Michael Martone was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and grew up there. As Fort Wayne was the site of, at least, nine forts (three each of French, British, and American fortifications, not to mention fortified villages of the Shawnee and Miami tribes), there was fostered in Martone a keen attraction to walls, fences, barriers of all kinds so much so that he was marked (as he matured) with what can only be thought of as a fetish for such structures which now (years later) expresses itself in his vast collection of examples he displays at his West End house in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. There, the visitor might find field stone walls (dry and mortared, finished and rough), vertical wood-picket fences with various finials and knurls, bamboo stave, horizontal clapboard running fence (reproduced in crosshatching or herring bone patterns), chain-link cyclone mesh, chicken wire, wrought-iron worked, brick, concrete block, red cedar plank snow-fencing, a four yard section of the right field fence bought at auction during the demolition of Yankee Stadium, corrugated galvanized steel, split-rail, adobe, dry-wall, wattle and beam, electrified, a slab from the Berlin wall with graffiti spelling out “wall” in German, and several versions of “invisible” pet fencing. Martone has a real fondness for star fortification (also known as trace italienne) and has in his backyard reconstructed the walled city of Neuhasel in Lower Hungry with its ravelins and redoubts, bonnettes and lunettes and tenailles and tenaillons and counterguards and crownworks hornworks and curvettes and fausse brayes and scarps and cordons and banquettes and counterscarps and the long grassed glacis suitable for picnics. He also has the largest collection of barbed wire in west central Alabama, including an example of contemporary razor and concertina wire. Martone has also written the authorized biography of Joseph F. Glidden (of DeKalb, Illinois), widely regarded as the man who perfected Lucien B. Smith’s original design of the famous agricultural fencing.

Q (Meg Pokrass): What story or book of your own do you feel closest to?

I like “The Sex Life of the Fantastic Four.” I am not sure I can ever publish it, so I read it publicly a lot and like to go through it that way. Someone else? William Gass’s “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” no contest.

Do you have a mentor?

Yes, several. One–John Barth.

How do you stay creative? What are your tricks to get “unstuck?”

Another mentor–William Stafford. He says: Stuck? Lower your standards.

What are your favorite websites?

Museum of Jurassic Technology

Personas/Metropath(ologies)

Trains Magazine

The Dan Quayle Museum and Vice Presidential Center

What are you working on now?

I am finishing a book of mini-collages called Four For a Quarter, a book of science fiction called Amish in Space, a collaborative project called Winesberg, Indiana, and a book of interviews (I hope this one will be part of) called You Can Say That Again.

Which songs do you currently love?

“Assassins,” Stephen Sondheim

Leonard Cohen in concert

Seferis’s song “Denial”

“California” by Joni Mitchell

What was your favorite elementary school teacher like?

His name was John Flora, 6th grade, Price Elementary. He was like Dick Van Dyke of the Dick Van Dyke Show, not of Mary Poppins or Bye Bye Birdie.

What are your five favorite works of art?

The Photos of O. Winston Link

Andy Warhol (I mean Andy Warhol not his paintings or prints)

The Boxes of Joseph Cornell

The Quilts of Gees Bend

The design of Loewy, Dreyfuss, Eames, Wright

What are your favorite buildings?

The Quonset Hut

The Four-Square House

The work of The Rural Studio

The four houses designed by Michael Graves in Fort Wayne, Indiana

Which book do you wish you’d written?

Amateurs by Donald Barthelme

What do you love about where you live?

The Emergency Barber Shop

The Moon Winx Lodge

Dreamland

Kudzu

Do you have a pet?

I have always wanted a draft horse-Percheron, Belgium, Shire, or Clydesdale — in that order.

Why are people often afraid of trying?

A failure of the imagination?

If you had a prop that you carried with you every day, what would it be?

A hat–Borsalino Fedora, an Italian boater, a bowler, or a campaign hat.

or

Kumboloi (Greek worry beads).

or

A folding chair of some kind.

or

A Mercury dime.

The Fictionaut Five is our ongoing series of interviews with Fictionaut authors. Every Wednesday, Meg Pokrass asks a writer five (or more) questions. Meg is an editor at Smokelong Quarterly, and her stories and poems have been published widely. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

We are taking a break from Luna Digest for the holiday, but I couldn’t help at least mentioning this:

I’ve been stumbling across some great excerpts recently from David Shields‘s upcoming book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (a book previously mentioned/excerpted already on this blog by Shields himself, “David Shields: Reality Hunger“). For example, yesterday I picked up a copy of the most recent A Public Space at Borders and found a thrilling excerpt about fiction and truthfulness from Reality Hunger. Then, this morning, I received a review copy of PEN America and inside is yet another excerpt from Shields’s book, this time a section about mimesis: “The origin of the novel lies in its pretense of actuality.”

Much intrigued, I popped Shields’s name into Google in the hopes of finding an excerpt for this post and also to get more information in general. I found more than seven other excerpts from the book in magazines—such as this very early one in the March 2006 issue of The Believer:

The world exists. Why recreate it? I want to think about it, try to understand it. What I am is a wisdom junkie, knowing all along that wisdom is, in many ways, junk. I want a literature built entirely out of contemplation and revelation. Who cares about anything else? Not me.

And I must say, the excerpts have worked. I’m hooked. Persuaded. What’s more, the excerpts are not even written by Shields, not directly; they were constructed by him from the world at large. The pieces are co-opted. They are reterritorialized. Shields writes about his process in PEN America:

I’m trying to regain a freedom that writers from Montaigne to Burroughs had but that we have lost. The uncertainty about whose words you are reading is not a bug, but a feature. Who owns the words? Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do. All of us. Reality cannot be copyrighted.

I think my former teacher (and Fictionaut board member) Frederick Barthelme got it right in his early blurb for the book:

An exhortation to attend the sublime pleasures of truth and “truth,” and the suspicious and clandestine meetings of fact and “fact.” Why is this man always writing the most interesting books? I think he is not from our country.

Peter Cole is an amazing dude and an amazing publisher who does great things for both the online and print indie community in general. I feel like this honest interview is a good time to point out that doing what we do, writing, editing, reading, publishing, is hard.

Q (Nicolle Elizabeth for Fictionaut): Hey Peter. I see you have a Keyhole group going on here on Fictionaut. Explain yourself to us. What is Keyhole (and its counterparts), and what does the group hope to do. Whats your deal, man?

A (Peter Cole): Keyhole is not much more than an assortment of other people’s work. Keyhole is a pimp.

Q: Are you going to apply your various roles as reader and editor to steer the group or are you going to watch what I would call, the Internet ants under a picnic basket theory? (I love ants, I want a tattoo of an ant.)

A: I can’t figure out what to do with the group. For one I’m hesitant to talk to people. The Internet is the worst place to talk to people. I like clicking Like on Facebook and leaving it at that. And aside from getting people to add stories to the group, the only other option appears to be the forum. I do think that groups were a good thing for Fictionaut to add, sending the users out to journals.

Q: What are your thoughts on internetting in general? (And specifically, if you want — I’ve got all day, I have no life.)

A: The Internet is a good way to make things happen. Also a good way to get hate mail because I’m not as fast as the Internet–there’s just not enough time for everything on the Internet. I try very hard to only use it for pressing tasks, and then ignore it.

Q: In what ways if any have you found Fictionaut helpful, interesting, or neither etc.

A: I do hope to find new writers on Fictionaut, and I have accepted a few stories through it already from authors I already knew. Some contributors have added their stories to the group, which is a nice way to give samples of what we like to Fictionaut users without having to do anything myself. Any outlet to connect publishers with authors is a good thing.

Q: If you had to choose chewing your arm out of a bear trap or explaining how difficult it is to run a non profit web literary journal to Kim Jong Il, knowing you may not make it out, which would you go for?

A: I’d be more likely to survive the bear trap. Kim Jong Il might put me out of my misery.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett was born in Carmel, California to an American father and Japanese mother. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in East Asian Studies. Her essay, “Letter from a Japanese Crematorium,” was short listed for Best New American Essays 2008 and anthologized in The Best Creative Nonfiction 3. Her book Picking Bones from Ash was published in October by Graywolf Press; this is her first novel.

Q (Meg Pokrass): What story or book do you feel closest to?

A big part of me is always going to identify with stories and books I read and loved as a kid. Even as an adult, I’m looking for that experience of being transported, and it gets harder and harder to find and is complicated by the fact that the adult part of me wants complexity from fiction, from language, situations and character. But if there is one story that I’ve turned to again and again, it’s the myth of Psyche, as told by the Greeks. Most of their mythology concerns male heroes, but Psyche is intriguing. She’s the only mortal to turn into a god. She travels to the underworld and survives. She forces the gods to reveal their true nature to her. And it’s telling that her name is the one we use today when we talk about the complexities of the mind.

Do you have a mentor?

No and there are times when I wish I did. I never got an MFA, so I didn’t enter into a formal program where I had a teacher. This summer, I did go to Bread Loaf for Non Fiction, and loved working with Patricia Hampl. Maybe I could convince her to be my mentor. But otherwise, I’ve been doing things the old fashioned way, turning to books for help when I’m stuck and reading about other writers for inspiration. And I guess I have some pretend mentors–people I have conversations with in my head when I am stuck. But they don’t know about this and it would be very embarrassing for us all if I revealed too much more. It would make me sound like Hilary Clinton talking to Eleanor Roosevelt.

How do you stay creative? What are your tricks to get “unstuck?”

I stop feeling creative when some other part of the world–that thing called reality–gets in the way. You know. My agent pointing out that I don’t have much of a sales record. An editor rejecting me because she “already has one half-Asian writer” whom she couldn’t figure out how to market. McNally Jackson in Soho inviting me to read, and then uninviting me (that’s my favorite story right now). These kinds of things are depressing because they don’t have to do with writing, and they demonstrate just how much crap writers have to battle, just to get their work out. But eventually, my mind wanders off somewhere and I have some new idea, or observe something new in the world, and then I want to write it down, and somehow I end up slogging through the muck. I don’t seem to be able to escape the impulse to write.

What are you working on now?

I’m in the middle of promoting my book, so my creative work has come to a temporary halt. But I plan to get to Japan next year to visit Osorezan, a version of Mount Doom, where blind mediums congregate twice a year to predict the future. That sounds like fun. I can speak Japanese, and am curious to try to engage them in conversation. I’ve also started my new novel, which will be set here in the US, and in various parts of Asia; it’s sort of speculative and is about some people who try to police reincarnation, which, if you study Chinese law, is not as outlandish as it sounds. And I have various ideas for short essays that I will continue to explore. I placed one recently on “love quests” in video games; I’d like to write more things like this.

Do you keep a notebook with you?

I have lots of notebooks lying around. I will sometimes scribble instructions for myself, and then lose the notebook. Then I will do a thorough cleaning and organizing of the apartment and find the notebooks. Today, for example, I finally cleaned up after neglecting the apartment for a good two weeks (I was traveling). I’m looking at a stack of 9 little notebooks. In the beginning, I relied on my notebook to make lists of things to do; it was useful to have the lists staring at me, like little commands.

How do you feel about trees?

City trees are like these noble creatures who are very out of place. And this makes me sad, so I try not to think about city trees. To me they are like city dogs who don’t know what it’s like to run around on the beach every evening, but must instead wear those little shoes in the winter so the salt won’t hurt their feet. I should have a better attitude about all these things. I ought to love Central Park, for example, but it’s always so crowded. I grew up very spoiled when it comes to nature–on the Monterey Peninsula in California. And, speaking more broadly, there is nothing like the west when you want to experience the grandeur of trees. So, I guess I’m sort of unfair to trees in New York because I can’t help but compare them to trees that live in the really crazy wild, like Yosemite or Mt. Shasta. I had a call once from a pollster asking me how much I was influenced by voting when it comes to “city green spaces,” and I felt very bad when I said that I just didn’t associate my city life with trees at all. It seems like such a lost cause to me. This is a terrible attitude to take. But I often feel like a non-physical entity in New York–I feel like a cerebral one. I get to have a body when I’m back in California, or at least out of the city. Maybe all this will change once I have a child. I think people constantly take small children to parks.

Do you plan what you write, or does the process of writing lead the way?

It’s a little bit of both. In the beginning, I tried to write outlines. But the work that resulted from the outlines always felt flat–the writing was dead and unsurprising. Things changed when I stopped working on my novel for a while, and wrote and published short stories. I found that I could have a sort of “structural shape” in my head, and that I could use that shape as a starting point. The more I did this, the easier it became. The same has been true for essays. When I finally sat down to finish the novel a few years ago, I let go of the outline and trusted my imagination to help me along. As I write this, I realize I sound like I’m describing that scene in Star Wars where Ben makes Luke put on the helmet so he can’t see, but he still has to use his lightsaber. Corny as that might sound to you, I think that’s the kind of transition I had to make in order for the writing to feel alive and surprising. I will still make some notes to myself–like little signposts pointing the way for which direction to take. But ultimately, I find that some part of the creation of anything had to happen just inside my head. I think this is partly because I’m attracted to unusual structures; I like Japanese fairy tales, for example, which do not conform to the standards of western storytelling, but maintain their own integrity. Outlining and planning, in such instances, are not useful; the rigidity shows in the writing.

The Fictionaut Five is our ongoing series of interviews with Fictionaut authors. Every Wednesday, Meg Pokrass asks a writer five (or more) questions. Meg is an editor at Smokelong Quarterly, and her stories and poems have been published widely. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

Okay, the National Book Awards are not quite the Oscars—no one is likely to do a one-arm push up at them—but their 2009 awards ceremony is this Wednesday and it’s an exciting line-up this year. Archives of many authors in the running either interviewing or being interviewed are up at the BOMB Magazine website. A.M. Homes talking to Jayne Anne Philips. Francine Prose and Lydia Davis. Nick Flynn and Carl Phillips. Etc.

Lana Turner is here:

Dear Reader,

Wyndham Lewis’s BLAST and Robert Bly’s The Sixties are respected but distant models (very distant in the case of BLAST) for this new annual magazine, Lana Turner (whose subtitle in fact echoes that of The Sixties). The editors don’t aspire to the powerful salience in the magazine that the aggressive and brilliant Bly and Lewis enjoyed in theirs; but neither will we always remain behind the curtains, affecting to be nowhere in the vicinity. Now and again, we’ll step out.

“Publish or Perish” from Guernica—Kiel Johnson on the web press.

McSweeney’s publisher Eli Horowitz says,

Reading a literary journal is not like eating your vegetables. We’re not doing this so it can be preserved in a museum while people actually enjoy movies, television and video games.

The new Rattapallax DVD is out, the magazine’s 15th issue. Rattapallax is like a combination of Wholphin and McSweeney’s, or Poetry and YouTube, or some mixture of all these. Whichever, I highly recommend the William Blake & Sao Paulo hybrid fantasy created by Guilherme Marcondes. Hell, the video for Billy Collins’s “Forgetfullness” is pretty damn good, too. (Scroll down after jump for videos.)

Just how much did Salman Rushdie have to do with Alex Clark’s resignation from Granta? (Nothing at all, according to him.)

And, with Philip Gourevitch leaving, L Magazine asks, “So Now Who’s Going to Run The Paris Review?”

Ann Donald uses Stephen King to make her argument for supporting literary journals in the Times of South Africa, offering:

The people who publish and edit these journals are as passionate about writing and books as the people who submit their work for publication. They provide writers with a community to assuage the loneliness of writing.

Finally, always working to assuage loneliness, ZYZZYVA celebrates its 25th birthday with what it does best: publishing new authors. Editor/Publisher Howard Junker sums up the lot: “They begin with AIDS and end with a mythic L.A…The word fuck is used, when appropriate, in 15 stories.”

Pissing in the Snow by Vance Randolph was originally published by the University of Illinois Press in 1976, and reissued as a rack-sized mass-market paperback by Bard in 1977. In the late seventies, it was a best seller. The edition I have has a roller-rink-style ring of concentric circles around the title on a yellow background. It shows sparsely forested slopes with tracks in the snow. You can buy a copy from Amazon for a penny.

Vance Randolph was writer turned folklorist who moved to the Ozarks in 1920 and remained there until his death in 1980. He collected folk songs and folk tales and began publishing them in with university presses in the mid-1940s. Among the tales he collected, there were dozens he couldn’t publish. These folk stories contained “unprintable” words and the standard of the time was to either use a Latinized version or blank them out. Randolph wasn’t a fan of either method and kept the stories separate from the other stories.

As dirty stories, they depend on a kind of propriety that is fussy by today’s standards. Even the word propriety is a relic. Even so, the stock figure of the banker, church-going farmer, and farmer’s daughter remains as familiar as the woodcutter and princess. They are composed of units of meaning and these units appear repeatedly in the different stories. Typically the stories turn on a role reversal or a revelation of hidden information.

The title story is about two farmers. One farmer’s son “had been a-sparking” the other farmer’s daughter. One morning one farmer says to the other farmer, “I don’t want your boy setting foot on my place again.”

“Why what’s he done?”

“He pissed in the snow. Right in front of my house.”

“There ain’t no harm in that.”

“No harm! He pissed so he spelled Lucy’s name, right there in the snow.”

“He shouldn’t have done that. But, I don’t see nothing terrible in that.”

“I do! There were two sets of tracks. And besides, don’t you think I know my own daughter’s handwriting?”

Randolph follows each story with notes about the collection and variants based on different structures of story units. In reading these stories, I became aware that the stories were composed of words, but they were also composed of story units that followed a logic and that a certain order in the story units made the stories agree. In this way the order of the story units were like the order of words in a sentence, where a certain order is required, but other elements of the sentence can fall in a variety of orders; some of these orders are more agreeable than others. The Ozark tales as dirty and as oral stories sit at the margin between familiar forms such as dirty jokes and the kind of popular stories, such as ghost stories, that retain their oral roots.

Both my father and mother grew up in households before TV, and a common activity when they were little was to tell each other stories. My father is still angry about the arrival of the TV in his house because he recalls the evenings when everyone would sit around and tell these stories. They would retell stories they had read, things that happened, and stories they had heard. The stories came in two separate parts. There was the story recipe, which was essentially the collection of “story parts” and their order. And then there was the telling the story, that is the words used, the names used, and various tactics of execution such as delay, repetition, making voices and faces and so on. When the TV arrived, my father says they stopped telling stories and just sat in front of the screen. My parents tried to recreate this environment in their house in the mid-1970s. They didn’t open an operating TV. But by the late 1970s my mother became concerned about our “cultural literacy,” and they abandoned their exhausting project. We immediately started to watch Three’s Company.

A story is not necessarily how it is said, but is a portable structure that can survives transport, not just into another language, where diction and syntax are unlikely to survive, but into other media. In reading Vance Randolph’s collection of Ozark folktales, even more so than reading the Brothers Grimm, I understand how to use Roland Barthes’ idea in his great essay, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives.” Narrative, Barthes writes, is “able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all of these substances.” Pissing in the Snow provides an essential great source of, for some, the basic narrative units of the American tale.

Rediscovered Reading is a regular series in which Matt Briggs reviews overlooked collections of short fiction. Matt is the author of Shoot the Buffalo and other books. He blogs at mattbriggs.wordpress.com.

Fictionaut is now offering RSS feeds for latest stories, recommended stories, and group activity. With a feed reader of your choice, you can subscribe to a full-text feed of the latest stories as they appear on the site and recommended stories that break into the top ten — look for the blue icons on the front page. You can also keep up with any public group by subscribing to its activity feed. To make it easier to find busy groups, we’re now also offering a way to sort groups by most active in a given time period in the groups overview.

Please let us know how these new features are working for you — and make sure to write if you come up with a great use for the RSS feeds.

Grant Bailie lives in one of the poorest cities in the country. His fiction has appeared in Opium, Night Train, Eyeshot, Pindeldyboz and numerous other publications. His first novel, Cloud 8, has been called “mad and fascinating” by Kirkus Reviews,  “an astonishing first novel” by San Francisco’s East Bay Express, and “tender and introspective” by Boston’s Weekly Dig. Boston went on to win the world series that year which can only reflect favorably on the book.

His second novel, Mortarville, was published in 2008. Some people said nice things about that book too, including Dan Chaon, who is a great writer and must know what he is talking about. Grant’s novel New Hope for Small Men is currently being serialized at Necessary Fiction.

Q (Meg Pokrass): What story or book do you feel closest to?

A: Do you mean of my own or others? If it’s my own, the book I am happiest with artistically is called Highway Narcissus, though that book is yet to be placed anywhere still, that is the one I feel comes closer to doing what I asked it to do. It is a very well behaved book in that way and I hope someone takes it into their home some day. Of my own published novels, I do not yet hate Mortarville.

But if you are asking about what book by someone else I feel closest too it is probably Go, Dog. Go! by P.D. Eastman. Elements of that book inform all of my work. Particularly the dog party in a tree at the end. My concept of heaven, such as it is, is based one that dog party.

Do you have a mentor?

No. It seems like a one word answer is inadequate here so I am adding these other words after my answer just to pad it out, even though my answer is just: no.

How do you stay creative? What are your tricks to get “unstuck?”

I think I like to be put in a corner, creatively speaking – something I have to work my way out of. For instance, I started writing one book by having every chapter being based on songs by a group called Sparks. Particularly the album Angst in my Pants. Another trick I am fond of is having a group of words that I must use – some random words that I have no control over picking. I should probably thank Kim Chinquee for introducing me to that method. I find it works very well, so thank you Kim. Also, I would like to thank Ron and Russel Mael of Sparks.

What are your favorite websites?

The ones that don’t ask for my credit card number. Also Zoetrope, Necessary Fiction and Fictionaut, of course. I like Fictionaut partly because it currently has an interview with me in it. I wonder what I think? I fascinate me.

What are you working on now?

A gothic crime novel called The Inheritance. It is something of a departure for me but so far I am really enjoying it. It is more plot driven than my previous work and I have yet to figure out how to work in a dog party in a tree at the end, but, as I said, I am enjoying it so far. Also, I am doing laundry, which I am a little behind on. I have no socks.

How do you attach to characters? I mean, how do your readers attach to characters? Or, what makes you, Grant, as a reader attach to a character?

I guess as a reader it is simple enough: I tend to like characters that I can relate to on some level, though there would be notable exceptions to this in Lolita or Ada or The Postman Always Rings Twice, but even these characters, thanks to the skill of their creators, I can at least understand. I can feel some degree of sympathy to temper the contempt. Take Heatchliff in Wuthering Heights for example. He is as repellent a character as I have ever read, but he is fleshed out completely. There is a complexity there that draws me in even with my hatred.

Now as a writer it is both more complicated and simpler than that. I do not know what attraction or bond I have or will have with any given character, but I have never written from a point of view that was completely alien to my own point of view. This may be a failing of mine as an artist – but maybe only a temporary failing.

What movies (I’m thinking old movies) influenced your way of being, of thinking, of wanting to be, or wanting to think?

I certainly like a great many movies, but as far as ones that in some way influence my approach to fiction (which is pretty close to how I define being, thinking, wanting to be and wanting to think) I would have to say something like 8 1/2 or Magnificent Obsession or Sherlock Junior stuff, I mean, that breaks with reality in some way, that sets up its own rules and goes where they lead. I like fiction, and maybe life too for that matter, to follow the meandering path of dreams. I like the back of my mind to surprise the front of my mind. And I like not exclusively perhaps, but plenty enough movies that do this too. A Matter of Life and Death or Black Narcissus. Blithe Spirit. La Dolce Vita. Too many, really, to name.

What do you think about the importance of having trees where you live? What would happen to you if you lived on a windswept treeless dune?

I need trees. My wife and I went to Arizona recently, and while the landscape was beautiful and awe inspiring we both discovered we could not live long without trees. Real trees, I mean. A tree is as close to an altar as I can get.

The Fictionaut Five is our ongoing series of interviews with Fictionaut authors. Every Wednesday, Meg Pokrass asks a writer five (or more) questions. Meg is an editor at Smokelong Quarterly, and her stories and poems have been published widely. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.

First—yes, even before the traditional Luna Park plug—one of the most interesting things to hit the lit-Internet for some time (from Guernica): “Bolaño Inc.”

I had told myself I wasn’t going to say or write anything more about Roberto Bolaño. The subject has been squeezed dry these last two years, above all in the North American press, and I told myself that there was already enough drunkenness. But here I am writing about him again, like a vicious old man, like the alcoholic who promises that this will be the last drink of his life and who, the next morning, swears that he will only have one more to cure his hangover…

Marcelle Heath (on Matt Briggs) on the Espresso Book Machine:

As Richard Nash writes on his recent blog post” The Emergent Landscape, or, The Continuous Permanent Reinvention of Publishing“: “transformation is irrevocable, continuous, multivalent, and potentially asymmetric.” One of the latest reinventions to emerge is the Espresso Book Machine, On Demand Books digital photocopier, book trimmer and binder, and desktop computer that can produce a trade paperback book in five to ten minutes. Books currently listed in the EspressNet software include titles from LightingSource, Ingram’s print-on-demand division, and public domain titles from Google Books. Those out-of-print and backlisted titles are now readily available. Matt Briggs points out in his Reading Local Seattle article that for writers, “an author merely needs to have their book listed in EspressNet, which costs less than having galleys printed and much less than an entire print run.” And for readers this means that along with ebooks, print-on-demand machines produce “the same cornucopia for literature that the music world has already been enjoying.”

Probably too much has been said about McSweeney’s upcoming newspaper issue—but, damn, these spreads look good.

Alex Lemon has a new column at InDigest.

And, on the subject of great things going on at InDigest, poet Ada Limón interviews Okkervil River lead singer Will Sheff.

Josh Bearman explains on The Rumpus how he finally “rode McSweeney’s coattails into a graduate English department.”

Editor Philip Gourevitch will leave The Paris Review. It will be interesting (to say the least) to see who will be asked to helm one of the most important English language literary magazines in history.

You should check out this very interesting poetry comic from Bianca Stone in the new issue of pax americana, “The Secret Intimacies of Insects.” (Pictured at right)

Some very, very (very) exciting lit mag news from A Public Space (a must read for literature & CW professors):

CALLING ALL TEACHERS

Are you interested in incorporating literary magazines in your curriculum? The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses is organizing a pilot program for the spring semester, the “Literary Magazine Engagement Program for Creative Writing Students.” The program offers half-price subscriptions for selected literary magazines to writing classes adopting them for course use (with desk-copy subscriptions to the professors). Additionally, once during the semester, senior editors from adopted magazines will participate in a virtual or in-person meeting with your class, allowing students to better understand the publishing community. The ultimate goal of this program is to expose students to the variety of magazines out there and promote an active, engaged reading culture among young writers.

You will be able to choose from the following magazines for adoption during this pilot program:

—Kenyon Review
—Ploughshares
—American Poetry Review
—The Oxford American
—A Public Space
—New England Review

If the pilot is successful, the program and the menu of magazines will grow significantly in the future. For more information, and to participate in the program, please get in touch with Jamie Schwartz at CLMP.

Finally, also from A Public Space, new work from Adrienne Rich, “Powers of Recuperation“:

A woman of the citizen party—what’s that—
is writing history backward

her body   the chair she sits in
to be abandoned  repossessed

The old, crusading, raping, civil, great, phony, holy, world,
second world, third world, cold, dirty, lost, on drugs,

gangrenous, maiming, class
war lives on

a done matter she might have thought
ever undone though   plucked

from before her birthyear
and that hyphen coming after

She’s old, old, the incendiary
woman

endless beginner

whose warped wraps you shall find in graves
and behind glass   plundered