Essay in ProximityProximity was started in June last year six months after the current rececession had started and six months before it was officially called. The first paragraph in the first magazine notes the paradox of recession (and even depression) ... "Only a bunch of artists would start a new art magazine in the throes of recession. [...] Because sure -- the economy is receding ... cultural production in Chicago is surging yet again." Ed and Rachael Marszewski. Proximity as a magazine is concerned with mechanisms of cultural production. The first issue, primarily focused on Chicago, featured an article about the collective art production during their factory braks in Pennsylvania of of a group built a communal art project called Swampwall. "Early on this relative of mine and several of his co-workers spent their work breaks attaching newspaper clippings, snapshots, spent soda cans, industrial debris, trashed food containers and similar pieces to one wall of the plant." Proximity contains charts, diagrams, analysis, articles, and speculation about the persistence of this kind of production.
I have an article in this issue three, which just came out. I spent eight months working as a social media analyst and discovered I enjoyed, perhaps too much, analysis. I used some of the new tools and techniques I learned at this job to compare the blog-based networks associated with three Seattle literary magazines and their corresponding print-based networks. I studied The Raven Chronicles, The Crab Creek Review, and Pontoon from 2003-2008, and discovered some surprising things.
Essay at Plortlandfiction.net
Another semi-commie or at least collective effort is Portlandfiction.net is a Web site in Portland. "Each week, the authors in The Portland Fiction Project write on a suggestion word." They've written about wedding anniversiy materials, Paper, Silver, Leather and Lace, answers to unstated questions, and so on.
In addition they have published a few guest essays including an article by Tom Spanbauer on Dangerous Writing. " I'm right now writing a book on Dangerous Writing and one of the things I've come up with is the fact that we are, all of us, in some way or another haunted. These days, we use psychological terms to express our hauntings. But when we come right down to it, isn't an Oedipal complex, a very specific haunting by a mother and a father?"
They just published my essay, "Marching Backwards into the Future."
The movement to restore the primacy of the printed word is a conservative one with the same degree of sense as might be found among medievalists, adopters of the Paleolithic lifestyle, and steam engine train enthusiasts.
Passes to Fictionnaught
Finally, I have five guest passes to the beta release of Fictionnaught an online writing community with a super clean interface and membership including some huge powerhouse writers such as Pia Ehrhardt, Claudia Smith, Marcy Dermansky, and Gary Percesepe. It was created by Carson Baker and Juergen Fauth. Although as a community it doesn't contain the mixers that make FaceBook work so well, it is an excellent way to find great fiction and share your work. Commentary tends to be on the gentle affirmative side. If you are interested in one of my passes, let me know, and I'll send it you. I'm at: matt(dot)briggs(at)geemail.
Peter Conners, the author of a previous collection of poems and a forthcoming memoir about following the Grateful Dead, Growing Up Dead, recently published Emily Ate The Wind, a novella of extravagantly tiny miniatures. At five-by-eight inches, the book is the size of a boulder. It is as light as pumice stone. The surface feels like a hardened sponge with just as many gaps and holes as the matrix of what is there. There are repeated sentences with repeated characters engaged in oblique activities of daily life made all the more bleak and oblique because there isn't any context for their actions. Many times the sentences themselves find themselves unraveling the mystery of the world documented here. "Emily tries to exit the bed on her left and hits a wall. There is no wall. Why is there a wall?" There is in the novel a Dan, an Amber, an Emily, a Lucinda. The events in the book have little to do with each other, and only the tenuous magic of same names, a book jacket, and Conner's sharp syntax keeps them bundled together. One event happens at dawn one day, or another at dusk. Something happens in a rock quarry. Another event occurs in a trailer.
Brangien Davis 
Final State Press has just released my new book, The End is the Beginning, a collection of stories I've been writing since 1998. This is the first book I've published with Final State, but they plan on releasing a novel next year, The Double E, and hopefully more books after that. I wrote many of the stories for reading series and events around the Pacific Northwest, including the Brontesaurus, a day long celebration of the Brontes at Richard Hugo House, a writing resource center in Seattle, back when Rebecca Brown was the Writer in Residence there. Although it was, one of the first I wrote in this collection; it wasn't published until last year in The Clackamas Literary Review. Most of the stories are about the end of the world, death destruction, and other light subjects. I wrote one story, called "Caffeinism" after I suffered a serious reaction to an overdose of caffeine. I wrote another about the day I was activated for the first Gulf War. And another is about the end of reading. Stories have been in mags such as Seattle Magazine, First Intensity, The Raven Chronicles, and The Wandering Hermit Review, and Web sites such as The Mississippi Review (Web), Smokelong, Slouch, Semantikon, and The Steel City Review.
In the middle of July hornets started to build a hive in the small fruit tree next to my mailbox. Shortly after I first moved into my house, my prior mailbox had been flattened in the middle of the night. I woke in the morning to find my old mailbox crushed on the side of the road as flat as a Pepsi can left on the macadam. I replaced the mailbox with a Rubber Maid contraption that jiggled and threatened to come apart whenever I opened the plastic flap of a door.
