River of Play

The Ecopoetry Anthology

I've been talking with Ann Fischer-Wirth about this anthology project for years, and it's great to see it's out and available. 

And if you click over here, you'll see a fantastic interview by a fantastic poet, Derek Sheffield. Is ecopoetry necessary? Hell yes!

 

 

Very Emerald, Not So Licious

The editor comments are back. Substantial but not unfair. In our defense, Jeremy and I generated 10k words in two weeks. We were expecting heavy notes, and so it wasn't a shock to return to the essay. But it's still a lot of work. 

And ASLE is wrapping up. My tribe--and Jeremy's--disbanding for another two years. So I'm in a deeply ecocritical state of mind that doesn't shut off when I'm reading books to Wendy.

Enter The Apple-Pip Princess and Emeraldalicious.

The former is a kind of re-telling of theParable of the Talents. The daughter, in this version, who wins approval works hard with her mother's magic to re-grow the kingdom. In Emeraldalicious--

I'll cut to the chase: how epic is this fail?

The book is another in the "-alicious" franchise begun by Pinkalicious. The art is intriguingly awkward and the story--for the first one--is unsteady and perhaps objectionable. Perhaps not. So we've read other books in the series because they get high-profile launches and library space, and they're fine, I guess, if forgettable.

Short answer: epic.

In this book, Pink and her brother are in a park. They discover a trash heap (not Marjory) in their favorite part of the park and use egocentrism and magic to remove the garbage. Now, I could spend a bit of time going over the details of the fail, but I'll narrow it down to one criticism: Change takes work--not magic, not wishing. I don't mind magic in a story, and if magic had helped her to contact all her friends to come help clean up the park, then I wouldn't be all cranky (in this scenario, Twitter=magic). Change isn't magic. It's us.

I had Dana read it with the only preface being that I was suspicious. She put it down at the end and tucked it back into the libary bag. She only raised an eyebrow at me. We've talked about it, of course, but it's the beauty of libraries: you don't own the books.

 

Bear Gallery Reading for the Alaska Literary Series

I'll be in Chicago when this posts, but I'll be home soon and heading to the Bear Gallery for UAP's kickoff reading for the new Alaska Literary Series and Boreal Books titles.

It's at 7pm, and it should be fabulous. Readers include:

Mei Mei Evans

Home of the Bear Gallery

Carolyn Kremers

Sara Loewen

Erin Hollowell

 

 

Ten Years of Anthologizing

The first week of April was the official rollout of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize 10th Anniversary Reader. The good people at the journal met with the good people of the University of Nebraska Press to have a lovely celebration.

At least, I’m told it was lovely. Alaska’s a long commute. And expensive.

But there’s a story here about university publishing that might be useful.

The lovely cover

While we were in the midst of the 8th book prize contest, I emailed an editor at UNP, Kristen Elias Rowley. We met for coffee at The Mill and discussed what might need to happen to make an anniversary edition work. What was important to the Press was timing. And I had come to them at the right time: two years was a good lead time. Still is.

I put together a proposal. They accepted it. I started to put the book together and then got a job offer in Alaska. Could I keep both ‘askas happy? My replacement at Prairie Schooner

took up the rest of the task by narrowing selections from the most recent books, and we had a short conversation to confirm our choices.

So the two years timeline is good, but we had an advantage in the fact that UNP had published the books and had permissions and digital files all lined up.

Here’s the “too long, didn’t read” version: publishing takes time. Plan for it!

Book Drinking Culture

Some great spaces for two great activities that go great together.

 

Ruh Ro Retro

Or something like that.

So the albums are great, but would you read the book?

 

Quixote, Table of Three

Good luck at the windmills, Don. But you gotta love the drive of these bookstores willing to take on Amazon!

Backwards and Forwards

Books, that is, looking both ways.

My brother recently asked me what I was thinking about the future of books, and I keep revising my answer. As I write this, I'm having a hard time not hitting backspace (in part, of course, because of my rudimentary typing skills). 

So while I ponder (key pondering points: small publishers might be in good positions, authors are far more free to pursue their visions, books won't die but their formats will change), I thought I'd drop a link to Jeremy Greenfield and his ideas about digital book start-ups. And the large number of them is why I keep my pinky trained for the delete key.

 

From the Desk

My to do list today is short, just two items. One is a joyful thing that will take a lot of time, the other is one of the great sadnesses of the job. The latter is, of course, writing rejection notes. I think editors keep trying to let this cat out of the bag, and either it's shy--the cat--or it has vanished, but for real and for true, we want to love everything that comes across our desk. It's why we got into the business--or stayed.

The other task, and another reason for staying, is developmental editing. For me, at least, working on the Big Issues of a book is just...fun. I don't have copyeding in my blood (you can ask my former students), but thinking about a whole book is just a delight. I'm lucky, too, in that I can do that kind of editing. I get the feeling that most acquisitions people don't get a chance to do that. So I might be at the edge of nowhere, but it's an edge with great ideas and words that need wrangling.

I'd like to send you over to this post over an editor's blog that I like. I don't know Jamie Chavez, but she's right on in this post.

Folklore, Women, and the Great Plains

I'm still early in this poetry project, a handful of early drafts of poems, and I'm beginning to feel a bit of momentum as well as a sense of the various attractors. So it seems like a good time to step back and look at the concerns of the project. 

Since I'm working from an ecopoetic stance, I have a sort of mental checklist of what I want to look toward as basic materials. History. Science. Culture. And this ecopoetry is place-based, so I'm trying to absorb more information about the place around me. Place meaning land, the non-human lives  on that land, and the people who interact with those others. My last project built out from a narrow focus, and I wanted to go larger. Plus, I wanted to explore a bit of the fantastic, a bit of whimsy, something more fictional and fun. So I turned to folklore.

The folklore has been quite rewarding, but at this point, as I step back to look at what's going on, I see a glaring problem: women. Or, rather, the absence of women. This is fairly basic stuff, women's studies 101, really, but it's always a shock to come across it. Again. One of the small ironies, here, is that I'm relying on Louise Pound's Nebraska Folklore as a source. Of course, there are women in the book and in the stories. Usually, they are unnamed wives or wise women mostly working in the background to move the hero along. The Native American tradition fares a bit better, but I don't feel nearly as comfortable exporting that tradition wholesale. There's a bit of touchy history, and a great delicacy is called for. 

So. I'm thinking about women of the Great Plains. If anyone out there knows of folkloric women heroes, let me know. I don't want to expropriate Dorothy Gale, though. Maybe I'll ship Joan of Arc over...

One of the ways this point got driven home was a game group that meets on Sundays at a coffeehouse in town. The group is all male. Nice guys, but still, a curious experience.