We’re back from a fantastic week in Minneapolis for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs annual conference. Thanks to everyone who took our books home with you and subscribed to Ecotone. We especially enjoyed meeting readers at our Thursday evening mingle and talking with you during the panel discussions throughout the conference.
Now that all 12,000+ of us have dispersed, we’re excited to continue the conversations virtually, and the Literary Hub, launched April 8, is the perfect gathering place. The featured daily content includes interviews with authors and cover designers, among others; and this week Ecotone 15 contributor Megan Mayhew Bergman and Musings editor Mary Laura Philpott discuss Southerners with a dark(ish) hearts, work ethic, and the fertile ground for storytelling between history and literature.
In other contributor news, Chantel Acevedo, whose story “Strange and Lovely” can be found in Ecotone 17, has a new novel, The Distant Marvels, out from Europa Editions. The Miami Herald offers this praise: “Toward the end of the novel, a character declares, ‘One day, you’ll look upon this moment, and all you have suffered in this war as a series of distant marvels, and it will only hurt a little to remember them.’ In The Distant Marvels, however, traumatic memories aren’t distant at all but resurface like long-buried shards of glass whose sharp edges never dull.“
After being surrounded by thousands of books and magazines at the AWP book fair this weekend, we’re excited to see these improbable libraries overcoming geographic, economic, and political challenges to bring books to eager audiences around the globe—even if it means ferrying those books down river by boat, or carrying them on a camel’s back!
Earlier this week In our interview series, Seven Questions, we continued our virtual tour to visit Hub City Bookshop in Spartanburg, SC. Manager Anne Waters let us in on all the hubbub about the store, which is also home to a thriving independent press and nonprofit arts organization. Join us next week when we swing by Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, NC.
Finally, Ecotone contributor Paul Lisicky offered his Instagram followers a sneak peek at the layout for “Volcano,” his piece forthcoming in the pages of Ecotone’s tenth-anniversary issue. The Narrow Door, from which the excerpt is taken, is due out from our friends at Graywolf in 2016. (You’ll have to follow Paul to see it!)