Roundup

Packing for AWP in Tampa next week and inundated by invitations to panels and parties? So are we! But we’re excited, too: AWP is always a big Ecotone/Lookout Books family reunion and we can’t wait to see you. We’ve whittled out a small selection of events, featuring recent Ecotone contributors. Visit us at Tables 1302 and 1304, where we’ll be getting “Craft”-y…

Remember: leave lots of room in your boes and bags for bookfair acquisitions, apply and reapply sunscreen, and hydrate! See you in Tampa.

Thursday

Intersectional South: New Perspectives in Southern Poetry. (Chad Abushanab, John Poch, T.J. Jarrett, Adam Vines, Juliana Gray) In the 21st century, there exists a multitude of Southern poetics defined not by location, but by the variable experiences of the American South. This panel seeks to explore “Southerness” in terms of individual experience in order to highlight new identities and perspectives in contemporary Southern poetry. It brings together a diverse group of poets who will speak to the idea of “Southerness” in literature, and how they see this operating in (or against) their own work.
Room 18 & 19, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Thursday, March 8, 2018
9:00 a.m. to 10:15 a.m.

The Art of Crafting a Chapbook from Start to Finish. (Abigail Beckel, Jennifer Tseng, Dan Mahoney, William Todd Seabrook, Brad Aaron Modlin) What makes a chapbook successful, both in terms of literary merit and sales? This panel will explore best practices for writing, organizing, and publishing chapbooks. Authors will discuss how they conceptualized and structured their chapbook manuscripts, and leading chapbook publishers will talk about what they look for in submissions and how they design and market chapbooks. We’ll also discuss the range of genres—poetry, flash, hybrid work—the short length of a chapbook can effectively showcase.
Room 5 & 6, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Thursday, March 8, 2018
10:30 a.m. to 11:45 a.m.

The World Grows: New Directions in Environmental Writing. (Ross Gay, Camille Dungy, Pam Houston, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Diana Owen) Through writing and art that explore the connection between nature and culture, Orion inspires new thinking about how humanity might live on Earth justly, sustainably, and joyously. This panel brings together an award-winning and diverse group of Orion authors who will read original work and discuss new directions in environmental writing, a genre that has become increasingly urgent in today’s world. Room 18 & 19, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Thursday, March 8, 2018
1:30 p.m. to 2:45 p.m.

Poetry, Myth, and the Natural World: A Reading with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Rajiv Mohabir, and Sherwin Bitsui. Sponsored by Blue Flower Arts. (Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Sherwin Bitsui, Alison Granucci, Rajiv Mohabir) The layering of cultures; the complex wonder of the natural world; the riddle of faith; the deep resonance of mythology: what better place for these dimensions to wrestle and converse than in the poetic realm? The urgency inside the poems of Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Rajiv Mohabir, and Sherwin Bitsui offer a complicated empathy with the world, one that grapples with loss and is tinged with sorrow: even beauty can hurt. Yet their language, resplendent with song, also sings into being a world of joy.
Ballroom B, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Thursday, March 8, 2018
4:30 p.m. to 5:45 p.m.

Friday

The World and the Story: How Plot Maps Fictional Realities. (Leah Stewart, Brock Clarke, Jung Yun, Brenda Peynado, Julialicia Case) In fiction, there’s an interdependent relationship between world-building (the map) and narrative construction (the route). This panel will examine how writers employ different types of stories—the romance, the mystery, the quest—in service to different visions of reality. Why does a realist like Chekhov so often use the romance? For what purposes does a fantasy writer use the quest? How can a writer of literary fiction employ the quest or the mystery to investigate character?
Room 11, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Friday, March 9, 2018
10:30 a.m. to 11:45 a.m.

Against Forgetting Against Forgetting: 25 Years Later. (John Poch, Jill Bialosky, Peter Balakian, Jacob Shores-Arguello, Rebecca Gayle Howell) Twenty-five years ago, Carolyn Forche’s groundbreaking anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, was published. This gathering of poems helped to galvanize an entire generation of poets who came to believe that poems could do more than articulate a poet’s confessional hankerings and could bear witness to history itself. The poets on this panel will read a few of their favorite poems from the anthology and discuss what this book meant and means to their own work and the world.
Florida Salon 5, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
Friday, March 9, 2018
12:00 p.m. to 1:15 p.m.

Vassar Miller Poetry Prize 25th Anniversary Reading. (Caki Wilkinson, Alison Stine, James Najarian, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Jordan Windholz) The Vassar Miller Poetry Prize, founded at the University of North Texas in 1993, honors Texas poet, writer, and disability rights advocate Vassar Miller (1924–1998). To commemorate the prize’s 25th anniversary, writers of winning manuscripts will read from their collections, showcasing the formal and geographic variety of poetry published in the series. The reading will be followed by a Q&A.
Florida Salon, 1, 2, & 3, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
Friday, March 9, 2018
1:30 p.m. to 2:45 p.m.

Sustainable: On Writing Long and Linked Poems. (Kathryn Nuernberger, Jenny Molberg, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Jacques J. Rancourt, Traci Brimhall) In an age of digestible snippets, we grow hungry for occasions to practice the fine art of paying attention. An art form rooted in mindfulness, the long poem is one way of practicing deliberate attention. Drawing on their own experiences writing and publishing long poems, linked poems, project books, and novels-in-verse, this panel will discuss both the rich literary tradition of long and linked poems, as well as provide insights into the process and craft of creating your own sustained lyrics.
Grand Salon D, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
Friday, March 9, 2018
3:00 p.m. to 4:15 p.m.

A Woman’s Place: Ecotone Essayists Expand the Boundaries of Place-Based Writing. (Belle Boggs, Anna Lena Phillips Bell, Shuchi Saraswat, Aisha Sabatini Sloan) Contributors to a new anthology from Ecotone and Lookout Books discuss how we can continue to broaden the traditional boundaries of place-based writing to make room for more complexity: explorations of body, sexuality, gender, and race. Joined by their editor, these authors consider how women’s unique experiences and histories make them artful observers of the natural world. They will read from their essays and talk about approaches to intersectionality in the field of environmental writing.
Florida Salon 4, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
Friday, March 9, 2018
4:30 p.m. to 5:45 p.m.

The Teaching Press: Bringing Professional Literary Publishing into the Classroom. (Holms Troelstrup, Steve Halle, Deanna Baringer, Ross Tangedal, Beth Staples) Lookout Books at UNC–Wilmington, PRESS 254 at Illinois State University, BatCat Press at Lincoln Park Performing Arts in Pennsylvania, and Cornerstone Press at UW–Stevens Point utilize literary presses as teaching tools for graduate, undergraduate, and secondary students, emphasizing hands-on experience in literary publishing. Panelists detail important practical and curricular concerns in establishing and maintaining a teaching press, as well as the local and national impact of their work.
Room 17, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Friday, March 9, 2018
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

A Foot in Two Cultures: First Generation American Poets. (John Hoppenthaler, Lauren Camp, Timothy Liu, Adrienne Su) The contemporary influence of poets who were born in the US and whose parents are immigrants has been substantial and important. For these poets, there is an ongoing calibration of the distance between the culture of their parents and their negotiation with the reality and myth of an American Dream. The inherent tensions of this push and pull create a space that can be fruitful for poetry, a space from which the poets who comprise this panel continue to write.
Florida Salon 5, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
Friday, March 9, 2018
4:30 p.m. to 5:45 p.m.

Saturday

“Ballade of the Poverties”: A Reading by Beloit Poetry Journal Poets. (Meg Day, Nicelle Davis, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Sally Wen Mao, Carolyn Forché) Writers will read poems inspired by Adrienne Rich’s “Ballade of the Poverties.” Addressed to the princes of predation and finance, this piece reminds us that political poetry isn’t new or newly necessary but remains a vital force for survival, resistance, and change. Audience members will submit lines for inclusion in a collaborative response to “Ballade,” to be printed published on the BPJ website.
Room 20 & 21, Tampa Convention Center, First Floor
Saturday, March 10, 2018
3:00 p.m. to 4:15 p.m.

Crafting the Weird: Techniques of Fabulist Female Fiction. (Clare Beams, Brenda Peynado, Jamey Bradbury, Celia Johnson, Ramona Ausubel) Surreal, magical, or fabulist fiction has traditionally been employed to attack political systems through subversive means. Yet, women writers have adapted this genre for their own modes of critique. In this event, panelists will discuss how they use elements of the weird to address subjects such as the domestic, the female body, otherness, and LGBTQ identity. Presenters will provide examples, methods, and techniques for crafting subversive fiction that offers new methods of witnessing reality.
Meeting Room 1, Marriott Waterside, Second Floor
Saturday, March 10, 2018
3:00 p.m. to 4:15 p.m.

During a time when there’s lots of talk about borders and walls and travel bans, we’re trying to remind ourselves of the power of great writing to break down walls, to help us really see one another. This week we’re celebrating both powerful new work from Ecotone and Lookout contributors, and the happy recognition of writing from the past year.

Lookout author Clare Beams is a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, and Ecotone contributors Belle Boggs, Eva Saulitis, and Patrick Phillips have all made PEN finalist lists too! (The Bingham Prize has a surprising tie to our hometown, Wilmington, NC, funny enought. See the full scoop from the Star News.) To top it off, Clare’s book found itself on the long list of titles recognized by The Story Prize, which received 106 books published by 72 publishers or imprints as entries this year. The list—beyond the three finalists and The Story Prize Spotlight Award winner—honors sixteen books that stood out for the judges.

Sure, she’s keeping herself busy with writing and readings, but, like the rest of us, Clare found time to watch Stranger Things things year. In this interview from Flavorwire, Clare reminds us of the literary power of Winona Ryder:

If you could write fan-fiction about any pop culture character, real or imagined, who would it be?

Hmm. Maybe Winona Ryder? When I was a kid she embodied cool, for me — and then recently, along with the rest of the world, I got totally sucked into Stranger Things. It’s interesting to think about what it must have been like for her (after her fall from grace, period of relative obscurity, etc.) to be part of that show, set back at the start of her heyday, but as the mom character this time.

Care to give us a few sentences of micro-fiction about that character?

Winona looked around the set. This, she thought, was like coming home. She brushed back her feathered hair. Home, but with differences.

Samiya Bashir has a video-poem up that’s based on her poem in Ecotone issue 19. Her book, Field Theories, will be out soon from Nightboat Books.

Issue 21 contributor Safiya Sinclair will judge for The Adroit Journal’s Prize for Poetry. The prize seeks to honor writers of secondary or undergraduate status whose work inspires action. The deadline for submissions is February 15–check it out.

Leila Chatti, whose poems appeared in Issue 21, has a new poem up on Rattle‘s website called “My Mother Makes a Religion,” a moving exploration of faith including this line: “A child, I heard the trinity wrong— / thought God was a ghost, her faith / a haunting.”

Issue 18 contributor Aimee Nezhukumatahil’s poem “Invitation” is featured on the Poetry Foundation website. “Invitation” reminds us to contemplate what lies beneath that blanket of sea with lines like, “Squid know how to be rich when you have ten empty arms.”

Ecotone and Astoria to Zion contributor Kevin Wilson’s new novel Perfect Little World came out from Ecco last week. As our friend Ann Patchett wrote of the book, “What I love about this book is that it’s full of good people and all their good intentions. That doesn’t mean everything works out, but you can’t help but think, Oh, what if it could?” And Mary Laura Philpott of Parnassus Books created this amazing book pie chart. Doesn’t EVERY book need a pie chart?!

We like ending on a note about good people and good intentions. We intend to keep to keep sharing all of the goodness we can.

It’s been a strange time in America these last few weeks, so we’re heading into this Roundup trying to focus on some good things for our readers and from our contributors. Here are things to toot happy horns about, and inspiring reads in the aftermath of some disconcerting divisiveness.

First up, Lookout author Clare Beams has received a ton of wonderful attention recently for We Show What We Have Learned. Most notably, perhaps, from the New York Times! “Stories as well executed as these are their own reward, but it’s also clear from the capaciousness on display here that Ms. Beams has novels’ worth of worlds inside her.” But there was love too from many others, including Kirkus‘s list of Best Debut Fiction of 2016, Paste Magazine, Parnassus Books, the Fiction Writers Review,  the Boston Globe, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Charlotte Observer, the Wilmington Star News, Shelf Awareness, Brit+Co, and Flavorwire, to name a few more notables. You can also hear Clare talk with fellow debut story writer April Ayers Lawson on WUNC’s the State of Things. And, here’s a roundup of photos from Clare’s very celebratory book launch here at UNCW.

Could you possibly need more convincing that this is a book you should read?

Lookout author Ben Miller’s Mural Speaks! project, the aim of which is to translate William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” into each of the 140 plus languages currently spoken in Sioux Falls, is still looking for submissions. We love the way the project celebrates the diversity of the urban midwest.

Oh, but there’s so much more to celebrate from Ecotone contributors!

We’re thrilled that Dan Hoyt is the winner of the inaugural Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction for his novel This Book Is Not For You. Dan’s story “The Mad King” is one wild ride, in our current issue.

Patrick Phillips’s book Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America, out this September, is reviewed in the Washington Post. You can read an excerpt from the book at Longreads.

Lynne Thompson and Douglas Kearney are included in this fabulous Black Lives Matter Poetry Reader.

Alison Hawthorne Deming offers the first entry in a new series at Terrain, “Letter to America.”

National Poetry Series winner Melissa Range is featured on PBS News Hour, taking on terms like “redneck” and “white trash.”

Annie Finch’s poem “Moon of Our Daughters” is featured on the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day.

Megan Snyder-Camp, who has not one but two books out this fall, has three poems in the Sewanee Review.

Belle Bogg’s The Art of Waiting is one of Oprah’s favorite books of 2016!

In their October issue, Poetry Magazine published Issue 21 contributor Laurie Clements Lambeth’s poem “Cusped Prognosis,” which was originally part of her essay, “Going Downhill From Here” in Ecotone‘s current issue.

We hope these engaging reads offer some perspective, comfort, and enjoyment. We’ll see you back here soon for our next Roundup!

It was an especially exciting week at Lookout HQ with the launch of Clare Beams’s story collection, We Show What We Have Learned, on Tuesday. The Lookout team has been hard at work on this amazing book for quite some time, and it’s been fun to see it getting the attention it so deserves. Here are a few of the special places you can read more about it.

The story “All the Keys to All the Doors” was featured in Electric Literature‘s Recommended Reading this week, with a fantastic introduction from Megan Mayhew Bergman: “Upon reading her, you make it to the third or fourth paragraph and realize this is not the restrained narrative you expected, that there is a cutting strangeness and profundity afoot.”

Clare got a bunch of love in Pittsburgh, the town she calls home, including this interview in the Pittsburgh City Paper, this review in the Pittsburgh Tribune, and a packed release party at the White Whale Bookstore.

And if you haven’t heard by now, she also got love from O, The Oprah Magazine, where it was featured as one of “10 Titles to Pick Up Now.”

This coming week, Wilmington will host its own special launch party for Clare as part of Writers’ Week on Monday night. To read more about it–and the other fabulous writers coming to Wilmington including Mei Fong, Maurice Manning, and Chinelo Okparanta–check out this article from Encore.

Speaking of hometown love, Wilmington’s Salt Magazine did a fabulous profile on Lookout and Honey from the Lion, saying, “The care and adoration lavished on a Lookout book is obvious…. French flaps, beautiful graphic design, and tailored page layouts are the hallmarks of a book that someone cares about…. At Lookout, each book radiates that level of care.” And Parnassus Books created this roundup of “Small Presses: Little Gems With Big Impact,” calling out Lookout books by Clare Beams, Edith Pearlman, and Matthew Neill Null. (Thanks, you guys!)

There’s good news for other Lookout authors, too! Matthew Neill Null’s novel, Honey from the Lion, has been named a fiction finalist in the 2016 Massachusetts Book Awards from the Massachusetts Center for the Book, and has sold to Albin Michel for publication in France in 2018. Oui oui!

And Ben Miller, author of the memoir River Bend Chronicle, accepted the Cornell College Leadership & Service Award for “contributions to American literature.” Ben’s acceptance speech is funny and inspiring, and we’re so happy for him.

And there are book launches in the world of Ecotone contributors to boot! Melissa Range’s new poetry collection, Scriptorium, hit the shelves this month. Chosen by Tracy K. Smith for the 2015 National Poetry Series, it’s now available from Beacon Press.

Issue 21 contributor Safiya Sinclair’s book of poetry, Cannibal, which came out last month, got a shout out on Lenny: “Her stanzas will revive you and leave you transformed.”

This is the post that nearly launched a thousand books. We hope your reading all the great new literature you can handle–thanks for checking out ours!

Fall is finally here, and along with it–and pumpkin spicing and starting to wear socks and breaking out the cardigans–comes lists of what to read this fall. We’re thrilled to find Ecotone and Lookout mentioned in a bunch of different lists. (And, for one more list, check back to the blog Monday to see the full roundup of Ecotone‘s Best American reprints and notables!)

Matt Broderick, the Review Review Reviews Editor (say that five times fast) introduced his list of lit mag journal editors sharing love, with this lovely thought, “One of my favorite things about this community of writers and editors is our willingness to give each other pats on the back and high fives for work well done.” He talked to a few editors he admires to find out which journals are on their radar, and we were excited that Chicago Review of Books Editor-in-Chief, Adam Morgan, mentioned Ecotone as one of his favorite lit mags.

Over at Book Riot, Aram Mrjoian rounds up a list of  “5 Lit Journals for Readers Who Love a Sense of Place,” and Ecotone tops the list. Aram says, “We naturally expect and desire for stories to transport us, to teach us about the specifics of an unfamiliar environment, and that our preconceived notions of the physical world will automatically skew our perception of what we read on the page.” We love the idea that Ecotone helps readers grapple with that kind of transportation and perception, and are so grateful to make the list.

On the site My Booket List, they’re kicking off their book club to celebrate National Reading Group Month by partnering with the Women’s National Book Association (Greater Philadelphia Chapter) to suggest a list of “fun, inspirational, and page-turning books” including Lookout’s We Show What We Have Learned by Clare Beams. Check out these other three books on the list, and head on over to their site if you want to join in the conversations.

The Masters Review has a fantastic list of seven upcoming fall titles they’re excited about, including our very own Clare Beams yet again. Clare joins other debuts from Anne Valente and Derek Palacio, along with Zadie Smith’s wildly anticipated new novel. We love the succinct plug in their description. “We love Lookout Books, and we love a good debut collection.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

We hope this list of lists has helped cure any listlessness or even any listing to the right or left. There are so many good things coming for you to read. Ge thee to a list and start making your way through it!

We’re rounding up this week’s Lookout and Ecotone contributor news with thoughts about the great white whale we all chase. If you squint, you’ll see him showing up throughout this post. Here we go!

We’re getting closer and closer to the release of We Show What We Have Learned by Lookout author Clare Beams, and so much good feedback is rolling in. The East End Book Exchange, where Clare is having her launch, is re-branding itself as a store focusing on new titles and getting a new name–The White Whale–and they mention Clare’s book in their Littsburgh interview about it! “It’s a short story collection that’s at times creepy, at times surreal, and wholly engrossing.”

James Scott (Clare’s issue editor at One Story) has a podcast called TK, and Janet Geddis of Avid Bookstore in Athens was on the show to talk about fall books! She discusses the whale of an endeavor that is opening an independent bookstore, and both her and James have some really lovely things to say about Lookout and WSWWHL, including about its cover. Definitely check out the whole episode and James’s other interviews.

We’re absolutely thrilled for long-time Ecotone contributor Brad Watson, whose new novel Miss Jane was named as a finalist for the white whale of literary prizes. Check out Brad and all of the other great writers on the National Book Award long list.

Ecotone issue 20 contributor, Anya Groner, has a piece out in Guernica: “Healing the Gulf with Buckets and Balloons.” Groner discusses how her group’s efforts to use balloons to map the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill shifted the paradigm from citizen science to community science. She explains, “Instead of answering a researcher’s questions, community science empowers ordinary people ask their own scientific questions and follow through with data collection and analysis.” There’s a whale reference to me made somewhere here, I’m sure.

And finally, we celebrate some new writing from Belle Boggs, whose book The Art of Waiting has been making a whale of a splash for the past few weeks. This essay from the New Yorker is all about the book that taught Belle what she wanted to teacher her daughter. She was fantastic on WUNC’s The State of Things (listen here), and there’s even more to be found from Belle on NPR and the Powell’s bookstore blog.

Whatever you’re up to this week, we hope you’re chasing some suitably challenging but approachable whale, and we wish you all the luck in catching it! See you next week.

Hi, folks! It’s been a little while since we’ve posted a News Roundup. We were busy, we confess, enjoying the last days of summer before school started up again. But now we’re back in the thick of it, and since we have some catching up to do, we’re christening this post the Back to the Future Roundup. With the aid of a literary-minded DeLorean, we’re going to time travel through various points of recent interest.

Let’s begin with Clare Beams, the author of Lookout’s forthcoming story collection, We Show What We Have Learned. One of the stories was featured on Kenyon Review Online, so you can get yourself a taste before October 25 when the book comes out. The whole collection is great, of course, but don’t take our word for it! It was featured on LitHub’s “Great Booksellers Fall 2016 Preview” this very week! And Steph Opitz, the book review editor for Marie Claire, talked it up on a recent episode of The Lit Up Show. “In every story, it feels like something is lurking right around you, but you never really get to it…. It’s creepy and the writing is so beautiful … you feel angry and obsessed and intrigued … I just absolutely loved it.” We suggest listening to the the full podcast, since all the recommended books sound incredible.

Now let’s go way back to June, and knowing that a trip so far back can be traumatic, we present this fascinating interview with Ecotone contributor Adrienne Celt with writer Esmé Weijun Wang on “The Inheritance of Trauma.” Adrienne says, “Because my paternal grandparents lived in Munich (after WWII, Poland was occupied by the USSR, so many loyal nationalists chose to leave, and my grandparents went to Munich to work for Radio Free Europe), I didn’t know them well, and the stories about them always felt distant to me—I wanted to know more.” Which sounds like something Marty McFly might have said about his parents…before he almost made out with his mom.

Also in June, Lookout Author Matthew Neill Null sat in the hot seat with the Millions, to talk some of his favorite writers, West Virginia stories, and–coincidentally?–“living in a world with no future.” Matt also had a new story in the Harvard Review over the summer. The story contains a scene Matt cut from his novel with Lookout, Honey from the Lion, about an elk with a toothsome liver “bigger than a baby.” We’re glad he found a place for that line, in the future.

And we’re thrilled for fellow Lookout author Ben Miller, who received a research grant from the Schlesinger Library that will send him back to the future (or Harvard) in 2017.

We’re getting right to it this week, because we’ve got some serious horns to toot: awards aplenty from Ecotone contributors, and Lookout author Matthew Neill Null publishing fabulous stuff all over the internet. Here goes!

Ecotone contributor Erica Dawson’s won the 2016 Poets’ Prize from the West Chester University Poetry Center! Hip!

Joni Tevis won a CNF Firecracker Award for her collection The World is On Fire (Milkweed). One of its essays, “What Looks Like Mad Disorder,” first appeared in Ecotone 17! Hip!

Ron Carlson’s short story “Happiness” from Ecotone‘s Sustenance issue wins an O. Henry! Hooray!

Matthew Neill Null, seen here talking fiction with Sam Lipsyte at McNally Jackson last week (thanks to Ethan Jameson for the photo!) has been bu-usy these past couple weeks. Here’s a quick rundown:

Matt’s dad prosecutes a dog in 1980s West Virginia over on the Paris Review blog.

Matt gazes backward at a landscape of ghosts over at Electric Literature.

Matt on the twinning of the dark and the absurd on the edge of the sea over at Guernica.

Matt reflects on writers from the other Europe over at Catapult.

Man, is there some great reading here! We hope you’re having your own hip-hip-hooray moment wherever you are, or that the good work of these folks inspires something worth celebrating. We’ll see you back here for the next Roundup!

As the school year ends and launches us into summer, and as the face of Helen is said to have launched a thousand ships, this week we have literary launches galore. I don’t know whether that sentence is entirely sensical, but in the spirit of launches–moments at the intersection of optimism and uncertainty–I’m going to let it stand–and springboard us into this week’s launch news!

Lookout’s forthcoming story collection, We Show What We Have Learned by Clare Beams, is right now making its way out to booksellers, reviewers, and other taste makers. We were happy to reveal this week, through our Instagram account @lookoutbooksuncw, a full preview of the press kit. Here’s one view of the process. Head on over to Instagram to see the rest, and the final kits.

Lookout author Matthew Neill Null has had an exciting week! His short story collection, Allegheny Front (Sarabande), launched on Tuesday. His story, “Gauley Season,” part of the collection, was featured on Electric Lit‘s “Recommended Reading” this week, and  Matt will be in conversation next week with Sam Lipsyte at McNally Jackson in NYC, talking about the book and his relationship to West Virginia.  If you’re not in the big apple (or, ahem, don’t want to launch yourself over there), you can read Matt’s awesome essay about writing about the “real” West Virginia over on Lit Hub.

Former Pub Lab TA and Ecotone designer Garrard Conley also launched a book this week. Boy Erased tells the story of Garrard’s experience in ‘Ex Gay’ therapy. He discusses the book, his family, and his time at UNCW over at Electric Literature.

We’re also thrilled for Ecotone contributor Rebecca Gayle Howell who has been launched into a new position as senior editor of the Oxford American.

We hope your weekend is launching you into fun a productive activities. We’ll see you at the next Roundup!

Last night, students in the MFA program here at UNCW hosted their End of the World Reading. School is over, and many of our students–some who have worked so hard on Ecotone and Lookout–are leaving us. We’re sad to see them go, but so excited about the possibilities ahead for them. In honor of this end-of-the-world feeling, and because we have so much good news to share this week, a request: read the following bits of news quickly, and to the tune of REM’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).”

Like the whole rest of the world, we were saddened by the death of Prince this week. Ecotone Sound contributor shirlette ammons wrote this tribute for a Triangle-based Indy publication.

“Uh oh, overflow!”

This week saw the first annual Edith Pearlman Creative Writing Award given at Brookline High School. Congrats to Alma Bitran! And to Edith Pearlman, whose work continues to inspire and change us.

Speaking of Lookout authors, Matthew Neill Null’s forthcoming story collection (from Sarabande) was reviewed by the Rumpus this past week, and they had nice things to say about Honey from the Lion too:  “It has become one of the laziest clichés to claim that the place in which a story is set becomes a character in that story. Works of fiction as great as Matthew Neill Null’s epic evocations of West Virginia deserve better.”

“Feeling pretty psyched.”

Ecotone contributor Melissa Pritchard was awarded the 2016 Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship for Writers at the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians in Columbus, Georgia. She’ll be living in Carson McCuller’s childhood home for three months this fall.

Ecotone Sustenance issue contributor Toni Tipton-Marton won a James Beard Award this week for her book The Jemima Code (which was excerpted in our issue).

“Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives, and I decline.”

Guernica did a nice interview with Ecotone issue 19 contributor Paul Lisicky, largely about The Narrow Door (we excerpted that too).

Clare Beams, author of Lookout’s forthcoming book We Show What We Have Learned, has a great Ploughshares blog about the difference between flashy short stories and longer ones that go for the “slow reveal.” Also, here’s a photo of Clare holding a galley of her book. So much greatness in one photo!

“Leonard Bernstein!”

Speaking of Ploughshares, this blog post by Ecotone issue 13 contributor Emilia Phillips about lyric essays, and how she turned to them after she had cancer removed from her face, is so very moving.

Ecotone contributors Christopher Cokinos and Eric MaGrane will be doing a reading and discussion about the Sonoran Desert tonight at Tucson’s Antigone Books.

“You symbiotic, patriotic, slam but neck, right? Right.”

Orion is finishing up its national poetry month feature, curated by Ecotone contributor Aimee Nezhukumatathil–photographs of poetry books in the wild. Here’s Anna Lena’s (Ecotone‘s edtitor).

“Birthday party, cheesecake, jellybean, boom.”

Ecotone contributor Shawn Vestal has a novel coming out called Daredevils. Check out this excerpt from LitHub.

I’ll leave you with this final lyric to ponder: “It’s the end of the world as we know it (It’s time I had some time alone).” Join me back here next week when we’ll start a new world all over with the best news of the week.