qarrtsiluni news blog

Richard Garcia chapbook "Chickenhead" available from Foothills

Qarrtsiluni contributor Richard Garcia’s new chapbook, Chickenhead, was recently released by Foothills Publishing. This is a 36-page, hand-stitched production, and may be ordered from the website at the foregoing link. Its prose poems depict “a land where reality is pliable and facts of the imagination reign supreme, where Sappho morphs into Dale Evans, a dog becomes a psychiatrist and analyzes its master, and a gangster named Chickenhead resembles Christ,” according to the blurb by Peter Johnson.

Qarrtsiluni chapbook now on Amazon

A Walk Through the Memory Palace is now on Amazon.com. It retails for $5.95, and qualifies for free shipping if bundled with orders of other Amazon stuff exceeding $35. But as we note on our “In Print” page, an order through our E-store provides a greater share of the royalties to qarrtsiluni; an order through Amazon.com has favorable shipping rates to non-US addresses. One way or the other, we think it’s a real bargain. You’d be lucky to get a chapbook this high-quality for less than $12 from most other publishers.

New Twitter account for daily post links

Our first experiment with “crowd-sourcing” a dilemma today was pretty successful. On both Twitter and Identica, we posted this:

Other magazines (and some bloggers) use Twitter and Identica to share links to every new post. Should qarrtsiluni do the same?

and then just to get people riled up, we added:

Our position is that people need to learn how to use a feed reader, for crying out loud. We can post a tutorial if necessary.

The three people who responded on Identica were, as one might expect of the more web-savvy users of that service, fans of feed readers, so they agreed that adding automated posts to our stream would be a mistake. (Read the conversation.) On Twitter, however, while two subscribers said no, four others felt we should consider it. Chris Clarke said:

PR strategies based on what the audience *ought* to do always fail. How do the people you want to reach *actually* get info?

The winning suggestion came from someone with privacy-protected tweets: create a new account just for the automated feed, so those who follow our existing account for qarrtsiluni news won’t be annoyed.

The new handle is @qarrtsilunifeed. We’re using Twitterfeed, which produces posts from the RSS feed with the formula title-first few words-shortened link. Follow us there if that’s the sort of thing you like. (But we still prefer Google Reader.)

A Walk Through the Memory Palace published in dual print and electronic versions

Qarrtsiluni’s first chapbook is out! Read all about it at the official announcement post.

We’re very pleased to announce the publication of the first-place winner of our 2009 poetry chapbook contest, A Walk through the Memory Palace, by Pamela Johnson Parker, in dual print and electronic versions.

The print edition, published in collaboration with Phoenicia Publishing in Montreal, is 28 pages long and has a full-color, glossy cover with a black-and-white interior. The list price is $5.95.

The online version features a simple-yet-elegant design with an easy-to-use navigation system, and includes audio files of the author’s reading alongside each poem. It’s Creative Commons-licensed (Attribution-Noncommercial) to encourage the sharing of its content. Let us know if you write a review, translate any of the poems, or make videos of them, for possible inclusion in the news blog associated with the site (as well as in qarrtsiluni’s own news blog).

Qarrtsiluni's new look: more than a facelift

Qarrtsiluni just got a makeover. The new design, which is based on the iNove theme from Chinese blogger mg12 at NeoEase, is quite a bit wider than the old one was, allowing us to carry longer-lined poems (such as Jeneva Stone’s “Montana Sky” or M. V. Montgomery’s “My Lady Copia”) without the lines wrapping. We can also publish wider photos, too, though we are still limited by our desire to have the site remain fairly accessible to folks with dial-up connections. There’s a new header, looking rather like the old header, and we were chuffed to be able to incorporate our unofficial mascot into the footer (in place of some rather obnoxious WordPress branding).

The main reasons for adopting this theme, however, had to do with the functionality. As long as we keep WordPress.com as our webhost — and for security and reliability it can’t be beat — we accept rather severe restrictions on what we can do. INove includes a large number of semantic classes, elements in the theme that are individually defined, giving us much more control over the presentation of the site using only CSS modifications. (The Sandbox theme has even more semantic classes, but unfortunately its archive pages display excerpts rather than full posts, so it’s not an option for us. We want people to be able to browse without a whole lot of extra clicking.)

We also liked the fact that this theme allows us to post a notice at the top of the main page, which we can use for reminders of the currently posting theme, upcoming deadlines, and the like. It won’t appear in feed readers since it’s not a post, but that’s O.K. — it’s more for the benefit of first-time or occasional visitors. And we think the drop-down menus for the pages in the top navigation bar are pretty swell, too.

The more significant changes, however, have to do with our style of presentation. During our posting of the chapbook contest finalists, we found we liked the style — common among online literary magazines — of including an author bio at the foot of every post. We’ll be formalizing this change with the upcoming Words of Power issue. The author’s name will appear under the title, linked to his/her tag page from the index. Links to the author’s blog or website, if any, will be relegated to the bio. In place of notes on contributors, issues will end with hotlinked tables of contents from now on.

We’re of two minds about this, frankly. On the one hand, we think it will make much more sense to readers, and most of our contributors will probably appreciate the increased attention, as well. We’ve already been including a condensed version of the author bios in our daily podcasts, so for consistency’s sake it makes sense for the text version to follow suit. On the other hand, it does represent a big concession to what we still regard as an excessive focus on personality and individual accomplishment in modern arts and letters. And whereas before readers were largely forced to decide for themselves on the merits of a given work, now they will be able to see at a glance whether the author has published multiple books and won prestigious awards, or is a college undergraduate just beginning to send work out.

We have great faith in our readers, though, and we trust you won’t be influenced by such considerations any more than we or our guest editors were in selecting the works. Our primary mission remains unchanged: to build an online literary community that remains open to inspired amateurs as well as to seasoned, full-time writers. We hope you all will continue to be a part of that.

Feel free to share reactions to the new changes, positive or negative, via our Contact page. And as always, blog links, re-tweets, StumbleUpon links and the like are deeply appreciated.

Pacosz chapbook gets ReBound

News from the Red Zone, a poetry chapbook by regular qarrtsiluni contributor Christina Pacosz, was originally published in 1983 by Seal Press and, typically for a chapbook (or any book these days), soon went out of print. Now it has been reissued in a brand new edition from the wonderful Seven Kitchens Press, the first in its new ReBound series. Read all about it on the Seven Kitchens’ blogsite.

“The passage of twenty-five years has not diminished the relevance of [these] poems. As I have followed Christina Pacosz’s work, I have been impressed by her vision of the world, beset as it is by the problems she addresses. If poetry is to be returned to circulation after a time in the dark, let it be the poetry that exposes recurring concerns and shows determination to deal with them.”
—David Chorlton, in his letter of nomination

Qarrtsiluni's new daily podcast

We’ve relaunched our hiatus-prone podcast as a daily feature — basically, a sexed-up version of the audio clips we were posting already. iTunes responded much more quickly than it had in the past, so that was a relief: the podcast is here. For more on our thinking behind the switch, see the announcement post on the site.

New call for submissions; chapbook contest winners

We hope you’ve been enjoying our Economy issue, which continues through the end of August. As an inadvertent reward for regular readers, Dave accidently published the call for submissions for our next issue three days early, so some of you have already seen it.

We’re editing this issue ourselves, and we’re really excited by the theme, “words of power.” The deadline for submissions is August 31, and publication will begin around September 15, after a special inter-issue selection of poems from our chapbook contest finalists.

Our first chapbook contest has been an unqualified success, with fifty manuscripts entered, ten finalists, two runners-up, and a first prize winner: A Walk Through the Memory Palace, by Pamela Johnson Parker, chosen by creative nonfiction guru Dinty Moore. Please read the announcement post to learn about all the winners, read what Dinty had to say, and get the low-down on the judging process, which was completely blind and as fair as we could make it.

Congratulations to the winners, and our heartfelt thanks to everyone who entered. The screeners and final judge were unanimous in their praise for the high quality of submissions  (which is something we hear a lot from guest editors of the magazine, as well). If you entered and didn’t win, we hope that the contest served as a goad to organize and polish your work, and that you found it a worthwhile experience. We’ll let you all know when A Walk Through the Memory Palace has been published. In the meantime, we hope to read your “words of power.”

Facebook for poets?

Check out the new Read Write Poem, now with a burgeoning social network for poets and fans of poetry (powered by the WordPress über-plugin BuddyPress), and with many more regular features on tap for the front end. This is much more than a weekly poetry prompt site now. Here’s a rundown of the new features.

Founder and director Dana Guthrie Martin and community manager Nathan Moore served as guest editors for qarrtsiluni’s mammoth and ground-breaking Mutating the Signature issue. News manager Deb Scott and several of the senior contributors to RWP have also contributed work to qarrtsiluni. And for what it’s worth, qarrtsiluni co-editor Dave Bonta is enthusiastically on board, forming groups for video poetry and political poetry, friending everyone in sight, and even volunteering to write a monthly column on a subject he knows little about, “O Tech.” We hope to see you all there.

Gender balance

A post at Gender Across Borders, “Sexism in English Language Poetry,” in which reference is made to journals that “publish significantly more men than women,” got us wondering how qarrtsiluni measured up. We did a tally, and it turned out that of the 380 authors and artists we’ve published so far, 218 — 57 percent — are female. (You have to trust us on this a little, because a few use pseudonyms, go by initials, or have gender-ambiguous names.) That’s about what we would’ve expected based on who submits to the magazine: somewhat more women than men.

Women fill the issue-editor positions at qarrtsiluni a little over 60 percent of the time: 26 of 43 total stints in our three and a half years of operation. It makes sense that this percentage would be fairly close to the percentage of contributors who are women, since one of our requirements for guest editors is that they must have had work published in the magazine.