The Torch

Discovering SHR: A Master Class and Reading

2012-01-19T13:26:00.000-08:00

We're very proud to have received funding from the Alabama State Council on the Arts to host two of our Pushcart Prize nominees--Emma Bolden and Alison Pelegrin--here in Auburn for a master class and reading. Both events are free and open to the public.

DISCOVERING SHR, as we've called the event, will run all day on Saturday, February 11.

Meet Alison Pelegrin

Alison will be running a master class on poetry, from 10:00-12:00. A description of her class is coming soon. In the meantime, do check out her incredible bio:

Poet, essayist, and teacher Alison Pelegrin is the author of two poetry collections from the University of Akron Press: Hurricane Party (2011) and Big Muddy River of Stars (2007), which won the Akron Poetry Prize, as well as The Zydeco Tablets (Word Press, 2002), and three chapbooks. Individual poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Poetry Daily and The Writer's Almanac. She earned an MFA from the University of Arkansas, and is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. A resident of the New Orleans area for most of her life, she currently resides in Covington, Louisiana with her family.

Emma Bolden

Emma Bolden's class, running from 1:00-3:00 pm, will be:

Thinking Nonfiction: Putting Your World on the Page with Emma Bolden

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” – Joan Didion

The art of creative nonfiction isn't solely about documenting the facts of a life; it’s the art of thinking itself, of making sense of your own world and your own life and finding a way to convey that to others. It's the art of creating that world in words, finding a way to make it so real that your readers can inhabit it with you. It's the art of finding your voice, a way of putting together words and images and creating moments that is absolutely, uniquely yours. In this workshop, we’ll cover the basics of nonfiction writing and practice ways to make our memories speak to the page.

Emma's bio:

Emma Bolden is the author of How To Recognize A Lady, a chapbook of poems published as part of Edge by Edge, the third in Toadlily Press’ Quartet Series; The Mariner’s Wife, a chapbook published by Finishing Line Press; and The Sad Epistles, published by Dancing Girl Press. She was the recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and was named a Finalist for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation/Poetry magazine. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Georgia Southern University.

Both classes will be held at St. Dunstan's Episcopal Church, here in Auburn, at 136 East Magnolia Avenue.

We'll also host a reading after the classes at 6 p.m. at The Gnu's Room, 414 South Gay Street in Auburn.

Do plan on joining us for this all day event. NOTE: CLASS SIZES ARE LIMITED, so sign up ahead of time by emailing Karen at shrengl@auburn.edu.

Again, our thanks to the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Department of English at Auburn University and the College of Liberal Arts for their support of SHR.

Fall 2011: Communing with the Dead

2011-12-07T07:36:00.000-08:00

Cover: Diego Rivera, detail from Day of the Dead

We've had a lovely and BUSY fall here at SHR, and the fall issue has arrived just in time to cap it off. The writers in these pages take readers on journeys, both physical and spiritual. And while a number of the poems, stories and essays in this issue are centered with that ultimate journey--death--Volume 45 of SHR is anything but morbid! There's a vibrant sense of life in all of the pieces, and we are eager for you to read.

With essays by Gordon Thompson, Josh McCall, and Neil Mathison; fiction by D.J. Thielke, Richard Dokey, and Mark Jacobs; and poetry by R.T. Smith, Renee Emerson, a translation of Horace by David Macey, Emery George, Mary Morris, and G.C. Waldrep, this issue is sure to please.

And remember, a subscription to SHR makes a very nice holiday gift! Support your literary journals! Take advantage of our new subscriber discount now!

Summer 2011:

2011-09-06T12:37:00.000-07:00

Today's blog picture is inspired by Michael Reid Busk's brief essay in the Summer 2011 issue of SHR, "Olympic Eighties."

There is much to admire about SHR's Summer 2011 issue. And while summer may seem already a thing of the past, there are still twenty days left of that sultry season, and this issue comes in just under the gun. So, have an ice-cream while enjoying our latest issue.

In it, you'll find essays by Paula Carter, Michael Cohen, and Michael Reid Busk.

Greg Johnson and Tyrone Jaeger offer a pair of delightful short stories.

Poets John J. Ronan, M.C. Pennington, Antoinette Constable, Leslie Adrienne Miller, Slobodanka Strauss, and Alison Pelegrin are featured, as well.

We'd be remiss in not pointing you to this issue's Comment by Editor Dan Latimer. Those of you with a fondness for Marilyn Monroe shouldn't miss it.

As ever, we urge former contributors to share their good news with us. We'd love to help you fire the glitter cannons!

Keep the good essays, fiction and poetry coming, writers!

Happy reading!

Spring 2011: Come One, Come All

2011-06-14T10:42:00.000-07:00

The Spring 2011 issue of SHR is here at last! When thinking about the themes that link the pieces in this issue together, we kept coming around to the idea of finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. Inspired by Stephanie Coyne DeGhett's short story, "Dime's Last Show," we decided on circus-y artwork by Malcah Zeldis.

Indeed, the poems, short stories and creative nonfiction in this issue all seek to find the extraordinary in the ordinary, and the ordinary in the extraordinary. Have a taste:

Sheep and cliff cows orphan

their skulls like discarded

shells of hermit crabs

to the hush of

forgetfulness in this doomed

landscape.

--Excerpt from Ginny MacKenzie's "The Artist's Skulls-Scotland"

my dead poet your half-smile in its bad photograph looks out from
the 3x4 frame at Target I know it's you but you shouldn't be on
display to sell a frame your exquisite poems framed your life
--Excerpt from D. L. Stein's "Rescuing Elizabeth" for Elizabeth Bishop

And it's the sky the old megaliths gesture toward. The Callanish Stones, on the Hebridean Isle of Lewis, are set on a grass-clad bit of land that looks on the map like a mittened hand with a bit of decorative tassel dangling from the woolen wrist.
--Excerpt from Elizabeth Dodd's "Megalithic North"

We hope you enjoy this issue as much as we delighted in putting it together for you.

Email Submissions Now Open

2011-04-14T19:15:00.000-07:00

Snail mail, or electronic submission? It's your call!

We are happy to announce that SHR is now accepting email submissions, and continue to accept mail-in submissions. Choose your preferred method, writers! Response time is the same for both types of submissions.

Please refer to our guidelines here, and as always, familiarize yourself with SHR before sending us your very best work.

Winter 2010 Issue: "You own snakes like mine, you learn their poisons"

2011-04-04T10:25:00.000-07:00

The year she is six my daughter dreams / of alligators in the closet: at home where / her uniform waits and at school / where the children hang their coats/in a room made of winter...
---from Faith Shearin's "Alligators"

Diah has lectured us. The Big Bass is a careful fish, he warns. Careful and reclusive, like a hermit hiding from the world.
---from Stan Lee Werlin's "In the Summer of The Big Bass, Forever and Ever"

On ogre's gaze, mosquitoes lift a twilight-coffin / of a dead woman above the bog land. He remembers, / once he was beautiful in someone's eyes.
----from Sankar Roy's "A Swamp Tale"

The world has warmed up again, and thoughts of summer are stirring. And so, in re-reading the Winter 2010 issue, this editor (who happens to be from Miami) can't help but hear the call of summer in the creamy pages--fishing and bugs and cold-blooded creatures basking in the heat!

If the idea of summer doesn't move you to pick up the latest copy of SHR, then perhaps the gorgeous August Macke cover, bursting with color, or the thought-provoking essay on Robert Musil, "Beyond this Infinity," by Claudio Magris and translated by Daphne Day, will.

Poems, fictions, essays and book reviews beckon!

The title of this post is an excerpt from Gary Fincke's essay, "Self-Defense."

We hope you enjoy this issue, and the sunshine, too.

-Chantel

New Website

2011-02-08T14:10:00.000-08:00

Scratch that! The new SHR website IS HERE!

We've been hard at work the last few months on bringing our readers and writers a clearer, sleeker website, and here it is at last!

There are a number of exciting features on our new online home, including updated archives for the last three issues, excerpts of essays and short stories for our Fall 2010 issue (excerpts for the poems are on their way), updated submission guidelines, live Twitter feeds, and links to Facebook and this blog, The Torch.

We've got more on the way, including a new quarterly podcast, featuring work from each issue read by Auburn University thespians, and interviews with some of our writers. Keep an eye out for the first podcast coming soon, including a reading and interview from one of our Pushcart Nominees for 2010, Emma Bolden.

In the coming days, we'll start test driving an online submission service. While we aren't entirely committed to ditching snail mail submissions altogether, we are eager to see what the ease of online submissions brings to our doorstep.

Lots of new, exciting things on the way for SHR. However, our mission remains the same--to publish the best creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, critical essays and book reviews from emerging and established writers.

Many thanks to Lori Woods, website designer extraordinaire, Sam Singer, our webmaster, Karen Beckwith, our editorial assistant, and Garrard Conley, the graduate student editor who lead the charge on the new website. Let's have a virtual round of "For They're All Jolly Good Fellows" for this amazing crew!

We hope you enjoy our new website, and that it inspires you to subscribe and submit to SHR.

Fall 2010 Issue: Autumnal Associations

2010-12-13T10:00:00.000-08:00

We challenged one of our Graduate Student editors, Garrard Conley, with selecting the cover for the Fall 2010 issue. He chose Max Ernst's Gypsy Rose Lee, for its vibrant color, suggestion of chestnuts, and whimsy. Garrard chose well, as the cover unifies the many essays, short stories and poems you'll find in our latest issue.

Here's a tidbit, one that recalls the Christmas season:

But what if she has good news,
carries just what the world hungers for--
wouldn't you rejoice?
Wouldn't you be there with forceps?

from "In the Produce Department," a poem by Pamela Davis

You can get your copy of SHR here.

Wishing all our writers and readers a wonderful holiday!

Pushcart Prize Nominations 2010

2010-12-13T09:14:00.000-08:00

It was hard work choosing from among all our darling writers, but we did it. Join us in celebrating SHR's Pushcart Prize nominees!

Poems:

Emma Bolden, “The Liturgy of the Word, Question II: The Methods of Destroying and Curing Witchcraft”

Gladys Justin Carr, “May Frost”

Fiction:
Michael Gills, “The Death of Bonnie and Clyde”
Mark Jacobs, “Loss Leader”

Essays:
Paul Crenshaw, “After the Ice”
Joe Kraus, “Discovery. Invention. Creation.”

Congratulations! And another round of applause for everyone that appeared in SHR's pages this year. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

Best American Essays

2010-12-10T09:16:00.000-08:00

You may recall our Fall 2009 issue featuring the vibrant volcano cover. The cover was inspired by Neil Mathison's lovely essay, "Volcano: An A to Z." As usual, our good taste is shared by others! Neil's essay is among the honorable notables in this year's BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS.

Congratulations, Neil! And thanks for letting us publish your work.

In addition, a few of our past contributors were recognized in the anthology:

John Gamel, Gary Fincke, Patricia Foster, David Hamilton, Eric Tretheway, Lee Zacharias, Jeffrey Hammond, Peter LaSalle, Priscilla Long, Desirae Matherly, Kat Meads, Kathleen Rooney, Carrie Shippers, and Joyce Carol Oates.

"Decampment"

2010-12-06T09:31:00.000-08:00

"This was where I first discovered/exactly what this land was missing"
from Travis Mossotti's "Decampment"

SHR was proud to publish Mossotti's lovely poem, "Decampment," in our Winter 2010 issue. Travis is an award-winning poet, teaching and living in California. We are happy to share this short film by Josh Mossotti, based on Travis' poem. This animated short is a poem for the eyes and ears. We wish the Mossottis the very best, and extend heartfelt congratulations to them.

Watch the film below, and please visit the film's excellent website here.

Remembering Editor Tom Wright

2010-12-03T09:30:00.000-08:00

Circa 1990. Pictured, left to right : Karen Beckwith, Dan Latimer, Mary Waters, Tom Wright

We remember SHR editor, Tom Wright, who died yesterday. Tom was assistant editor (1983-85) and then co-editor of SHR (1985-1991) until his retirement in 1991. Tom was a kind man, with a wicked sense of humor and a sweet tooth. His many comment card reflect both characteristics.

Dan closed his Fall 1991 Editors' Comment with the following lovely salute, which also seems appropriate now:

"It is a matter of clear unanimity here...a unanimity of regret, that this fall issue is the last in which we can expect the collaboration of our colleague, Tom Wright, who escaped to retirement earlier this year. We will miss his stabilizing influence, humor, and depth of experience. Free now from the tyrannical quartan fever rhythms of four numbers and four hundred pages a year, may he now have leisure to indulge his bracing prose style, the most entertaining we have seen, to unfetter Pegasus and fly."

Tom will be missed by all of us here at SHR, and we keep his family and friends in our thoughts.

Summer 2010 Issue: The Eternal Return

2010-10-05T16:07:00.000-07:00

We've been remiss in talking up our amazing Summer 2010 issue on The Torch. The cover features Giuseppe Maria Crespi's "Aeneas, the Sibyl and Charon" (c.1700) and reflects Francesca Cauchi's essay "The 'Cadaverous Perfume of Schopenhauer' in Nietzche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra."

In The Aeneid, Aeneas sees the line of souls in the underworld, ready to take to the earth again, to relive life, and he wonders at the choice. This moment in the epic exemplifies one of the central concerns of this issue.

The question of "The Eternal Return," which asks whether one would live this life over again if one could, speaks to many of the pieces here. Vic Sizemore's short story, "Hush Little Baby," gives us a snapshot of a man rebuilding his life--his young daughter is in remission and he is falling in love with someone. What to make of a life brought to the brink of disaster? Can a person ever recover?

Similarly, the poet Diana Woodcock gives us Tiananmen's Square most iconic image:

Heavy with despair, I repeat parrot-like the same/ words, Peace, let there be peace. Though others/ accuse me of growing tedious, may my words/lodge in the collective memory--like the image/of the Chinese young man, Tiananmen Square,/holding back the armored truck...

Again the question: would this unknown man face the tanks again, if he had a choice?

We hope you find the work in the Summer 2010 issue of SHR as thoughtful and compelling as we did.

A New Pages Review: "...surprised, pleased and curious..."

2010-09-01T06:59:00.000-07:00

Our thanks to the wonderful and dedicated folks at New Pages, and to Sima Rabinowitz, for a lovely review of our Spring 2010 issue. Here's a peek:

My recent reading just happens to have included a great deal of poetry by women whose work in the first half of the last century is now largely forgotten or ignored, so I was surprised, pleased, and curious to discover Mina Loy’s name in a poem by Priscilla Atkins in this issue’s TOC. I had to start there, though I was tempted to begin with a poem by Michael Andrews, “Lykambes Has Promised Neobulé,” because it has the most unusual title in the issue; or Terry W. Thompson’s “Spencer Rex: The Oedipus Myth in Henry James’s ‘The Jolly Corner,’” because I am fond of academic essays, and as editor Chantel Acevedo notes in her Comment, few journals publish them.

Read the rest at this link.

SHR Featured on the Huffington Post

2010-08-14T15:51:00.000-07:00

We were pleased to see SHR listed in a recent Huffington Post piece, Anis Shivani's "17 Literary Journals That Might Survive the Internet."

Editor Dan Latimer provides the commentary on this great photo feature. Here's a taste:

Today there are formidable forces arrayed again against the little magazine, not the least of which is the U.S. Postal Service, which continues to raise its prices for presorted mail. Yet electronic internet publication does not have the longevity of paper and print, which can languish in your magazine rack until you realize, I should have read that! Or, What was that again?!

Read the rest at the link.

Spring 2010 Issue: Remember the Hungry!

2010-06-14T13:31:00.000-07:00

We're proud to announce the newest issue of SHR. Inside, you'll find, among many, many others, poetry by Gladys Justin Carr, fiction by Michael Gills, and creative nonfiction by Ron Tanner and Bob Kunzinger.

Kunzinger's essay, "The Canon," about a memorial for the Siege of Leningrad, inspired our cover, a 1921 Russian poster designed by Ivan Vasilievich Simakov that reads, "Remember the Hungry."

Coincidental to our cover, "Views and Re-Views: Soviet Political Posters & Cartoons" is a new exhibit at the Jule Collins Smith Museum, for those of you that live close to the SHR offices in Auburn, Alabama.

Thank you to all our contributors, and to you subscribers, too. What? Don't have a subscription yet? Click on the image of the cover to the right to order yours today.

The Hoepfner Award Winners

2010-04-30T08:33:00.000-07:00

We are happy to announce the winners of the 2009 Hoepfner Award.

The Theodore Christian Hoepfner Awards were established to honor a colorful scholar of the Auburn University English Department in residence here from 1941 until his death in 1966. They are given each year to the best essay, story, and poem published in the previous volume. In other words, they are not a contest to be entered, but an award made for work already accepted and published through the regular submission process. They are announced in the Editors' Comments of Winter issues.

Join us in congratulating:

Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum for her essay, "This is How it Happens"

Thomas P. Balázs for his short story, "The Music Man"

Melody Lacina for her poem, "Handyman"

Congratulations, and thanks for being a part of SHR.

A New Pages Review: "the heat of the volcano..."

2010-03-15T13:18:00.000-07:00

New Pages calls itself the "Portal of Independents!" and rightly so. The site features guides to and reviews of literary magazines, independent bookstores, creative writing programs and more.

SHR is glad to share part of today's review of our newest issue, by Samuel Howard, who writes:

A dormant but beautifully ominous volcano sets the mood for this compelling issue of Southern Humanities Review (SHR). From the Japanese art on the cover, to the final poem “Resurrection: Ivorybill,” by Ashley Mace Havird, an undertone of imminent eruption, and the realms that will be, are, or have been downstream from the event, pervades each piece. This is not to say that every piece is dark and looming; rather, whether fissures of perception, or pyroclastic flows of meaning and connection, this issue conveys that the effects of earth-shattering change are worthy of being felt, remembered, and revered.

There's more, of course. But you'll have to go to the New Pages site to read the rest. We are so proud of this issue, and it's so nice others think it's great, too. Thank you, Samuel Howard!

C.M.A.

Roald Hoffmann: A Reading

2010-03-12T15:50:00.000-08:00

Southern Humanities Review and the Auburn University Department of English were honored to host a poetry reading this past week, featuring poet, playwright, and Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry, Roald Hoffmann. His poem, “The God’s Face,” appears in our most recent issue.

Hoffmann began the reading with “Tsunami,” the poem opening his collection, Soliton, as a way of explaining his scientific and artistic influences. As much of his poetry is inspired by his studies in chemistry, Dr. Hoffmann encouraged the non-scientific minded to follow him despite our differences, asking us to “float along” on his words as poets often do, bypassing the lines we don’t understand and holding on to those we do.

As the reading continued into the afternoon, Hoffmann’s poetry evolved from its scientific roots to reveal threads of his childhood memories of the Holocaust. With each poem, Hoffmann offered the origins of his inspiration, stories as beautiful and provoking as those in his verse.

Upon his reading of “The God’s Face,” Hoffmann briefly spoke of his time spent in Japan and of the Japanese god at the center of his poem. As SHR also describes, “Hitokoto-nushi was a god who built a bridge on the road between Yoshino and Katsugari. But he worked only late nights, so that people would not be frightened by his ugly face.”

In a room filled with scientists, writers, students, and teachers, Hoffman, like Hitokoto-nushi, seemed to build bridges of his own. His poetry and musings closed the distance between the sciences and humanities, between individuals and communities. It is this same idea that seems to be at the heart of much of Hoffmann’s poetry. His work reflects a poet who truly sees no gaps, only bridges, and it is work SHR feels privileged to publish.

H. G. J.

Vol. 1, No. 1: Then and Now

2010-03-10T10:49:00.000-08:00

The first issue of SHR, Spring 1967

The editor's comment in the first issue of SHR urges the following:

Our appeal to all of you--artists, scholars, teachers, scientists, humanists--is therefore a simple one: send us scholarly, informal, and creative writings thoughtfully conceived to enrich the mind and stir the heart.

The founding editors, Norman Brittin, Eugene Current-Garcia and Taylor Littleton set for us a mission--to seek work that enlarges the humanities and, at the same time, touches the individual. The macro and the micro. The exterior and the interior. The physical frame and the beating heart.

Since, then, SHR has published continually. We've had stories selected for Shannon Ravennel's BEST OF THE SOUTH anthology (Jesse Lee Kercheval's "Gravity"). We've introduced emerging writers, and published the work of established authors and scholars. For forty-four years, the SHR office has been witness to thousands upon thousands of pages, of stories that have made the editors weep, poems that have cut to the quick, and essays that have thrown light upon their subjects in new ways.

Today, SHR celebrates our first blogpost. The blog, titled THE TORCH, is so named for the first logo of this magazine. The passing torch is a classic symbol, one that connotes learning and illumination. Though the logo is gone from our covers, having eschewed it for issue-appropriate art, its symbol has not disappeared from our mission. We're proud to resurrect it here.

The first issue of SHR is a product of its age. An essay by James K. Feibleman titled, "A Philosophy for the Space Age" begins:

The space age is here, and we have the problem of learning how to live with it.

Like the space age, the internet age has changed the way we live. And though a blog is, admittedly, a small step in the right direction, we're eager to bring SHR to the internet party.

We are grateful to Auburn University for their support, as well as to the Southern Humanities Council--two bodies that have been there since the beginning.

Our most recent issue features a poem by Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Roald Hoffmann, titled, "The God's Face."

Hoffmann will give a poetry reading today at 4 pm, in the Student Center at Auburn University.

You may order a copy of this issue at our website.

C.M.A.