In her bittersweet novella about a strained and ultimately failed romantic connection between two young New Yorkers, Lillis successfully eludes the sappiness and excessive sentimentality that sometimes seeps out when writing about love. She accomplishes this with honesty—she takes a hard look at how insecurities can cripple a relationship—and with her smart, disarming prose. Obsessed with the life of a recent former lover, the nameless narrator recounts her time with Anselm, a humble composer with myriad emotional hang-ups that presumably stem from his troubled Appalachian upbringing. Relying on his personal journal and her flawed memories, the narrator grapples to find meaning and closure. It’s a rough road as the reader learns early on that both parties have tendencies to act as foils, drifting past each other too often. “Anselm was good at promises. I was good at hoping for the future, hoping and waiting for his promises to come true.” What’s left for these two stumbling lovers is a collection of moments, some truer than others. The narrator comes across as flawed yet earnest, and in the end it’s Anselm’s credibility and sincerity that are called into question. Whether or not he actually loves the narrator is something that’s constantly on her mind, and also his. At one point he asks: “Do you feel loved by me?” Here Anselm suspects what the reader—and perhaps the narrator—already knows: he exudes poorly. Lillis handles the subject matter gracefully, though readers who like their love stories, tragic or otherwise, brimming with purple romanticism won’t find that here. Watch the Doors as They Close is a sometimes somber, sometimes sweet, sometimes heartbreaking story about impermanence and uncertainty, how a person can really only know him or herself, and how lesser measures of faith in relationships can create shallows unfit for diving. (January 2012)

Purchase the book HERE.

So I got to thinking that it would be fun to read chapbooks written by authors from all the states/provinces we drive through–to not only see and smell the landscape, but to hear it as well. I’d love to hold the paper chapbooks in my hand as we drive, but I need to stick with Kindle versions since packing space will be limited.

How can you help? Let her know of some e-chapbooks by authors from the states she will be traveling through. More details can be found here, at her “In Search of eChapbooks” post.

(By Estlin Kenyon)

It

    is

       made!

                 it is made!

Though I doubt it will

stay together.

I nervously walked up on stage.

I heard some of the girls giggle

as I held up my lego masterpiece.

I put it on the launcher.

                    Pleew

It shot through the air and smashed

into the wall it fell with a thud.

no dent no scritch no scratch

I had kicked ass I sure did

I totally kicked ass on this contest!

Estlin Stevenson Kenyon is finishing up his 4th year of Elementary School.  His poetry has previously appeared in "Mrs. Fein's 2nd grade class' book of poetry" and he has written over 35 original comic books which he has published himself in limited, hand-made editions.  He is the founding and managing editor of Tyrannosaurus Press where his mother, JodiAnn Stevenson, and his father, Timothy Kenyon, serve as his advisory board.

by Michele McDannold

Greetings!

We are writing as a group of Milwaukee-based independent literary presses including Rescue Press, New American Press, Plumberries Press, Burdock Magazine and others. Currently, we are curating what we hope to be the 1st annual Midwest Small Press Festival, over the weekend of June 1st-3rd. Due in part to your own investment in independent lit, we would like to reach out and invite you to join us.

The weekend-long event will take place in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood, a cozy little spot full of artists and doers with a cooperative fervor. We’re including some addresses in this note in case you might want to take a look at the layout of the festival.

The festival will center around a book-fair at the Polish Falcon (801 e. clarke st.) on Saturday June 2nd where small presses from throughout the region will have their wares on display and for sale. With presses coming from Chicago, Minneapolis, Michigan and Ohio, as well as from other parts of Wisconsin, (some names of specific mention: Switchback, DoubleCross, Horseless, Xexoxial, etc.) the event will present an impressive introduction to the independent literary presence in the Midwest.
Ancillary events throughout the weekend include an opening reception at Woodland Pattern Book Center (720 e. locust st.) and multimedia word based performances at The Nut Factory (3750 n. fratney) on Friday June 1st as well as workshops and readings at the Cream City Collectives (732 e. clarke st.) throughout the day on Saturday the 2nd and a brunch spelling-bee and literary trivia game at the Riverwest Public House (815 e. locust st.) on Sunday June 3rd as well as live music, gallery showings and more.

Table space is cheap at $15 for half a table, $25 for a full table.
For more information about the festival including a complete schedule and list of visiting presses please keep an eye on www.midwestsmallpressfestival.org
We encourage you to forward this widely.
Hope this finds you well.
–
Midwest Small Press Festival
June 1st-3rd • Milwaukee, WI
www.midwestsmallpressfestival.org

“I decide to have a festival. I invite Dave and Lisa and some guys I know with guns.” So begins Ridge’s sharply humorous story that touches on gun culture, exploitation, and masturbation guilt, among other things. A nameless first person narrator, who is terminally confused with a man named Brad “who throws really great festivals,” creates a festival of his own with the help of some friends. His friend Dave works at an orphanage so he’s able to contribute to the festival’s head count in the form of ecstatic, dancing children. Brad, the festival guru himself, instructs the narrator to focus on exploitation to help further the festival’s success. Brad encourages him to “Sell things. Sell lots of things.” Our narrator’s friend Lisa answers the call by slinging tickets to other festivals during the festival. And of course let’s not forget the gun-toting, Constitution-quoting guys who are adamant about keeping tyranny from rearing its ugly head at the festival; they’re perched in the nearby woods, popping off rounds. But, as with any festival, things really don’t get cooking until the police show up in search of a permit. What Ridge has created here in this short work—it can be ingested in one sitting— is a wonderful concoction of silliness and wit and danger that comes in the form of roughly fifty or so small cards the size of business cards. They come neatly stacked in a box that boasts a tiny toy gun on its top, too. The presentation of Ridge’s work—the result of a collaborative effort between Ridge, Rust Belt Bindery, and artist Genevieve Lawrence who contributes a few spare and meditative images throughout the deck—further adds to the reader’s enjoyment of it. Overall, it’s a genuine treat, a curious and delightful creation that, despite its brevity, has enough current running through it to jump-start a stalled pony. Readers looking for something fresh and fun will surely find it here, though given the work’s limited run they’d better find it fast. (2012)

Purchase Hey, it’s America HERE.

Growing Up Dead in Texas centers around a fire that consumed Greenwood’s cotton, a fire that Stephen Graham Jones went back to Texas to investigate, all while reconnecting with those who didn’t get away. Whether a needle in a haystack or a smoking gun, it’s this event that provides us with that “part mystery.” Then again, Jones tells us, “Some of the stories I’ve had published, they’re just me as the main character, with a different name, a cooler truck,” which, him being in the story, there’s plenty of, like how his long hair saved him, and that story he wrote in the ER waiting room, plus the first one that got him noticed. But, and I guess I’d have to say “then again” again, here, there’s also that fire, that it never happened. The investigation, though, it’s nothing but authentic. Jones is spot on about that.

If I go further, really play detective, I have to consider things like Jonas shooting hoops in GDTX, thinking if he can make it swish that this one thing will never have happened, consider how much that’s like Jim Doe in All The Beautiful Sinners telling himself “if I just make this shot, then everything would be all right.” And if I consider that, then I have to think of all of the cats and “Dogs” either put out of their misery or put down for growling at someone. Why stop there, though? I could say the idea of that fire being started by the family of whoever it was who turned up dead in 1963 sounds a bit like Dodd in It Came From Del Rio coming back from the dead, taking out the people who took away his family. All of these things in a book that’s “part memoir” crossing over into novels and short stories, it’s got my head reeling. Could be I’m looking for a line that’s not there. After all, Jones says that fiction’s his camouflage, that he wished he were writing fiction this time, and that this (Growing Up Dead in Texas) is the only way he could go back. So he’s telling us right up front that this is fiction, right? Again, the hamsters in my skull are spinning out of control. If I’m being honest, though, that’s what I’m looking for, and I got it.

What’s fantastic about this book isn’t that it’s engaging and brilliantly written. Well, okay, those are fantastic, yes, but what really grabs me, triggers my “I want to believe” feelings is that every single word in this book, it could have happened just like it’s said, or it could be nothing but fiction. That is, Growing Up Dead in Texas is the best, most purest fuel for believing. It’s proof that stories really are real.

Buy this title from Amazon
Buy this title from B&N
Buy this title at independent bookstores
Visit the author, Stephen Graham Jones
Visit the publisher, MP Publishing

Failure is a major theme running though Bell’s dystopian landscape comprised of twenty-six connected pieces, though Cataclysm Baby—bearing some resemblance to a catalog of baby names—is nothing short of a creative success. In a collapsing, sputtering world, the adults are despicable and greedy, and their children—those who survive birth—are often feral or deformed, physically and sometimes supernaturally. In Abelard, Abraham, Absalom a son is born covered in hair, “inverse of our own nakedness,” and in Yaretzi, Yasmina, Yatima a child is a “puff of womb-air” that seeps into the world as a disembodied, menacing “daughter-voice” that commands its broken, guilt-plagued father to build a tower into the sky. The children may be aberrations who are sometimes ritualistically sacrificed with the belief that the others might live on, but it’s the men—desperate for the continuance of their flawed bloodlines in a dying world—who are the true monsters in this work. The women in these pieces are often viewed as “receptacles” that need to be filled, if not willingly then by rape. Over and over they’re subjected to violations that usually lead to failed pregnancies. The world Bell has created is bleak and violent. Its overriding success is its ability to keep the reader rapt, not unlike a passerby on a highway drawn to an endless string of roadside carnage. Bell’s writing is surgical and smart, making great use of measured repetition to create an alluring cadence for its array of narrators. What’s curious then is Bell’s decision to maintain a first person narration throughout, given that the voice is largely unchanging despite being spoken by twenty-six different fathers. It’s a decision that allows the pieces as standalones to work exceptionally well, though when sewn together, some of the resonance of that early, unique cadence is lost as this cadence quickly becomes the standard. As an allegory that focuses on the fear of parenthood and how it can be painful and destructive but also necessary for the growth of an individual as well as that of a society, Cataclysm Baby is powerful, original, and wholly mesmerizing. (April 2012)

Purchase Cataclysm Baby HERE.

In their collaborative mini-masterpiece published by the rock solid and always surprising Rose Metal Press, Erdrich and Nelson prove that three is definitely not a crowd as they not only invite reader participation but also quietly demand it. Constructed to loosely resemble the choose-your-own-adventure model and comprised of pairings—poem and image and also homonyms like wait/weight and tide/tied —the work as a whole is surreal, playful, and wonderfully addictive. Erdrich’s beautifully soft, often haunting images hold a certain dreamy childlike quality that suits Nelson’s nostalgic text. Lines like “But the sun is blind and must touch everything:/always feeling its gold way forward towards the dark” and “Your small ears are necessary/to my/day” spark both amazement and delight. At the end of each poem and image pairing, the reader is presented with a fill-in-the-blank sentence and must choose between two homonyms to determine the next step of the experience. The construct is clever, not to mention relevant and culturally adaptive in this age of hyperlinks and touch-screen devices, and the worn interface of printed page and reader is injected with new life. The book is looping and fast, two traits that lend to its compulsive readability and also to its power to move the reader to begin again and again, hungry to try different routes. The size of the book, too, particularly its generous width, makes it easy for the reader to flip back and forth. What’s more, it’s this casual flipping that allows for glimpses of as of yet unseen texts and images, thus whetting the reader’s curiosity to uncover the paths to these pages. Erdrich and Nelson, who continue to collaborate under the name Invisible Seeing Machine, have successfully bled their imaginations together to produce a delightfully whimsical and exploratory experience for the reader. Whether paired up or as individuals, these two have established themselves as bright stars worth watching. (March 2012)

Purchase I Take Back the Sponge Cake HERE.

Stage 1 = acceptance into the show (judged by unFold editor Rose Auslander)

Stage 2 = selection of one Best of Show winner and three Honorable Mentions (judged by poets William O’Daly, Jessie Carty, and John Sibley Williams).

What are they looking for? Poems inspired by all things garden: flowers, vegetables, trees, landscaping, water features, birds, pollinators, garden gnomes…you name it. Poems paired with a digital photo or artwork will be given extra consideration. Entry is free. Full details and submission information is available from the Folded Word blog HERE.