qarrtsiluni news blog

Gender balance

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 21:38:00 -0400

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.

The qarrtsiluni model?

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 10:32:00 -0400

Poet, playwright, and qarrtsiluni contributor Nicolette Bethel is the editor of tongues of the ocean, an online poetry journal based in the Bahamas that concentrates on poetry from the Caribbean and its diasporas. In an interview with the Caribbean Review of Books blog, Bethel says she’s a big fan of qarrtsiluni, and that she “stole a bunch of ideas” about internet poetry publishing from us, most notably the unfolding, blog-like publishing pattern.

She says “Part of the fun of qarrtsiluni is the almost chaotic nature of the journal, the edginess, the not-knowing what to expect (from the themes, from the guest editors, from the managing editors) — you’re always surprised.”

Thanks, Nicolette, and best wishes from us for tongues of the ocean!

Economy issue gets underway

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:32:00 -0400

The Economy issue launched today with some photos and a snippet of audio from Newfoundland. Guest editors Anna Dickie and Pamela Hart have selected a wide range of exciting material, and we expect the issue to unfold at the rate of 5-6 posts per week through August.

Submissions are open for a new qarrtsiluni issue: Economy. The guest editors this time are Anna...

Fri, 01 May 2009 12:33:00 -0400

Submissions are open for a new qarrtsiluni issue: Economy. The guest editors this time are Anna Dickie and Pamela Hart, and the deadline is May 31. Please visit the site for the complete details.

Silk Road has a good interview with Dinty Moore (who will be judging qarrtsiluni’s chapbook...

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 11:49:00 -0400

Silk Road has a good interview with Dinty Moore (who will be judging qarrtsiluni’s chapbook contest, still ongoing). We particularly like what he says about the growing acceptance of online journals:

The credibility battle is being won in many ways, by pioneer online journals that have remained very selective in the work they publish, by somewhat newer ventures like McSweeney’s and Narrative and Blackbird that have the funding and staffing to act like “real” magazines and draw in the star power, and by conventional print magazines that are opening up more and more online content. I suppose there are some tenure committees that still turn up their collective egghead noses at online publications, but most writers I know, and especially if they are younger, don’t carry that prejudice any more.

Kudos to Brent Goodman for not letting a little thing like a heart-attack dissuade him from his...

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 20:54:25 -0400

Kudos to Brent Goodman for not letting a little thing like a heart-attack dissuade him from his poem-a-day NaPoWriMo schedule. (We were still very alarmed to learn about this, and extend our best wishes for a speedy recovery.)

The Opposite of Cabbage

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:19:00 -0400

Rob Mackenzie’s first full-length collection of poetry, The Opposite of Cabbage, was published earlier this month by UK-based Salt Publishing.

Messiahs parachute themselves to disused northern fairgrounds, a woman diets until practically invisible, trained apes teach a colony of drunks how to dance, a bingo night fuels familial despair and love, and an airborne cabbage blasts a cyclist into orbit. With precision of language and a colourful, anarchic spirit, Mackenzie’s poems focus on their subjects with humanity and hard-won compassion. They have a light touch, but are never trivial. They are for readers who trust that questions are rarely simple and answers never final.

Rob served as co-editor for qarrtsiluni’s Making Sense issue, and we’ve published three of his poems, as well. Rob’s become an influential figure in the contemporary Scottish poetry scene, in part because of the popularity of his blog, which draws commenters from all over the UK and around the world.

In other qarrtsiluni-issue-editor-first-book news, Brent Goodman’s The Brother Swimming Beneath Me — which you can order directly from the author, as we noted the other week — is now featured on his publisher’s front page as a “spotlight book,” with three glowing blurbs. Check it out.

Cassandra Pages turns six

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 23:40:06 -0400

Qarrtsiluni managing editor Beth Adams has now been blogging at the cassandra pages for six years. She commemorated the occasion with a post reflecting on some of the changes she’s observed in blogging and online publishing in recent years. Check it out.

Creating a body of work over time continues to be, I think, a critical goal of the artistic life whether or not one achieves “success” - it’s through the process of committing ourselves over years and decades that we finally begin to see ourselves and our work, and become able to put them into the context of our world and the time in which we’ve lived - and the reward for that is a life more richly lived than many. I find the regular disicipline of writing for the web - along with my online relationships - a great help in that goal because the biggest challenge in art is always, simply, keep at it.

Best of the Net anthology recognizes qarrtsiluni authors

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:28:00 -0400

We’re pleased to announce that a short story by Teju Cole first published in qarrtsiluni has been selected for the Sundress Best of the Net 2008 anthology. “Modern Girls” was selected by Carey Wallace and Dana Guthrie Martin for our Hidden Messages issue, and was selected for Best of the Net by fiction judge Andy Mozina.

Speaking of Dana and Carey, they’re both included among the additional three qarrtsiluni authors whose work made it onto the list of finalists for the 2008 anthology. Carey Wallace’s story “The Century Room” and two poems, Dana Guthrie Martin’s “And the Crickets Outside the Window” and Monica Raymond’s “Moth and Rat” all originally appeared in our Insecta issue, which was edited by Ivy Alvarez and Marly Youmans. Dorianne Laux was the poetry judge for Best of the Net this year.

Back in August, Dave and Beth submitted the maximum number of nominations permitted — two short stories and six poems — after a couple of days of back-and-forth and agonizing over lengthy lists of our favorite posts from the previous year. In addition to those already mentioned, we nominated: “What We Ate After Passing The Cape of Eleven Thousand Virgins,” by Luisa A. Igloria; “Hallowed and Behold,” by Allan Peterson; “Cyclamen,” by Katherine Durham Oldmixon; and “Self-Portrait as Dryad, No. 5,” by Marly Youmans.

Qarrtsiluni contributor and past editor Brent Goodman’s debut volume of poetry, The Brother...

Thu, 12 Mar 2009 13:33:00 -0400

Qarrtsiluni contributor and past editor Brent Goodman’s debut volume of poetry, The Brother Swimming Beneath Me, is now out. Brent has a Paypal button on the sidebar of his blog of the same title where you can order a signed copy. For a long-time reader of his blog such as your humble scribe, it’s been fascinating to follow the whole process involved in writing, submitting, editing, and finally publishing a book of poems.

If you’re within driving distance of Madison, Wisconsin, Brent will be celebrating the book launch with a reading at Avol’s Books on Saturday at 7:00 pm.

Two qarrtsiluni contributors have recently published new chapbooks of poetry. Martin Willitts,...

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 11:38:00 -0500

Two qarrtsiluni contributors have recently published new chapbooks of poetry. Martin Willitts, Jr.’s Garden of French Horns is his third chapbook with Pudding House Publications, and includes “Simple Things,” which first appeared in qarrtsiluni. It’s not listed on the nearly unusable Pudding House website yet, but in the meantime one can order his second book with Pudding House, Lowering Nets of Light (2007), which is listed as a new book (though his last name is spelled wrong) and which, he tells us, contains his poems about cancer.

Matthew Hittinger’s new chap Narcissus Resists is available in two forms: in treeflesh from Amazon or Createspace, or as an ebook with audio from Issuu. The publisher in either case is MiPOesias. Narcissus Resists had won the 2007 Beauty/Truth Chapbook Contest from the online magazine Beauty/Truth, but they subsequently folded without a word to the author and left him in the lurch. We can be grateful to Didi Menendez at MiPOesias for stepping forward to rescue the project and doing such a fine job with it.

We’re soliciting submissions to our first annual poetry chapbook contest, which will be judged...

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 15:51:16 -0500

We’re soliciting submissions to our first annual poetry chapbook contest, which will be judged by Dinty Moore. See the contest page for complete details on how to submit and why we asked a nonfiction author to judge it.

Qarrtsiluni contributor Kathleen Jesme is featured today in our favorite poem-a-day site, Poetry...

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 07:53:33 -0500

Qarrtsiluni contributor Kathleen Jesme is featured today in our favorite poem-a-day site, Poetry Daily. Congratulations, Kathleen!

We’ve just learned about another way people can make audio recordings of their work for...

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 23:17:10 -0500

We’ve just learned about another way people can make audio recordings of their work for qarrtsiluni. A new contributor, Dustin Brookshire, made a very clear MP3 with his iPhone using a free application called iTalk. He said, “All I had to do was download the free version on my computer as well. It was soooooo easy that I was quite surprised and actually just recorded another poem for my blog.”

We’ve added this new option to the growing list of suggestions on How to Make an Audio Recording. Thanks, Dustin!

We congratulate poet and qarrtsiluni contributor Christina Pacosz for the selection of her chapbook,...

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 11:49:04 -0500

We congratulate poet and qarrtsiluni contributor Christina Pacosz for the selection of her chapbook, Notes from the Red Zone, as the inaugural volume in Seven Kitchens Press’s Rebound Series. Dave can vouch for the fact that Seven Kitchens — the baby of another qarrtsiluni contributor, Ron Mohring — does beautiful work, so we’re excited that Christina’s Notes will get what’s sure to be a spectacular makeover.

Notes from a Red Zone was nominated by David Chorlton, and the announcement post quotes from his letter:

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.

“Whoops!” That was our reaction when we started hearing from some of our friends...

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 10:47:00 -0500

“Whoops!” That was our reaction when we started hearing from some of our friends overseas that they were being hit with exorbitant shipping fees when they tried to order the new print edition of qarrtsiluni from Lulu.com. Beth did a quick exploration of other options, and decided that the best and easiest solution would be to polish our abandoned CreateSpace version so people could buy it through Amazon.com. Links to both versions are now listed at the top of the print edition announcement in the Apocalypse issue archive. The two versions should be equal in quality now, though Lulu’s has a creamier paper, according to Beth.

Thanks to everyone who’s already ordered a copy, and our sincere apologies to anyone who may have already ordered the Lulu.com edition from overseas and has suffered sticker shock. We’re still feeling our way in this print business, obviously, and we beg your indulgence.

Our first print edition is finally available! After a serious flirtation with Amazon’s CreateSpace...

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 13:41:51 -0500

Our first print edition is finally available! After a serious flirtation with Amazon’s CreateSpace service, and not liking the results, we realized the truth of the Zen adage “first thought, best thought,” and went with Lulu.com. Here’s the storefront of our publishing partner, Phoenicia, and here’s what it looks like. As we say in the announcement post at the head of the issue archive,

This first foray into print publishing represents a big step for us. We want to test the viability of offering a print edition, feeling that print still does carry a certain kind of legitimacy in the world of contemporary literature which our writers definitely deserve to have, and we also feel that hard copies of published work could help us increase the journal’s already excellent reputation and broaden its base among critics, reviewers, and some readers and writers as well. If this volume is well-received by you and others, we are also considering an anthology from qarrtsiluni’s first three years, as well as an annual chapbook contest. None of this will affect or distract us from our primary focus, which is our online publishing and web presence.

All proceeds from “Journaling the Apocalypse” will support future projects like these. This is all a labor of love for us, though like any non-profit arts organization we hope someday to have a small income stream that can at least pay a small amount to the artists and writers and guest editors who make the whole qarrtsiluni experiment burst forth into reality. This is our first step in that direction, and we hope you’ll take it with us.

Qarrtsiluni contributor Alistair Noon’s first chapbook of poetry has just been published by...

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 09:14:41 -0500

Qarrtsiluni contributor Alistair Noon’s first chapbook of poetry has just been published by Oystercatcher Press, and may be ordered here. Oystercatcher “specialises in contemporary, cutting-edge poetry,” according to the press release, which lauds Noon for his “worldly intelligence, striking verbal dexterity and a technical accomplishment by no means common in today’s poetry world.” We can’t resist reprinting the sample from the publisher’s site:

Mikhail the Domestically Detested
and George the Unfortunate Progenitor
have thawed in Iceland. Yugoslavia is at war.

Someone is strumming unplugged,
the sounds reeling down a stairwell.
Where’s the melancholy, alcoholic nose
of Belkin, with his squirrelish name
and ear for slang and news?

Qarrtsiluni contributor C. E. Chaffin has a new book of poems out from Diminuendo Press. Order...

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 09:24:00 -0500

Qarrtsiluni contributor C. E. Chaffin has a new book of poems out from Diminuendo Press. Order information and a sample are here. We’re pleased to see blurbs from two other Qarrts contributors, Kate Bernadette Benedict and Norman Ball. Kate says,

The unexpected light in these poems is a certain sort of light: faint, slant, the light of twilight or a fading penlight or a barely discernible sliver of moon. Yet the poems pierce and burn.

And we love this quote from the sample poem:

Everyone is Jesus to me,
everyone who leaves
a space to occupy.

We’ve rewritten our page on how to make an audio recording to include a couple of new...

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:13:35 -0500

We’ve rewritten our page on how to make an audio recording to include a couple of new suggestions, most notably: you can use a camcorder. Dave just discovered how easy it is to extract audio tracks from videos.