Content Tagged ‘authors’

Today in Seven Questions, we talk with Ecotone postgraduate fellow Sophia Stid. Sophia recently received the 2021 Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize, from Calyx magazine, and the 2022 Sally Buckner Emerging Writers’ Fellowship, from the North Carolina Writers’ Network. Her micro-chapbook Whistler’s Mother was published by Bull City Press in October 2021. Her work has also been supported by fellowships from Vanderbilt University and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and her recent work can be found in Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, and Pleiades.

Sophia has worked on Ecotone for the past two-plus years, and was recently promoted to associate editor. Her keen editorial sensibility, and her equally keen attention to both place and the artists and writers who consider it, are a gift to the magazine. Though some on Ecotone’s staff may quibble with her choice, in the lightning round below, of pie over cake, her editorial and writerly decision making is indisputably exemplary—wise, nuanced, thoughtful, kind. We are lucky to have her as part of the Ecotone team. Editor Anna Lena Phillips Bell interviewed her in fall 2021.

As you begin your third year with Ecotone, what are you excited about in your work?

I’m really excited about the Climate Issue, which we’re putting together right now—and Ecotone 30, which will reach subscribers and newsstands in the next week. The questions we’re holding as an editorial team are difficult and important: how to walk with hope and grief and rage at once, how to work for change while mourning what we’ve already lost. Carrying these questions in community with our contributors has already shaped my thinking and my living.

What’s something you’ve discovered in editing that surprised you or helped your own writing?

I’m surprised by how often it seems that when I have questions for a piece of writing as an editor, the work itself will hold a phrase or idea that guides the editorial team through those questions. I’ve learned so much from that about trusting the work itself to teach me how to write it.

design by Lookout intern Katie Jones

Thank goodness it’s Friday! To kick off the weekend, we’re once again showing our Lookout authors some love. Check out the recent happenings that caught our eye:

• The blog of the Antioch Review recently featured Edith Pearlman on how her short story “Decorum” (Fall 2013 issue) came into being.
• Edith sat down with novelist Carrie Brown, on behalf of The Howard County Poetry and Literary Society of Columbia, MD, to talk about influential writers and how her past as a computer programmer “connects to the brevity and economy of her short stories.” Take a few moments and watch the wonderful interview.

I first read Edith Pearlman’s “What the Ax Forgets the Tree Remembers” when considering it for the Abnormal Issue of Ecotone, in which it found its first home. I remember being excited by its boldness, made to feel uncomfortable at moments, and ready to fight for it to appear in the pages of the magazine.

At the time, I was twenty-three, in UNCW’s MFA program, and feeling a little out of my league. I was also dating a woman for the first time, and coming to terms with my sexuality. Reading Pearlman’s complicated characters felt almost essential to me, and the story’s ending stayed with me long after—a piece of wisdom I’ve often returned to.

The story follows fifty-year-old Gabrielle on a path of self-discovery after she uncharacteristically volunteers for the local chapter of The Society Against Female Mutilation, an organization that hosts testimonial-driven seminars in church basements and hotel meeting rooms. A petite and attractive woman, Gabrielle “was without her high-heeled shoes only in the bath.” Before her sudden philanthropy, her only responsibilities in life included her concierge job at The Devlin Hotel and the “half-crippled aunt back in Pittsburgh” she visits annually.

“The road to the coast was a long, steamy corridor of leaves. Narrow bridges over brush-choked creeks. Our father drove, the windows down, wind whipping his thick black hair. Our mother’s hair, abundant and auburn and long and wavy, she’d tried to tame beneath a pretty blue scarf. He wore a pair of black Ray-Bans. She wore prescription shades with the swept and pointed ends of the day. He whistled crooner songs and smoked Winstons, and early as it was, no one really talked.”

—Brad Watson

Excerpted from “Alamo Plaza” from Astoria to Zion: Twenty-Six Stories of Risk and Abandon from Ecotone’s First Decade. Copyright © 2014 by University of North Carolina Wilmington. Used by permission of Lookout Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Lookout Books would like to congratulate Edith Pearlman on her most recent success! The Sunday Times says:

“Pearlman’s UK debut at the age of 76 is a dazzling revelation. Written over a 35-year span, the stories in this collection winningly exhibit her impressive breadth of subject matter. Conjured up with atmospheric flair, locations range from London during the Blitz to condominiums in present-day New England via postwar Paris, Latin America, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Jerusalem. Characters — frequently cosmopolitan — are correspondingly various, as are tone and mood, which modulate between ironic comedy and pathos. Rich in social detail, the stories are alive with psychological and emotional subtlety. Long delayed, their arrival here is a cause for celebration.”

Be sure to check out the rest of the article to read more about Binocular Vision as well as the other Sunday Times picks. 

As we begin to prepare for the upcoming AWP conference in Seattle, we just can’t forget about Boston. In case you missed it, here’s a highlight from the conference featuring Andre Dubus III and our very Edith Pearlman reading and discussing their work. Thanks to The PEN/Faulkner Podcast Series for making this available!

Check out the podcast and look for us in Seattle!

Lookout is proud to announce that poet and Lookout author John Rybicki will be heading out on a North Carolina tour this coming week. The tour, made possible with generous support from the North Carolina Arts Council, will include stops at oncology centers, a library, and a bookstore.

Planning this tour for John has been such a pleasure, and we are so excited about creating some new platforms for him to read his incredible work and to share his powerful messages of grief, hope, and healing.

(For the full tour details, including venue addresses, please go to http://www.lookout.org/Rybickireadings.html.)

Above: Tour kits sent to reading venues

On the evening of Sunday, April 7, John will be a guest on “That Cancer Show,” which airs from 8 – 9 p.m. on WPTF 680 AM in Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill and WSJS 600 AM in the Greensboro-Winston Salem-High Point area. You can listen to the program on the “That Cancer Show” website: http://www.cancersupport4u.org/that-cancer-showtrade.html. “That Cancer Show” is a program from Cornucopia Cancer Support Center in Durham.

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Now that we’ve had some time to recover from AWP 2013, here’s a little photo recap of our time in Boston. We had several great panels, including a tribute to Edith Pearlman, a talk on successful indie publishing, and our own four debut Lookout authors reading together for the first time. They also signed books at our booth and got to talk with all our loving readers.

Oh, Steve