Content Tagged ‘lookout’

We’re rapidly approaching the end of the semester here at UNCW, and are trying to cram in as much learning as possible in these last few weeks, even as spring beckons us to the beach. In honor of the teaching and learning we all do, this week’s post corrals some news worth getting to know.

First up: have you pre-ordered Lookout’s new title yet? Clare Beams’s We Show What We Have Learned comes out in October, but you can reserve a copy now here. About half of the stories take place in schools–from odd assemblies to fraught classrooms–and combine the literary, the historic, and the fantastic into one fabulous collection.

Speaking of Lookout specifically, and the idea of the teaching press more generally, Lookout founder and publisher, Emily Smith, has an essay in the anthology Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed), edited by Travis Kurowski, Wayne Miller, and Kevin Prufer, which was officially released on Tuesday of this week. Among some really fantastic and thoughtful essays about the work of–and challenges facing–independent presses and literary magazines, Emily’s essay documents the founding of Lookout Books; the historic success of our debut title, Edith Pearlman’s Binocular Vision; and our innovative teaching press at UNCW.

We’re lucky here at UNCW to have wonderful teachers, and to bring in guest writers and publishing professionals to boot. Last semester’s visitor, Michael Taeckens, interviewed editor of the NYTBR, Pamela Paul, for Poets & Writers this week.

For those in the know: if you didn’t make it to ‪#AWP16‬, we still welcome you to use our AWP subscription discount for Ecotone! The code AWP16 grants you two issues for $14.95—two issues at more than 50% off the cover price! Use this knowledge well, friends.

For National Poetry Month, during which we all get to learn and enjoy poetry even more than we usually do, Ecotone is sharing poems from our Sound issue and archives all month long. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter to see when new poems are live. The first few are here, here, and here. And if you’re still hungry for more poems, Ecotone contributor Angie Macri has two poems in Terrain.org. And Ralph Sneeden has another Sound-centric poem (about Hendrix!) in the Southeast Review. Here’s a picture of Ralph reading his poetry this past week at Word Barn for its Silo Series of readings. We heard the acoustics were amazing, and it sounds like such a cool space wherein to learn about words. Thanks to Paul Yoon for the photo!

To take us out, we give you two topics we never tire of learning about: Donald Trump and mini golf. Ecotone contributor Jeff Sharlet had this fascinating story about Trump rallies in NYT Magazine. And have you ever wanted to learn more about mini-golf courses? Me too. Luckily, Ecotone contributor Sarah Bryan has an interesting audio piece up at the Southern Review about her dad’s role as one of the country’s preeminent mini golf course designers.

We hope we’ve given you lots of new things to learn and think about this week, and that your quest for knowledge never ends. We’ll see you back here next time!

As part of UNCW’s College of Arts and Science’s Open House this Saturday, April 16, Lookout and Ecotone will be selling (very gently used) books and back issues for a steal! You can get books from Lookout’s entire catalog–including our newest release, Honey from the Lion–for only $3. We’ve never had a local sale with discounts this big, and we’re excited to share what we’ve been up to with the Wilmington community.

And the Open House has plenty of other things besides reading material to offer. Come by from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m to see a marine animal touch tank, a fossil sifting exhibit, musical performances, poetry readings–from our own MFA and BFA students– and more. The event is free, family friendly, and open to the public.

The 2016 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference (AWP) is coming up fast, and Lookout Books, Ecotone, Chautauqua, and the UNCW MFA program are gearing up to celebrate books and writing in sunny California. For those of you who will be joining us in Los Angeles, we’ve got a fun contest to promote Lookout’s debut novel, Honey from the Lion, by Matthew Neill Null. In this lyrical and suspenseful novel, a turn-of-the-century logging company decimates ten thousand acres of virgin forest in the West Virginia Alleghenies—and transforms a brotherhood of timber wolves into revolutionaries.

Enter to win the entire Lookout Books catalog, including a signed copy of Honey from the Lion, and a swag bag! The contest is simple. Hop on Instagram, find the historical photo below in our feed @lookoutbooksuncw, and caption it by commenting on it.

This photo, along with others from Roy B. Clarkson’s Tumult on the Mountains—a history of lumbering in West Virginia—inspired Null’s novel and our staff in creating a series of digital broadsides you can see here. We hope this photograph will inspire your captions too.

The Rules

• Follow Lookout Books on Instagram @lookoutbooksuncw.
• Comment on the photo with your best caption.
• Stop by book fair tables 919/921 at 10:45 on Friday, April 1, before Matthew Neill Null’s 11 a.m. signing, for the announcement of the winning captions.

The Prize

One grand prize winner, chosen by Null, will receive the Lookout Books catalog, including a signed copy of Honey from the Lion, bookmarks, bumper stickers, and more. Three runners up will receive a Lookout title of their choice.

Matthew Neill Null’s Honey from the Lion was published in September, and his story collection, Alleghany Front, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in May. Null will be signing Honey from the Lion at the UNCW, Lookout, and Ecotone tables on Friday, April 1, from 11 to 12, and we can’t wait to see you—and your captions—there.

The Lookout Books team is thrilled to introduce our next book, We Show What We Have Learned, a debut story collection from author Clare Beams. As imaginative and compelling as they are emotionally complex, these nine exquisitely unsettling stories blend the fantastic, the historic, and the literary to capture the true strangeness of what it means to be human.

Already some of our favorite writers are loving the book. Caitlin Horrocks says, “Clare Beams is a magician, and each of these stories is a muscular, artful haunting.” Change-Rae Lee says, “In gorgeous prose that thrills, instructs, and thoroughly inspires, Clare Beams obliterates the ‘dividing line between possibilities and impossibilities,’ showing how our passions can rule with reality-bending magic.”

From bewildering assemblies in school auditoriums to the murky waters of a Depression-era health resort, Beams’s landscapes are tinged with otherworldliness, and her characters’ desires stretch the limits of reality to delight, surprise, and provoke: Ingénues at a boarding school bind themselves to their headmaster’s vision of perfection; a nineteenth-century landscape architect embarks on his first major project, but finds the terrain of class and power intractable; a bride glimpses her husband’s past when she wears his World War II parachute as a gown; and a teacher comes undone in front of her astonished fifth graders.

Four of these nine stories take place in schools. “I began to see the common themes and threads that tie these stories together,” Clare said. “Their concern with the shaping of selves has a lot to do with my time in the classroom.” These are complex characters, and their vulnerabilities are made manifest in all their messy beauty. From the mercurial space between girlhood and adulthood to a matriarch coming to terms with her legacy, these stories show us women grappling with power and legacy, prompting Joyce Carol Oates to call Clare “a female/feminist voice for the twenty-first century.”

This gorgeous cover, designed by Lookout publisher and art director Emily Smith, features art from Andrea Wan. We think it’s the perfect complement to Clare’s rare and capacious imagination. Find more of Andrea’s work on her website.

We can’t wait to share the full collection with you on October 25. These stories appear in Ecotone, One Story, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading and are forthcoming in the Common and online at the Kenyon Review this summer. In the meantime, we hope you’ll head to Clare’s brand-new website designed by the Lookout student staff, where you can read more about her and pre-order a copy of the book. And like her Facebook page and follow her @clarebeams on Twitter, too!

Going to AWP this week? We’ll be taking pre-orders at table 919 at the bookfair and giving out these beautiful bookmarks.

We’re so excited to welcome Clare to the Lookout family!

This week we’re rounding up the Ecotone and Lookout haps (that’s California-style talk for “events”) at next week’s AWP conference in L.A. We, like, totally hope you’ll come see us at tables 919 and 921 in the bookfair!

Stay tuned to the blog this week for details about promotions we’ll be running, including a caption contest related to Honey from the Lion (the winner will receive the ENTIRE Lookout catalog!) and how using #overheardatawp in honor of Ecotone‘s sound issue can score you some schwag.

Speaking of Honey from the Lion, you’ll find author Matthew Neill Null signing books twice in the bookfair: on Thursday at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center table (1254) from 10 to 11, and at our table (919) on Friday from 11 to 12. Come get a book signed!

And if you’re up for a party, please come have a drink and a chat with us on Thursday from 5:30-7:30 as we mingle with our friends at the Common, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Young Literati of The Library Foundation of Los Angeles, and Santa Monica Review. 

Here’s what some of our other friends are up to:

This panel features a nice taste of the two “great Jamies” of our Anniversary issue :
The New South: A Reading in Three Genres. (Devin Latham,  Dr. David Jamie Poissant,  Adam Vines,  Carrie Jerrell,  Jamie Quatro) With Faulkner’s South paved into history, what defines Southern literature today? Do contemporary Southern writers still make use of old tropes like familial loyalty, racial tension, and heavy religion set in a humid landscape of live oaks and wisteria? Does the urban and suburban South require new settings and themes? This reading features five Southern writers reading fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that illuminates and redefines Southern literature today. Thurs at 9 am: Room 406 AB, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level

Here’s a place-based and co-starring issue 20 contributor Toni Jensen:
Rewriting the Iconic West: Native and Latino Writers on Crafting Change. (Toni Jensen,  Stephen Graham Jones,  Tim Hernandez,  Erika Wurth,  Ito Romo) From the cowboy on horseback to the detective on the dark city streets, the fictional icons of the West loom both familiar and large. Their stories have the ease of familiarity, but what if the stories you want to tell shift the vantage point? What if your hero is the one shot by the cowboy, the man turning the corner to avoid the detective? A diverse set of writers discusses strategies for telling the West’s iconic stories through a wide range of viewpoints and in diverse cultural contexts. Thurs. at 10:30: Room 402 AB, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level

Another place-based panel, this one featuring Ecotone all-star Alison Deming and one-time contributor, the legendary Mark Doty:
The Tattooed Desert: A Tribute to and Reading from Richard Shelton, Hosted by the University of Arizona Poetry Center. (Alison Deming,  Mark Doty,  Ken Lamberton,  Naomi Shihab Nye,  Richard Shelton) This panel/reading celebrates the life of poet, writer, teacher, and literary citizen Richard Shelton. Shelton’s 12 collections of poetry include The Tattooed Desert, Selected Poems: 1969–1981, and The Last Person to Hear Your Voice. A critical influence in the 20th-century American literary landscape and a quintessential voice of the American Southwest, Shelton’s work as an educator perseveres, particularly in the Arizona prison-writing program he launched in 1974 that continues today. Thurs. at 10:30: Room 502 B, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level

This one has Ecotone‘s editor Anna Lena and contributor Annie Finch:
From Tetrameter to Terza Rima: Prosody as a Catalyst for Discovery in the Workshop. (Anna Lena Phillips,  Kim Addonizio,  Annie Finch,  Timothy Steele) Formal poetics can enliven workshops and offer students access to a rich set of traditions, replete with potential for new work. As teachers and authors of guides to poetic craft, the panelists have introduced students to formal prosody in college courses and in community settings. How can craft guides be used to encourage experimentation with meter, fixed forms, and procedural work? Their titles offer a wide range of strategies; they will discuss these as well as other possibilities. Thurs at 1:30: Room 409 AB, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level

This one has Ecotone contributor Camille Dungy:
Genre-Crossing and Poetic Truth: Lyric Nonfictions, Reported Poems. (Tess Taylor ,  Camille Dungy ,  Robert Polito,  Tom Sleigh,  Brian Turner ) This panel examines the places where genres collide and inform one another. What happens when the poet takes up the memoirist’s work, the reporter’s notebook, the essayist’s pen? What do poets learn about poetry by pushing its boundaries? By what means does documentary poetry emerge, and what can poets teach documentarians? Five skilled practitioners of both poetry and nonfiction explore the productive sites where genres overlap. Thurs. at 3: Room 518, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level

So, no contributors here, but this one’s right up our alley!:
The New Nature Writing. (Sarah Gilman,  Meera Subramanian,  Christine Woodside,  Elizabeth Rush,  Laura Pritchett) What is the impact of climate change on contemporary literature and creative nonfiction in particular? How do you write creatively about climate change? And how can we engage new audiences about a deeply polemic issue? Through a sustained discussion of craft, best practices, and theory, this panel explores the ways in which climate change has destabilized and redefined our literary interaction with nature. Thurs. at 3: Gold Salon 4, JW Marriott LA, 1st Floor

We’ve got a hat trick in this one! Ansel, Rebecca, and David are all Ecotone contributors:
The Music Issue: Poetry’s Root Influence (Hosted by the Oxford American). (Ansel Elkins ,  Ada Limon,  Don Share,  Rebecca Gayle Howell,  David Kirby) Roots music represents a diversity of styles ranging from Tejano to gospel to blues and beyond—sound work from the crossroads of place, family, and culture. Poetry, too, has an Americana tradition, a divergent verse that sings the multitudes of our fly-over selves. The Oxford American presents a conversation about musical influence that moves through the global into the local and returns us to the origins of poetry: the beat, the breath. Friday at 9: Room 502 B, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level

This panel features folks from UNCW’s graduate program–Jamie Mortara, former Lookout intern, and Corinne Manning, former Pub Lab staff:
Reimagining Literary Spaces. Maisha Z. Johnson (Black Girl Dangerous, Silk Road,various), Jayy Dodd (The Offing), Zinzi Clemmons (Apogee Journal), Jamie J. Mortara (Voicemail Poems), Nancy Jooyoun Kim (various, The James Franco Review)Literary journals must go beyond stating a commitment to inclusivity and diversity. To change the literary landscape and make public more work by POC, LGBTQ, women,working class and differently abled communities, journals must reimagine the traditional structure of submissions or even the role of literary spaces. Editors will share their experience of how they re-visioned journals or differently approached the editing process Friday at 1:30, Gold Salon 2 in the Marriott on the 1st Floor

Two Ecotone contributors in this remembrance:
Remembering Claudia Emerson. (Emilia Phillips,  Jill McCorkle,  Alan Shapiro,  Kathleen Graber) Claudia Emerson’s death in late 2014 grieved her friends and her readers. This event features panelists remembering her spirit and her work and inviting audience members to participate by also reading her poems so that her single voice resonates through a chorus of witnesses. The panelists focus on her posthumous books, The Opposite House and The Impossible Bottle. Friday at 1:30: Room 403 B, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level

This one place-based AND stars two Ecotone contributors:
The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide. (Christopher Cokinos,  Eric Magrane) More than 50 writers respond to the stunning biodiversity of one of the world’s most important deserts. From serious to comic, postmodern to narrative, this community produced an anthology as varied as the desert itself. Editors and contributors will do brief readings, followed by a discussion of the processes behind creating a unique book that combines, for the first time, anthologizing creative work with (playful) natural history descriptions and illustrations found in traditional field guide. Saturday at noon: Robert Muroff Bookfair Stage, LA Convention Center, Exhibit Hall Level One

We hope to see you at one of these events or at the bookfair table or totally soaking in some sun waiting in line outside of a taco truck. Travel safe to L.A.!

Friends, spring is springing here in coastal Carolina, and along with it: Ecotone and Lookout writers are in full bloom, sprouting up all over the internet with fabulous projects, opening their leafy arms for literary embraces. Are we getting carried away with this metaphor? See what they’re up to and I think you’ll agree that it should have gone on much longer.

Before we start, we’d like to share some pictures of Ecotone and Lookout in the wild, to add some spring color to this post. Look! It’s Ecotone poetry editor Stephanie Trott, who found a rare Issue 3 at Powell’s Books in Portland. And, farther down, Matthew Neill Null finds himself in some great company at Housing Works Bookstore in NYC.

Okay, first up, Ecotone contributor Rick Bass has a new story collection out. Here he is talking about the art of the short story on NPR. And Smith Henderson reviews the collection for the NYTBR here, saying, “One long proposal of chemical magic, the fantastic origin of the very color blue, and Bass has situated us at the intersection of science and another kind of terrestrial alchemy.”

Speaking of magic, Ecotone contributor and soon-to-be Lookout author (more on that very soon!) Clare Beams is talking about magic over on the Ploughshares blog. “I turned some kind of corner as a writer when I started letting inexplicable things happen in my fiction,” she says. And we can’t wait to show you exactly what she means!

Speaking of inexplicable things, if you’re up for hearing about “Haunted Souls and Public Hangings”–and we hope you are–join Lookout author Matthew Neill Null at the Virginia Festival of the Book this weekend. He’s giving a talk with Glenn Taylor at the New Dominion Bookshop in Charlottesville (404 E. Main Street) at 12 p.m., Saturday, March 19.

Speaking of Main Street, are everyday problems getting you down? Do you need some hilarious, practical, and sensitive advice? You’ve probably heard Lookout author Steve Almond on the Dear Sugar podcast with Cheryl Strayed, but you might not know that he does a regular advice column for Cognoscenti called “Heavy Meddle,” where he tackles all sorts of advice from “My In-Laws Are On The Warpath Over Our Baby’s Name” to “It’s Been 2 Years Since My Wedding and I Still Haven’t Sent ‘Thank You’ Cards” to “I Don’t Know How to Live Without My Dying Cat.” Sad, surreal, and totally helpful.

Speaking of music (I’m referring, ahem, to the “heavy metal” inference above), Ecotone contributor Dom Flemons has a fantastic piece about Thomas A. Dorsey, the inventor of modern gospel music, in the Oxford American. “He wrote songs like a bluesman because he was a bluesman. And he taught choirs to sing that way: calling to God, guided by the musical structure of the blues.”

Speaking of public transportation (okay, we weren’t, but grant me one rough transition, okay?) Ecotone contributor Brock Clarke has a great story online at the Kenyon Review called “The Bus.” It’s a wild and totally entertaining ride!

And last but not least, and bringing it back to spring flowers!: The winner of the 2016 Rose Post Creative Nonfiction contest has been announced! Karen Smith Linehan won for her essay “Magnolia grandiflora.” Final judge Kate Sweeney says of the essay, “There is a sense here that every phrase and every word is chosen with great intent, and taken together, the work conveys the magnitude of this tree in a voice that is, like the tree itself, both quiet and commanding.” The contest is hosted by the North Carolina Writers’ Network and administered by UNCW’s creative writing department. She’ll receive a $1,000 prize. We can’t wait to read it–congrats, Karen!

We hope your week is filled with growing things both tangible and not. Enjoy the coming spring, and we’ll see you at the next Roundup!

I’ve worked at a local bookstore as long as I’ve known about UNCW’s Publishing Laboratory. They’re both small, independent, and full of people I want to be when I grow up. They both give loving homes to books that might be ignored at larger institutions.

But here’s the thing about being small: it takes big effort. Huge, in fact. Let’s just go ahead and call it a gigantic labor of love. Small presses like Lookout compete with larger publishers before the book even makes it to the shelf (if it does that). Most indie publishers have limited budgets from which to offer authors advances for their manuscripts, and it’s not surprising that big numbers consistently compel great writers to sign with the big houses and their imprints.

Even when indie publishers bring great titles into the world (or, like Lookout, only one per year), it’s especially difficult for bookstores to sell the books of small presses. At Pomegranate Books, where I work, we often receive boxes of press kits and advance reading copies for the big books that big publishers want us to stock. Sure, we’d love to shelve every novel by our favorite indie presses, but will those titles move as fast as the mass-marketed books that everyone and their cousin want to read?

Pomegranate Books is small, but even for larger independent stores with more shelf space and more customers, there are different challenges to selling indie books. Trade publishers often offer volume discounts, or additional in-store advertising money to incentivize stocking and prominently displaying their books. So big-publisher books get coveted window display and shelf space even if a bookseller would prefer to give attention to her new favorite by an indie press. The New York Times wrote about this back in 1996, and it’s still a tiresome obstacle.

Instead of advertising money, Lookout offers gratitude to indie bookstores in the form of author visits, signings, and readings in their stores. At Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, Lookout’s publisher and editors tagged along with authors Steve Almond and Matthew Neill Null to offer free publishing workshops and to serve on panels after the authors’ readings. And Lookout celebrates indie stories such as Brookline Booksmith, which to date has sold almost six hundred copies of its first title, Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories by Edith Pearlman! That collection found its way into the hands of hundreds more readers thanks to the generous support of booksellers at Harvard Book Store, Porter Square Books, and Politics & Prose, which hosted Edith Pearlman for one of her first public readings from Binocular Vision.

Millions of books exist in this world—in fact, I encourage everyone to purchase So Many Books by Gabriel Zaid, an exhilarating read published by another indie press, Paul Dry Books—but our store has fewer than five employees. Perhaps, if we had the time and human capital to dedicate regular hours to discovering new books by small presses, we’d be able to better hand sell their books. Instead, we struggle simply to stay up-to-date on the titles brought to our attention through large mailings and marketing budgets.

The better an independent press can convey its mission, purpose, and we-consider-every-little-detail attitude, the more inclined a bookstore’s owners and staff will be to share that appreciation for thoughtfully made books with their customers. It’s extremely difficult to verbalize or advertise that feeling, but Lookout serves as proof that it can work.

These five best practices from Lookout Books include things I wish I saw more of as a bookseller—from every press, big or small.

1.    Authors

Lookout seeks works by emerging and historically underrepresented writers, as well as overlooked gems. Unlike large trade publishers, they aren’t beholden to stockholders or corporate owners, so they tend to be less motivated by profit margins. Bookstores know that they consider their publications works of art by literary artists, not just best-selling retail items (though they hope for that too!).

2.    Marketing

In developing media kits, Lookout makes or buys materials, when they can, from local or independent sellers. If a bookstore receives a promotional kit that includes unique, handmade materials, they’ll be more likely to give it attention. When Lookout staffer Anna Coe created coasters to celebrate the recent release of Matthew Neill Null’s Honey From the Lion, she ordered the wood slices from a supplier on Etsy and personally stamped and sealed every coaster!

There was lots of good news in the halls of Ecotone and Lookout this week, not the least of which is that Lookout author Matthew Neill Null got a starred review from Kirkus for his forthcoming story collection from Sarabande, Allegheny Front. Calling the stories “sometimes lyrical, sometimes scarifying” the reviewer says Matt is “a natural writer with much to say.” We wholeheartedly agree.

It’s been a big week here for Ecotone! Our Sound issue, pictured here, is hot off the press. We hope you’ll check it out, and keep your eye on the blog for more on the issue, the great stuff inside, and its contributors. We’re also profiling sound-related news and writing on Ecotone‘s Facbook page.

And subscribe, why don’t you? Not convinced? How about the fact that Ecotone made BuzzFeed’s list of twenty-nine literary magazines that will help you read better things. That’s pretty compelling, right? The list includes so many other great magazines, too. We hope you’ll check it out.

In other goings-on this week, Ecotone contributor and all-around-hilarious guy Bill Roorbach is visiting our MFA program this semester, and gave a fantastic reading from his forthcoming story collection last night, watched over by a younger (and smoking) version of himself.

Bill is also joined by many other Ecotone contributors–including Rick Bass, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Barbara Hurd, Kathryn Miles, and our own founding editor David Gessner–in this forthcoming collection on fracking. Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America brings together over fifty writers to explore “the complexities of fracking through first-hand experience, investigative journalism, story-telling, and verse.” Check out this video for more.

We hope good news abounds in your neck of the woods, too! We’ll see you back here next week for more happy literary things.

In this week’s Roundup, we’re playing a game of quotable contributors! In this game, everybody wins. From envy to Donald Trump to marriage, Ecotone and Lookout authors are talking about all sorts of things on the Internet this week. Here are our favorite morsels to challenge and inspire you.

Ecotone contributor Molly Antopol has a conversation with Sophie McManus over at Pixelated. Sophie asks how Molly gets inside her character’s heads and she says, “It’s much easier for me to write about the things I’m really upset about, terrified of, etc. when I can look at them through the lens of someone very different from myself. Basically my sweet spot in writing is cranky, middle-aged Jewish men. But nothing in writing comes easily for me, unfortunately! These stories took FOREVER.”

Ecotone contributor John Jeremiah Sullivan has a conversation over at Chapter 16 with Susannah Felts. Asked about if the topics and people he’s written about in the past pop back of for him, he replies: “All subjects come back, both to haunt and to goad you. The best ones do it the most. That’s one of the ways you recognize them. By best, I mean the subjects that trouble you in a deep enough way to sustain you.”

Ecotone contributor Sarah Manguso takes on envy in her author’s note in the New York Times. Smartly putting things in perspective, she says, “The purpose of being a serious writer is not to express oneself, and it is not to make something beautiful, though one might do those things anyway. Those things are beside the point. The purpose of being a serious writer is to keep people from despair. If you keep that in mind always, the wish to make something beautiful or smart looks slight and vain in comparison.”

Lookout author Steve Almond, always ready with the most helpful advice, has some hilarious tips in the Boston Globe for talking to your kids when they inevitably bring up Donald Trump. “Remember that your child has not yet learned to draw a clear line between fantasy and reality. She may not understand the difference between the monsters encountered in fairytales and the bloated, orange-faced creature bellowing polls numbers at her on the television.”

Ecotone contributor Delaney Nolan has a story up on Electric Literature‘s Recommended Reading. Here’s one of the characters on his marriage: “Natalie and I used to fight a lot, before. Regular marriage fights—I pretend to laugh too often; she criticizes me too much. I wouldn’t say we had issues, but we’d gotten married in our twenties, and after two decades together even our thinnest problems had had time to accumulate into thicker, heavier ones, like stacks of plastic transparencies that eventually stop being transparent. But when the sand started to come up and cover everything and everybody, the fighting sort of died off.”

We hope these quotables have given you something to think about, and we hope your week ahead is filled with all sorts of inspiration things you can’t wait to write down. Oh, and if you’re looking for more inspiration, don’t forget to follow Ecotone (@ecotonemagazine) and Lookout (@lookoutbooksuncw) on Instagram!