Spring Fashion, Take 2

Readings and Interviews

Keep an eye on the website for forthcoming interviews with Benjamin Percy, Michael Martone, and this year's Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award Winners, hopefully all posted within next week. We've got some more great readings coming up too for the RopeWalk Reading Series, including Benjamin Percy, Nickole Brown, and Lynnell Edwards.  

Spring Fashion

Ok, the upload has caused the colors to change in an extremely bizarre manner (the primary scheme is actually blue), but either way, you can see that we’re going to look a little bit different this time around. Many thanks to art editor Joan Kempf deJong for all the hard work. SIR is also indebted to the family of Mary C. Mohr for underwriting our annual contest. This year Brian Mohr of Boggstown, Indiana, donated additional funds, allowing us to print a color portfolio of our featured artist, Michael Aakhus.

In addition to the MCM Poetry Award winners, the spring issue celebrates National Poetry Month by featuring new work from Stephen Dobyns, Bob Hicok, Sarah Kennedy, Leslie Adrienne Miller, and Dave Smith--and others.

Ron

Sudden Anthem

Matthew Guenette, friend and former reality television star, just had his first book Sudden Anthem go up for purchase on Amazon.

You can find it here.

Support him, he's an amazing writer and is going to have a bebe soon.

Told a lady in my fiction class I'd go first in turning in stories, and trade her. I have a thing I thought I could have shaped up enough to take a beating, but I've been sick all week, so basically I am turning in my notes.

Oh well, so it goes, etc.

Jason Brown , grad student at SIU-C started a program called Writers on the Road, where schools basically exchange writers for readings. It's a good thing to do, I think, even if you figure in the travel costs. I myself am a pretty HORRIBLE public speaker at times, and practice is the only thing that makes that better. And whiskey? I don't know, I've just heard.

Top Ten

My top ten this week includes:

1. Adobe CS software on the big SIR Mac. So much faster. Our efficiency level just went way up.
2. Coffee from a French press. The whole process is just more fun.
3. Michael Martone's contribution to the forthcoming Spring issue of SIR. You're going to like it.
4. Getting acceptance letters from MFA programs. Best mail/email ever.
5. Random spring-like days out of nowhere.
6. HBO's The Wire. Picks up right where Homicide: Life on the Streets left off (in a way).
7. Anything by Sam Cooke
8. "It Makes no Difference" by The Band. A song composed of clichés, but it's somehow still beautiful.
9. Using Alt + the number pad to do things like this: é, á, ñ, ó, ú. Really helps with using online translators for Spanish homework. If I'd discovered this two years ago, my GPA would be higher.
10. "Creve Coeur" by Jacob M. Appel, from The Missouri Review Spring 2007.