The Georgia Review Blog

The Georgia Review wins it all!

2012-04-13T09:52:00.000-04:00

In the championship round of "Literary Magazine March Madness," we here at The Georgia Review hung on to best our worthy opponent, The Paris Review, by a final score of 150 to 104. OK, so we don't play much defense, but when things are clicking we score at will! We don't go in for any of that "one and done" stuff, unlike a certain championship men's basketball team we could name -- we're in it for the long haul, doing our literary thing day in and day out since 1947, all from our headquarters here at the University of Georgia in beautiful Athens.

What's this all about, you might ask? Try asking Bill Roorbach and David Gessner, overlords of Bill and Dave's Cocktail Hour. They set the matchups, beginning with the Lit Mag Sweet Sixteen. Perhaps there was a round of eight, but next we knew GR was in the Final Four, battling Ecotone while The Paris Review scrapped with Oxford American on the other side of the bracket. Then on the afternoon of April 10 came the news we'd been waiting for -- "Despite a furious late rally by The Paris Review, The Georgia Review holds on for a statement victory."

Bill and Dave organized these showdowns scientifically -- folks visited the website and registered their votes in the comments section. Each vote was worth 2 points and there were no 3-pointers. The whole shebang was a lot of fun, especially since we came out on top. Those championship rings are going to look real nice when we show them off at next year's AWP conference. Our booth needed some bling, and now we've got it!

Thanks to Bill, Dave, and all of the participating magazines. Hopefully we'll all get our game on again next March!

The Voice: On Meeting Harry Crews

2012-04-05T11:37:00.005-04:00

by Stephen Corey

When I wrote here last week about the death of Harry Crews on 26 March, I said I’d come back to tell the story of our first “meeting.”

In the fall of 1975, just a few months after I’d moved to Florida from my home in far western New York—Jamestown—I was reading late one night in a window booth at the Gainesville Krystal on University Avenue. Across that main drag, to my left, was Anderson Hall—a turn-of-the-twentieth-century brick monolith housing the English department of the University of Florida. Straight ahead of me, across a side street (NW 15th, I think it was), was an old three-story, former private residence converted to the English Graduate Center, featuring several faculty offices plus a former living room used for classes and readings. To my right, out through the kitchen and across a small parking lot, the back of the University Press of Florida building abutted the restaurant property. Krystal is—or was then (I don’t frequent them anymore)—among the lowest of the low-rent hamburger chains, and something we didn’t have up north, but I could sit for hours with a cup of coffee and never be bothered by anyone on the staff. And, besides, whenever I stopped there I was flanked on three sides by structural reminders of the new world I had entered—that of a PhD program in English for which I had left friends and most family, now nearly a thousand miles away.

That one night, my fourth side proved to be covered as well. I began to overhear behind me a conversation—no, I should say a holding forth—from a voice that, to my still very northern ear, was exceptionally and jarringly southern. With a slow, scratchy delivery that sometimes dropped to a growl and other times rose almost to a whine—not that of a child or insect, but of a saw—the voice bragged about its just-completed day: not only had it risen early and written for several hours, it had also gone out for two—that’s two—long runs, in the morning and the late afternoon. All the fires were burning for this voice, all the juices cooking. This voice hadn’t felt better in a long time. This voice had even stopped its drinking . . . well, pretty much.

Even if you’ve trained yourself, as I had over the years, to work well in public places, you still encounter conversations or monologues that just can’t be shut out from your attention to your reading or writing. At such times, you have to make a choice: get up and leave, or stick around and listen. That night in Krystal, I took the latter option for a while and then shifted to the former—in part because I was a dutiful enough returning-to-it student to tell myself I had to get back to work, but also because I wanted to see the embodiment of this voice before it got away.

The man I passed as I walked slowly out of Krystal, and then passed again as I moved by his booth on the outside of one of the plate glass windows forming three sides of the restaurant, was both as-expected and totally unexpected. Burly of tank-topped chest and lean of blue-jeaned hip, Harry Crews (then nameless to me, of course) had a classic look of meanness in his squarish face: deep-set and intense eyes above a Pancho Villa mustache, prominent mouth and jaw, a profusion of fine-cut wrinkles on his brow and below. His arms were large and hard; I assumed his legs would be lean and hard. His black hair curled down over part of his forehead and all of his neck, in the manner of one who cultivates an uncultivated look.

In short, the voice looked as it had sounded: tough, standoffish, rather scary. But the voice looked completely unlike some of its subject matter. To my still-quite-innocent eyes, this character appeared to belong on a tractor, a factory floor, or a street corner—not at a desk, scrawling or typing the hours away. Although I did not know it for quite a while afterward, I learned one hell of a lot about Harry Crews during that first one-sided and anonymous meeting.

A few months later, sometime during what passes for winter in north-central Florida, I found out who I had seen that night (and, subsequently, a couple of times on the streets around campus). A friend got pretty carried away one evening with her extolling of a local writer, and when she went to her bookshelf to pull down a sample of what was exciting her, there Crews stood on the back of the dust jacket: framed by an old doorway, looming in the camera’s eye with arms folded and face scowling, he was most certainly that anonymous southern voice I had met over my shoulder.

I never came to know Crews well during my five years at the University of Florida, never really came to know him at all except by his reputation and to exchange hellos with him in a departmental hallway. I heard he was fiercely dedicated to his fiction-writing students, of which I was not one, but that otherwise he kept pretty much to himself and his own life of writing and of . . . well, those other things that I kept hearing were the substance (and, yes, substances) of his manner. I never knew where the truth left off and the myth began concerning Crews’s personal life; but I knew then as I know now that not all writers’ lives generate myths, and that when myths arise it is because there is at least some justification for their being.

That faceless voice I heard had a “voice” behind it, the kind we talk about when we talk about writers. A voice with a good chance to stay around, to echo from all four walls. Harry would likely laugh and growl at such a “soft” statement, but I think he would also believe it to be true. He knew the run was difficult, even when you had a go at it every day—so he did it twice.

Photo by Gail Collins, from the Summer 1970 issue of University of Florida Magazine. Courtesy of UF Today magazine and the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia.

On the Death of Harry Crews

2012-03-30T17:09:00.007-04:00

by Stephen Corey

On 28 March 2012 the American and international literary communities lost one of their most unique citizens, Harry Crews—a man some no doubt would say the world is better off for having lost, and a man who would have thought that such an opinion showed he had been doing his job just the way he wanted to do it.

Crews didn’t care what people thought of him or his writing—he cared about the writing itself, about finding and then being true to a distinctive way of honoring language, narrative, and character in his novels, essays, and autobiographical writings. The Georgia Review has been with the Georgia-born Crews from the start, being the first to accept and the second to publish his work: under then-editor William Wallace Davidson, GR brought out the story “A Long Wail” in Summer 1964. (The Sewanee Review’s editor took a story after Davidson, but brought it out sooner.)

In 1985, Stanley W. Lindberg and this fledgling assistant editor—I’d come to GR in 1983—chose “A Long Wail” for reprinting in our forty-year fiction retrospective issue (Spring 1986), and this great little piece (it runs just seven pages) also made the cut for our just-released book, Stories Wanting Only to Be Heard: Selected Fiction from Six Decades of The Georgia Review (University of Georgia Press, 2012).

In the fall of 1994 we ran Tammy Lytal and Richard R. Russell’s “Some of Us Do It Anyway: An Interview with Harry Crews.” Harry holds forth on many topics, including how to write (and not write) dialect, the vital importance of his mother in his life—“See, much of the rest of the world seems to have a lot of trouble knowing what is right and what is wrong. My momma doesn’t have any trouble with that. She knows what’s right and what’s wrong, and she’ll be quick to tell you . . .”—and his view of his authorial responsibility: “See, if I do my job right when I’m writing, I will really get you turned back on yourself, and on your own code of ethics or morality or vision of the world or sense of self or whatever. If I get you turned back on yourself, then I done my job. I’ve done what I set out to do.”

About six years ago Harry placed his papers with the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Georgia, and as soon as we learned this we began examining the archive in the hope of finding some previously unpublished Crews we might present to a world that hadn’t seen any such in a long time. We ended up publishing a seventy-five-page special feature in our Winter 2007 issue: forty pages from Harry’s (still) unpublished second volume of autobiography—the first, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978), is generally considered to be his finest book—along with a selection of his letters and an essay by self-confessed Crews fanatic Larry Baker. (If you’ve been reading carefully here, you’ll recognize the first part of Baker’s title: “‘If I Do My Job Right’: Harry Crews and His Readers.”)

For Winter 2011 we returned to the Harry Crews archive and came out with “We Are All of Us Passing Through,” a personal essay from an unpublished collection called “Take 38,” and in Fall 2012—this plan predated Harry’s passing and had his blessing, as did our printing of the other archival material—we will feature “You’ll Like My Mother’s Grave,” an earlier, very different, and very interesting version of “A Long Wail.”

If you have gotten this far you are almost certainly that kind of attentive reader who will have noticed that sometimes above I call Harry Crews “Harry.” I don’t do so because I’m a believer in the “casually familiar” form of address—I emphatically am not—but because I had the privilege of getting to know Harry over the years—just a bit while I was in graduate school at his place, the University of Florida, and then a little better across the twenty years of our association while I’ve been with The Georgia Review.

I have what I think of as a pretty good story about my first “meeting” with Harry in Gainesville, but it’s a bit long and this post is already long, so I’ll save it for next week sometime—say, Tuesday the 3rd. For today I’ll close with a few more of Harry Crews’s own words, again drawn from that 1994 interview in The Georgia Review.

First, there’s Harry talking about some of the run-ins he’s had with women of the 1990s—particularly women in big cities like New York—who tend not to take to being addressed in the ways that Harry learned from his south Georgia mother in the 1940s and ’50s. Harry begins narrow but finishes broad, with the words we used to title the interview: “I don’t know what it is, but as soon as I say ‘lady’ they jump. Again too, I’m supposed to say ‘person,’ when what I wanted to say was ‘lady.’ But what I tell them is that where I come from, when a female reaches puberty, she is ‘ma’am’; that’s just the way it is. My momma told me that’s the way it is, and since I have seen or heard nothing to change my mind or prove me wrong, I still say ‘ma’am.’ There’s lots of things you used to could do, you can’t do anymore, except some of us do it anyway.”

And, from earlier on in the discussion, a comment that I think says enough and good about why those who dislike Harry Crews’s work dislike it, and about why those who like it like it: “I never wanted to be well-rounded, and I do not admire well-rounded people nor their work. So far as I can see, nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.”

Photo courtesy of John Zeuli Photography

In Memoriam 1935–2012

2012-01-23T11:02:00.003-05:00

Here's an excerpt from We Are All of Us Passing Through, an autobiographical piece by the inimitable Harry Crews, who died Wednesday at his home in Gainesville, Florida. There's more from that work plus some of Crews' fiction from The Gospel Singer in the Winter 2011 issue of The Georgia Review.

To take advantage of our great subscription deals and have the best in contemporary American writing delivered to your mailbox four times a year, visit our online store.

The Winter 2011 issue is now out!

2012-01-10T15:43:00.001-05:00

New Sharon Olds poem on our website and in our just-out Winter issue--which also features a previously unpublished Harry Crews essay, stories by Ann Pancake and Marguerite Sullivan, poems from Carol Frost, Elton Glaser, James Applewhite, and Albert Goldbarth, and a beautiful cover and full-color interior art spread by Eugenie Torgerson...to name just a few. You can purchase the issue at fine booksellers across the USA or order single copies, subscriptions (one-year, multi-year, or gifts), back issues, t-shirts, and more at our online store. Come join our literary party!

Winter 2011 update

2012-01-05T11:04:00.000-05:00

Our Winter 2011 edition ran a bit late but should arrive in subscribers’ mailboxes soon (if it hasn't already). The issue is available for purchase online right now, so follow the link and treat yourself, a loved one, a friend, or a colleague to some of the very best in contemporary American writing -- whether by buying a single issue or (better yet) by taking advantage of our great deals on subscriptions.

The Winter 2011 GR features a previously unpublished essay by the inimitable Harry Crews plus new work from Coleman Barks, Carol Frost, Gary Gildner, Albert Goldbarth, Judith Kitchen, Sharon Olds, Ann Pancake, and many more. We think it was worth the wait. Thanks so much for your patience.

In the meantime, enjoy this vintage video clip of Harry Crews on the Dennis Miller show. Crews says his unusual haircut is in honor of "freak the citizens month" and Miller describes the coiffure as "a G.Gordon Liddy meets Vanilla Ice type thing."

The Boomerang v. the Right Angle

2011-11-15T13:58:00.003-05:00

Kent Meyers’ “The Makings” begins where Meyers grew up—on a “family farm,” that cultural memory, mostly extirpated in its purest form and a term now wrongly applied to corporate food-growing factories. These small farms comprised a chaotic mix of pastures, crops, outbuildings, and yards, woodlots and fencerows, ponds and marshland. They were homesteads where place names, as Meyers says, “sprang from the nature of the land itself.”

As farming changed, Meyers began to see “acres sucked dry of their mystery”: a squared off and tidied up world with streams dredged into ditches, wetlands drained and tiled, crop rows straightened so a boy could never get lost. And he recalls, “I wanted to journey, not merely to get there.”

Some farm children dreamed. Meyers made boomerangs and learned how to throw them. A boomerang was possibility, and throwing one successfully created a wondrous curve that was about the journey rather than the destination. It was, of course, an escape.

As a teenager, he read a book called A Sporting Chance, which set him to making primitive hunting weapons—not just boomerangs but spears, atlatls, bolas. Guns bored him: “They didn’t inscribe instantly vanishing lines on the air, didn’t shape French curves or trace time and happening.” Guns are for efficient killing, which is a “rote and repetitive thing.” The destination is a dead animal; the journey, well, there is no real journey.

His hunting would aspire to imitating and entering the natural world as the Inuit in sealskin kayaks play at being seal. He describes examining such a kayak in a museum in Alaska:

As I stood there, it was as if generations of murmured dialogue between human and seal took on physical shape, impressed into the kayak’s structure and curves. Even the flex and fat of the seal are there. . . . [T]he sealskin kayak’s frame is tied together so that it sways and gives, like seal, or water itself. Imitating waves, it absorbs them.

And of course, the tying together is an ingenuity formed by the available makings.

The catalyst is the “makings”—those things in the Inuit’s world, the leftovers and cast-asides on Meyer’s boyhood farm. He couldn’t have cared less what those leavings had been used for or how they got there; all that mattered was their “particular imagined future.”

With help from a picture of the biblical David, he made a sling. “A slung stone thins, melts, disappears. After a while you may hear it falling through the trees in the grove past the cattle yard—though sometimes you throw it so far there’s silence, and the stone, for all you know, has left the farm, or the earth, or the universe.” Indeed, Meyers saves some of his more ecstatic prose for the curve of the missile released, as in this description of a trebuchet experiment. “[We] tossed an eight-inch rock from here to way, way, way over there in one of the loveliest arcs I’ve ever seen on a thing tossed, the rock fleeing the trebuchet’s sling at the end of its long arm so liltingly it seemed melodic. I was hard-pressed to say whether the world gave that lilt and curve to us or we gave it to the world.”

“The Makings” moves in curves and arcs through various weaponry as well as topics as disparate as early nineteenth-century verse and S&H Green Stamps. But it always finds its way back to the idea of possibility—possibility and the simple assertion that anything made with care and used well can be linked to a deeper truth and a larger good.

Alice Friman and Ecstatic Pragmatism

2011-09-12T08:49:00.003-04:00

From poet Alice Friman, I have learned many things about the arts, including the domestic arts—how to iron a silk skirt, for example, among other housewifely confidences. Equally likely to share wise advice or a comfortably dirty joke, on the page or in person, Friman is good company, earthy company in the concrete, literal sense of being at ease with the physical earth and its accoutrements. Friman sometimes expresses exasperation with the physical world, using the intimate, even gossipy tones with which one might dismiss a frustrating family member: in “The Birthmark,” for example, she calls the moon a “naked rock in borrowed clothes.” Yet Friman’s exasperation originates in familiarity, in closeness, not in distance from visceral experience. Friman’s poems give the impression of a writer comfortable working with her hands—she’s no airy fumbler—and on her pages we meet speakers accomplishing the day’s ordinary needs, such as “whomping up / a mess of vittles,” as the speaker’s son jokes in “How It Is.” If you were wrapping a package in a room full of poets, struggling to get the bow right, Alice Friman is the one you would intuitively know to gesture toward with your chin, requesting council and a steady hand.

To enter a poet’s stanza is to walk into a room (stanza’s Italian derivative) built by that poet. Guests entering Friman’s stanzas are invited to enjoy designs characterized by her specific and comforting species of competence: Friman attends to the day’s physical demands alongside its spiritual ones. Her stanzas balance and juxtapose physical and metaphysical forces as they collide and diverge—air and earth, mind and body, desire and loss—so that we see how these forces pull on each other, orbit each other, crash together, blow apart, then do it all again. On Friman’s pages, we meet the body in thought. Her multi-layered design sense creates a multi-layered vocal tone one recognizes anywhere it appears, like a familiar melody played in many places. Ever a celebrator, a jovial host, she is never a fluttering one: at Friman’s poetic parties for the page, one enjoys a billowy welcome spiked with briny appetizers.

Friman is a celebratory writer of odes to Beauty with a capital B, and she deals in The Big Subjects. To borrow a gag from Marilyn Hacker, most of Friman’s work, too, engages Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons. Yet in her approach to her elevated subjects, Friman is a pragmatist with the, poetically speaking, broken nose and crooked smile to prove it. Therefore, Friman’s understanding of Beauty incorporates its threat; as she described in our recent interview, “There is something in ‘beauty’ that’s a little terrifying . . . beauty isn’t necessarily pretty. They aren’t synonyms for each other. Pretty is pleasing; beauty shakes you up.” Thus, she says, “I strive usually . . . to undercut myself in order to, hopefully, raise ‘pretty’ to a degree of ‘beauty’ . . . sometimes it means a quick switch from lyricism to starkness.” We experience this “quick switch” tactic working on us throughout her poems in the Summer 2011 Georgia Review. Friman’s salty bon mots enhance her celebrations by reminding us of what those celebrations are in spite of, or in addition to—disappointment, betrayal, grief, plain stupidity. In other words, Friman reminds us what the stakes are.

The briny flavor circulating within Friman’s poetic interiors is, for me, exemplified by a bit in “Sonic Boom,” from her collection The Book of the Rotten Daughter (BkMk Press, 2006): “I come from a family of Russians / stubborn as stumps. Crabby, but we live.” There is something of resignation in “Crabby, but we live,” but also a lively variety of self-deprecating humor, and something pugnacious besides. This is one of those small, crisp bites circulating on platters within all of Friman’s stanzas that ground the poet’s flights of lyric celebration. This tinge of bitter in the vocal tone allows me to trust Friman’s tender moments as well as her flights of fancy, for every balloon must have its ballast: something heavy must be dropped in order for the poem to go soaring, and it could whomp on someone’s head. At first, it might seem unwise to trust a poet who is as like as not to drop a sandbag (or an olive pit?) on your noggin, but it’s Friman’s honesty in the acknowledgment of existing threat that allows me to trust that she’s not holding knives I can’t see.

Among the poems featured in the latest Georgia Review, Friman’s pugnaciousness is most immediately apparent in “How It Is,” a poem of natural cycles—their beauty, but also the cruelty of their inevitability. “Late October, / and the pitiless drift / begins in earnest,” the poem begins, yet that “pitiless drift” is preceded by a frenzy of fertility. The speaker’s mimosa, which endured “death fingering the leaves / all summer,” still “plumped its pods, spending / all July squeezing them out, / going about its business, as did / the slash pine and loblolly, spraying pollen—coating / windows, cars, filling every / idle slit with sperm.” Affection and exasperation vie for prominence in this depiction; the speaker seems resigned to, even amused by, the lack of dignity afforded by the compulsory cycles of desire and death. Happily, Friman isn’t the sort of poet to tell us what to do with our own resignation, but neither does she leave us blowing in the breeze with no direction at all; she settles on a middle approach, offering, “Who am I to write the user’s manual / for a life, except to say, / Look at trees, dug in and defiant. / Be like the river. Stick out your tongue.” This tongue image sets a mocking child among the defiant trees, but also shows a fevered child saying “aah” for the doctor. Here, the rascal’s mischief rides with the understanding that mischief is, partly, a response to lack of control over rules—in this case, the incontrovertible rules of mortality. Friman’s whistling is a whistling past the graveyard.

The note of resignation when responding to the natural world’s spectacular shows is quieter in “Red Camellia,” but ever present: it’s woven into the image fabric of the piece. The poem begins, “The bush has reaped her reward: / she cannot hold up her arms.” By “arms,” the poet indicates the camellia’s branches, here personified as human arms, but also the bush’s arms as in her armaments, her weapons. Thereafter, the lines are suffused with martial diction. We encounter the camellia’s arms in a “salute” during a spring season that is “primed,” as a gun ready to fire. Images of imprisonment also catch our attention: “the wasp tending its cells” precedes an image of the camellia waiting “all year / locked in her thin verticals / for the sun’s first hot speech.” Desire, or at least the biological imperative to reproduce, is figured throughout this lush poem, full though it is of “lascivious plumpings,” as a prison in a war zone. So, when we arrive at the speaker’s direct address to the beloved—“Love, I want to talk camellia talk”—it feels fitting that this conversation must happen “quick, before summer’s endless / conscription in a green uniform— / that stifling march into fall.” Meanwhile, the lover is implored to “juice me up red and barbarous: / a phalanx of redcoats, a four-alarm fire.” So even as the speaker says, warmly, “I’m tired of pork roasts and ease / in an easy chair,” we know that when she’s asking her lover to “Bring me one more / season. A reason. Bring it in your hands,” what she’s asking for is no idyll, but the lived experience of passion, with its tirades and restraints. If we were looking for this poem’s kindred spirit in popular love songs, we’d be better off listening to Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” than Sinatra’s “The Way You Look Tonight.”

Even the most somber poem of this trio, “The Birthmark,” throws sparks of Friman’s characteristic insouciance into the heartfelt mix. Set during the small hours in a bedroom where the speaker is watching her husband sleep, “The Birthmark” turns around its apostrophe to the moon. This address begins romantically (Romantically) enough: “Come, I say to the moon, meet the new / Endymion . . .” But the poem proceeds directly to the contemporary shepherd’s snoring, the lover’s insomnia beside him, the daily grind of making syllabi and grading papers. The speaker acknowledges her fall from the vatic poet’s more elevated role: “Forgive us,” she asks the moon, “We serve a shabbier world.” But knowing that “we serve a shabbier world,” that we are “crabby,” that our passions imprison us and do harm to our beloveds, that our most basic tasks are a little silly, does not diminish the felt power of our needs, or the scale and power of the world in which those needs often go unmet. As Friman says in “How It Is,” “What does life mean / but itself? Ask the sea. / You’ll get a wet slap back- / handed across your mouth. / Ask the tiger. I dare you.” Yet Friman seems to be delighted by, and delights us with, her daring, bringing dangerous creatures into the comfortable rooms she’s designed, where we meet both her artistry and her recognition that all artistry must go the way of the camellia’s blooms before the sun’s “hot speech.” Friman’s work serves up both “the tedium of suffering” and the incontrovertible urge to address the moon in the presence of one’s beloved, asking her to “Shine on him nonetheless.”

—Dorine Jennette

“Oh, no . . . not another nursing home story!”—a note on “Paolo’s Turn” by Karen Laws

2011-08-31T10:52:00.002-04:00

All editors and most readers have had their brains imprinted with variations on the desperate cry above. In place of “nursing home” some lovers of good writing may substitute “divorce,” “ruined childhood landscape,” “faithful dog,” “hospital deathbed,” and/or a number of other popular subjects—but some readers will, I know, keep nursing home on their lists.

Subjects become popular because they carry important emotional or other weight for writers, as they do for most of the rest of us. So, to cry out for fewer dying-and-death tales, or less recounting of torrid affairs and lost children and faraway wars, is counterintuitive for human beings. However, we can ask . . . can expect . . . can demand of writers that they recognize the heightened stakes they face when they deign to approach a ring already filled to overflowing with hats from around the country and the world.

I can’t help but suspect that Karen Laws, whose story “Paolo’s Turn” is the lead prose piece in our Summer 2011 issue, has read Bel Kaufman’s novel Up the Down Staircase, wherein the annoying and irascible high school principal counters all complaints about difficult situations with “Let it be a challenge to you!” And I know that Laws knows E. M. Forster’s deservedly famous dictum from The Art of the Novel: “bounce the reader into it.”

“It was time, Jeffrey Ingalls told his roommate Fred Robinson, for Paolo to steal Francesca’s thunder.” Three sentences after this opener to “Paolo’s Turn,” we learn that Ingalls and Robinson live at Guardian Oaks Care Center—but almost before we can mutter, “Oh, no . . . not another nursing home story!” we hear Ingalls declaim two wild questions that let us know we are not in any Kansas of run-of-the-mill writing: First, he asks of the Alzheimer’s-slowed Robinson “Why shouldn’t Paolo sing of how he straddled the great bull of lust, grasping the horn of pain in one hand and twirling the lariat of pleasure with the other?” Then, after eliciting only a head shake from his roommate, Ingalls says, “An opera about Hell performed by the inmates of a nursing home—what could be more appropriate?”

Indeed.

Through the middle of September you can read “Paolo’s Turn” in its entirety while the story occupies the featured spot on our website, and thereafter you can read or reread it—and all manner of other distinctive prose and poetry—by subscribing to (and thereby crucially supporting) The Georgia Review.

--Stephen Corey

The (Sometimes Stupid) Reality of Becoming a Grown Up

2011-08-22T14:02:00.003-04:00

Athens has made the transition from summer to fall—or at least from summer break to school year. The students are back at UGA, which means more traffic, increasing numbers of submissions to read at the Review, and a heightened sense of industry in the town. Suddenly everyone has to-do lists, and that includes me, even though I will no longer be a resident of Athens come August 31. With the closing of summer, I’ve acquired an ample number of things to worry about, and a hearty sense of purpose to go along with them.

When I first came into this internship, I felt iffy about the future but, at the same time, nonchalant. I had the whole summer to think about nothing beyond working or hanging around Athens. It’s been all well and good, but summer is ending, and I find myself feeling iffy again. And suddenly, nonchalance isn’t an option. I have to do things like take the GRE and research potential grad school curricula. And in these last two weeks in Athens, I know I’ll be preoccupied with thinking about the upcoming fall in Northampton, even though I should just focus on my priorities right now—like making sure my old car will survive all the way back to Ohio and spray-painting graffiti so I’ll leave a mark on Athens before I leave for I don’t know how long.

I’m coming back to the busy reality of being a student—I can’t float around relatively carefree anymore. But that’s okay, because even though I’ve got a lot to think about, I now have a goal that will help guide me in making important decisions about what to do with the rest of my life: to work in the literary magazine industry, preferably as an editor. I can thank my internship for this goal, and even though it might not lead me quite where I expect it to, it’s a better starting point than none at all.

The business of literature has always seemed to me like a big, fuzzy entity somewhere separate from the real world, where people make money off intellectualism and get paid for doing the same things that they did in a university English class. Working at the Review hasn’t necessarily contradicted this impression, but getting into the business doesn’t seem quite so illusory anymore. And more importantly, it seems like the kind of scene where one can partake in many different opportunities while still maintaining one position, which is important to someone like me who’s afraid of getting into a rut in anything I do.

The most illuminating thing I’ve learned from working at the Review might also be the most confusing: this business is simultaneously easy and hard to get into. Knowing people is important, but talent also matters. Except when the only thing that matters is talent. Or when the only thing that matters is who you know.

Maybe that’s actually how lots of career fields are, and I’m just learning for the first time what the real world is like. Which is fine—I’m still young enough that this epiphany hasn’t come too late. But what’s scary about the real world isn’t the prospect of being in it; it’s the idea of how hard it is to push your way into it, into a place you actually want to be, and not to settle for something less. At the Review, I’ve learned that there are way worse things than to settle into the world of literary magazines because there is always a way up and out. I just have to figure out how to dive in.

A Summer 2011 Tag-Team Match: Dunn and Kitchen vs. Sullins and Laws

2011-08-12T08:56:00.017-04:00

Ladies and gentlemen . . . in this corner, Pulitzer Prize–winner Stephen Dunn—weighing in at fifty-plus Georgia Review poems across the past three-plus decades—and Judith Kitchen, the heft of whose semiannual essay-reviews of new poetry for GR since 1990 would fill a brace of 400-page books. And in this corner, Karen Laws—a newcomer to our pages—and Jacob Sullins, a newcomer to GR and to just about every other publishing outlet as well . . .

Even before the match begins, I can assure you that it will result in a draw—because continuity and change form the best duo in this literary realm, where writing excellence always bounces reputation and past achievement over the ropes.

We are thrilled and honored to have gathered new work by and about Stephen Dunn, whose many appearances in our pages attest not to some abstract notion about the quality of his writing, but to our belief in the strength of each individual piece we have presented—including his five new poems for Summer 2011. Judith Kitchen—I have said this before and reassert it here—writes poetry criticism whose breadth, intelligence, and heart are unexcelled by that of anyone else around. (Some enterprising press would do well, for itself and the American reading community, to bring out at least a selection of her GR essay-reviews in book form.)

Still, no one should bet against the on-canvas styles and wiles of the Laws-and-Sullins fiction-writing team. In “Paolo’s Turn,” Karen Laws (a finalist for this year’s Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award) needs only a few sentences to change any “Oh, no, not another nursing home story!” reactions to marveling (and laughing) at the zany but true-feeling world she creates. And Jacob Sullins’ “12 Rounds” reinvigorates “the cop story” as a subtly smart, humane, and complex genre.

As you’ve probably realized by now, I’ve jammed myself up against the betting window in such a way that I’ve got to wage my literary capital on everyone in the ring—a square space with a round name—of Summer 2011: Sydney Lea and Greg Johnson, whose frequency of appearance in our pages (with poems and reviews, respectively) reasonably rivals those of Dunn and Kitchen; poets Alice Friman, Lola Haskins, and Dave Smith, who have been with us a number of times; Robert Cording and former United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins, each of whom has also been with us before—but not often enough; Jed Rasula, whose long, sweeping essay on the broad artistic and cultural influence of Richard Wagner will send you hungering for his earlier big-time essay in our pages, “Jazzbandism,” from Spring 2006; Kathleen Graber and George Looney for their keen but radically different appraisals of Stephen Dunn’s writing—and Laura McCullough for her one-person tag-team effort in the form of an essay about and an interview with Dunn; Sarah Gordon, the noted Flannery O’Connor scholar whose poem “Acta Sanctorum” is her second with us—and follows thirty-nine years after her first in Fall 1972; and, last but by no means least, the never-before-featured Date Farmers, with their wildly irreverent visual art that, in the words of Mindy Wilson, “celebrates an ethic that values the homemade, the salvaged, the collaborative.”

Collaborative . . . that’s the key descriptor for this full-to-bursting ring of a Summer 2011 issue. Everyone wrestling with his or her art . . . and everyone winning. If you haven’t yet had your admission ticket punched, now’s the time to step forward.

—Stephen Corey, Editor

Congratulations to Philip Levine, the next Poet Laureate of the United States

2011-08-12T07:00:00.002-04:00

Photo credit: Frances Levine

On Wednesday, August 10, the Library of Congress announced that Philip Levine will be the next poet laureate, succeeding W.S. Merwin.

Levine is a longtime friend of The Georgia Review, having published over twenty poems with us, beginning with "Everything" in the Spring 1978 issue. His essay "A Day in May: Los Angeles, 1960" appeared in the Spring 2005 Georgia Review, and our Fall 1998 edition included a special feature gathering four previously unpublished poems that were subsequently published in his book The Mercy (Knopf, 1999). In May 2008, Levine participated in a Georgia Review-sponsored public reading held at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan.

Hit this link to read the full text of Levine's poem "The Two Tinos" -- first published in the Spring 2008 issue of The Georgia Review. Enjoy!

The Library of Congress has assembled an impressive collection of Levine material that's available online -- including audio and video recordings, reviews of the poet's work, interviews, full-text poems, and more. In the wake of Wednesday's announcement there's been widespread coverage in the national print and online media, including two pieces in the New York Times (one by Charles McGrath and the other by Dwight Garner), an article in the Huffington Post, and much more.

To subscribe to The Georgia Review and receive four issues per year of the finest contemporary American writing available anywhere, click here. As always, your support is very much appreciated.

Writing and Suffering

2011-08-11T11:32:00.002-04:00

I worked recently on collecting information for biographies of past contributors to the Review and found it the spectrum of backgrounds the Review’s writers come from very interesting. I researched writers from all over the U.S., and a few from outside it. There was the fair share of women writers, a few non-white writers, and the standard chunk of white male writers. During my research, I gathered information for the biography, and then I would read the story by the author to see if I thought it was the kind of literature that would be resonant fifty or one hundred years from now. In the end, I had no way of knowing; for all I know, the stories that I found to be closer to kitsch, or to be more clever than affecting, could be the ones that really matter in fifty years.

But comparing the quality of the story with the type of life the author had led intrigued me, and it brought to mind the question of to what degree suffering is connected to writing, a question that has dogged me in the past as I’m sure it has many other writers. This glossary of authors seemed like a list of evidence for why some people believe you can’t be a true writer without having suffered; the more dramatic lives the writers appeared to have led, the more obvious it was why and how their writing was so exceptional.

For example, Ernest J. Gaines, who wrote a thoughtful story with strong, ominous undercurrents of racial tension, grew up impoverished in rural Louisiana. His story was energetic, and it had a sharp awareness that’s hard to imagine another author, who had lived an easier life, possessing. Harry Crews grew up in the back woods of Florida and Georgia, suffering from poverty, disease, and abuse as a child. Crews’s story might have been one of my favorites, as it set a new standard for the phrase “quiet intensity.” The narration was at once controlled and charged with wild emotion.

Then there were authors like Joyce Carol Oates, who on the surface seems to have lived a largely privileged life, suffering losses and setbacks that could be called more conventional than overwhelming. Her story was a good example of how quiet tragedies can be as weighty as dramatic ones, and how inner pain matters as much as visible suffering. T.E. Holt, a Ph. D and M.D. who grew up in a family of doctors, wrote a deeply touching, saddening yet realistic post-apocalyptic story. His story was also one of my favorites, although I’m probably biased, as I’m a sucker for slightly sci-fi, otherworldly stories that are emotionally driven.

How suffering is connected to writing is a personal question for me, as writing is important to me, but I can’t say too much about suffering based on my personal experience. After all, I’m white, upper middle class, attend a private liberal arts college, and can safely say that I’ve experienced nothing truly bad. In some ways, I subscribe to possibly one of the worst clichés—I sometimes suffer about not having a whole lot to suffer. How the Georgia Review contributors have brought suffering into their writing, or left it out, is evidence of their talent as writers, but in some cases it seems evident to me that how they pair suffering with writing is also strongly tied to their backgrounds. Those whose quiet tragedies aren’t readily or publicly apparent probably don’t bring those tragedies into their writing in obvious ways; at the same time, it is undeniable that suffering on a dramatic scale makes for good writing, if it’s the right author. In any case, what this research has ultimately taught me is that you don’t have to suffer to write, but in some cases, it might help to make the writing better.

Our Summer 2011 issue is available now, highlighted by a special feature on Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn

2011-08-09T14:10:00.001-04:00

The Summer 2011 issue of The Georgia Review is just out, and includes a lengthy special feature on the remarkable poet Stephen Dunn as well as poems by Billy Collins, Alice Friman, Lola Haskins, Sydney Lea, Dave Smith, and others; short fiction by Karen Laws and Jacob Sullins; Jed Rasula's expansive, provocative essay "Wagnerism: A Telephone from the Beyond"; book reviews by Greg Johnson and Judith Kitchen, and a full-color art portfolio by The Date Farmers, otherwise known as Armando Lerma and Carlos Ramirez.

The Dunn feature, titled Many a Beautiful Strangeness, gathers together five new poems by Dunn himself, Brief Answers to Unspoken Questions -- an innovative "intraview" with Dunn by Dunn, an interview with the poet by Laura McCullough (who also contributes her essay Between Worlds, Refuge: Stephen Dunn and the Creative Writing Workshop), and prose pieces by Kathleen Graber and George Looney. This and other Dunn material will be posted on The Georgia Review website in the coming days and weeks, so bookmark the link and check back often.

If you already subscribe to GR, the issue is either on its way to your mailbox or has already arrived. If you aren't yet a subscriber, there's no better time than now to begin receiving four issues a year of the finest in contemporary American writing. Click here for to order your subscription online or to purchase single issues. Enjoy!

A Question of Location

2011-07-25T12:48:00.005-04:00

Living in Georgia these past weeks, I’ve been reminded of American regional misconceptions, which I was able largely to avoid when studying in England. At the Review, I’ve had the chance to read some interesting perspectives on conceptualizations of different American regions. The Georgian writer Mary Hood distinguishes between northern and southern storytelling in a good-hearted but provocative way. Her thoughts have made me question how much stock we put in the idea that the North and South are really so different. More specifically, Barry Lopez’s essay “A Dark Light in the West: Racism and Reconciliation” (Fall 2010), which is largely about the history of racism in Oregon, has reminded me of the dangers of assuming that prejudice changes across state lines. Issues of regionalism have been particularly present in my mind because I will be writing a senior thesis exploring these issues in the upcoming school year.

In high school, southerners annoyed me when they generalized about the North; I thought they sounded ignorant. But since I decided on my senior thesis topic, I’ve become more interested in southern generalizations, and realize that based on ignorance or not, these pervasive opinions still influence the way southerners relate to their heritage. And this cultural spread of impressions and stereotypes is just as present in the North, even if it’s not as outspoken.

I’m neither a southerner nor a northerner, and when it comes down to it, I don’t think my parents, who created lives on both sides of the Mason Dixon line, subscribe to those labels either. They met in Florida, where I was born, and spent a few years in Michigan before settling in Athens for about ten years. They’re Americans—they don’t define themselves according to where they happen to live within America because they’ve lived all over. And I, who felt so at home in England, try not to characterize myself according to wherever I am. But in America it’s impossible to avoid people who limit themselves and others according to region. I’ve encountered this attitude everywhere, but over the past two weeks I was bluntly reminded of two overarching and troubling southern opinions about the North that are opposite but equally presumptuous.

The other day a young woman from Atlanta, who had asked me how I liked the North, said she loved visiting but would hate to live there, citing the familiar reason: “People just aren’t very friendly up there!” When I replied that there are rude people everywhere, she agreed, but said that you couldn’t find the kind of small-town friendliness in the North that you do in the South. I’ve heard this before, though I’ve never quite understood it. I’ve encountered unfriendliness in small southern towns, and friendliness in northern towns.

A few days later, a friend’s dad, who had asked me about living in Massachusetts, complained about how the southern way of thinking was so narrow in comparison with the North. I wouldn’t have expected this kind of statement to make me uncomfortable, but it did. I had to keep myself from telling him about opinions of the South that I had heard from fellow Smith students, young women who’d spent their whole lives in New England. Being in New England, it’s become clear to me that many northerners have as restricted an impression of the South as many southerners do of the North. In an extreme example, one student from Vermont talked about how backwards people in Atlanta were—she’d presumed that they didn’t even get cable TV. In a pre-Civil War history class, where we’d had an open and considerate conversation about the n-word, another student had said she didn’t think such a thoughtful conversation could occur in the South outside of a university classroom. I realize now what I should have said to her: that anywhere in America such a conversation is unlikely to occur outside of a university classroom. If New England is so progressive, surely it would be more aware of its southern neighbors, and less willing to apply stereotypes automatically. To assume that an entire region is riddled with ignorance is ignorance in itself.

One thing I want to do in my senior thesis is explore the readiness with which people think of different regions of America as something “other,” as something almost intellectually separate. No matter where I go, I’ve encountered people with the same resistance towards thinking of and accepting other regions and cultures as just as complex as their own. But I’ve found that the same kinds of people settle themselves into the same kinds of circles. Rednecks exist everywhere, even in New England, as do artists and suburbanites. What I’m really trying to do is figure out how similar and how different the North and South are, and the more I think about it, the less sure I am what exactly those similarities and differences are.

"Dog brains are not allowed on the air": Frederick Busch's "The World Began with Charlie Chan"

2011-07-14T09:33:00.007-04:00

My father once told me a story about a troubling performance he saw over twenty years ago. The act starred a comedian who singled out audience members to stand and be mocked. What confused my dad was that the people who were being mocked seemed to enjoy themselves as much as the people laughing at them, which raised the question of whether the comedian’s derision was really such a bad thing Twenty years later, audiences’ love for this potentially cruel form of entertainment has not waned; for some reason, we love not only to watch people calling people stupid, but also to be called stupid ourselves.

It’s a curious phenomenon, the subject, I’m sure, of plenty of journal articles, and the idea behind Frederick Busch’s short story “The World Began with Charlie Chan,” which first appeared in the Spring 1989 issue of The Georgia Review [This story is no longer available online. To purchase this issue click here or call 1-800-542-3481 for more information]. The story features Malcolm Pitkin, a successful radio personality whose late night show consists mostly of ridiculing his callers. Malcolm’s audience of less-than-intellectual toadies are fooling themselves—but then, so is Malcolm, who proudly calls himself “King of the Fools.” Indeed, he embodies that title when an old flame decides to reconnect with him on his radio show “in front of how many millions—well, not in front of, let’s say in ear shot.” Her name is Lisa, and Malcolm calls her “dumb as ever,” but he clearly still cares for her. However, in his moment of utter surprise at her calling, he is overwhelmed by other calls and cannot handle the technical difficulties. So in order to compensate for a love reconnection lost, he tells himself, “She could not have been that Lisa.”

Although Malcolm seems smart, which is more than can be said about some radio jockeys, the reader gets satisfaction in watching him lose his composure and his control of the conversation. But what Busch’s story really calls attention to is something we might not be so ready to admit: the degree to which we like to see others suffer. When Malcolm squashes his insipid callers’ egos, it’s just as fun as when he squirms like a salted slug. To act repelled by the idea of mockery as entertainment is easy, but when we’re actively participating in that entertainment, do we stick to our moral guns? Reading Busch’s story feels like listening to a sleazy radio talk show—not to observe the inanity, but to revel in the dirt being flung. This ambiguity of the reader’s role leads to questioning whether one is at all justified in passing judgment on the situation. Thus, the reader, instead of feeling guilty or dirty, isn’t entirely sure what to feel.

Malcolm makes asides about his millions of listeners and about Frank, his producer, hidden in the production booth. But as the story goes on, it becomes clear that there aren’t millions of people listening to him, and there probably isn’t even a producer, although Malcolm seems convinced that there is. At one point, he exclaims, “You don’t think it’s fun up here at night, do you? You think somebody sits up here and talks to people at night because he wants to?” The joke’s on Malcolm, who is at least smart enough to realize it. But Busch also leaves the lingering possibility that the joke is really on the reader, which is a more ambivalent and deliciously uncomfortable matter.

An Intern's Introduction

2011-07-12T12:31:00.005-04:00

I may as well be honest from the start—I wanted more to return to Athens, Georgia, than to spend the summer working. I attend Smith (a women’s college, not a girl’s school) in Northampton, Massachusetts, which is a great town, but I always looked forward to coming back to Athens. I grew up here. Then my family moved to southeast Ohio two years ago, so when I returned home for breaks and the summer, I wasn’t really returning home. Athens, with its heat and music, Confederate flags and peace signs, magnolia trees and kudzu, left a tangy-sweet taste in my mouth that I haven’t been able to find anywhere else. Southern Ohio is a lovely place, but it can taste a bit like stale bread.

Last fall, I decided that I wanted to spend this summer working at a literary magazine. I’m an English major who loves poetry, and magazine publishing has always appealed to me more than book publishing. Magazines seem to be a livelier scene, and I’m thinking there’s more money for poetry in magazines than in books because people don’t seem to buy books of poetry as often as they subscribe to literary magazines. When I discovered through the Poetry Center at Smith that The Georgia Review is published at the University of Georgia, I saw a double opportunity: I could get internship experience at a literary journal, and I could spend the summer in Athens. So I bothered Doug Carlson (an editor at the Review) with enthusiastic e-mails until I found out I had scored an internship. One spring semester later, here I am.

As I mentioned before, I love poetry—in fact, I just got back from studying at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, because it has one of the best creative writing programs in the UK. It was a rewarding experience; I learned as much about beer as poetry. However, as much as I love poetry, I’m always looking for motivation. I usually find it by taking workshop classes, but those are hard to come by over the summer. At the Review, by reading poetry submissions, back issues, and exchange journals, I’ll be surrounded by poetry every day—which, two weeks into it, has been energizing. The good poetry makes me want to write more to improve, and the bad poetry is equally, if not more, useful because it shows me exactly what not to do in my writing.

I’m thrilled to be back in this odd place, where I can see my friends again and have Athens adventures. But I’m also thrilled with my internship, reading all day and thinking critically about what I’m reading. It’s like being an English major—but without the grades. I have yet to find a serious downside to this.

I’ll be making regular blog contributions about my experiences at the Review and in Athens during the summer. I hope to publish blog entries about once a week or so, so check back soon.

“The hope of another version”: the short fiction of Marjorie Sandor

2011-06-06T10:00:00.008-04:00

We’re pleased to offer – for a limited time only -- the full text of Marjorie Sandor’s short story “Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime,” originally published in the Fall 1997 issue of The Georgia Review and reprinted in our current issue (Spring 2011), “A Home in Other People: Selected Stories and Art, 1984 – 2007.” The story is also the title piece of Sandor’s 2003 collection published by Sarabande Books.

As is the case with Sandor’s larger body of work, “Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime” concerns itself with family histories, family stories, and the ways in which the imagination can bridge the gap between the factual and the fanciful. Rachel, the story’s as-yet-unborn narrator, spins a speculative tale regarding her mother Clara’s youthful, brief friendship with Lev, a Russian painter, and his wife Manya, who are recent arrivals in Clara’s hometown. Manya is “quite ill” with what Clara’s mother describes as “a female disease.” On her second visit to the couple’s home, they ask Clara to pose for an odalisque, a request she quickly accepts. The portrait, which Rachel never sees and which Clara refuses to describe in any detail, ends up becoming the crucial lost artifact in the daughter’s detailed imagining of her mother’s early life during the closing days of the Second World War. Because the painting is missing, Rachel’s story (and by extension, Sandor’s) comes into existence; its absence transforms what might have been a merely ekphrastic description of an actual portrait into a richly imagined tale of the ways in which secrets shape families. As Sandor writes, “It’s late, Mother, but listen anyway, while I tell my children that somewhere in the world there is a painting of you and me, and in that painting your womb is not stark white and humanly cursed, but a whole dazzling universe, the burning blue-white of bones and stars.”

Marjorie Sandor has published four essays and eight short stories in The Georgia Review since 1984. Her memoir The Late Interiors is just out from Arcade/Skyhorse Publishing. Her story collection Portrait of My Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime won the 2004 National Jewish Book Award in Fiction. A previous essay collection, The Night Gardener: A Search for Home (the Lyons Press), won the 2000 Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize XIII, Twenty Under Thirty, Best American Spiritual Writing, and other anthologies. She directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

Home Is a Place in Time: “Stories About the Boys”

2011-05-17T14:14:00.011-04:00

In one of his many affecting essays about rural Minnesota life from Grass Roots, Paul Gruchow begins the story of his mother’s death and funeral by asserting: “To plant a garden is to enter the continuum of time. Each seed carries in its genome the history that will propel it into the future, and in planting it we stretch one of the long threads of our culture into tomorrow. A home, like a garden, exists as much in time as in space.” This could preface, equally well, Jim Heynen’s stories of growing up just over the border in northwestern Iowa, several of which we gathered in our Spring 2011 fiction retrospective as “Stories About the Boys.”

Gruchow understood, and Heynen demonstrates, that remembered stories are the seeds of home and place; both are essential to the preservation of what is worthy in a past culture and vital to a healthy orientation in a present one. If Gruchow had grown up with brothers, these stories would have also been his to tell. He, like Heynen, would be the youngest boy, the introspective one with all that innocence and wisdom. And he would be reminding us that we have little chance to know where we are if we don’t know where we’ve been.

“Stories About the Boys” encompasses wonder and acceptance, beauty and danger. In short, these compact narratives are about people living with each other, the animals, and the land. They maintain and continue a way of life before agribusiness took the culture out of agriculture, before, as Gruchow once said, we made “the countryside safe for machines.”

Moreover, Heynen’s carefully composed tales amount to much more than rural reminiscence. Gary Snyder wrote that Heynen’s fictional farm is a “universe of myth.” Considered singly, the stories carry the attributes of metaphor. They contain moments of revelation that can’t be reduced to mere nostalgia, moments that open, beyond description and narration, to a sense of home and place.

Photo credit: Wayne Gudmundson

Elevator World, Atlanta Baby, and Me

2011-05-16T13:37:00.008-04:00

by Stephen Corey

As I have done for many a year now, I recently (on 5 May) made the ninety-minute drive from Athens to Atlanta for the GAMMA Awards ceremony—sitting down for standard banquet lunch fare amidst a very nonstandard group of editors and other magazine staffers from such publications as Atlanta Parent, Oconee Living, Professional Photographer, Habitat World, Elevator World, and Garden and Gun. I have a particular fondness for this contest—I’ll explain the acronym GAMMA later—for the very reason that it sets such a diversity of publications in competition with one another.

The Georgia Review is known as “a literary journal,” an appellation that can be construed as a badge of honor by some readers but that, I’m sure, strikes many a potential reader as a marker for “specialized,” “elitist,” or—worse, from a marketing standpoint—“boring.” What the GAMMAs do is toss all the strange bedfellows into a room marked “Best Essay” or “Best Feature” or “Best Single Issue” or “General Excellence,” and then ask the competition judges to consider the magazines’ writing and editorial perspectives and designs in a broad, nondiscriminatory (and I am tempted to say “absolute”) way: “We don’t care whether you are writing about poems or elevators,” these judges seem to say. “We care about how well you do it for caring readers like us.”

Within this democratic (and admittedly a bit weird-seeming at times) arena, The Georgia Review picked up seven honors at the 2011 ceremony and has earned many dozens over the years—dating back to the time when the honoring organization, the Magazine Association of the Southeast, was the Magazine Association of Georgia. (GAMMA was a sort of reverse, inside-out, and inexact acronym that someone with a decent ear forged from the GA abbreviation of Georgia, the MA of both Magazine and Association, and the . . . well, you see what I mean about “inexact.” For better or worse, the Magazine Association of the Southeast folks decided not to throw out the acronym baby with the organization bathwater.) Among these seven were gold awards for Best Single Issue (Fall 2010) and Best Feature—won by a long poem, for Pete’s sake: “Cadaver, Speak” by Marianne Boruch from Summer 2010. We took home “only” the silver for General Excellence—the category in which we had earned the gold for the past three years straight—but we’ll try to improve. (For a complete rundown of our 2011 GAMMAS, click here.)

Yes, there’s a bit of an odd feeling in having to think such things as “We beat out Garden and Gun” or “Dang, we just barely lost out to Atlanta Baby,” but—as I said—I like it: some smart readers proclaiming that The Georgia Review is doing some top-notch work that all kinds magazine aficionados can and should take up, enjoy, and support. What’s not to like in that?

The Devil in Angela

2011-05-11T09:44:00.021-04:00

One signal moment in the education of many literature aficionados is their first encounter with the Satan of John Milton’s Paradise Lost—that headstrong rebellious angel who can’t manage to be satisfied with the beautiful perfection that is Heaven, and who seems to get nearly all the best lines of dialogue in the poem. William Blake, who always knew to listen to the writing rather than the writer, summed up this blasphemous situation better than anyone else, before or since: “Milton was of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”

Most of us, for various reasons, have a long and usually unacknowledged fascination with the bad boys and bad girls of the world. When “Angela Perfidia” first crossed my desk about fifteen years ago—its author, Margaret Benbow, had not previously submitted work to The Georgia Review, nor had I encountered her writing anywhere else—I was gripped by the story’s fulminating narrator from the opening sentences: “The big garlic-breathing snake of penitents whips its coils up and down the church aisles. Whew, this parish has to be God’s funkiest ever. I’m one of the snake’s links, and like everyone else I back with tiny steps toward the confessional.”

When Angela reveals her young age the raucous goings-on become even more perversely enticing, as does the fact that her attitude and actions grow ever darker throughout the tale—which Benbow manages to render both taut (at just over seven pages) and fully developed.

Not all the best short stories are primarily character driven, but many are. After all these years, “Angela Perfidia” continues to haunt and amuse me—Angela is wickedly, shamelessly funny—not only for its grand titular figure and her much beleaguered mother, but also for its handful of deftly carved cameo characters such as the confession booth’s Father Len, who “studies the macerated design of my life with such quiet hopelessness. It lies there, vibrating, and he pokes it sadly, like a voodoo spook hired to harvest potent truths from chicken guts.”

—Stephen Corey

"I've seen a man die, but not like this": Robert Olen Butler's "This Is Earl Sandt"

2011-05-03T14:30:00.012-04:00

“I lifted my camera and I tripped the shutter, and here was another amazing thing, it seemed to me. One man was flying above the earth, and with a tiny movement of a hand, another man had captured him. . . . Earl Sandt was about to die, but he was forever caught there in that box in my hand.”

When we were trying to pare stories from our too-long list for The Georgia Review Spring 2011 fiction retrospective, Robert Olen Butler’s “This Is Earl Sandt” refused to budge. We were drawn to the story’s historical setting—a rarity among the 300+ works we considered—and especially to how it makes palpable the conflicting fascination and anxiety its unnamed narrator feels about the emerging technologies of his moment and the transformations they signal. Set in 1913 and inspired by a vintage postcard from Butler’s extensive collection, the story is told in the voice of a small-town banker who gathers with his young son and fellow citizens after church one Sunday “to peek into the future and cheer it on”—to watch a man fly—and ends up witnessing the aviator’s death when the fragile biplane falls from the sky—a violent and, until this moment, barely imaginable end. “I’ve seen a man die, but not like this,” the narrator begins. “There was silence suddenly around us when he disappeared beyond the trees, silence after terrible sounds, that hammering of his engine, the engine of his aeroplane, and the other sound, after.” Shaken, the narrator begins to identify with the dead aviator, to try to experience what Sandt did and to understand its implications.

What you won’t know from simply reading this story is that its coming-to-be is itself a story of spectating, exhibitionism, and the never-entirely-risk-free use of technology. Robert Olen Butler created “This is Earl Sandt,” from conception to final draft, during a live webcast in seventeen two-hour episodes over a two-week stretch in fall 2001. That is, Butler assigned himself a writing exercise and then invited anyone to watch him succeed or fail. The potential consequences of his act were hardly as grave as Sandt’s, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to point out a family resemblance between the one instance of audacity and the other.

As Butler explains in a 2004 essay “A Postcard from America,” he intended the webcast as a sort of extended teaching moment, an opportunity for students to witness, as intimately as another can, one artist’s creative process. Shortly after the project was done, he told the Guardian that “A dancer can watch her mentor move in a rehearsal studio. And a painter can watch their mentor at work, over their shoulder. But what can a writer do?” The webcast is still available for free download (search for “Inside Creative Writing” at iTunes), and in it you can watch Butler do the things a writer does—stare awhile at a blank white expanse, type words, delete words, type some more, consult a dictionary, and so on. But he also does things most writers would never think of doing: he talks to an audience about the choices he is making, and, in the last half hour of each session, answers questions viewers e-mail to him. Listening to Butler talk and watching his words appear on his screen, which is in fact your own computer screen, you’re getting closer to inhabiting the mind of the writer, to becoming Robert Olen Butler . . . all while Butler himself is trying to inhabit the mind of the postcard’s photographer, creating a character who is also obsessed with entering the experience of another.

Butler chose the Earl Sandt postcard as his writing prompt the morning the webcast began, he says, and while he’d always expected to write a story about it, he imagined he would tell it in the voice of the aviator. He decided instead to tell the story “in the voice of the man who watched.” It was barely two months after 9/11, and Butler, like the rest of us, was still shaken by the most profound and terrible moment of collective witness for any of us who were alive to see it. At the center of that horror was our discovery of some terrible truths: that a passenger jet can be a missile, that technology can be turned against us in ways unimaginable to most, and that such knowledge can and will be graphically articulated to us, over and over, “forever caught there in that box.”

“We each of us viewed the fall of an aeroplane under stunning circumstances for which we had no frame of reference, and as a result, the event got around certain defenses that we all necessarily carry within us,” Butler writes about 9/11—again in “A Postcard from America. “And we confronted—one by one by one—in a way most of us never have—our own mortality.” Those words might just as easily have come from the mouth of the narrator who watched Earl Sandt lift into the sky, “defying the trees, defying the earth,” and then fall from it.

It’s fitting that a story set during a turn-of-the-century transitional moment, in which people were realizing how planes, cars, cameras, and other newfangled contraptions might dramatically alter physical and metaphysical landscapes, was composed at a similar moment of upheaval. In the still-rippling wake of 9/11 and its awful new lessons in ways to die, we were beginning to understand and exploit the Internet’s seemingly limitless opportunities, to educate, interact, build, to self-promote, spy, deceive.

When I think about how Butler wrote this story, using the Internet to create community and promote creativity, I’m struck by how deftly “This Is Earl Sandt” embodies the multiple personalities of any technological beast; and how the story achieves the unity of form and content, purpose and means I think all artists want in their best work. His narrator’s anxiety over technology’s conflicted nature, its power to create and bewilder, to better our lives and to destroy them, is our own. No wonder this story feels relevant and resonant a decade after its creation, and no wonder it held firm its claim on our minds and our pages—not once (Winter 2003 originally), but twice. Order your copy of Spring 2011 here.

GR comes to NYC May 6 - 12

2011-05-03T13:13:00.000-04:00

The Georgia Review, one of the country’s most highly regarded and longest-lived literary journals, has more subscribers in the New York City area than in any entire state other than its home base of Georgia. So, to honor those readers and some of the many Review contributors who also live in and around the city, the journal is presenting four programs around Manhattan and Brooklyn in early May -- all free and open to the public.

On Friday May 6 at 7:00 p.m., essayist Martha Graham Wiseman, fiction writer Anna Solomon, and poet Jane McKinley will read in the Kaufman Dance Studio of the Juilliard School, located at 60 Lincoln Center Plaza.

On Sunday May 8 at 4:00 p.m., poet/playwright/humorist Louis Phillips, poet Kyoko Uchida, and poet/essayist Stephen Corey—who is also the editor of The Georgia Review—will read at Union Hall, 702 Union Street (at Fifth Avenue) in Brooklyn.

On Tuesday May 10, from 6:00-7:30 p.m., The Georgia Review will be the featured publication for the monthly “Periodically Speaking” series, co-sponsored by the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses (CLMP) and the New York Public Library (NYPL), in the periodicals room of the library's main branch. The topic of discussion, “A Mag in the Hand Is Worth Two on the Screen—Or Is It?,” will be explored by Review editor Stephen Corey, assistant editor David Ingle, and Review contributors William Giraldi, Kathleen Graber, and Lynn Schmeidler. These three authors will open the program with brief readings from their work, and the panel conversation will follow.

On Wednesday May 11 at 7:00 p.m., the award-winning poets Margaret Gibson and Michael Waters will read for the Review at Poets House, located at 10 River Terrace in lower Manhattan.

More about the readers for 7:00 p.m. Friday, May 6, at the Juilliard School:

Martha Graham Wiseman has published poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her essay “In Rehearsal,” about growing up in a family and family circle of professional artists, appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of The Georgia Review, and a new essay is forthcoming in the journal later this year. In the past, Wiseman has been a dancer and choreographer, a theater student, and an editor; currently she teaches English at Skidmore College.

Jane McKinley’s poetry collection, Vanitas, came out from Texas Tech University Press early in 2011 as the latest winner of the prestigious Walt McDonald First-Book Prize. A handful of the poems in the book, including the title piece, appeared first in The Georgia Review (Fall 2009 and Fall 2010). McKinley is also a professional oboist serving as artistic director of the Dryden Ensemble, a Baroque chamber music group based in Princeton, New Jersey.

Anna Solomon, a former Brooklyn resident now living in Providence, Rhode Island, has published two stories in The Georgia Review as well as essays and other stories in the New York Times Magazine, Harvard Review, One Story, and elsewhere. Winner of a Pushcart Prize and the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize, Solomon has a novel, The Little Bride, coming out in September from Riverhead Books.

More about the readers for 4:00 p.m. Sunday, May 8, at Union Hall:

Louis Phillips, a longtime Manhattan resident, is a widely published poet, short-story writer, humorist/satirist, and playwright, two of whose one-act plays have been printed in The Georgia Review. The most recent of his many books are Fireworks in Some Particulars (Fort Schuyler Press), The Woman Who Wrote King Lear (Pleasure Boat Studio), and The Kilroy Sonata (Word Audience).

Kyoko Uchida’s poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Grand Street, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other magazines, as well as the anthology Stories in the Stepmother Tongue (White Pine Press). Reared in Japan, Canada, and the United States, Uchida currently lives in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Cornell University.

Stephen Corey, editor of The Georgia Review, has published nine poetry collections as well as numerous individual essays, poems, and reviews in such periodicals as American Poetry Review and Poets & Writers. His most recent book is There Is No Finished World (White Pine Press).

More about the readers and panelists for CLMP’s “Periodically Speaking” at 6:00 p.m. Tuesday, May 10, at the main branch of the New York Public Library:

William Giraldi was reared in New Jersey and currently lives in Boston, where he teaches at Boston University and is senior fiction editor of AGNI. He has published essays on fiction writers Lee K. Abbott and George Singleton in The Georgia Review, and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many other periodicals—among them the New York Times Book Review, Yale Review, and Salmagundi. Giraldi’s first novel, Busy Monsters, will be out from W. W. Norton in August.

Kathleen Graber’s second book of poems, The Eternal City (Princeton University Press, 2010)—a portion of which appeared in The Georgia Review—was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the William Carlos Williams Award. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and other organizations, Graber teaches creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Lynn Schmeidler’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Chelsea, Mid-American Review, Brevity, and other journals. Her short story “The Speed of Dark,” from The Georgia Review, was a Pushcart Prize nominee. A former faculty member of the Writers Studio in Manhattan, Schmeidler now teaches workshops in Westchester.

Stephen Corey is the editor of The Georgia Review, with which he has worked in various capacities since 1983.

David Ingle has served as an assistant editor of The Georgia Review for the past decade.

More about the readers for 7:00 p.m. Wednesday, May 11, at Poets House:

Margaret Gibson is the author of ten poetry collections, all from Louisiana State University Press. They include Long Walks in the Afternoon, the Lamont Prize winner in 1982; Memories of the Future: The Daybooks of Tina Modotti, co-winner of the Melville Cane Award in 1986; The Vigil, a finalist for the National Book Award in 1993; One Body, winner of the Connecticut Center for the Book Award in 2008; and her latest, Second Nature (2010). Gibson, who lives in Preston, Connecticut, has also published a memoir, The Prodigal Daughter (University of Missouri Press, 2008). Her work has been appearing in The Georgia Review with regularity over the past thirty-plus years.

Michael Waters’ most recent books, all from BOA Editions, are Gospel Night (2011); Darling Vulgarity, a 2006 finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (2001). He has also served as co-editor for two anthologies, Contemporary American PoetryPerfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003). Waters teaches at Monmouth University and in the Drew University MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation. (Houghton Mifflin, 2008) and

For more information, visit The Georgia Review website, phone 706-542-3481, or email ingle.david@gmail.com.

Robert Olen Butler story full-text now available from The Georgia Review

2011-04-26T08:18:00.003-04:00

Read a story from the Spring 2011 retrospective . . .
	“I've seen a man die, but not like this. There was silence suddenly around us when he disappeared beyond the trees, silence after terrible sounds, that hammering of his engine, the engine of his aeroplane, and the other sound, after.” —Robert Olen Butler “This Is Earl Sandt” (originally published Winter 2003)

Barry Lopez live in Athens one week from today!

2011-04-12T09:40:00.003-04:00

The Georgia Review proudly presents
its third annual Earth Day Celebration:

“The Writer and Social Responsibility”
A reading by Barry Lopez, National Book Award–winning author

7:00 p.m. Tuesday, April 19: 2011

State Botanical Garden of Georgia Visitor Center & Conservatory
Reception to follow

$8 general public
$4 students
ORDER TICKETS
or call 706-542-3481

Barry Lopez is the author of many books, among them the National Book Award winner Arctic Dreams (1986); Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited with Debra Gwartney (2006); and eight works of fiction. His honors include the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the John Hay Medal; Guggenheim, Lannan, and National Science Foundation fellowships; and Pushcart prizes in fiction and nonfiction. The San Francisco Chronicle has called him “arguably the nation’s premier nature writer.”

Barry Lopez’s distinctive essays and stories have graced eight issues of The Georgia Review since 1993—most recently, in Fall 2010, “A Dark Light in the West: Racism and Reconciliation.” This essay is an example of the sustained attention Lopez applies, throughout his work, to the complex ethical problems of our social, environmental, and political systems.

Meet Lopez at a reception after his presentation, which will include readings from new fiction and nonfiction. Tickets for the Barry Lopez program are $8 for the general public and $4 for students; seating is limited and advance purchase is strongly recommended. For ticket information and purchase, call The Georgia Review office at 706-542-3481. This event is presented by The Georgia Review with vital support from the State Botanical Garden of Georgia, the UGA President's Venture Fund, the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts, the Department of English, the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications, the Office of International Education, the UGA Press, Big City Bread Café, Terrapin Brewery, and Byhalia Books.