If You Love Authors Who Play With Words

If you love writers and/or artists — writer artists, if you will — who literally play with words, check out my review of Paul Siegell's poetry-at-play books, jambandbootleg and wild life rifle fire in the December issue of Gently Read Literature.

I featured the wild life rifle fire book trailer several months ago, though it's worth viewing again.

If you're looking for other writer artists who use words — and punctuation of all kinds — to create visual art akin to concrete poetry, here are a few more suggestions:

• Alice's Adventure's in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

• House of Leaves and Only Revolutions by Mark Z. Danielewski

• Vernon Fisher (photo of gallery exhibit)



• Faith Ringgold (Unity Makes Us Stronger artwork), who also wrote the children's book If a Bus Could Talk: The Story of Rosa Parks





Happy writing!

Four Submission Opps: Two With Dec. 1 Deadlines

If you've got something to submit, you'd better hurry up little doggy, because at least two of the opportunities below have Dec. 1 deadlines:


Motherwell Prize (Dec. 1 deadline)

Fence Books, which is connected to Fence Magazine, awards the Motherwell Prize to a female poet writing in English for a first or second full-length collection of poems between 48 and 80 pages long.

This is no namby-pamby prize, either, but rather $5,000 and more importantly, publication in 2012. The entry fee is $28. Take a look at the submission guidelines.


Mary Magazine (Dec. 1 deadline)

Published by St. Mary's College of California's MFA in Creative Writing program, this online publication is looking for poetry, prose and new media arts for its next issue. The current online issue features all of those including some fabulous art by Jim Fuess (featured above) and an interview with the artist.

Unlike most literary magazine's, Mary actually pays $50 most of the time, by which I mean, in a strange twist to standard pay or don't-pay policies, the magazine does not pay those published in the NouVeau section, which is dedicated to helping emerging writers gain exposure.

The submission guidelines ask that all submissions be emailed to mary@stmarys-ca.edu as Word docs, or from artists as jpgs or gifs. There are a few more guidelines, so be sure to send check them out.

Note that this publication and Mary: A Literary Quarterly appear next to one another in google but are not the same. The latter publication is both a print and online magazine that also happens to be seeking publications, though this magazine is looking specifically for prose, poetry and essays relating to homosexuality . Submissions should be no longer than 5,000 words and can be emailed to maryliterary@gmail.com.


Ginosko Literary Journal


This online publication out of Fairfax, CA, says it gets 500-700 hits a month and has a mailing list of 3,300. Ginosko is currently looking for poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, , which, according to the submission guidelines, can be either snail mailed or emailed to GinoskoEditor@aol.com. The publication also features music and art, like that by Justine Tatarsky (featured here).

The perk here is that work from each issue is selected for publication in an anthology.



If you're lucky enough to have something published through these opportunities, make sure to pass along the good news.

Happy submitting!