The Sweet Spot

The summer 2013 issue of Colorado Review has found the sweet spot, with material accessible enough to be enjoyed and edgy enough to shake you up. See my New Pages review at

http://www.newpages.com/literary-magazine-reviews/2013-09-16/#Colorado-Review-V40-N2-Summer-2013

I've Got a Fish Story to Tell You

My short story about trout fishing in the Ozarks, "Opening Day," is on-line at *82 Review, http://star82review.com
In case you're wondering, *82 is what you punch in to unblock your cellphone. The California-based on-line magazine is chock full of interesting writing. Enjoy.

It's Been a Good Spring

Haven't posted much here lately, but that doesn't mean I haven't been writing and publishing.
Off the Coast picked up two poems for the Spring 2013 issue, and Upstreet, which is sold at Barnes & Noble, published this one:

PRAIRIE WORK DAY

This eighty acres has enough creek

for one beaver family to scrape by,

pasture for three or four bison,

were they allowed in town.

Redwings do well here. Whitetail,

who live anywhere. There’s a hawk.

Four states away a monster storm

takes aim at a third of the country,

while we volunteer in chest-high 

messiness that grabs the wind

and quiets it. We run our fingers

up the rough stems of graminoids

to gather seed: Indian Grass, 

Turkey Foot, Canadian Wild Rye

we’ll scatter in March on the poor 

soil they seem to like, abandoned 

dumps and vacant city lots, 

or those awkward jogs you find

along rural roads, where true 

north and the grid don’t fit.

In addition, poems are forthcoming in Chaffin Journal, C4, Elder Mountain and Storm Cellar; and short memoirs in Clare, and Sugar Mule.

Tomorrow (July 13) I'll have the pleasure of reading with colleagues from the Red Herring Writers Group at a house concert in Urbana. They are a great group of writers and friends, and I've learned a ton from them.

Keep writing.

Latest Creative Nonfiction review

My review of the latest Creative Nonfiction is at New Pages: “Don’t write like a girl. Don’t write like a boy. Write like a mother#^@%*&,” the Rumpus columnist "Sugar” advised young writer Elissa Bassist in 2010. Bassist took the advice to heart, making it into an “anthem and a lifestyle” that is about “quitting your bitching, getting out of your own ego, and getting to work.” Three years later, she and “Sugar”—now revealed as Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things, extend the discussion in an email conversation that appropriately kicks off this powerful collection of work by women writers."

Canadian magazines trade coasts

From my review of the latest Malahat, up today at New Pages.“Two outstanding Canadian literary journals have collaborated on separate issues consisting of work from each other’s patch. This issue of Malahat, based in British Columbia (B.C.), features “Essential East Coast Writing” in collaboration with Fiddlehead, published in New Brunswick. Alternately, Fiddlehead published a West Coast issue. . . .The result, at least by reading the Mahalat half, is a celebration of artistic vibrancy.”