As Mehdi noted, the reading period is closed, and our spring content has been decided. All the acceptance letters and rejection slips have been sent, so now we're in the process of laying out and copy editing the magazine. I think the issue will be out around early July, and the reading period will open again August 1 with a nearly new staff.

August Kleinzahler has a new book of poems reviewed at the NY Times. It looks pretty good.

While I still have a blog ID, I'm going to embarrass and offer public congratulations to some members of our staff. First to our editor, Mehdi Okasi, who recently won a statewide National Society of Letters contest and gave a reading down in Bloomington Sunday. Also congratulations to our rising Assistant Director of Creative Writing, Christopher Feliciano Arnold, who recently won Playboy's college fiction contest and will have a story out in Playboy's October issue. Finally congratulations to Mindy Gutowski, whose poem "Affinity" recently won in the AWP intro awards, and is due to be published soon in Artful Dodge.

In an effort to find the name of some writing contests that people at Purdue have done well in, I stumbled onto this blog that lists upcoming contest deadlines. Sycamore's own Wabash Prize was featured there a few weeks ago. It's resources like this that still make me stand in wonder at what the internet can do.

I just got the spring issue of The Southern Review in the mail, and, though they don't have it on their web page as of today, it's quite an issue, Bret Lott's last as editor. I haven't digested it all yet, but there's a good essay by Charles Baxter about why you don't see a lot of happy literature, and all of the fiction consists of novel excerpts--notably from CofC (my alma mater) alum, Elizabeth Weld, Ron Rash's Serena (to be released this fall), and Lott's own Ancient Highway (to be released this summer).

I would have glossed over this, but the Sound of Music has been on cable so much lately that my eye couldn't help but be drawn the the sunny picture of her dancing in the Alps. The Times has a joint review of her memoir and a biography. Her memoir ends with leaving England, and the reviewer has this interesting comment about the biography, which continues her life:

"To continue with the story you can skip to Page 118 of Richard Stirling’s “Julie Andrews: An Intimate Biography,” an extensive cut-and-paste job that suspends its reverential tone only with the author’s panicked discovery that his subject may be close to finishing a rival book: 'I pondered why she should be writing it at all if, as I surmised, she were to be so selective. She certainly did not need the money.' Poor Richard!"

His new book, Our Story Begins: New and Collected Stories, is reviewed in the Times. They've got "Bullet in the Brain" online as an excerpt here.

One of my favorite authors, Ron Rash, was a finalist for this year's Pen/Faulkner award for his book of stories, Chemistry, along with Annie Dillard, David Leavitt, and T.M. McNally, another interesting story writer. The award went to Kate Christensen for her novel, The Great Man.

I think we've got our finalists for the Wabash prize sent off to Richard Bausch, so the next deadline is March 31, the end of our reading period. I'm not sure how things are going with the poetry and nonfiction, but because of the fiction prize and the strength of our fiction slush pile, we should have all our fiction acceptances in the first week of April, which means that any submissions coming in after this week will most likely be returned unread. If you submitted before mid-February and haven't heard from us yet (and are sure you included a SASE), your story is in the strong maybe pile, and we'll get back to you in the next two or three weeks.

Fiction reader and rising MFA program assistant director Christopher Arnold pointed me to this review in the NY Times. Donald Ray Pollack's "Knockemstiff" is a collection of linked stories about Knockemstiff, Ohio, a real town south of Columbus, and has "a concentrated focus on the lonely, the depraved, the neglected." The reviewer compares Pollack, who spent thirty years working in a paper mill before attending Ohio State's MFA program, to Pat Conroy (for the bad fathers), Harry Crews (for the gritty characters), and Chuck Palahniuk (for the attitude).

The NY Times reviews Sarah Boxer's "Ultimate Blogs," an anthology of material culled from blogs between 2005 and 2007. Boxer apparently thought it was a "dreadful" idea when an editor first suggested she edit such a book, but she seems to have come around and, in the words of the reviewer, captured "good bloggy prose that non-blog readers can read." I like the idea of embracing new forms (like blogs), rather than just huffing about the death of good writing (which I do anyway) or dismissing them as cultural trash (which a lot of them are). But I'm thinking this anthology can only capture part of what makes a blog a blog. A lot of people use their blogs for long (often rambling) personal musings, and I guess have a small but interested audience. Those posts would be good for an anthology. But I think my favorite blogs (such as Bookninja or Maud) make better use of the form. They post regularly, keep the posts short, and link to something interesting, so that I can go to their pages for fifteen seconds a day, every day, and find something worthwhile. But those blogs wouldn't be very interesting in an anthology. Or at least I wouldn't buy it.

The UK Times has a pretty good profile of Stoppard here. Looks like they're doing a series of profiles for the Oxford Literary Festival, which you can read more about here.

Bookninja points to this long blog post about why most of the stories in the recent Willesden Herald short story competition were rejected. As a reminder, that's the competition Zadie Smith judged and decided not to award a winner. That blog post is interesting and comprehensive, and feels especially relevant to me now that we're reading through all of the Wabash prize submissions. (Don't worry: unlike Zadie Smith, we are most definitely awarding and publishing the winner Richard Bausch chooses from the finalists, and probably publishing a second story from the pool as well.) I'd say the big thing that's making me pass on the entries, though, boils down to whether the story makes me care about it, which I think is the hardest thing a story writer has to overcome. No matter how well written, a mean-spirited or didactic or trivial story won't win over the reader, and no matter how generous and moving a concept is, a sloppily written story won't win over the reader. The polls are all showing people don't read as much, and the cold reality is that most readers are extremely busy, or emotionally distracted, or just have a bad headache and a low attention span, and the best fiction somehow manages to win those readers over (though if I knew how, I'd sell it and get rich).

The winter edition of The Missouri Review includes found letters from Laurence Olivier to young actors. These letters show Olivier as generous enough with his time to respond to letters (which is more than I could see any famous actor doing today), and he gives his honest opinions about acting. I'm not sure how a Shakespeare scholar or an acting professor would take the following quote about playing the role of Hamlet, but I think it's one of the most refreshing pieces of craft advice I've heard in a long time:

"I would not plumb too far into psychological depths if I were you. It is simply a play about a man who could not make up his mind. If you start worrying about why he could not do this you are almost sure to get involved in a great number of readings and innuendos which will be completely perplexing to the public; he just can't and you must just feel that he can't, that's all."

We all remember the James Frey scandal, where he admitted to gross exaggerations and out-and-out lies in his memoir, A Million Little Pieces. His appearance on Oprah took over the news so that Nasdijj went unnoticed. Supposedly a Navajo who grew up in a destitute Spokane reservation, Nasdijj is actually, as Sherman Alexie noted two years ago, just some white guy who got tired of writing porn.

Well here we are, and Misha Defonseca has said her Holocaust memoir was fake, that her parents were not in fact seized by Nazis, and that she did not in fact roam Europe during WWII, or even leave Brussels. She says, "This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving." (That raises the issue of truth, I guess. Tim O'Brien says quite eloquently that fiction can lead to important emotional truths. Of course, The Things They Carried is labeled a novel, marketed as fiction.) Finally, the NY Times has the story of Margaret Jones's Love and Consequences, a "memoir" of growing up in a gangland, actually written by Margaret Seltzer, who grew up in a well-to-do section of Los Angeles.

I do think there's something despicable about a person publishing a fraudulent memoir, and something equally despicable about publishers telling authors, "You know, if this were a bit more exciting..." or "You know, if this were your life instead of a novel..." But I'm very interested in our reaction to memoirs as readers. Slap the label on a book (or movie), "Based on a True Story," and we're suddenly involved in a way we couldn't have been before? What does that say about our psychology?