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

Our 2011 Pushcart nominations

Last night, Robert, Sarah, Shayna and I met (on Skype) to choose our nominations from Versal 9 for the 37th Pushcart edition.

Ahead of the meeting, we asked our editorial team for their thoughts, and we received back enthusiastic lists -- which ultimately amounted to nearly our entire table of contents. In other words, we all still love it all.

Having never actually had a piece from Versal chosen for a Pushcart Prize, and not entirely sure what "will make it", our nomination procedure is based on the simple goal to choose a selection of work that we feel is representative of the Versal reach. Therefore, we feel, not only do these pieces each rock buckets individually, but taken together they more or less (and admittedly, probably less), span the range of the work you'll find in our pages.

Congratulations to our nominees:

The Miracle of Mrs. Evelyn Howard, Russell Helms
The Freight, Jane Lewty
Demonstrum, Nate Liederbach
Where the water comes from and gets together with its friends, Tony Mancus
Winter Song, Jill Osier
The Reindeer Daughter, Suzanne Warren

If the good folks at Pushcart choose any of these for publication in the 2012 anthology, we'll know in April.

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!

Post-Holing to the Flesh Temple

Megan Robert Glick gave a shout-out to Sidebrow literary magazine earlier today via the Versal Facebook Page. I'm contributing my own praise for the journal. Add to that some frothing enthusiasm for Derek White's Post-Holing To The Flesh Temple.

Surreal, hyper-textual loveliness.