Wanting so bad to love it. Still waiting. Every funny thing is ripped off from The Office- except these characters have no depth.

Funny how different it feels from Battlestar - glossy, conventional, labyrinthine - yet terrifyingly familiar. Overall excellent. Who didn’t swoon, watching that cylon take its first steps?

[Re-posted from the Galactica Sitrep:
http://galacticasitrep.blogspot.com/2009/04/caprica-pilot-25-word-review.html ]

… comes from the dazzling Mark Doty, on his blog:

“Surely one of the pleasures of blogging is curatorial, placing things side by side.”

My story “Monkey Heaven” has been named one of the the best online short stories published during 2008 by the judges of the Million Writers Award. Check out the full list of Notable Stories; ten finalists will be chosen on May 15, and then there’s a period of public voting. I’m in competition with a ton of phenomenal writers who I admire intensely (Robert Olen Butler, Kim Chinquee, Nick Mamatas, Jill McCorkle, and Cory Doctorow), so I’m not too optimistic about my chances…. but “Monkey Heaven” WAS one of only 18 stories nominated by more than one judge.

I look forward to the MWA list of Notable Stories every year, as a good laundry list of the most exciting online literary journals and a sort of checklist of who I should be reading regularly; sorta like the Pushcart Prize anthology.

From their website:

“The purpose of the storySouth Million Writers Award is to honor and promote the best fiction published in online literary journals and magazines during 2008.”

CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL LIST

As the 2008 fiction fellow at the Bronx Writers Center, I will be the fiction editor for the next issue of their literary journal, Cross Bronx.

We are currently seeking submissions! See below for the complete guidelines. Short stories are welcome from all writers living or working in the Bronx, but we will also consider work that is set there…
==============================================

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS:
Fiction, Poetry and Photography from or about the Bronx

For its next issue, the online literary journal Cross Bronx (crossbronx.org) is seeking short stories, creative non-fiction, poetry, and photography on the theme of HOME.

What does home mean to you? What is it like to have a love/hate relationship with your home? What if home is a friend’s couch, or a shelter, or a park? Is is a color, a sound, a sudden sharp sense memory? Home is a complicated concept, and for this issue we want new and challenging views of what “home” means. We want to meet fictional characters who wrestle with the diverse emotional, physical, and spiritual landscape of “home.” We want poetry that illuminates different aspects of “home” - safety, warmth, family, confinement, repression, fear, love, food, sex, etc. We want photographs that show us something we’ve never seen before.

Submissions are welcome from Bronx-based writers, as well as work that takes place in the Bronx. Deadline for all submissions is MAY 15th, 2009.

For Fiction & Creative Non-Fiction

* Submissions can be no more than 6,500 words or approximately 20 double-spaced pages. Very short works welcome.
* Send prose submissions/proposals to: prosesubmit@bronxarts.org.

For Poetry

* Submissions of up to three (3) poems per author.
* Send poetry submissions to: poetrysubmit@bronxarts.org.

For Original Digital Art/Photography

* Up to three (3) submissions per artist, with a maximum file size of 100 megabytes.
* Send digital art/photography submissions or a link to a website to: artphotosubmit@bronxarts.org.

Submissions will be accepted by e-mail only. Simultaneous submissions welcome, as long as you notify us immediately upon acceptance elsewhere. Include full name, mailing address, and e-mail address in the body of your e-mail. All text pages must be titled and numbered with one-inch margins, double-spaced and typed in 12-point font.

Liked it better when I first saw it, when it was called The Children’s Hour. Ultimately pretty fabulous. Lovely light. Streep’s astonishing. I’m over Hoffman.

[Note: I read a lot of literary journals. When i find a really phenomenal short story in one of them, I do a short write-up of adoration here.]

“Dialogues of Departure” appeared in the last issue of Tin House, and its the strongest of many strong stories in there (I also loved Kevin Wilson’s “No Joke, This is Going to be Painful.”)

The plot, about a Canadian teaching English in Japan, feels fresh. The story is not the standard Westerner’s feeling of Tokyo alienation and bewilderment. If anything, it’s the narrator’s realization that he feels so at-home in this foreign world because he lived out such a solitary rootlessness in his old life.

For me, what made the story so stellar is one minor plot element, present throughout but suddenly becoming hugely relevant in the end. The narrator buys a second-hand phrase book for learning Japanese, and is amused by the macabre lexicon that frequently pops up: in an early lesson, alongside key words like “pencil” and “store,” is the word “corpse.” Later on he finds additional eerie phrases and sentences whose value, to a Western traveler, seems minimal. “Child massacre,” and detailed dialogue about hunting for children through the rubble of a recent bombing (the actual examples are hilarious, but I can’t quote any because I gave the journal away to a writer friend… because I liked the story so much I had to pass it on). In the end, we learn that the book had caused a scandal - it was written by a professor who had been jailed for pacifism during World War Two, and subsequently dismissed from his university post during the American Occupation for his public stance that Japan was the victim - not the aggressor - and that foreigners were a corrupting influence in Japan and should not stay. His book on Japanese for English speakers becomes a weirdly eloquent protest, as well as an illustration of the way that the overwhelming weight of history stands between people who come from different countries.

The writing and the story are flawless, but it’s this artful device that, for me, makes “Dialogues of Departure” so haunting, and effective.

Topher’s still not dead, although I felt like this was finally the moment [shakes fist]. Exciting, intriguing (who’s playing who? what’s going on?), emotionally satisfying.