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: 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.

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)

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.

(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)

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.

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

Chris Bachelder

“The rain gutter is an apt synecdoche of domestic existence. From the ground it appears practical, functional, well conceived. But when you stand on a borrowed ladder and peer into it, you realize what a gutter is. A gutter is a flimsy trough of sludge, secured by rusty hardware. Rainwater is not so much channeled and diverted as collected and absorbed.” –from Abbott Awaits

Fiction writer Chris Bachelder will read from his third novel, Abbott Awaits (LSU Press 2011) Wednesday, March 30 at 8 PM in Leonard Theater.

His novels Bear v. Shark (Scribner 2002) and U.S.! (Bloomsbury USA 2006) ask us to consider the consequences of an entertainment-drenched existence and the nature of hope. Abbott Awaits offers a sublimely heartbreaking meditation on domesticity, from a lively, inventive, and humane satirist.

Bachelder teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and he will be in residence at Miami the week of his reading, teaching a graduate sprint course. His stories and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Mother Jones, Harper’s, The Oxford American, The Cincinnati Review, Subtropics, and other journals.

Read an excerpt from Abbott Awaits here, and a 2008 interview with OxMag here.

Cover art: Sinking and Shrinking by Cat Lynch

The Winter 2011 issue of Oxford Magazine is out–at last, at last!  Click here or on the image to read the new issue!

This issue features fiction about motherhood and the harshness of nature and rural life, new poetry from Erica Bernheim and Eugene Gloria and many others, nonfiction of the lunar and arboreal variety, multimedia, and interviews with authors Ron Hansen and Padgett Powell among so much more. And holy smokes, none too soon, because here comes spring with the birds and the bees and my allergies!

The OxMag editors and staff would like to thank all the contributors, Miami University faculty and staff in the English Department, friends and family who helped put this together. None of this would have been possible without your talent, patience, hard work and, above all, kindness.

“Despite all their play, they had yet to swap gender or experiment with homosexuality. Barry reluctantly got dressed and admired himself as an extra from Fiddler on the Roof.”

Do you like Jewish quiz shows, having sex with historical figures, corduroy jackets?

Todd Hasak-Lowry’s writing is fast-paced and funny, riddled with ridiculous circumstance and hard-biting truth.  Author of the novel Captives and the short-story collection The Task of This Translator and an Assistant Professor of Hebrew Literature at the University of Florida,  Hasak-Lowry explores the most grisly and horrifying experiences in humankind through sexual role-play. It seems to be Hasak-Lowry’s task to find bizarre yet entertaining ways to explore the depths of humanity, mockery and sympathy. We see real human beings in their vulnerable states, trying to cope with a world somehow unfit for them, eschew before they were born.

Lowry is unafraid of approaching the possibility that ordinary people think about and have to deal with crazy shit.  History not only influences the most powerful, but the meekest as well, as in the first story from The Task of This Translator in which two failing people meet and carry out a short drama within the “massive complex commemorating the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews.” Above all, Lowry’s writing is honest, showing the hilarity and sadness that follows every human being trying to come to terms with the history and circumstance around them.

Click on the video to watch Hasak-Lowy read part of a story tentatively titled “Jewpordy.” The reading delivers on its promise of being “very Jewish” and “very sexy.” ~ Evan Steuber