PHILIP LEVINE PRIZE IN POETRY

May 28, 2012 at 12:30 am (Links, Publishers, Recommended)
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Prize:  $2,000 and publication by Anhinga Press (Do not send manuscripts here; This prize is administered by California State University at Fresno.  See information below)

Final Judge:  Cornelius Eady

Postmark Deadline:  9/30/2012

Previous Judges:  Denise Duhamel, Brian Turner, Garrett Hongo, Dorianne Laux, C. G. Hanzlicek, Corrinne Clegg Hales, Philip Levine

Previous Winners:  Ariana Nadia Nash, Lory Bedikian, Sarah Wetzel, Shane Seeley, Neil Aitken, Lynn Chandhok, Roxane Beth Johnson, Steve Gehrke, Fleda Brown

About Final Judge Cornelius Eady:  He was born in Rochester, New York and is the author of the poetry collections Hardheaded Weather, nominated for an NAACP Image Award; Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and many other books.  With poet Toi Derricote, he is co-founder of Cave Canem, a national organization for African American poetry and poets.

2012 Contest Guidelines:

Manuscript should be original poetry, not previously published in book form, 48- 100 pages, no more than one poem per page.  Include two manuscript title pages:  one with name and contact information, and one with the name of the manuscript ONLY.  Manuscripts are screened and judged anonymously.  Multiple submissions are fine as long as the manuscript is withdrawn immediately upon its acceptance elsewhere.  The entry fee is $25.  Checks should be made out to “Fresno State (Levine Prize).”  Poets can submit more than one manuscript, but each will be considered a separate entry and must be accompanied by the $25 fee.  Online payments can be made via credit or debit card.  Please note, online entry fee is $25 plus an additional $3.38 service charge. (Here’s the link to CSU-Fresno’s contest announcement)

Mail entries to:

Philip Levine Prize in Poetry
Department of English
Mail Stop PB 98
5245 N. Backer Ave.
California State University, Fresno
Fresno, CA 93740 – 8001

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Talked to Margarita, Happy Happy Joy Joy

May 18, 2012 at 7:00 pm (Calls, Conversations, Publishers, Surprises)
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Margarita Donnelly, founder of Calyx — nothing in the world sounds as good as hearing her laugh.  Self called her today, and found out that the memoir self and others have been urging Margarita to write, for years and years, has just gotten a tremendous boost by the discovery –  of course in an attic, probably even a mice-infested attic (Now why, self, would you think about mice just because you keyed in the word “attic” a few moments ago, and now where do you think you are going with this you started out writing about Margarita, remember???)

Oh yes, the memoir in the attic, very yellowed, nibbled at the edges, turns out to be about Margarita’s memories of her mother, who died too young.  And now an agent is interested in helping Margarita get her memoir published, and there is no doubt at all in self’s mind that Margarita’s memoir will be an instant feminist classic!

And then self found out that Margarita has a plan to go to Venice early next year, and before self had fully realized what she was doing she found herself blurting out:  “Venice is great!  Can I join you?”

And Margarita said, “Of course you can join me!”

And now self has to figure out how to break the news to the husband, but as usual self gets ahead of herself, Margarita might just have been thinking aloud.

So, hmmm, what else was important about this week?

Marc who cuts her hair was wondering aloud if he should invest in Facebook shares.  Until that moment, self had never thought of Marc as the investing type.  Shows you how easy it is to misconstrue people!  Just because a guy is 30 years old, good-looking, and works in a beauty salon does not mean he can’t be interested in Facebook!  Especially Facebook shares!

Yesterday, Tiffany, the woman who’s been applying this wonderful gel-like nail polish on self’s hands and feet for months, suddenly up and asked self if it was true that the Philippines was the best place to get sex change operations.  Picture this:  dear blog readers.  It was 2 p.m., on a warm day in Redwood City, California.  The sun was shining.  All sorts of people were passing by the nail salon:  teen-agers, women in yoga attire (There is a yoga studio right next door, in the Andrew Building –  self kids you not, the name of the building is on a sign, that’s how self knows the building has the same name as her son), business people out on lunch break, even firemen (There is a fire station nearby).  And suddenly, this gorgeous young woman who self has known for several years decides the time has come to ask self about –  sex change operations in the Philippines ???

“Hmmm,” self replied.  “I don’t know much about sex change operations in the Philippines, but I do know you can have plastic surgery for something like $3,000 US.”

“Really?” Tiffany exclaimed.  “How much does plastic surgery cost here?”

And self, really reaching now, said “$10,000 US!” (which is probably way off the mark, self’s never been interested in this particular form of surgery)

But OK, she can pretend to be an expert, for Tiffany’s benefit, that is.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

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The Connectedness of Everything

May 14, 2012 at 2:03 am (Flowers, Lists, Publishers, Recommended, short story collections, Sundays, Surprises)
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It is nearing the end of Mother’s Day.  It was a beautiful Sunday.  Bella came in, out, in, out.  And the Iceberg rose that self planted in the front yard a couple of years ago chose today to go into sudden and spectacular bloom.  Perhaps if self has more time tomorrow, she will post a picture.

She is reading these three things simultaneously:

  • The AWP Writer’s Chronicle
  • The Women’s Review of Books  (She just renewed her yearly subscription)
  • The Economist

The husband put the TV on to the J. J. Abrams “Star Trek,” and then left the vicinity.  Declared he needed to water.  When self peeked out to see what he was doing in the backyard, he was having a smoke.  A glass of red wine was next to him.  Of course, he also had the sprinkler going.  Good one, husband!  He announced that the watering would take at least “an hour.”  Self went ahead and fed Bella, and then herself.

Self knows she has enough material for a fourth collection of stories.  But how to approach it?  Should she be joining contests?  She doesn’t think she’ll ever win, her stories are too strange, too hard to categorize.  She nearly got published by Grove/Black Cat.  That is, she spoke to an editor twice.  But all came to naught.

Perhaps she should be applying to more residencies.  The very last one she applied for (Hawthornden) is coming, and after that she has nothing for 2013 and 2014.  She deliberately stopped applying because she felt she had work to do in Bacolod.  She still feels she has work to do in Bacolod, but she also needs to get another book published.  What to do, what to do?

Mark Zuckerberg is turning 28.  28!  And Facebook is going public.  But self decides not to buy the stock.

She almost bought Apple stock, she is such a believer.  She still has her 1995 Apple laptop, which she had with her in Mojacar, Spain.  Though it weighs a ton, it is still running!

As of this moment, self has three working laptops, all Apple.  She worships at the Apple Store, yes.  Even though, when she was in DC last month, one of the trio of gals she got to know said, as they passed a bar:  “All white!  Looks like an Apple Store!”

When Steve Jobs passed away, she went right away to the Mother Ship, on University Avenue in downtown Palo Alto, and the plate glass windows were covered with post-it notes, in all colors of the rainbow.

Now, self hears that Eduardo Saverin, who was portrayed in “The Social Network” by a riveting Andrew Garfield (the new Spiderman), is renouncing his U.S. citizenship.  Purportedly, “for tax purposes.”  But self feels this news is connected to Facebook’s going public, in some way.  And perhaps also to Zuckerberg becoming a billionaire before he even turned 28.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

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Hey, You!

May 3, 2012 at 9:07 pm (anthologies, Books, Links, Lists, Publishers, Recommended, Women Writers)
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Yes, you!  Dear blog reader!  Whose impeccable taste is affirmed daily when you check in with Kanlaon (i.e., this blog, not the volcano, silly.  The volcano’s on the other side of the world, and self chose it to name her blog after because –  well, because she has a thing for mountains and volcanoes, who knows why.  It’s elemental)

Well, self wants to call dear blog readers’ attention to an excellent interview with Calyx Senior Editor Becky Olson.

It’s on bibliobitch (Way to appropriate the derogatory, oh fab bibliobitch editors!  Hear, hear!), which is the publisher of Bitch Magazine (See above parenthetical remark), and if you want to know how Becky and staff are handling the transition from founder Margarita Donnelly (Self’s Most Awesome Second Mother, after Dearly Beloved Doreen Fernandez) to the current crop of kick-ass women writers, read this now!

Here’s what Calyx did to add to the cultural landscape:

They published The Forbidden Stitch, the first Asian American women’s anthology in the United States.

They published Nobel prizewinner and newly departed poet Wislawa Szymborska, way back in 1980, when she wasn’t even Wislawa Szymborska.

Heck, they even published Barbara Kingsolver when she wasn’t even Barbara Kingsolver!

They published Chitra Divakaruni’s Black Candle, when she was still writing poetry.

They published the Filipino women’s anthology GOING HOME TO A LANDSCAPE!  Which self co-edited with Virginia Cerenio!  (And that volume included:  Shirley Ancheta, Arlene Biala, Michelle Bautista, Conchitina Cruz, Luisa Igloria, Reine Melvin, Maiana Minahal, Angela Narciso Torres, Barbara Jane Reyes, Veronica Montes, Maloy Luakiun, and so many many other women who feared they weren’t “really” writers because they hadn’t any publications yet)

They published self’s first book, Ginseng and Other Tales From Manila!

They published M. Evelina Galang!

Really, where would self be today if not for Calyx?  Puh-lease check out their website and if you can find it in your heart to dig out a little contribution (for the furtherance of women’s art and all future women geniuses) please do so.

Self will leave you with an excerpt from a Szymborska poem:

I believe in the refusal to take part.
I believe in the ruined career.
I believe in the wasted years of work.
I believe in the secret taken to the grave.
These words soar for me beyond all rules
without seeking support from actual
examples.
My faith is strong, blind, and without
foundation.

Beautiful. Challenging. Brave. That’s Calyx.

Stay tuned.

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Forget the Pulitzer! Here’s the Orange Prize Shortlist

April 20, 2012 at 3:15 am (Books, Lists, Publishers, Recommended, The New York Times, Women Writers)
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The mighty Pulitzer declined to award a prize to any of the novels on the 2012 shortlist, which then made – according to a headline in the Arts section of the Wednesday 18 April 2012 issue of  The New York Times — the publishers of the shortlisted books “cranky.”

Who cares?  The Pulitzer is so yesterday.  Let’s turn our attention to more important things, such as who is going to win The Orange Prize, “an annual prize in Britain that is awarded to a novel written by a women in English” (which is how the “Arts, Briefly” section of the Wednesday 18 April 2012 Times described it)

Here are the novels that made the Orange Prize for Fiction shortlist.  Self browsed the web and found that “Four Northern Americans, including Booker-Prize winner Anne Enright, made the list” and that Georgina Harding is “the only one” of “six nominated authors” who is British (quoting from THE WEEK)

  • Canadian Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues
  • Dublin writer Anne Enright’s The Forgotten Waltz:  (Self doesn’t know why the Times article abbreviated the title of Enright’s novel to The Forgotten)
  • Georgina Harding’s Painter of Silence:  Self thinks this title is pretty fab.
  • American Madeline Miller’s debut novel, Song of Achilles
  • American Cynthia Ozick’s Foreign Bodies (Ozick’s seventh:  According to the British paper The Guardian, Ozick is “the favourite” to win the Orange Prize)
  • Previous Orange Prize winner (10 years ago, for Bel Canto) Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder

The winner, says the Times, will receive “a bronze statue and about $48,000.”

BTW, three of the shortlisted share the same publisher:  Bloomsbury.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

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Friday the 13th, April 2012: Washington DC AALR Launch Party and Other Excitements

April 13, 2012 at 3:21 pm (Publishers, Recommended)
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Morning, Friday the 13th. The complimentary copy of the Wall Street Journal had this Page 1 Headline: NORTH KOREA LAUNCH FAILS. Self doesn’t get very much into the article. She gets only as far as: “North Korea launched a multistage rocket Friday morning, again defying countries that want it to stop pursuing advanced weapons, but it blew up less than two minutes into flight and parts crashed in the Yellow Sea off Korea.”

Self is meeting an old Assumption classmate for lunch at Kinkead’s on Pennsylvania Avenue. Tonight is dinner with the other writers participating in the Edgar P. Richardson Symposium at the National Portrait Gallery, tomorrow. Massages at the Fitness Center start at $105 for the Classic Swedish Massage, $25 more if you want the massage in your room (So, that fixes that notion). Meanwhile, the husband can barely contain his excitement at being in Washington again, he hasn’t been here for almost three decades. Bright and early, he went off to the National Air and Space Museum, about a five-minute walk from our hotel, toting along his camera.

Last night, Lawrence’s parents took us to The Big Hunt for the launch party for the new issue of The Asian American Literary Review, the “Generations” issue. It was crowded and dark and noisy and everywhere were people having a good time. Self doesn’t know how she managed to down a glass of Jack Daniels on the rocks, in something like five minutes. This morning, while getting ready to go over her notes for tomorrow’s event, she opens The AALR copy she snagged last night at the reception, and is reading the various responses to the quote from Prof. Min Hyoung Song of Boston College:

“The notion of an Asian American literature emerged at the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s, when members of a generation just reaching their adulthood began to connect their commitment to left politics with creative expression. A few short decades later, we find ourselves witnessing a flowering of literature by Asian Americans that would have been hard to predict. Are there any continuities between the earlier generation of writers which first raised the banner of an Asian American literature and a later generation of writers which inherited it?” (The quote continues, but self is badly pressed for time here)

Here’s a response self enjoyed. It’s by Sunyoung Lee, editor and publisher of Kaya Press (who were at The Big Hunt reception last night, only self couldn’t pick her out in the crush)

“First off, it seems worth pointing out that any notion that we might have of Asian American literature is wholly dependent upon what someone at some point deemed worthy of publication. Decisions made by countless editors and publishers have been instrumental in shaping what we can even discuss as Asian American literature. And it’s more than likely that those decisions were made for reasons that had nothing to do with an interest in establishing or developing something called Asian American literature.

“That’s because a lot of the books that are considered to be a part of the canon are published by commercial presses.

* * *

Touché, Sunyoung Lee! The response by Allan Kornblum, founder of Coffee House Press, also gave self much to ponder.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

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Latest Book Deals (Courtesy of PUBLISHERS LUNCH WEEKLY 20 March 2012)

March 21, 2012 at 4:53 am (anthologies, Authors, Books, Eavesdropping, Lists, Memoirs, Publishers, Weather, Women Writers)
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Latest e-letter from Publishers Weekly has announcement of the following deals:

Fiction Debuts:

  • Rachel Urquhart’s The Visionist, the story of “a 15-year-old girl who sets fire to her family farm, killing her abusive father, and finds refuge –  as long as she can guard her dark secrets — in an 1840s Shaker settlement,” to Reagan Arthur Books, in a pre-empt, by Dorian Karchmar at William Morris Endeavor
  • Jillian Cantor’s Margot, “reimagining Anne Frank’s sister’s experience in post-war America as Anne’s growing status as a cultural icon dramatically upends Margot’s own new identity, love, and life,” to Riverhead by Jessica Regel at the Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency

Thriller

  • A. J. Hartley’s Tears of the Jaguar, “bringing back protagonist Deborah Miller from The Mask of Atreus who has to connect four remarkable events or die trying:  the most famous witch trial in English history; the discovery of an underground Mayan tomb in the Mexican jungle; the disappearance of the original English crown jewels in 1649; and a string of murders perpetrated by an arms dealer in pursuit of a high tech weapon,” to Thomas Mercer for publication in Fall 2012

General/ Other

  • Roboticist and New York Times bestselling author Daniel H. Wilson and anthologist John Joseph Adams, eds.’s, Robot Uprisings, an anthology of stories, to Vintage, by Laurie Fox at Linda Chester Literary Agency and Joe Monti at Barry Goldblatt Literary

There were other deal announcements, such as the memoir by Amanda Knox’s former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, Presumed Guilty:  My Journey to Hell and Back with Amanda Knox, written with Andrew Gumbel, which describes Sollecito’s “first meeting with Amanda” and “his arrest, prison time, and subsequent release,” but the rain which fell all morning has finally ceased and self does not want to miss an opportunity to go moseying around Lacson Street.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

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Latest Book Deals (Courtesy of PUBLISHERS LUNCH WEEKLY 28 February 2012)

February 29, 2012 at 4:29 am (Authors, Books, Eavesdropping, Lists, Publishers)
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Latest e-letter from Publishers Weekly has announcement of the following deals:

Fiction by First-Time Novelists:

  • Kim Church’s BYRD, about a woman who bears and surrenders a son, her only child, without telling his father, little imagining how the secret will shape their lives, to Dzanc Books, by Emma Patterson at the Wendy Weil Agency
  • Nicholas Mennuti’s debut EXILE, written with SAFE HOUSE screenwriter David Guggenheim (originally announced by publisher as Guggenheim’s book written with Mennuti), a fast-paced, Hitchcock-esque thriller about an American businessman living in exile in Cambodia who gets mistaken for a mysterious government operative, to Mulholland Books for publication in 2013

General/ Other

  • Pushcart nominee and MFA grad Lisa Lisa VanAuken’s WOOLGATHERERS OF TAPPAN SQUARE, which “brings together three estranged sisters in their mission to save their beloved yarn shop and also protect their rumored magical ability to weave the most ardent of wishes into the scarves, mittens and fibers of those most worthy, brimming with magic, legends, folklore, and knitting, a novel about second chances … ” to Ballantine Bantam Dell, in a two-book deal
  • Author of the CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI, Andrew Sean Greer’s MANY WORLDS, “in which a young woman living in 1985 receives electroconvulsive therapy for her depression and, as a result travels through time to parallel worlds where she is forced to confront the uncertainties of love and the unpredictable consequences of even the most carefully considered choices,” to Ecco for publication in 2013.

There were other deal announcements, such as National Review’s Deputy Managing Editor Kevin Williamson’s THE END OF POLITICS:  The Retreat of Government in Our iPhone World, “a look at how the hidden economics and secret politics of failed government are prohibiting innovation and market-based solutions to our most pressing national problems,” but, alas, it is time to clear the sink of the dinner dishes.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

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Perusing the Economist Best Books of 2011: Short List

December 29, 2011 at 5:35 am (Authors, Books, Lists, Memoirs, Publishers, The Economist)
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Books self is interested in reading after perusing The Economist’s “Best Books of 2011″ list:

Biography and Memoir

History

  • Jerusalem:  The Biography, by Simon Sebag Montefiore.  “After his acclaimed biographies of Stalin, Catherine the Great and her lover, Potemkin, Simon Sebag Montefiore has finally turned to the book he was born to write.”

Culture, Society and Travel

  • People Who Eat Darkness:  The Fate of Lucie Blackman, by Richard Lloyd Parry.  “A page-turning, if horrifying, read about the murder of a young Englishwoman in Japan and the dubious workings of the Japanese criminal-justice system.”

Fiction

  • Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson.  The Economist calls it a “dense, mesmerising novella about a labourer in the American West … ” (Wonder what that is:  a “labourer” in the American West.  Not a cowboy, not a ranch hand, not a homesteader.  A labourer.  Can’t wait to read the book and find out)

Incidentally, all but three of the above books are published by Knopf (Two are published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one by Penguin Press).  Self is suitably impressed.

Stay tuned.

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Friday Morning, December 2011: Reading Indiana Review, Vol. 33, No. 1 and the Women’s Review of Books

December 9, 2011 at 4:47 pm (Books, Lists, Publishers, Recommended, Women Writers)
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Two more Christmas cards to send today.  These things take self a looong time to write, as she considers it un-friendly not to give a summing up of 2011.  But before self gets started on another long digression, she better get on with it.

On p. 16 of Volume 33, Number 1 of the Indiana Review, a poem by Megan Moriarty:

Facts About Locations # 1

One of the drawbacks of living in a snow globe
is you never know when it’s going to snow.

It could snow wildly every few minutes or
it could not snow at all for years.

The people who live there
use oxygen tanks or have gills.
Some are polite, whereas others are combative.

None of the streets go on for very long.
When it’s not snowing, all of the snow
piles up on the ground and never melts.

Most people make plans to leave.
There are legends of breeze globes and sun globes,
where every time the world shakes it gets prettier.

There are legends that say someone started those legends,
but each person chooses what they’d rather believe in.

Megan Moriarty’s poems have appeared in Rattle, Washington Square, Flatmancrooked’s Slim Volume of Contemporary Poetics and Best New Poets 2009. 

*          *          *          *          *

For dear blog readers who may be at a loss for what to give a beloved niece, daughter, sister, mother, aunt or even brother, son, father or uncle this Christmas, what about a subscription to Women’s Review of Books? (Individual Subscriptions are  $42/year)

Here are some of the books reviewed in the latest issue, Vol. 28 No. 6, the November/December 2011 issue:

  • So Good in Black, a novel by Sunetra Gupta (Clockroot Books)
  • Elegies for the Brokenhearted, a novel by Christie Hodgen (W. W. Norton)
  • An Atlas of Impossible Longing, a novel by Anuradha Roy (Simon & Schuster)

Just looking at the titles above, how can one not conclude that writing from/about India, in any shape or form, is “hot” ?  (But then again, when has writing from/about India ever been not hot? Self still remembers:  E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, M. M. Kaye’s The Far Pavilions, and Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance)

Here’s a passage from a poem on p. 14 of the Women’s Review. The poet is Jessica Greenbaum, whose second collection, The Two Yvonne’s, is forthcoming in 2012 from Princeton University Press:

For our sake, here, I’ll say that one book
held all a city and that one day was like my life.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

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