realistic impulse underneath this common unstated wish. If “I want people to love me because I am a good writer” really means “I am smart and I want people to value this part of me,” then this could reduce to “I want to be in the company of people who value what I value.” Looking for intellectual peers seems to me like a good reason to write, and in fact not so different from what many of us are looking for when we read.<br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">If you were an angle, what kind of angle would you be?</span><br />
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Oblique.<br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">If you could meet a writer from the 15th, 16th, or 17th centuries, who would it be? And what would you talk about?</span><br />
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Marguerite of Navarre: I have ripped off a couple of stories from the <i>Heptameron</i>, itself substantially a ripoff, and Marguerite was famous in her own time as a refined and pleasant companion. I assume we would gossip.<br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">Tell us something few people know about you.</span><br />
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I am probably the worst judge of what other people know about me; things that I take as common knowledge may be obscure, and things that I try to hide may be quite obvious. However, people who have only seen my name in literary magazines may not know that I am a sociologist, just as many acquaintances from my academic life don't know that I write fiction. <br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">Other than Versal (which has clearly been awesome), what's one great place you've been published?</span><br />
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In general I have been very pleased by the places that have published my work, but one that stands out is <i>The Lifted Brow</i>, a bimonthly magazine published in Australia. As with <i>Versal</i>, publishing in <i>The Brow</i> has made me feel a little less provincial. More importantly, I am a great admirer of Australian literature, which, evolving in partial isolation, has become something very weird and singular, so I was flattered that Australians, or at least one Australian editor, would find my own writing worthwhile. I've been publishing there in a column, “Something Happens,” and I hope that my name will burrow itself down into Australian literary consciousness.<br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">Why did you send work to <i>Versal</i>? Be honest.</span><br />
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I picked up a copy of <i>Versal 9</i> at Printers' Ball in Chicago. My partner flipped through it and suggested that I could publish here. (In fact, said I could publish here “with no problem,” an estimation of my skill that is both kind and a good deal higher than my own estimation.) <br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">What has lasted you ten years?</span><br />
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Nothing so far, but my partner and I have been together for eight years. I feel sanguine about our chances of hitting a decade.<br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">Tell us what you're working on right now.</span><br />
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I am revising a novella about reading Adorno's <i>Aesthetic Theory</i>, which I have titled <i>Aesthetic Theory</i>. If there happen to be any editors or publishers reading this, I would appreciate any help they could offer—I expect it will be rather difficult to get this work published.<br />
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I have recently gotten back to Chicago after a trip to China, so I expect I will soon be writing about my trip, if only for my friends, who are curious to hear about my time with bureaucrats, academic officials, and urban <i>nouveaux riches</i>. The highlight will be my account of the unsuccessful efforts of several provincial Party officials to get me drunk at a noontime banquet.Megan M Garrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17177325304418811047noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-83770734121237818482012-10-01T16:13:00.000+02:002012-10-01T16:14:08.750+02:00Contributor Notes: Lisa Annelouise Rentz<i>Interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of </i>Versal 10<i>. Next up, a conversation with the wonderful Lisa Annelouise Rentz, whose story "Conrad's Hammer" can be found on page 91. Lisa's stories have been published most recently by the </i>Oxford American<i>, </i>Liars' League London<i>, the </i>Not A Stitch<i> gallery show in Philadelphia, and in a book from </i>They Draw and Cook<i>. She lives in South Carolina.</i><br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">Have you been to Amsterdam? What did you do while you were here? If you've not been yet, what do you think you'd do in our fair town? </span><br />
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I have been to Amsterdam. I spent the summer in Germany after high school and we visited for just one day — my friend was still in school, so it was actually a field trip. We went to the Van Gogh Museum and the Rijks Museum, and walked all around town. This was 1988 — I remember the street bums and canals, finding an Indonesian shop that sold bags of krupuk, and hearing Creedence Clearwater Revival on the bus's muzak. Later I made sate sauce for everyone to go with the krupuk. <br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">What is the first creative thing you ever did?</span><br />
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As an adult — when I was first dating my husband, I hand-drew a silly drivers license for him. <br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">What is the dumbest thing anyone has ever said to you about being a writer?</span><br />
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Announcing "I'm a writer!" because they're in a critique group and keep a journal. I think most people are and can be and should be avocational writers — it's an important skill for daily life. For being a civilization. But at the same time, cool it with making "writer" into a title for a business card. <br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">If you were an angle, what kind of angle would you be?</span><br />
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90 degrees all the way.<br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">If you could meet a writer from the 15th, 16th or 17th centuries, who would it be? And what would you talk about?</span><br />
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Maria Sibylla Merian, she studied and documented insects by making beautiful drawings (which include writing, introductions, etc.) of the creatures and their habitats and predators and prey. I've only read up on her lightly, so if we met, I'd love it to be back in her 15th Century studio so she could show me around. She was German, so we might be able to chat. I'd like to hear how she financed and arranged her travels to South America, and how she stayed committed to her work. Show me the originals please, and let's see the notes too! I just googled her to refresh my memory-- and she eventually lived and died in Amsterdam, and according to wikipedia the city of Amsterdam sponsored her for a trip to Surinam! I have a newly finished story set in the near future with a character based on her. I learned about Merian from a friend, an accomplished nature artist and teacher. She's got a great out-of-print book that's a compilation of Merian's work. <br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">Tell us something few people know about you.</span><br />
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I really like privacy. <br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">Other than <i>Versal</i> (which has clearly been awesome), what's one great place you've been published?</span><br />
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<i>Liars' League London</i>, because it's London, and because their live reading-performances and e-audio files are a new format for me. Plus I don't know who else would have taken that piece about how Santa and Lillef (the future Mrs. Claus) met. <br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">Why did you send work to <i>Versal</i>? Be honest. </span><br />
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Well I do judge a website by its cover, so I definitely approached <i>Versal</i> that way at first. And perhaps there was a suggested theme for issue 10 which I felt "Conrad's Hammer" suited. Either way, as I dig around looking for the right place for my work, I try to get a feel for the quality and editorial needs of the journal. Also, I like the low submission fee, it's very fair. I don't often submit to annual publications, out of impatience, but <i>Versal</i> appealed to me.<br />
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<span style="color: #999999;"><br /></span>
<span style="color: #999999;">What has lasted you ten years?</span><br />
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Too much of some and too little of others. <br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">Tell us what you're working on right now.</span><br />
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I'm working on a short story that's getting pretty long already. Like "Conrad's Hammer", it's set where I live now, more explicitly this time. It's about objects, antiques and heirlooms and art— the neat old stuff that's still around and how the current owners handle it all. Haves and have nots. The bad guy is a pastor, an Episcopalian priest. I tried to resist that, but it's true, I find a lot of religious people to be more harmful than good. It's also set at Christmas, and right now it looks like the end of the story will be a big Christmas bash, where I plan to kill off the pastor during the festivities. Megan M Garrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17177325304418811047noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-19472281078337108072012-09-23T11:00:00.000+02:002012-09-23T11:00:07.316+02:00For the Amdammers: local lit stuff<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The English Bookshop's recent (and jam-packed) Meet & Mingle was a wonderful demonstration of how much literary energy there is in Amsterdam right now. It's a far cry from what I flew into 11 years ago. And like clockwork, this fall once again brings some new literary programming to town, so I thought I'd take a moment to highlight two programs that I'm especially excited about.<br />
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<b>ART OF FICTION:</b> The wonderful Nina Siegal (of Time Out Amsterdam fame) has put together a top-notch series on the art of fiction writing. Fictioners out there, you're not going to get a workshop much better than this in our buurt. Nina's not only got her own novel on the shelves, but she has also worked with some of the leading writers of our time. The four workshops can be taken as a whole or individually, and the price is CRAZY CHEAP. For more information, click <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/495724260440582/" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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<b>LITERARY WALKING TOUR:</b> The English Bookshop is now hosting literary walking tours through this amazing city. Anyone who loves the printed word and wants to know more about the fascinating literary and cultural history of Amsterdam will love this new offering. And it's a great tip for your visiting family and friends! Complete details can be found <a href="http://shop.englishbookshop.nl/our_community/walking_tour" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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And as you probably know, or should know, The English Bookshop hosts an array of workshops and writing groups, from children's book writing to poetry critiques. <a href="http://shop.englishbookshop.nl/our_community/writing_workshops" target="_blank">Check out their site for details</a>.<br />
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Keep an eye on this space, dear friends, because we also may, just may, have something new up our sleeve.<br />
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Happy writing, Amdam!Megan M Garrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17177325304418811047noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-17477464585171187582012-09-17T10:16:00.002+02:002012-09-17T10:16:54.024+02:00Submission call: Send your work to Versal 11!Amsterdam's acclaimed literary & arts journal, <i>Versal</i>, is now reading for its 11th edition. Its editors are looking for excellent prose, poetry, art and the inbetween.<br /><br />Guidelines and submissions here: <a href="http://www.versaljournal.org/guidelines">www.versaljournal.org/guidelines</a><br /><br />A $2 submission fee applies, or submit for free between October 1 and October 7, 2012.<br /><br />For a close look at <i>Versal</i>'s tastes, purchase the current no. 10 or a back issue: <a href="http://www.versaljournal.org/order">www.versaljournal.org/order</a>. Pre-order <i>Versal 11</i> when you submit and we’ll waive the submission fee.<br /><br />The deadline for submissions to <i>Versal 11</i> is January 15, 2013.Megan M Garrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17177325304418811047noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-33226897834504653022012-09-03T15:54:00.001+02:002012-09-03T16:50:22.894+02:00Contributor Notes: Eric Magrane<i>This year we're posting "Contributor Notes": interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of <a href="http://www.versaljournal.org/versalten" target="_blank">Versal 10</a></i><i>. After a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silly_season" target="_blank">cucumber season</a> hiatus, we're back with Tucson-based writer Eric Magrane, who recently visited the border wall between the US and Mexico and wrote about his experience there. </i><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b>OF BORDER WALLS & LIGHTHOUSES</b></span><br />
July 2012<br />
(photos by Adela C. Licona)<br />
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Recently I visited the U.S./Mexico border wall on a scouting trip for a Border Wall Poetry Sounding. <a href="http://www.sonicanta.com/">Glenn Weyant</a>, sound-artist provocateur, has been playing the border wall as an instrument for six years and this is the first time that I joined him. Along with <a href="http://poetry.arizona.edu/content/homenaje-homage-cecilia-vicu%C3%B1a">Wendy Burk and Adela Licona</a>, we left Tucson before sunrise on a Sunday early in July, and drove the seventy miles to the border in Sasabe for our first stop.<br />
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As we traveled toward Sasabe, the border patrol presence was ubiquitous. We saw at least ten border patrol vehicles to every one non-border patrol vehicle, and the non-border patrol vehicles were likely off-duty border patrol agents. Clearly, this is big business.<br />
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The wall along this section of the border cuts through desert and grasslands and has a sublime presence. Stretching out across the rolling terrain, the wall continues to the border of the Tohono O’odham Nation and then abruptly stops. (This has sent many migrants through the T.O. nation, which extends over both sides of the current U.S./Mexico boundary.)<br />
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The wall is a manifestation of a geopolitical climate where the far-right state legislature of Arizona passes draconian and xenophobic laws such as SB 1070 (of which the U.S. Supreme Court recently struck down much, but left the “Show me Your Papers” provision intact), and a ban on Mexican-American studies complete with banned books (see one of our illustrious school board members discuss the Mexican-American studies ban on a piece from <a href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-april-2-2012/tucson-s-mexican-american-studies-ban">the Daily Show</a>).<br />
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In the meantime, the number of deaths from border crossers trying to cross this terrain is staggering. As of the fourth week of July when I write this, the number of deaths since October 2011 stands at 94 (The humanitarian organization <a href="http://www.nomoredeaths.org/">No More Deaths</a> keeps a running tab on their website.) And the wall doesn’t just affect human migration; it keeps many other species from their natural crossings, threatening the biodiversity of the region.<br />
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With this backdrop, we are here to interact with the wall as something other than an embodiment of fear and divisiveness. Glenn describes it this way: “If it is accepted that the border wall can be repurposed as an instrument when played, then this symbol of fear and loathing is capable of producing beauty, encouraging listening, developing unity, engaging dialogue and presenting an alternative narrative.”<br />
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And now I’m thinking about lighthouses. In Megan Garr’s introduction to <i>Versal Ten</i>, she writes, “set at the boundary where sea and land converge, the lighthouse fixed itself in my young mind as my first metaphor, a personification of who I wanted to become and the site of where I thought the world’s honesty could be glanced.”<br />
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If we think of objects as metaphors and embodiments of ideas, the contrast between a lighthouse and a border wall couldn’t be more distinct. One is a beacon and the other is its opposite. What would it take to turn what divides us into something that brings us together? Or, in an object-oriented ontology, can we interact with this object and change it and how it thinks? <br />
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Along with Glenn’s musical equipment, we brought poetry along, some in the form of language on clear acrylic glass that could be reflected onto the wall. The language included the words “BRIDGE” and “MISERY” and the phrase “OPEN SESAME”. The video here shows the reflection of OPEN SESAME while Weyant and Burk play the wall.<br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="300" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/46244431" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" width="400"></iframe><br />
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What role does art have in the world? It may be solipsistic to think that playing the wall as an instrument and interacting with it as a location to practice poetics could be a form of alchemy and could shift deeply embedded social and geopolitical structures that are deleterious to our species and to the earth. However, I believe—and hope—that it may add to that “collective willpower of our humanity, of our art, and of our drive to protect both” that Garr also writes of in the Introduction to <i>Versal Ten</i>. Megan M Garrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17177325304418811047noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-29628366891376764812012-07-09T16:00:00.000+02:002012-07-09T16:00:11.270+02:00Contributor Notes: Renee Couture<i>This year we're posting "Contributor Notes": interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of </i><a href="http://www.versaljournal.org/versalten" target="_blank">Versal 10</a><i>. You may or may not know that </i>Versal<i> is closely linked to the mountain town of Missoula, Montana. Many of our contributors, past and present, also have ties to this "Paris of the West". This week we speak to artist <a href="http://www.rcoutureart.com/" target="_blank"><b>Renee Couture</b></a>, who has a show in Missoula this November.</i><br />
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Have you been to Amsterdam? What did you do while you were here? If you've not been yet, what do you think you'd do in our fair town? </div>
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No, I’ve never been to Amsterdam. I’ve traveled a lot and lived abroad, and I love experiencing new places - people, architecture, food. I think I would do fine in town. <br /><br /><br />
<span style="color: #999999;">What is the first creative thing you ever did?</span><br /><br />
My father has this dough ball I made when I was perhaps five years old. I’d love to make a companion piece to it. It would be made from the same dough recipe, but it would be bigger. I would figure out the ratio between the size of the original dough ball to my weight as a five year old, and then use that same ratio and my current body weight to figure out the size of the new dough ball. I would make it look as similar as possible to the original.<br /><br /><br />
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What is the dumbest thing anyone has ever said to you about being an artist?<br /> </div>
Someone said, “what a neat hobby you have.” (Shaking my head and sighing as I write that.)<br /><br /><br />
<span style="color: #999999;">If you were an angle, what kind of angle would you be?</span><br /><br />
An obtuse angle. Obtuse angles are nice and open. I try to be a nice, open person. <br /><br /><br />
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If you could meet a visual artist from the 15th, 16th or 17th centuries, who would it be? And what would you talk about?</div>
<br />“Anonymous” or “Unknown Artist”. There’s a lot great work out there by artist’s whose names are not known. I’m curious about those artists. Would the artist be coming to my time, or would I be going to his time? I think the time period might dictate some of the content of the conversation. I hope we would be conversing over bourbon on the rocks, though. <br /><br /><br />
<span style="color: #999999;">Tell us something few people know about you.</span><br /><br />
I hate parsnips. I really want to like parsnips, but I just don’t. I want to like them because they make me think of the book about Banicula, the vampire bunny. I loved that book. <br /><br /><br />
<span style="color: #999999;">Other than </span><i style="color: #999999;">Versal</i><span style="color: #999999;"> (which has clearly been awesome), what's one great place you've been published?</span><br /><br />
<i>Versal</i> is the first place I’ve been published. I hope to find other opportunities similar to <i>Versal</i>.<br /><br /><br />
<span style="color: #999999;">Why did you send work to </span><i style="color: #999999;">Versal</i><span style="color: #999999;">? Be honest. </span><br /><br />
One of my friends had work in <i>Versal</i> a couple years ago. I bought the publication and really enjoyed it. I also wanted to “get my work out there” and I thought this would be great opportunity to have my work along side that of other great artists and writers. Plus I love that <i>Versal’s</i> format is the square. <br /><br /><br />
<span style="color: #999999;">What has lasted you ten years?</span><br /><br />
I have a pair of hiking boots I bought before leaving for Peace Corps in 2001. I still have the boots; I keep replacing the insoles. Now that I write this, I feel like I really need to go hiking more, that clearly I don’t hike enough because the boots are still in good shape. <br /><br /><br />
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Tell us what you're working on right now.</div>
<br />I’m working on some conceptual photographs and sculptures that focus on bio-regional ethics for an exhibit I have in November at the <a href="http://www.thebrinkgallery.com/" target="_blank">Brink Gallery</a> in Missoula, MT.Megan M Garrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17177325304418811047noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-23518163901839865192012-07-03T10:31:00.000+02:002012-07-03T10:41:39.216+02:00Fans! You're probably not seeing our posts on Facebook anymore.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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By now you've probably heard that Facebook has made some changes to its page posting policies. In a nutshell, you're not seeing most of what pages post anymore. Why? Because pages now have to pay to ensure our content gets out to our fans. If we don't do that, we're lucky if 100 of our 1500 fans see our posts.<br />
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Before I opine about this new state of affairs, I want to share with you what I've read about reversing its effects. <b>A simple first step</b> is this:<br />
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1. Go to the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/versaljournal" target="_blank">Versal page</a><br />
2. Under the cover photo on the right-hand side, click the "Liked" button<br />
3. Check "Show in news feed" if it's not already <br />
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This will help, but if you can spare the time, <b>set up an "interests list"</b> that combines all of your favorite pages. This will really ensure you see exactly what you want to see -- not what Facebook wants you to see. Instructions can be found in <a href="http://alwaysupward.com/facebook_helpers/Get_Your_FB_Page_Posts_Back.pdf" target="_blank">this PDF here</a>. <br />
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Though most of the burden here is on you, the "fan", there are things that we, the "page", can also do. And we're doing them. I'm a not-so-closet geek and follow <a href="http://lifehacker.com/" target="_blank">Lifehacker</a> and the like, so I'm educating myself. My goal? To optimize our use of social media so that we're interacting with you, our community. Feel free to feedback in the comments. We're always excited to hear from you.<br />
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As to my opinion about Facebook's latest move? It's douchey, but not surprising. Facebook is a business model, not a public park; if we didn't know that going in, then we weren't paying attention. Maybe Facebook becomes a house of advertisers, and maybe some people will enjoy spending their days liking Pepsi, Dior, and the occasional yet vague political outcry.<br />
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As for <i>Versal</i>? We'll continue to work to interact with you however we can. <b><a href="http://eepurl.com/eh4yT" target="_blank">Join our e-newsletter</a></b> to keep a monthly tab on us, or <b>add this blog feed to your burner</b>. <br />
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Meanwhile, check out ed Anna Arov in this photo series by Jaap van de Klomp: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=3676369865679&set=a.1050769587313.2009389.1167936499&type=1&theater" target="_blank">Face - Book</a>Megan M Garrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17177325304418811047noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-27333959515135452152012-06-27T18:12:00.000+02:002012-06-27T18:13:00.371+02:00Page 127<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Working with my hands thrills me immensely, apart from writing it’s the only activity that fully absorbs all my attention. The blank page in Versal ten was the perfect surface, both provocative and limiting. Using a needle, sand paper, sealing wax and hair from various specimens, including human, I set out to make my forty circles. <br />
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The day we were to gather at Megan and Shayna’s apartment, I sifted forensically through shelves and boxes in my atelier. I collect. My collection of stuff includes paper, rubber stamps, sewing kits, perfume samples, feathers, fur bits, bones and teeth, small porcelain or plastic figurines and body parts, pressed flowers, pigment, tiny cadavers, hair, etc.. I am emotionally attached to all the objects, so using them in a piece of art is a journey of loss that can only be justified by urgency. <br />
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The blank page in Versal ten provided that urgency. I scraped its surface, stitched human and dog hair to it, burned sealing wax, glued bits of plastic, bits of cloth, bits of fur to it. Working for eight hours straight, I became familiar and intimate with page 127 and all my anxiety of irreparably marking a page in a brand new Versal, disappeared. <br />
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I developed a system, using some materials in a row, developing each circle over a few copies. My circle making station was a range of tools, consisting of matches, a leather bound vintage sewing kit complete with tiny spools of yarn, tailor scissors, glue and tape, plus all the materials. As the day progressed it became impossible to navigate through the production line that Megan and Shayna’s living room had turned into, all of us spread out with a stack of unopened golden Versals at our side. The collective energy in that room was glowing and things were done to a journal, things were done to Versal ten. If I put my forty circles next to each other they would form a narrative, but now scattered around the globe they are archival units of a collection and community. <br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-87942154775144077022012-06-20T13:15:00.000+02:002012-06-20T13:16:12.182+02:00Contributor Notes: Brandon Shimoda<i>This year we'll be posting "Contributor Notes": interviews and guest posts from the writers and artists of </i><a href="http://www.versaljournal.org/versalten" target="_blank">Versal 10</a><i>. This week's installment features <b>Brandon Shimoda</b>, a poet whose crossings with </i>Versal<i> start (and persist) deep in the Rocky valleys of Montana.</i><br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">Have you been to Amsterdam? What did you do while you were here? If you've not been yet, what do you think you'd do in our fair town? </span><br />
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Here’s a photograph of me and my sister in the Netherlands, somewhere on the outskirts of Amsterdam. We’re standing on a road narrowing onto a levee before a row of windmills alongside a body of water. It doesn’t seem like anything is in bloom, but mud, grass wet and dry at once, sky white with heat, but it is cool—I’m wearing my Yankees jacket, my sister her white sweater, buttoned at the top. The photograph is from the early 1980s. We were living then in Overijse, outside Brussels, in Belgium. This is where my memories begin. Splitting my head open on the school bus. A neighbor girl with curly blond hair I loved and had a tea party with. A house with thirty cats. Hair and bees in amber light. A rectal thermometer. Horse chestnuts. A piece of chocolate on a roof. A pile of sugar on a counter. My father making green eggs and ham. A stuffed bear in a cardboard egg. Falling in love with my sister’s friends. My sister having to wipe me. Falling asleep beneath paintings. Reading <i>The Fox and the Hound</i> with my mother. We visited Amsterdam. I don’t remember the visit, or what we did. If I were to visit now, I would find Megan Garr and Shayna Schapp and with them have a long, disorganized meal, plates stacked atop plates, or none, but with a vinyl record skipping in the other room. Plus, I have always wanted to see Van Gogh’s <i>Wheatfield with Crows</i> (1890). <br />
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What is the first creative thing you ever did?</div>
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I took everyone’s shoes—off their feet, or from where they were scattered around the house—and placed them in a circle, toe-to-heel, interspersed with blocks of wood light dashes cut off a 2x4, on the navy blue carpet in the basement. Then I laid in the middle of the circle of wood and shoes, on my stomach, my arms at my sides, one cheek to the floor, and fell asleep. <br />
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What is the dumbest thing anyone has ever said to you about being a writer?</div>
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About ME being a writer or about THEM being a writer? I’m sure plenty of people have let slip dull, ignorant, ill-formed, ill-informed, judgmental and/or preposterous things about being a writer—including and especially ME! Though I’m not sure anyone has ever said anything DUMB. Looking at the word now, I’m reminded of DUMBO and DUMP, which makes me think of an elephant taking a shit. <br />
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If you were an angle, what kind of angle would you be?</div>
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There’s a poet here in Tucson, Arizona—where I live—named Renee Angle. I don’t know her very well, or at all, but I’ve always been interested in her work and what she does, and I suppose it is not totally impossible that we are twelfth, thirteenth or even fourteenth cousins, which, if true, would make me genetically something of an Angle already. <br />
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If you could meet a writer from the 15th, 16th or 17th centuries, who would it be? And what would you talk about?</div>
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One of the many left out of history—the poet whose work was lost or burned or thrown away by force or spite; the one who died early, or dispelled their young self in the old; the one who was ahead of his or her time, or centuries behind, still catching up, or resigned to being dragged under, as like a pack of leaves under limbs raking water, dragging with her, or him, the generative detritus of what had been abandoned in the past by bad assumption. We would talk about music, and I would say, Listen, we’ve figured a way to catch it, to hold it! And then we would listen to what had happened since. I would start with, for example, Akron/Family: <i>Please Lord give me strength to be nobody…</i><br />
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Tell us something few people know about you.</div>
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From 1996 to 1998 I recorded hundreds of songs under the name Cactus Cooler. Singing and guitar with some piano and drums. The first handful I recorded shortly after my grandfather died. I had a malfunctioning tape recorder from Salvation Army and in the basement of the house I grew up in recorded six or seven songs after Thanksgiving dinner. After that, I could not stop. I dropped out of college, cleaned houses, lived with a recovering alcoholic and his daughter, spent time in a hospital, took a Greyhound bus cross-country and back with two friends, delivered food to shut-ins in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, and listened to and recorded music. Recently, a friend I have known since we were four years old, digitized the original songs. I have been archiving them slowly here: <a href="http://cactuscooler.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">The Collected Songs of Cactus Cooler</a>. I have only recently thought this might be where the material evidence of my life as a poet begins. I played a show in Saratoga Springs, broke four strings on my guitar and ran out into the street. It was snowing, night, and the sky was pink. Yes, it most certainly is. <br />
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Other than <i>Versal</i> (which has clearly been awesome), what's one great place you've been published?</div>
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<i>We Are So Happy To Know Something</i>, made by Stephanie Anderson and MC Hyland. I love them both. Together they’ve made three volumes, all brilliant and beautiful, embodying the love and care they’ve brought to the occasion and space of each and poetry. I can feel the conversations they’ve carried on. Some of my favorite poets—Phil Cordelli, Dot Devota, Amanda Nadelberg, Alice Notley—appeared in the first two issues, so I sent poems for the third. They published five, all of which I wrote in Japan. “Published” seems here an inexact, near-bloodless word, as it does with such dwellings as <i>Versal</i> or <i>Cannibal</i> or <i>Poor Claudia</i> or <i>Filter</i> or <i>Muthafucka</i>, and so on, all of which feel predicated on the present terms of life, lives—of those involved, who see first and through to what needs to be made in that present, the moment—the life, the lives, coming out. <br />
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<span style="color: #999999;">Why did you send work to Versal? Be honest.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGIlwsATPO9Ln6uhyEFZYDw0tgOsvsnIh8Ut1bQhfM5ZIB4m-hetc2uvekzQSy7bnf-cvytckZWZRiTXCbHIpfgihhTCBU0nuZT2ykPyaX14mi_LBYPmUTsHNdPjT5OZA__yV3lacCFoc/s1600/Shimoda+%233+Nabil+Kashyap.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGIlwsATPO9Ln6uhyEFZYDw0tgOsvsnIh8Ut1bQhfM5ZIB4m-hetc2uvekzQSy7bnf-cvytckZWZRiTXCbHIpfgihhTCBU0nuZT2ykPyaX14mi_LBYPmUTsHNdPjT5OZA__yV3lacCFoc/s320/Shimoda+%233+Nabil+Kashyap.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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My friend Nabil Kashyap had a poem in <i>Versal 6</i>. I read it, and the issue, while eating freshly fried doughnuts on the sidewalk outside Left Bank, an anarchist collective bookstore in Seattle. I love Nabil, his writing and his mind, and trust all three implicitly. We went to school together in Missoula, Montana. Some of Sawako Nakayasu’s Takashi Hiraide translations were also in the issue. I was convinced on the spot, and sent poems shortly after. I did not know that the editor had also once lived in Missoula. I had a poem in <i>Versal 8</i>, and was especially happy to discover the issue’s cover art was by the artist Kerri Rosenstein, another friend from Missoula. We were once next-door neighbors. One day, while taking out the garbage—I had to walk past the windows of the other ground-floor apartment, Kerri’s, to get to the cans in the alley—I noticed a dark-haired girl standing at a large work table, working very intently on something: a drawing, I thought, from the way she was standing, and regarding what it was she was working on. After tossing my garbage in the can, I went around to the other side of the building and knocked on the dark-haired girl’s door. She answered and I said, Hi, I was just wondering what you were doing …<br />
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What has lasted you ten years?</div>
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“I am writing. Can you spare me ten years?” Pablo Neruda said this to Clarice Lispector in 1969.<br />
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Tell us what you're working on right now.</div>
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I’m still arranging shit on the floor. Now: my books—face-up, open, beneath a ceiling fan so that when the fan is turned high the pages of the books begin to flutter, reminding me of the condemned (malaria) house on the mountain in Belize where I spent a night with my friends Kristen and Ted, twelve years ago. The floor was covered two-inches thick with dead butterflies, and there was constantly the sound of dog’s pissing in dead grass. A family had been murdered there. The father turned out to be the murderer. The family’s clothes were still in the wardrobe and a hairbrush was resting on the bed. We drank water straight from the faucets in the bathroom. I will be living for a month this summer in southern Taiwan with the poets Dot Devota, Molly McDonald and Zachary Schomburg. We will be teaching writing to middle and high school students. The work will consist of recording the days, as it always is, the work, so the atlas can be added to—on the wall, the walls growing higher seeming thicker, so when they finally touch where we are, that is it. Also: I’m co-editing, with my friend, the poet and critic Thom Donovan, a retrospective collection of poetry and prose by Etel Adnan, due to be published by Nightboat in 2013. And also, little-by-little, I am writing a book of non-fiction about my grandfather. I don’t know really what is working …<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWNXLMvUbmJmZ9hJI7WclIyGe1a8-19VJAtKknIAawZCTUH-FCoH_K4YDCFejeN9mw7kKkwzKNAcqsRKliTqUc1razQx7D4W_mvGY5lsYbwbqbw9JfqKLW5R4advMIBdKEPJ_CaLDZDtE/s1600/Shimoda+%25234+Van+Gogh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="149" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWNXLMvUbmJmZ9hJI7WclIyGe1a8-19VJAtKknIAawZCTUH-FCoH_K4YDCFejeN9mw7kKkwzKNAcqsRKliTqUc1razQx7D4W_mvGY5lsYbwbqbw9JfqKLW5R4advMIBdKEPJ_CaLDZDtE/s320/Shimoda+%25234+Van+Gogh.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>Megan M Garrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17177325304418811047noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-78671867224517207222012-06-17T20:14:00.001+02:002012-06-17T20:14:20.373+02:00Brain Cookies 44I might be jumping on the band-wagon here, but whatever. I loved the Wire, and here is a great profile from <a href="http://www.maxim.com/tv/maxim-interrogates-the-makers-and-stars-of-the-wire">Maxim</a>. SO SUE ME.<br />
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<a href="https://encrypted-tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRysWxyTXXp8hLvvfQbP4VQ3rk6wK04HphpYiajKhvHK3ZHZ2aXRA" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://encrypted-tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRysWxyTXXp8hLvvfQbP4VQ3rk6wK04HphpYiajKhvHK3ZHZ2aXRA" /></a></div>
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I'm very, very late–but happy birthday Prince. I'll play your records all night.<br />
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The nation's poets have something to <a href="http://www.theonion.com/articles/shadows-meet-the-clouds-gray-on-gray-like-dusty-ch,28355/">say</a>.<br />
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<a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/internet/2012/06/dear-internet-why-you-cant-have-anything-nice">Unacceptable behavior. </a><br />
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We are all <a href="http://itself.wordpress.com/2012/06/14/we-are-all-macgyver-now/">MacGuyver</a> now. Maybe one of my favorite essays at the moment.Daniel Cecilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08636538755565594279noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6442854124012230891.post-26627661661089824072012-06-08T21:13:00.000+02:002012-06-08T21:13:39.448+02:00Sell us out<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.wordsinhere.com/versalten.html" target="_blank"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSI_911RPVx4S8bfYJJywb6BumIWcVtwStPgpMbwGmgT9rpqGEH_lRjxm2M2TBSAOxIi4VZmsIpfGN0AilD45n2xQYf05jCUXHFFZ5aAboW5rHO99LAJ38NlO_nhIbsOoL0na7P7AekWg/s1600/Versal10_Cover_300.jpg" /><span id="goog_230742175"></span></a><span id="goog_230742176"></span></div>
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There's a lot to like about the new issue of <i>Versal</i>. And we're not afraid of hyperbolizing about it:<br />
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1. A contributor list that'll make Norton Anthologies weep<br />
2. Art so fine, gallery walls the world over are bowing in ecstasy<br />
3. The handmade "750 Circles" project by each <i>Versal</i> editor, the first of its kind<br />
4. It's gold, people. GOLD.<br />
5. Your coffee table will never look back after <i>Versal</i> lies on it <br />
6. <a href="http://www.wordsinhere.com/versalten.html" target="_blank">This <i>vette</i> trailer</a><br />
7. The fact that it's only 14.95 (that's Euros and Dollars, folks. Apple styley)<br />
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Sell us out. We really won't mind. And you'll love <a href="http://www.wordsinhere.com/versalten.html" target="_blank">every page</a>.Megan M Garrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17177325304418811047noreply@blogger.com0