My MFA Search + Google Spreadsheets

So, in addition to work I do for SIR, I also have this other life in which I attempt to finish my degree at USI and in which I am going through the grueling process of applying to graduate schools. Only, I haven't even gotten to the grueling parts yet, maybe.

A month ago I thought I had my MFA list down to a sure 10 or so, but I've since discovered a few more programs I might like (Virginia Commonwealth, Brown, Vanderbilt...), and so had to go back to charting and tabling (which is what I do best in life, perhaps...). It's a time-consuming process involving two open reference books (AWP Guide [borrowed from Mitchell like a year ago...] and Kealey's Handbook); five Firefox tabs opened at all times to the U.S. News MFA program ratings, Kealey's MFA Blog, GMail, New Pages list of programs, and Google (to get to programs' websites, which usually offer the least info out of all of these methods); and a comfortable swivel chair. It's a freaking mess, and that is where a nice clean spreadsheet comes in.

I get obsessive, yes.

From the above link you can keep up with which schools are still on my list (I know like 1/2 a person who is actually interested in this)--I'm deleting them as I rule them out, and hopefully not adding many more, although some have mentioned that I need some safety schools thrown in there, so over the next week or so I might add a couple of those.
And then, someone please stop me.

Fall Readings! Pictures!

So far this fall the Ropewalk Reading Series at University of Southern Indiana has hosted Mike Magnuson, recently the author of Heft on Wheels: A Field Guide to Doing a 180; Michael Martone, with his latest collection, Double-wide: Collected fiction of Michael Martone; and Gary Gildner, whose latest collection of poems is titled Cleaning a Rainbow. We've implemented a new and fun thing this semester, in which students do a kind of "meet and greet" with the visiting writers before their readings. This includes punch, cookies, questions, and sometimes pictures. For the pictures of the readings and the receptions, please take a look at our new Photobucket account, which is linked below. And we've added a big backdrop with a sharp-looking 3-D logo, which just makes our readings that much more enjoyable.

On November 8 Dana Kinstler, winner of our 2006 Mary C. Mohr fiction award will be reading as well, so keep an eye out for that.

Don't forget to check out our pictures...

Photobucket Album

Fall Issue Update

In the office today making final edits. If all goes as planned, the fall issue will be shipped to the printer tomorrow (Monday) morning. It never fails that just when you think that everything is perfect, another error (or two) rears its ugly head. This morning I was flipping through the poetry, confident that all that was left to proof were the book reviews, when I noticed a couple of errors that somehow made it through four levels of proof reading (my original layout, the author, SIR staff, USI's Print Services): "imaging" instead of "imagining" and "breath" instead of "breathe."

Ah, the spellbinding life of an editor...

R

Back to Business, But Not as Usual

From the fall introduction:

...America likes to think

Every one can recover from every thing,
But about this,
Especially, America is wrong.

—Liam Rector, "Back to Country with Pulitzer"


The editors note with regret departures by three friends who have helped and inspired us and whom we have loved as a part of Ropewalk, the Press, the Reading Series, and the Review. One of these, the departure of former managing editor Jim McGarrah for sunnier climes in Florida, is not such a painful loss for Jim but for all his friends here in Indiana who will miss seeing him on a daily basis.

The other two departures, however, are causes for sadness and alarm. The death, in August, of Jim Blevins, dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Southern Indiana, came after a long bout with prostate cancer and deprives us of a friend who was instrumental in creating the structures--financial and intellectual--which permitted our projects to flourish. We will miss his wise counsel, his optimistic outlook, his enthusiasm regarding all the creative arts, and the particular interest he took in our success.

The death of Liam Rector at age fifty-seven in New York City came as an especially severe blow to his many friends here at USI. It was at the time of Matthew Graham’s wedding in 1987 that Liam, a member of the wedding party, first proposed that New Harmony would be an ideal place for a literary retreat. Out of that notion, and with Liam’s encouragement and support, Ropewalk itself was born, followed in time by all of the ancillary programs.

Liam continued to be a close friend and follower of our projects. He led panel discussions at Ropewalk, read several times on campus, and continued to advise us in long, often late-night phone calls (for which he was famous). While Liam’s program at Bennington often put us in competition with him for workshop leaders we would have liked to recruit, his warm friendship and advice more than compensated for the loss. Nothing, however, will compensate for the death of such a close, close friend. Our sympathies in particular go out to his wife, Tree Swenson, and his daughter, Virginia Rector.

TW

Web Silence

Note to self: finish spring issue. Check. Finish spring semester. Check. Keep up with the blog over the summer while the interns are on break. Uh-oh.

So, here's what I've been up to since the last post:

1. Attended The Missouri Review fundrasing dinner in Columbia, MO, to hear Rodney Jones read. Here's a photo taken by TMR's promotions director, Kris Somerville...the contents of Rodney's right hand may or may not have been altered. At said event, I "secured" (OK, swiped) Rodney's poem "Willows," which appeared in the spring issue of SIR.

2. Helped coordinate (actually, Linda Cleek does all the work) the 19th RopeWalk Writers Retreat in New Harmony, IN. This year's faculty members were Marianne Boruch (poetry); Michael Waters (poetry); Jennifer S. Davis (fiction); and Kevin McIlvoy (nonfiction). Bich Minh Nguyen was the guest artist.

3. Started working on the 20th anniversay Retreat (June 14-21, 2008) NEA grant.

4. Started the layout of Twenty Years in Utopia: The RopeWalk Anthology, which will (hopefully) be available by April '08.

That said, the blog will probably be inactive until the fall semester begins in September.

See you then,

R

Spring issue has arrived!

The new phone book is here! The new phone book is here!
So, Ron and I drove my deathtrap S10 across campus to print services yesterday to pick up the just-completed spring issues, and they look great. There's just something about holding the thing in your hands that makes it all worth it.
Things are going to start happening to us now.

In other important news, I've discovered a new, really practical keyboard short cut for Firefox. If you close a tab by mistake, just click CNTRL-SHIFT-T, and watch as time folds back on itself and corrects a small part of your sad life.

Have I told you people why you should get Firefox, by the way? Let me just make this my recommendation of the week, or day, or whatever calendar cycle this blog pretends to adhere to. Get Firefox, and then go to their add-ons page and install the following:
1) Inline Google Definitions. With this you can highlight any word, right click on it, and see in a convenient little window its definition(s).
2) Foxmarks. Have more than one PC? One at home and another at the office? Foxmarks keeps your bookmarks synchronized. It's how NASA employees do it, I bet.
3) Super DragAndGo. Drag a link to a blank part of the page and watch it instantly open in a new tab for you. How fun is that?
4) FoxyTunes. Control whatever program you use to play music files directly from your browser. No need to minimize your browser to pause Itunes or to skip that ten minute monotone track at the end of A Ghost Is Born! Welcome to the future, where laziness reaches whole new levels.

Intern Issue #1...

Coming soon...

Hot Fuzz, etc.

Have you seen "Hot Fuzz?" I laughed, a lot. It's a very strange blend of British slapstick, Patrick Swayze parody action, and other things I haven't figured out yet. A unique, hilarious movie, through and through. This is the first movie I've watched in months, which is something else I'd like to recommend: Stop watching movies for a while, then when you return, they're all amazing.

So, summer is here, at least for the academic world. Which means we're all just wishing it was already time for Ropewalk. It will be my first time there, and I'm pretty schoolboy giddy about it. I mean, a week away from computers and (worse) computer chairs, workshopping with great writers, swimming, eating free food, rolling around in the grass and stuff...I can't wait.

Other upcoming summer events include:
- The Spring issue
- The debut of our intern issue
- my interview with Dana Kinstler, 1st place winner of the 2006 Mary C. Mohr Fiction Award

Catching up

Okay, there haven't been that many posts lately, but what to write about? I suppose I could regale everyone with my tales of data entry. We just started laying out the intern issue on Quark, which seems to be going OK so far. Knock on wood.

My interview with Marika Lindholm, third place winner of the Mary C. Mohr Short Fiction Award, is now online. Jordan's interview with Mark Lindensmith and Chris' interview with Dana Kinstler are coming soon, so keep checking back here for those. I know we've all spent a lot of time on our interviews, so I hope people will read them and enjoy them.

Go here to read my interview with Marika Lindholm, author of "Fall Seven Times, Stand Up Eight." Seriously. Do it. Right now.

Yours Truly,
Katie Guthrie
(SIR Intern)

a reading, a duck, an interview....

So much news:

First of all, last week's Ropewalk Reading Series brought in the first two poets published by Ropewalk Press, Matthew Guenette and Jeffrey Thomson. They read from their chapbooks, as well as some things we hadn't heard, and we were all pretty blown away by how good it was. No one rioted, as in Guenette's reading nightmare, although Ron Mitchell did do a bit of heckling, as prophesied in the dream. (But really, it doesn't take a soothsayer to predict that...)

Our first Mary C. Mohr Fiction Award winner interview will be up soon (today?). Marika Lindholm, who won third place with her story, "Fall Seven Times, Stand Up Eight," is interviewed by Katie Guthrie, one of this semester's SIR interns. Keep checking the MCM Award page for that and for upcoming interviews with the other two winners.

We're also working hard on putting together the first intern issue of SIR. The cover will look something like this:






















The painting on the cover is by Stephen Cefalo, my good friend of old. Check out his other stuff.

Also keep an eye out for the spring '07 issue of SIR, due very soon. We're excited to publish the award winners' stories, a poem from Rodney Jones, and much more.

Change is in the Southern Indiana air...

We're getting back into the swing, as they say, now that AWP is behind us and the future ahead. We've decided on a logo - some version of the bike. We just like it, OK? Does it have to make sense? Need we point out other reviews and their seemingly-arbitrary logos? Sorry, we get defensive sometimes.
We're also gearing up for a new site design and some new pages, including one just for our beloved interns, as well as exclusive interviews with the three Mary C. Mohr award winners.

We will soon look something like this:

AWP

We've returned from the AWP conference in Atlanta. It was a huge thing, with a lot of people, tables, and books. We walked around in a conference-induced-daze and pawed at these books, and we sat at our table a lot, pawing at our own books. Lots of nice AWP-ers dropped by the table and left with copies of SIR and with Ropewalk Press' newest release (Jeffrey Thomson's poetry chapbook). We thank those people.

We ate a lot of bad food, as the Hilton is poorly placed in a barren part of Atlanta, where the best food one can find is at Quiznos. We went to Buckhead, froze to death (yes, in Atlanta!) walking around trying to find where the part everyone talks about is, and then froze to death some more coming back, and were nearly killed by stray bullets on the subway (a story that gets worse with each telling, of course).

On the ride home, we discussed very literary and philosophical things. Now we are home, ready to start working on this logo again, and some other stuff. I'm going to call the interns now, and yell at them for no reason.

Here are some pictures:

on the marta:

brittney and jordan:

jordan:

john, thinking he is on the hood of a camaro:

brittney, john, ron:

brittney, chris:

In Chattanooga:

Buckhead:

In the van on the way back:

...or how about...an old bike?

Here's one I came up with this morning:

Intern

My name is Jordan Cory and I am the other intern for the Southern Indiana Review this semester. Along with the duties of submission entries and mailing of rejection or acceptance letters, the internship also provides the opportunity to witness the duties of acting editors. It is a fortunate experience for an undergrad, since normally literary magazine experience is only open for grad students. We also work on a student version of the review for further practice on the procedure of developing a literary journal.

Outside the internship I have been rereading Saul Bellow's "Herzog" for a critical assessment paper. Trying to find a way to write something new and true about something that has been written on widely already. A lofty choice of literary work for the assignment, but it was mine and now I have to go with it.

Introduction

Okay! I finally got signed on to this thing! That was forty-five minutes of my life I'll never get back. Apparently, I was at eblogger.com, instead of blogger.com, and I couldn't understand why it kept saying "incorrect log-in information." I don't even know. In my defense, the B in the Blogger.com logo does look a lot like an E.

My name is Katie Guthrie. I am a senior majoring in English and French, and I am an intern at the Southern Indiana Review. So far, my duties have included logging in and sorting submissions, sending out rejection letters, and researching turtles and top hats. (The turtle logo is still my favorite, by the way.) I've never been an intern before, but it's been a good experience so far. It'll also be nice to have something besides fast food restaurants on my resume.

Speaking of food, what is going on lately with all these recalls? First, it was E. coli in spinach and green peppers, and now they're apparently finding salmonella in peanut butter! I was just watching the news today, and they were saying those pre-cooked rib meat chicken strips are also being recalled. Honestly, what kind of a world is it when eating has become a high risk activity?

In search of a new logo

We need a new logo. We've held meetings, drawn funny pictures on scraps of paper in the office, smacked our foreheads in frustration, and given each other supportive, friendly slaps on the back. But we've still got basically nothing. Here are the problems with choosing a logo:

1) Do we want to emphasize the regional nature our title suggests, or do we want to suggest that we are more than just southernmost Hoosiers, and that while we strive to be the "voice of the Heartland" (doesn't Tom Petty already do that anyway?), our scope and view is much broader than that? How do we say both? Do we want to say both? Do we want to say either?

2) A logo: a single, simple image that sums up an entity. What can do that in this case? A leaf? A bird? A salad fork? A turtle with a top hat? What does any of this have to do with literature, or with Southern Indiana, or with us? How does anyone ever decide on a logo?

3) Must literature always be represented by leaves and trees and fountain pens? Are we earthy? Have any of us ever used a fountain pen, and so what if we have? Can literature not also be represented by a turtle with a top hat, or by a dancing bear, or by a car in flames?

In addition to my duties for SIR, I also run an online literary venture at www.theedwardsociety.com. It's been dormant for a long time now, shoved to the bottom of several piles of seemingly more important things. But I bring it up to illustrate (no pun) how arbitrary and meaningless a logo can be, while still doing a fine job. I chose, for no reason at all, to place a bird on a bald man's head and stick it at the top of every page. It looks like this












and it has been well received. People have offered their own interpretations, none of which ever occurred to me. For SIR, here's what we've done so far:










What do each of these say about us? How can we ever decide?

Things Need to Look Nice

Among the problems we try to solve here at SIR headquarters is the ongoing problem that Things Need To Look Nice. We're constantly designing things: chapbook and SIR covers, posters, a table layout for the upcoming AWP conference, a new website, and a new SIR logo. In nature, plants and animals are born and they grow naturally into aesthetically-splendid things, but in the artificial world of literary publishing (despite all of the parent-child metaphors writers love to use for their relationship to their work), everything is faceless and without personality until we have sat for days in front of a bright screen, manipulating lines and text until our eyes are puking.

We're amateurs at this, of course. It takes us entirely too long, and the revision process is grueling. I hesitate to put a percentage on the amount of our office time that goes into graphic design - a thing we never claimed to be qualified for (Well, I once did, and faked it well enough to land a job as a graphic designer/web programmer in New York City, but that's another story that ends just as pathetically as it begins...), but it's somewhere around 100%. It's almost all we do. Editors, ha! Let's be honest here. We're underqualified, overworked, graphic designers.

- Chris Dickens, Associate Graphic Designer for the Southern Indiana Review

Pictures

A few images from yesterday's SIR meeting (Top to bottom - Ron, our Managing Editor; Katie, one of our University of Southern Indiana interns; 3/4 of the group hard at work; Katie and Jordan, our other semester intern; and Chris, Associate Editor):





































































- posted by Chris

Welcome to the SIR blog

SIR is a bianual literary journal published by the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville, featuring original artwork, poetry, and prose. The journal is also associated with RopeWalk Writers Retreat, a conference held each winter and summer in New Harmony, IN. Here are our two primary websites:

www.ropewalk.org
&
www.southernindianareview.org