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Canadian anthology, “Side Effects,” seeks proposals for personal essays on mental illness. Submit a max. 350-word proposal and short bio as .doc or .rtf file. Deadline: October 1, 2009. Payment: upon publication. The best proposals will be included in a proposal package for publishers. For full details email andboden@gmail.com or lrowntree@look.ca

Torontoist blog is looking for writers/contributors to cover all things related to Toronto (news, arts, events, culture, transit, politics, photography, advertising, street art and graffiti, food, etc.). More details...

Bionicbong (Japan) is seeking contributors for its literary magazine on things Japanese. Stories should have a Japanese feel. Length: 1500 words max. Deadline: July 31, 2009. More details...

Entries are invited for New Millennium Awards for Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction. Appreciates "originality, accessibility, musicality, psychological insight, and moral sensibility." Entry fee: US$17. Deadline: July 31, 2009 (extended). More details...

Dream Quest One (US) invites poetry and short story entries for their writing contest. First prizes: $500 (fiction) and $250 (poetry). Fiction: 5 pages max. Poetry: 30 lines max. Theme: open. Entry fees: US$10 per story or US$5 per poem. Deadline: July 31, 2009. More details...

“Stories are the back door into a very deep place inside of us. A place where reason doesn’t always reign.” – Ira Glass

No related posts.

Sketch in progress.....

So my friend, Dema, just got a new fish. He's a happy little beta fish with orangey-red tints. His interests include: swimming around his tank, eating his food pellets for breakfast, and watching TV (he seems to look towards the light when she watches TV, and she works in the television industry . . . so he must like TV!). He also enjoys occasional treats of dried bloodworms once a week. Yum.

She misses him when she goes to work, which got me wondering . . .what do you suppose he does when she's not at home? Leave a comment with what YOU think goes in the thought bubble.

Also, Dema hasn't decided on a name for him yet. For now, she calls him “Fishy.”

Think you can help? Let us know what you think his name should be! Leave your ideas in the comments, and I'll let you know what she names him!

— Ratha, STACKS Writer

Just when you think we can't possibly get any more excited for the new Harry Potter film, comes a real treat as seen in the new HBP "First Look" at Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. NOTE: SPOILERS GALORE New funny moments with Ron, Lavender, Slughorn and more can be seen in part one here via Youtube. However it is part two that is the most striking of the new video feature. Delightful new... Read the rest of this post

And also to Louis Armstrong (America at its best...)

Author J.K. Rowling has contributed a new piece to a book for charity that will be out in October of this year. As noted on the official website of author Jessica Adams, Jo has donated a piece that will be included in  the new Kids' Night In Three. Jessica Adams writes:
"Also on the charity book front we're really excited to have J.K.Rowling on board for Kids' Night In Three, which debuts in Oct... Read the rest of this post

PMS Poetry seeks submissions for an anthology of poems "infused with the irritability, despair, sadness and horror of PMS or Menopause." Working title: "Cranky Town." Deadline: August 1, 2009. Send submissions to: pmspoetry@gmail.com. More details...

Are you receiving emails from ALSC's listserv? Here's a message from Jenny Najduch, Marketing Specialist, Membership of the Association for Li... Read the rest of this post

From Bobby Kennedy's grave site at Arlington National Cemetery

Leepike Ridge by N.D. Wilson

My review

Pop Montreal and Matrix Magazine invite fiction and poetry entries for the Matrix Litpop Award. Categories: Fiction (5000 words max.) and Poetry (up to 5 poems). Prize: a round-trip ticket to Pop Montreal from September 30-October 5, VIP pass to the Pop Montreal Festival, accommodation, publication in Matrix Magazine with full honorarium, and presentation at a special Matrix Litpop event. Entry fee: $25. Deadline: July 15, 2008. More details...

Quarterly journal The Writer's Block is looking for submissions of poetry, fiction, flash fiction, reviews, photography, and artwork for its third edition. Wants writing that is accessible and delivers immediate impact. Deadline: July 15, 2009 (new deadline). More details...

Don’t forget to watch the Twilight Zone Marathon on the Sci Fi Channel today. The Zone is my favorite TV show of all time! I am watching as I am cooking dinner for 40 people tonight!

Previously we told you about the new Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Potions Making Contest on YouTube.  At this link, click on the tab that reads "Vote" and you can give thumbs up or thumbs down to the selected submissions. Good luck to all the contestants!

After reading Bill's review of ALSO KNOWN AS HARPER by Bill at Literate Lives, I had to put it at the top of my stack. I finished the book this week and LOVED it! I agree completely with Bill. This is a great read. One that I am happy to have put on the top of my stack.

Those long, spindly legs make him a bit shaky.

People keep emailing me articles about the “good ole days,” meaning roughly that time period from 1950 to 1964, somewhere between “I like Ike” and the Civil Rights Act. These articles always extol the virtues of a so-called simple life, a time when everything cost less, women were supposed to be virgins when they married, and white Christian men ruled the western world. But do these people really remember what it was like back then? I do. Thank God that time is over!

I was born in 1951, which means I grew up in the 1950’s and came of age in the late 1960’s. I remember lots of trivial things from that era, like manual typewriters, rotary-dial phones, ugly poodle skirts and even uglier hairdos (beehives and cast-iron curls); uncomfortable girdles and stockings; really cool cars and some terrific movies; a few great black-and-white TV shows like “The Dick Van Dyke Show” as well as some dumb-as-dirt TV fodder (remember the Beav?). If you only watched old reruns, and never read a book or talked to people who lived through that era, you’d think America in those days was a bucolic Eden mostly filled with docile Christian white people. It wasn’t like that at all.

When I look at old TV commercials and magazine ads, and when I hear people talking about 29-cent hamburgers, I am reminded of the woefully bad food in America during the “good ole days.” Coming from New Orleans, where great food has always been the norm, I never knew there was bad food in the world until we left town. We moved around some in my childhood, and we traveled a great deal, so I had a chance to see what was out there in the American hinterlands, and way too much of it was not only inedible but downright unhealthy. Remember diets loaded with saturated fat and corn syrup? Remember when the apex of good “cuisine” was a t-bone steak smothered in thick brown sauce or a lobster drenched in butter? The only “foreign” cooking you ever heard about was French, and the only Italian cuisine most Americans had ever sampled was pizza and spaghetti. If you look at a popular cookbook from the 1950’s, you’ll find it loaded with stuff like green bean casserole, tuna noodle casserole, fruit cocktail cake and green jello with marshmallows, all of which were considered fit for human consumption in those days.

Before he married my mother, my American Indian dad had lived all over the world and had developed an international appetite. My mother was well traveled and a good cook, and she would have gladly tried her hand at ethnic cuisine, but she just couldn’t get the ingredients required. If we had stayed in New Orleans like my mother wanted, most of the ethnic essentials would have been available, but my dad’s job moved us several times, and in the late 1950’s we wound up in Pittsburgh (where people had never heard of red beans and rice or fried chicken) for three years and, a couple of moves later, we finally landed in an awful little jerkwater town in Alabama where people fried almost everything that hit the dinner table. In those pre-internet days, living in such a place meant living among people who had never even heard of tacos much less humus or mushu pork. We had to drive a hundred miles either north or south to a real city (not the one attached to the nearby military base) to buy culinary ingredients (and almost everything else), and even in those cities, there wasn’t much to choose from. We’re talking about the south in the 1960’s, where everything was either drowned in mayonnaise or deep-fat fried in lard or corn oil. I remember when I saw my first tub of yogurt in a grocery store. Eureka! In those pre-Starbucks days, my mother was considered weird for lacing her coffee with vanilla or rum flavoring and drinking it iced. At nineteen, I married my first husband, who was from Washington, D.C. He whisked me off to points north and introduced me to a world of culinary delights that I never knew existed except in my dad’s travel tales: lox and bagels, vichissoise, souvlaki, and every other imaginable ethnic cuisine in that truly international city. I had hit the mother lode! I was in absolute heaven. I was also introduced to a city where women and minorities could actually get good paying jobs and were not treated like second-class citizens. For the first time in my young life, I made friends with gay people, African Americans, and people from Japan, India, Egypt, Canada, Ireland, Belgium, Korea, Vietnam, Venezuela. And I found Native Americans other than my dad’s family, a first. I became a hippie and ate granola. I joined the National Organization for Women and burned my bra at a rally. I loudly protested the war in Vietnam. I was reborn! It was the 1970’s and anything was possible. I gladly waved goodbye to the “good ole days.”

There was a reason why things cost less in the good ole days—people made less money than they do now. Duhhhhh! And women were paid a lot less than men as a rule. In those days, women were expected to get married, be housewives and mothers, and generally become servants of their husbands. The poor women who had to work were treated like children by their bosses and they certainly made a lot less money than their male counterparts. It was hard for a woman to become a professional like a doctor or lawyer or engineer in those male-dominated fields. Many women attended college, but they were supposed to become teachers and nurses and secretaries, and until the 1960’s, they were expected to quit working when they got married. Women in those days did not generally make large purchases such as cars and homes, and their husbands usually handled the family finances. And God forbid, if a single woman got pregnant, she had few choices: (1) an illegal back-alley abortion; (2) a shotgun wedding; (3) a home for unwed mothers. If anyone found out the truth, the poor woman was branded for life. Ah yes, the good ole days!

Whenever I receive those “good ole days” emails, I always wonder if the people sending them to me have undergone lobotomies. Don’t they remember the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam? How about Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Vernon Johns, Selma, Birmingham, Little Rock, the entire state of Mississippi? Do these people even remember the assassinations of President John Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Dr. King? Do they remember “restricted” clubs, schools, restaurants? No Jews, blacks, Asians or American Indians allowed. I remember all of that and more.

Having grown up in the south, my memories of the “good ole days” include whites-only signs everywhere, segregated schools, the “n” word, the Ku Klux Klan, rampant racism and classism, Confederate flags, and fear—fear that the southern white Christian way of life would shortly come to end. And it did. That termite-ridden society inevitably came to a screeching halt not long after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, and right about the time Johnson ramped up the bombing in Vietnam.

Short-sighted, nostalgic twits have blamed the sea change in American society on everything from Elvis to the Beatles to the mini-skirt, but entertainers and fashion trends are never the cause of societal change, they are merely reflections of it. Even though they had gone through two world wars, Americans before the late 1960’s were still rather isolationist. Except for a very small minority, they really believed in the garbage their government and their TVs were spewing into their living rooms every night. But there is a big world out there beyond our borders, and it was spilling over onto American soil and airwaves exponentially. Did eleven states suffering from social dry rot really think they could keep American apartheid alive indefinitely while the riots raged in south central Los Angeles and our nation’s capital? Did they really think they could get away with killing three freedom riders from the north and four little black girls in Birmingham and Martin Luther King in Memphis? Did men really think they could keep women enslaved in the interior when women in New York and Chicago and San Francisco were burning their bras and demanding equal rights? Yes, most of them really thought they could, until it all came crashing down on their obtuse little pointy heads and the “good ole days” were gone forever.

Brian Kubarycz - Six Pieces:

These six pieces run the full gamut, don't they?  One page stories, a longer short story, a couple of poems.  There were two things that continued to jump out at me - his brief inclusions of Christian references, and his vocabulary, which had me thinking in terms of writing from long ago.  Specifically this second point, usage of words or phrases like:

"Crouching on shore, my skin now rubicon, on came the nights.  Space compacted me, the compass shrank down to a pit of iron ice;" ("Puerto del Sol")

"The very book of death has no horn but doth rise up, vermiform, eyeless." ("Auspex")

"Superintending the edge of this world, waiting for veined temples to descend, I plunge into the wreckage and I search for my lost kind." ("Kuklops")

Is there something specific about the writing of Kubarycz that grabs your attention, or is it perhaps a combination of various aspects?

David:

You're a close reader, Dan. Any allusion to Christianity in Kubarycz's work is no mistake. Specifically, any allusion to Mormonism, as Kubarycz was raised a Latter-Day Saint who now teaches at the University of Utah.  But know this: Kubarycz is no saint, Latter-Day or otherwise. The mind of his heart is too openly independent to be that of a saint. He sees too clearly to let his way of seeing be compromised by external dogma. He's the one the saints might envy and weep for simultaneously.

Let me share a quote from Harold Bloom's book, The American Religion: "A major American poet, perhaps one called a Gentile by the Latter-Day Saints, some time in the future will write their early story as the epic it was." Well, Mr. Bloom is an extremely smart man who sometimes offers his readers some far-fetched notions, but I agree with this statement, and to a certain extent I believe that Brian Kubarycz is the poet he speaks of. 

Kubarycz may never write the epic foreseen by Bloom, but already he has written what one might call an authenticated Mormon mythology. Kubarycz bears witness unflinchingly. He takes the stance of a Mormon who is no longer a believer, and gives us writing I believe could not be written by anyone raised otherwise. I also believe his pages could not have been written by a Mormon who remained loyal to the fold.

Kubarycz's content is one of insightful religious contention. Lingually, he presents many discernibly subtle moments. Here is a sentence from "On the Mountain", the first story he ever submitted to me for Unsaid: 

"He needed leaving for a while under the house until the sun got to him even under there and we began to feel the stink coming up from under the rug my mother might have beaten into cleanness."

Clearly--by anyone's standards--this is a beautifully wrought sentence. But it's the phrase "beaten into cleanness" that hit me hardest and continues to hit me each time I read it. This assemblage of three words sums up the Mormon legacy as clearly as the whole of Bloom's tome. The history of the Mormons is stained by violence under a veneer of cleanliness. Kubarycz nails it. "On the Mountain" is as good a story as I have ever read. Even without knowledge of its backdrop, any attentive reader will measure it as a great accomplishment in American Literature. 

This stands true for all of Kubarycz's work. I've had the great pleasure of reading his unpublished collection, tentatively entitled, The Instruments I Used. It disconcerts me to no end that the publishers of Cormac McCarthy's work responded to Kubarycz's pages by saying they are "too literary for the current market." Regardless, Kubarycz is making his mark, and I have no doubt that his pages will be praised by both the public and the likes of Bloom before the final sun sets.