Versal is the best literary journal in English coming out of Europe.

That's what Penelope Fletcher, founder and owner of The Red Wheelbarrow bookstore in Paris, says anyway.

Finally getting around to posting some pics from our trip and reading at IVY Writers. Thanks to our friend and fellow editor, poet and critic Jennifer K. Dick and contributor Rufo Quintavalle for organizing an excellent evening.

Megan, Jane and Anna

Jen introduces the evening

Jane

Kate

Anna

Megan

Rufo

Lars Palm

Hey editors! We saw this when we were in DC too!

Kate & Tonnie

Shayna in the wool room (Plight, Joseph Beuys)

Megan, Shayna and Anna in the Infinity Room, Yayoi Kusama

An open letter to my grumbling inbox

Lately, my inbox has been full of grumbling. Of all kinds, mostly literary in nature of course since it's my inbox. I won't go into specifics because then I'd be grumbling, and this isn't a grumble-post. But it did all put me over the edge one night last week and I went over to Jane's and drank down a bottle of whiskey that Anna gave me and grumbled at Jane for awhile.

When grousing begets grousing, you know you gotta do something.

The grumble-cloud has since mostly cleared, and I am feeling hope for humanity again. So rather than reply individually to all the grumblings, all three weeks worth of it, I'd like to put forward this as an open letter to my grumbling inbox.



Laugh, people!

Sometimes we put on events

I hope you Amdammers can join us on the 26th.

Visiting writer Louis Armand and newly-landed local Jane Lewty will be reading at The English Bookshop. Louis is an Australian writer and artist who lives in Prague. Jane just moved here from Iowa City, where she did that famous workshop we all hear about all the time.

I'm excited about this reading because I like Jane and Louis's her friend so I'll probably like him too, and their poetries are stellar, and in the dark cold of the end of November it'll be really nice to step away from all the Versal submissions I'm reading and hear something live. The reading will probably be the last one we put on this year, and then we'll all go into that December black hole of holidays and reemerge sometime in January a little weightier and exhausted. If you're wondering how else to beat the winter blues, I passed this on Lifehacker the other day.

Anyway, if you're in the lowlands,

Check our site
Or obviously our FB

Seriously, we used to do this event thing more often. In fact, we were so good at that we grew too big for our britches. Do you know how hard it is to produce a quality club event every month with zero budget? Nevermind, even writing that sentence was hard. You know what it's like.

I like the little ad hoc stuff we do now. It's way more low-main, and my attention span at the reading is wider/longer/higher.