A quick look at Jenny Magazine

Flipping through my Twitter feed (I’ve been known to tweet, it’s true) I came across a link to a lit mag simply titled “Jenny.” Wasting time to avoid grading as always, I clicked and found myself at a website which shared one of my favorite aesthetics ever: the dying industrial rust stuff.

Jenny is operated out of Youngstown State in Ohio. Since it’s fairly new and Oxford Magazine is proudly headquartered in the same state, I’d like this post to double as a charming yet simple neighborly gift. Maybe a virtual basket of fruit or something.

The magazine keeps up its wonderful attitude and aesthetic by way of a photo section in each issue (there are only two so far), and the images up now are wonderful. The focus seems to be on the poetry in each issue, which I admittedly love, but they also include interviews, fiction, and non-fiction in there, too. A notable local poet (of whom I am a pretty big fan) included in the first issue is Nin Andrews. Something I certainly consider brag-worthy.

I highly recommend shooting over to the site and exploring what it has to offer, which is a decidedly great deal for such a small magazine. Enjoy.

- C.J.

WRITERS HARVEST

Writers Harvest: Tuesday, Nov 1, 7:30 pm.

Tuesday, November 1st, come to the annual Writers Harvest reading event, which happens in conjunction with Pledge-a-Meal on the Oxford campus. Both raise money for local food pantries; this year donations will be spread between the Oxford Family Pantry, the Cincinnati Freestore Foodbank, and Hamilton’s Serve City and Nourish International. As we move into the holiday and cold weather season, these programs are vitally important. Please support, if you can. Students can donate the value of one meal or multiple meals through their campus dining hall plan by going here, and donations will be accepted at the door. So don’t be greedy, give to the needy. Yeah, I said it.

John Matthias Poetry Reading Tonight at 8 PM in 40 Irvin Hall

John Matthias’ poetry reading is tonight at 8 PM in 40 Irvin Hall.  He currently serves as the poetry editor at the Notre Dame Review.

Here’s an excerpt from Working Progress, Working Title courtesy of Salt Publishing:

“In the beginning
without any mother the girl was born a machine.
In the year of erotic parades.
The Novia poured out the oil the gears were engaged
the études composed and the light bulb
was Amèricaine. Voilà Picabia sweetheart of first
occupation voilà ballet mécanique.
We’ll not eat our bread by the sweat of our brows
in the end: Je viens pour toujours
it is error and grief you’ll be known by
the strength of our steel
the number of rivets and not by the river
where fishermen cast or the last
of your towers to build on the strength of our dowry.
Antheil Olga Boski Hedy and Ez, she says:
Or probably better
Olga and Ez, Antheil and Boski [Hedy Keisler Mandl Lamarr.
That’s Mandl, Fritz, from Vienna, the armaments man,
the war profiteer. Hedy Keisler, the naked broad in the film.
It won’t be a dance, it won’t be ballet mécanique.
Ecstasy, rather, a run through the woods and a swim.
The actress saying: sex in this movie is real,
Mandl’s lieutenants will buy up & burn any print they can find
so Hedy and Fritz can entertain Hitler and Mus.
Aribert Mog is displaced; the telescope on the lens
enlarges another face
from about a decade before.] “

Hope to see you there tonight!

(Information and Author’s Photo courtesy of Salt Publishing)

 

 

Your Writing Family Tree

On Tuesday, Marjorie Sandor (who you’ll remember as the topic of Tuesday’s post) came to the Fiction Workshop. While in workshop, she gave us the writing and reading exercise of exploring our writing family tree.

The easiest way to do this is to read an interview of a writer you admire and note who they list as influences in general, or what works influenced them that you also especially admire.  So, let’s use Jonathan Franzen as an example. Let’s say you really admired the dinner table scene in The Corrections. You might then read Franzen’s interview with The Paris Review and read that he feels that he was directly inspired by Don DeLillo’s writing in Underworld while writing that scene. If you’re lucky, you’ve already read some Don DeLillo. If you’re even more lucky, you’ve read Underworld and can then completely grasp Franzen’s commentary on DeLillo’s writing in that work enough to agree or disagree with his statements. (Or if you’re me and you’ve been waiting to read Underworld during Winter Break, you’re now considering whether or not you have the free time to read Underworld and do all your other writing and reading. You will conclude by the end of this sentence that you don’t have the time and that’s sort of OK.) So, then, you can either continue down your literary family tree by reading an interview with Don DeLillo or you can try to do an exercise now if you’ve already read both works. Here’s the first round of the exercise: try to think about the ways DeLillo has influenced Franzen who has influenced you. Write a piece that directly uses and explores those influences on your writing. Or, if you want to keep reading interviews and stories and books, you’ll read that linked DeLillo interview and choose either a) comic books b) Faulkner or c) James Joyce.  We’ll choose Faulkner because Faulkner’s Paris Review Interview will also lead us straight to Joyce. Now, you’ll have to consider whether there are similarities from Franzen–>DeLillo–> Faulkner.  And if you can find those similarities, what are they and how have you made them your own? So, you then write again, using those similarities in your voice.

I haven’t tried it yet, but hope to try it out this weekend. If you’ve done this before or try it out, please feel free to post about your results–or if you’re adventurous, share your results–in the comments.

Marjorie Sandor Tonight at the Leonard Theater

Tonight, Marjorie Sandor will be reading at the Leonard Theater in Peabody Hall at 7:30 PM. I could give you a long post enumerating Marjorie’s accomplishments (publications in Best American Short Stories! A pushcart prize!),  but let me instead share with you an excerpt from The Late Interiors: A Life Under Construction.

(From “Visitation”) “One February morning, not long after I left your father, my own father came to visit me. He’d been dead over twenty years by then, and you were barely six. Do you remember, before we moved into this house, the apartment we occupied for a while, with its linens and forks and pans all furnished, the woodstove we used every night in fall and winter? Rooms that felt like sanctuary but never quite home, that held the strange delights of the temporary bivouac but also the underbelly of fear, for it was the place to which you came every other week without promise or choice, under your parents’ agreement of joint custody. It spooked me, i can tell you, now that you’re a little older. Under my feeling of temporary safety lay a darker note I never let rise up: a feeling of deep insecurity that maybe underlies all our dwelling places, maybe underlies our passion for ‘decorating’ once we convince ourselves that we own a space, and can somehow control what happens in it.

How appropriate that my father should visit here. A ghost in a ghostly, in-between place.”

If you want to hear more:  Be there at 7:30 in Peabody Hall’s Leonard Theater. Bring your fall flannels, your reading glasses, and your love of beautiful prose.

(photo courtesy of MarjorieSandor.com)

Erica Bernheim Goes the Distance

A big congratulations to Oxford Magazine contributor Erica Bernheim, whose manuscript The Mimic Sea has just been named winner of the 2011 42 Miles Press Poetry Prize. Along with a cash award, Erica’s manuscript will be published under the 42 Miles Press imprint. Erica’s poetry has previously appeared in Boston Review, The Canary, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review and, of course, issue 27 of Oxford Magazine.

Expect to find The Mimic Sea on the shelves sometime in 2012. In the meantime, here’s Erica reading her work at Miami University’s Bicentennial Writer’s Festival in 2009, compliments of meshworks. Dig it.

BLOOMSDAY

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Ryan’s Tavern (241 High St, Hamilton)

6 – 10 PM

Readings From James Joyce’s Ulysses

Music / Merriment/ Etc.

 

“yes I said yes I will Yes.”

Organized by Margaret Luongo

Made possible by drunkenness and the stream of consciousness