Content Tagged ‘Karen E. Bender’

We’re taking the long view in this week’s Roundup, folks. We hope you’re in for the long haul, because–long story short–we’re going to take a long, hard look at some good news. This post will be filled with long-ing.

Up first? Some long lists! We’re thrilled for Lookout author Matthew Neill Null, whose debut novel, Honey from the Lion, made the long list for the Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize in the “Prince of Tides Literary Prize” category, where he is joined by Ecotone contributors Ron Rash and Karen E. Bender. The Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance renamed their book awards this year after Mr. Conroy. Wanda Jewell, SIBA’s Executive Director, said, “We have long wanted a sexier more marketable name for our book awards, and nothing is sexier than Mr. Conroy!” We’re resurrecting a photo of Matt with Mr. Conroy himself–signing over a copy of Honey.

The 2016 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award long list has also been announced–with a prize of £30,000, it’s the world’s richest prize for a single short story. Lookout author Edith Pearlman made the list for her story “Unbeschert,” and Ecotone and Astoria to Zion contributor Maggie Shipstead did as well, for her story “Backcountry.” They are joined by ten other writers from six different countries.

Ecotone received a nice write-up from Wilmington’s own Star News this week thanks to our inclusion in BuzzFeed’s long list of literary journals that will help you read better. We mentioned that in our last Roundup, but we plan on having a long memory about it.

Indiana Review has a great interview with Ecotone contributor Matthew Gavin Frank who spent fifteen long years inadvertently research his book, The Mad Feast. “I’ve had a lot of strange food-related jobs—ice cream truck driver in Chicago, edible grasshopper trapper in Oaxaca, Mexico, wine cantina floor-mopper in Barolo, Italy.” Matt will have you longing for a copy, and for any word on his new book on pigeons and their role in global diamond smuggling, which he describes as “something like Blood Diamonds bumping-and-grinding with the Audubon Field Guides.”

And last but not least, we hear Ecotone contributor G.C. Waldrep has long-poem-turned-book coming out from BOA Editions called Testament. In defiance of our theme, the reviewer over at the Ploughshares blog says,  “The most concise reference point that occurs to me… is that Waldrep is the closest American poetry comes to Geoffrey Hill, in the music of his language, the range of his erudition, the integrity of his intellect, and the honesty of his doubt.”

That’s the long and short of it this week. Thanks for reading, and we hope to see you next time. In the meantime, so long!

All through the next week, friends, there is an embarrassment of riches in our small coastal Carolina town. If you haven’t heard of Wilmington, it’s time to get with two very particular programs: Writers’ Week at UNCW and the film festival Cucalorus, which bring writers and filmmakers to Wilmington in spades.

All free and open to the public, next week we’ll host readings, panels, craft talks, and demonstrations from Edward P. Jones, Jill McCorkle, Sarah Messer, Tayari Jones, Ilya Kaminsky, James Campbell, agent Peter Steinberg, and book artist Rory Sparks. A panel of UNCW alumni will talk about careers after graduation. And we’ll host a reading and book launch of Honey from the Lion, Lookout’s debut novel from Matthew Neill Null. It’s a week of nonstop activity and inspiration–if you can get here, I’d do it.

If you’re not yet in the car, let me entice you further: Cucalorus offers an incredible selection of films, and this year launches Cucalorus Connect, which explores entrepreneurship and venture capital through a variety of panels and talks. Ecotone contributor John Jeremiah Sullivan and Ecotone and Lookout publisher Emily Smith are part of the Cucalorus Connect media marriage panel, about the creative and commercial potentials of integrating video and audio into traditionally text-driven publications. The conversation will include Ecotone contributor Jeff Sharlet and his Instagram essay, “A Resourceful Woman,” which is open to readers on our website for a week or so around the festival.

We’ve also got a National Book Award finalist in our midst. Wilmingtonian–and Lookout and Ecotone contributor–Karen E. Bender is on the short list for her fabulous book Refund. Current UNCW MFA student Jonathan Russell Clark interviews her for Lit Hub.

In yet another happy marriage of locals, Ecotone contributor George Singleton has released a new linked story collection from Dzanc Books called Calloustown and UNCW alum Rachel Richardson writes all about it for the Spartanburg Herald-Journal.

It was a year ago this time when we hosted a community dinner right here in Wilmington to celebrate Ecotone‘s Sustenance issue. We’re so glad to see poet Elizabeth T. Gray Jr.’s fascinating interview with The Cloudy House, in which she discusses her poetry book projects, part of which was featured in that issue.

Whether by plane, train, or automobile, we hope we’ve enticed you to visit Wilmington, full as it is of artistic people and things to do. If you can’t make it, we hope wherever you are is filled this week with as much inspiration and connection as you can rightly handle.

Welcome to another Friday! We’ve been busy at work on production for our Sound issue of Ecotone, and wanted to share some good noise with you this week.

Lookout author Steve Almond along with cohost Cheryl Strayed celebrated the one-year anniversary of Dear Sugar radio this week! If you haven’t listened to this podcast, do so posthaste. Always moving and thought-provoking, these two make a fabulous pair.

In Honey from the Lion news, author Matthew Neill Null had some fun in Third Man Record’s 1947 Voice-o-Graph booth this week. He read the first two minutes of his book along with impromptu guitar backing by Porter Meadors. Then the machine pressed the 6″ phonograph disc immediately. Here’s some video of the playback. As Matt says, “nice and crackly.”

LitChat posted a lovely review of Honey from the Lion this week: “It’s as if he sets up an old view camera and stands behind it, head beneath the black cloth, allowing, or perhaps conjuring, the slow seep of images. At times hard to see and even harder to unsee once they form, Null’s imagery and turns of phrase are beautiful, sharp, and keenly rendered.”

You know what else sounds good? Book awards, and new books.

Finalists for the National Book Award include books by contributors Karen E. Bender, Lauren Groff, and Patrick Phillips! Stephanie Trott, one of our poetry editors, interviewed  Lauren Groff for The Rumpus. Stephanie and Lauren talk about how words sound, prompting this lovely quote from Stephanie, “But sometimes those words are so delicious that you have to speak them aloud and wonder how we don’t use them on a daily basis.”

Ecotone contributor Ana Maria Spagna’s new book, Reclaimers, is out. It tells the story of how members of the Mountain Maidu tribe attempted to reclaim the Humbug Valley, a forest-hemmed meadow sacred to them, from the grip of a utility company. 

Corinna McClanahan Schroeder, whose work will appear in our forthcoming Sound issue, has a first book out from Texas Review Press. Winner of the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, the poems in Inked chart a departure and a return.

That’s all for this week! We hope your weekend is full of joyful noise and the sounds of beautiful words.

Happy Friday, everyone!

Did you miss Bookriot’s feature on bookstores in weird and wonderful places? From barns to boats, abandoned trains to haunted houses, the descriptions of  these stores will leave you itching to travel.

Photos courtesy of the Gallifreyan Detective tumblr.

Judith Rosen of Publishers Weekly checked in on six indie bookstores opened within the past two years—from Scuppernong in Greensboro, NC, to Bookbound in Ann Arbor, MI—to see how they’re faring. As Scuppernong owner Brian Lampkin said, “There’s a growing shop-local movement. People are so ecstatic to have the downtown come back.” His NC store, which emphasizes literary fiction and poetry, also boasts an ambitious events schedule. Good news: they’re thriving!

UNCW is back in session, and so is our weekly Lit News Roundup. We hope that our readers had a wonderful and restful holiday season.

We highly recommend reading this thoughtful and inspiring Slate article by Daniel Menaker, who writes, “The profession, in whatever form, will continue to produce physical and now electronic objects that move not only units but people. Move them and enlighten them emotionally, move them to action, move them to share what they learn and care about with others.”

© Laura van den Berg

In case you missed the cover of the Sunday Book Review on January 4, it featured a stunning review by Laura van den Berg of Honeydew (Little, Brown), the new collection by Lookout’s debut author, Edith Pearlman (Binocular Vision). A profile of Mrs. Pearlman, written by another Lookout author, Steve Almond, also appeared in the Times and chronicles her writing and publishing background, leading to her “commercial breakthrough at seventy-eight, after five decades of writing short stories, some 200 of them, nearly all appearing in small literary magazines.” The profile includes a quote by Lookout co-founder and former editor Ben George.

After a long hiatus, we’re finally back with our weekly Lit News Roundup.

Hearty congratulations are in order for several Ecotone contributors:

Shawn Vestal recently won the $25,000 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction for his story collection, Godforsaken Idaho, and we couldn’t be prouder that two of the stories in the book, “Winter Elders” and “Opposition In All Things,” first appeared in the pages of Ecotone. “Winter Elders” also has a home in our best of Ecotone fiction anthology, Astoria to Zion.

And Ecotone 16 contributor Molly Antopol’s stunning story collection, The UnAmericans, made the 2014 longlist for the National Book Award in Fiction. You can read “My Grandmother Tells Me This Story” in full on the Ecotone website.

Karen E. Bender, whose story “Candidate” originally appeared in Volume 2, Issue 2 of Ecotone and is now featured in Astoria to Zion, sent us this fantastic photograph and accompanying description of the “ecotone” she and her family learned to navigate in the Tong Bie neighborhood of Taichung City.

At first, we didn’t know where to walk. We stepped into the neighborhood of Tong Bie, just north of Tunghai University in Taichung City, Taiwan, and saw this: the scooters, their guttural growl vibrating in my throat, the scooter drivers moving, carving their paths down the road, wherever they wanted, really, a huge public bus occasionally swerving through the crowds. Where were we supposed to walk? We watched the pedestrians, calmly carrying a plastic cup of tea or sweet potato fries or an egg pancake, walking.

design by Lookout intern Katie Jones

I came across Karen E. Bender’s “Candidate” several months after I moved to a small Southern town and began working as a local news reporter. Diane Bernstein—the protagonist of Bender’s grittily realistic tale exploring the human side of staunch ideologies—works in the remedial writing lab of a private university. Like Diane, I was a city dweller, from the North, and progressive-minded. At least, that is, compared to the undergrads Diane teaches—students who come to class bearing diatribes against terrorists, “lazy people” and the “gay agenda.”

Diane is also coming to terms with her husband’s recent desertion, and bearing all the parenting responsibility for their two children, one of whom has spells of autism-related rage that result in the regular fleeing of babysitters. The story revolves around a single loaded episode, during which a conservative state Senate candidate calls on Diane’s family at home, for what turns out to be an extended and revealing visit.

In an attempt to keep track of Lookout’s first four prolific authors—Edith Pearlman, Steve Almond, John Rybicki, and Ben Miller—as well as the contributors to Astoria to Zion: Twenty-Six Stories of Risk and Abandon from Ecotone’s First Decade, we’re beginning a new weekly roundup department, featuring author news. We at Lookout and Ecotone are awfully proud of our growing family, and we hope you’ll show these authors some love by clicking through. Enjoy our first roundup.

• Karen E. Bender writes “The Emotional Power of Verbs” for the New York Times.
• The Express Tribune’s Nuzhat Saadia Siddiqi praises Maggie Shipstead’s book Seating Arrangements, saying that “the book under review steers so far away from the average chick lit bestseller that you’ll be left with a grin on your face and satisfaction over time well spent.
• Steve Almond offers advice to readers on Cognoscenti’s Heavy Meddle blog.
• Aspen Public Radio featured Ben Fountain and Rick Bass in their weekly show, First Draft, which “highlights the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft and the literary arts.”