November 23, 2009

Trans-

Last month marked my eighth year in the Netherlands, a number I never expected to reach. It also marked the seventh year since a small handful of writers and I put our heads together to come up with what you now see here, Versal et al.

Just back from a trip to the States and still feeling the whir of jetlag; the sensation that I'm straddling the Atlantic is slightly more keen than normal, and the months of scribbled notes I have made to myself on translocality -- upon confrontations with art, late-night drinks with friends in bars, after people ask me "so what kind of Work does Versal publish?" (caps intended) -- seem rather daunting. I'm trying to work something out, and I promised Robert, sort of, that I would work it out on the blog. But I'm a reviser, see, and hesitant -- wary -- of absolutes. If you read my editorial in Versal 7, then you can probably guess that my work to define translocality is rather, in many ways, to undefine it.

But. Last weekend, Crossing Border put on a "minisymposium" on the "correlation between (literary) magazines and literary publishers", pivoting around the (in)famous McSweeney's and its various projects, with a few Dutch publishers thrown into the mix. I ended up not being able to make it down to The Hague in time, but regardless I feel the need to say something about the fact that Versal was not asked to join the local contingent of speakers at this event. To take a card from McSweeney's deck, we're a cool group of Gen X-cusp-Yers, and Versal is no Dutch eyesore.

The symposium's focus on the relationship between literary journals and publishers, and seemingly on how "paper" as a medium is the great savior of print (a recent Eggers theme), would have benefited from Versal's translocal perspective. Here is, perhaps, where I've lost you (if I didn't lose you already because you thought this was going to turn into a bitter rant). Here is also where all my little scribbles become a great daunting pile. But stay with me for a few more paragraphs; this isn't a five-paragraph essay. That Versal was not asked to join the program underscores the question the symposium seems to have started with, about the relationship between publishers and journals -- which is layered something like: between literary publishers and writers, between readers and printed matter, between the computer screen and paper, between global and local. One could say that it's all the same "between", just seen from different perspectives. And that between is the (growing) black hole that translocal writers fall into, or the crack we fall between, pick your metaphor/onomatopoeia.

What happens to the translocal writer, exactly? For many professions, longer-term work abroad is considered a CV must-have at any level, but writers who live more permanently abroad are better off, in many cases, going back home. From a logistic standpoint, an emerging translocal writer may face the following challenges:

1. Disengagement from his/her home literary community (e.g. loosening networks, lack of "being in touch" with "what's going on")
2. Limited engagement with his/her "new" literary community
3. Rejection from journals in either community due to the work's foreignness
4. Hesitation from "home" publishers who tend to prefer local (i.e. residential) writers who can give lots of readings, etc. to sell books

This symposium was an exciting event to hit the Netherlands, whether you like McSweeney's or not. If any of you were there, I'd love to hear about it. So here, finally, is my hypothesis: I believe that translocality is instructional, that translocal writing, e.g., can be a way of understanding literary production and craft in general. Journals like Versal are that greatly-needed bridge between national literary cultures, the spanning scaffolds that will enable literary publishers to notice the ever-increasing number of writers who are taking part (like so many others) in this global world. Using "the hell out of the medium" as McSweeney's asserts oversimplifies the answer to the great digital question of our literary age (i.e. how is the publishing community going to survive it). It's not just about making paper carry its weight. Part of the answer also lies in the traverse between the local and the global, and finding the writers who are working there.

November 21, 2009

More editor news

In my 6 November post I forgot to include news from Kate Foley who's on our poetry team. Kate was shortlisted for this year's Bridport prize (judged by Jackie Kay); she was commended in the Second Light competition (judged by Pauline Stainer); she has three poems and a review in the current Ambit and one poem in the forthcoming queer literary journal Chroma. Five of her poems also appear in the recently published anthology Cracking On. Congratulations Kate!

November 10, 2009

Versal welcomes another new editor

I am excited to announce another addition to our fiction team – Bonnie J. Rough. Bonnie is an American writer living in Amsterdam, Netherlands with her family. Her memoir, Carrier: Untangling the Danger in My DNA, is forthcoming from Counterpoint in spring 2010. Other work has appeared in MODERN LOVE: 50 True and Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit, and Devotion (Three Rivers Press, 2007), The Best Creative Nonfiction (W.W. Norton, 2007), The Best American Science and Nature Writing (Houghton Mifflin, 2007), as well as magazines, journals, and newspapers including The New York Times, The Sun, The Iowa Review, Ninth Letter, Identity Theory, and Brevity. She holds an MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Most recently, she lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where she was a Teaching Artist with The Loft Literary Center, and became the recipient of a Bush Artist Fellowship, a McKnight Artist Fellowship for Writers, and a Minnesota Arts Board grant. On her blog, The Blue Suitcase, she writes mini-essays about life as an airline family abroad.

With her experience as a writer and as an editor at The Iowa Review, Bonnie brings another new perspective to our fiction universe.

November 06, 2009

Read all about it

Every so often we will use this space to post literary news of Versal contributors and editors. Here's our first round-up:

Marilyn Hacker's new book Names will be published next month by W.W. Norton in New York. He and I, her translations from the French of poems by Emmanuel Moses, was just published by the Oberlin College Press FIELD Translation Series in Ohio. Both contain poems published in Versal 5. Nicole Walker (Versal 7) has a book out in December, This Noisy Egg, from Barrow Street Press. Dawn Lonsinger (Versal 6) published her first chapbook, the linoleum crop, at the start of this year with Jeanne Duval Editions. It was the winner of the 2007 Terminus Magazine Chapbook Contest chosen by Thomas Lux. Her second chapbook, The Nested Object, came out this August from Dancing Girl Press. She has poems forthcoming in The Journal, Blackbird, Cream, City Review, Post Road, Bateau and Packington Review.

Some editors have news too: fiction editor Robert Glick has stories forthcoming from Black Warrior Review and Denver Quarterly. Contributing editor Laura Chalar received the honorable mention for fiction in the Annual Literary Awards of the Uruguayan Ministry of Culture, for her short story collection The discreet charm of lawyering.

Congratulations, everyone! We love to hear about what past contributors are doing now, so please send any more news to us via our versaljournalATwordsinhereDOTcom email address.