We’re excited to be featuring paintings by Chris Way in the Spring 2013 Issue of PDR.

Chris Way is a self-taught artist whose work in chalk and pastels seeks to join the straightforwardly autobiographical with the alien and unseen. He says of his work:

I paint to bear witness to what has happened — and is happening — around me and in me.  Whether that’s the rich, wild abundance of the sensual world or a passage of epiphany or spiritual struggle in my life. But the bearing witness is always quickened by the unseen forces beyond logic and reason that thread through all we do and feel, and that bind us all. My aim is to translate all this to form, color, texture, rhythm, and above all: presence.

Chris Way was born in Florida in 1977. He received his BA from the University of Florida in 1999. He works and makes various things (paintings, poetry, music) in New York City, where he lives with his partner Michelle and their daughter Cyrni.

AWP has an odd reputation. In the early months of this year, people on the websites of various lit mags (as well as on plenty of personal blogs) were griping about how the literary world has degenerated into a who’s-who contest of networking wills, with the focus shifted away from finding and promoting the best possible writing to finding and entrapping potential writers in mountains of debt from pursuing MFAs and attending conferences where there is little on offer beyond the false promise career advancement. I am ambivalent about the value of an MFA and generally angered by how much excellent writing goes unpaid these days, but all of the bitter talk only intrigued me. When I pre-registered for AWP just after Christmas, I was hopeful there might be more to it than the detractors would have me believe.

I’ve been out of school long enough to start craving seminars again. Nerdy, to say the least, but I was in excellent company. Hynes Convention Center was overrun with plenty of backpack-toting, glasses-wearing nerds like me who couldn’t wait to camp out in one of the many readings or discussion panels and take extensive notes. Wednesday night I attended the UMass kick off party at the Pour House, across the street from the convention center. The room was packed with people sporting lanyards and talking recent acceptances–to journals and graduate programs both. Lloyd Schwartz and Jill McDonagh talked shop with potential MFA candidates next to metal trays of chicken wings and a decimated crudite. Easing into the conference meant rubbing elbows with poets I’d heard on NPR and read in the Best American Poetry anthology, and I was wholly unprepared. I drank one-too-many of the massive draft beers and ended up discussing teaching poetry to children with Regie Gibson at great length. I had the blessing and curse of my home city hosting the event, which meant I didn’t have to pay for a flight or hotel, and also that I had a few familiar faces to fall back on during my moments of awestruck burnout. It also meant that I took heavy advantage of sleeping in my own bed and missed the morning panels every day.

On Thursday morning, “Writing Masculinities” flew by while I was brushing my teeth in Somerville, as did “The State of Literary Publishing,” but I managed to slog downtown in time for the panel on autobiography and experiement, as worthy an official start to my conference experience as any. Though I rolled my eyes heavily when the intro to the discussion began with some hubbub about “rejecting false dichotomies,” the time was well spent. One panelist, A Public Space’s poetry editor Brett Fletcher Lauer, talked about how online dating lead him to construct a fake Craigslist Missed Connection using text from the profiles of fellow lonelies. A single line in the post, “putting the ‘ass’ in ‘Cassie’ since 1982” had PDR contributor, Cassandra de Alba, and I in hysterics. The central question of the panel, at least as I recorded it in my notebook, was “What is your heart?”

With heart and the construction of self still heavily in mind, I moved on to my next panel on Plath and Craft. This subject is a pet obsession of mine, one I argued about all through college poetry courses when I felt my classmates were focusing too heavily on biogrpahical details when explicating Ariel. (I even have an embarassingly empassioned paper about it sitting on my laptop desktop, begging to be expanded to Madwoman In The Attic proportions and self-published for the Kindle.)  Besides demarcating the difference between confessional poetry and Plath’s uncanny talent for self-mythology, the panelists showcased Plath’s excellent craftsmanship.  C. Dale Young removed all adjectives from “Poppies in July” and even stripped down, the word choice was so precise the poem could not be mistaken as the work of any other author.  Tara Betts implored the audience to treat Plath as a craftsman worth apprenticing ourselves to as poets, asking us to consider, “where does the image snap open long enough us to capture it?” as Plath might have when arranging her stark imagery into the verses we now know as hers.

If I had to declare the heart of AWP, I would say it is in the small clusters of writers sitting, heads together, before a panel or reading.  So many of us were misfits as children, buried in our notebook pages during recess.  In a convention center full of other misfits, there is an air of instant kinship.  Everyone is afraid to speak first, so words explode out of people’s mouths in nervous monosyllables.  Entire sentences pass breathless, because there is simply too much to say.  There are plenty of people there for the pissing contest of who has published where and with whom, but the bulk of the people I encountered were simply delighted to skip out on work for a long weekend and get deeply entrenched in some friendly word play.

PDR would like to congratulate Kendra DeColo, Edward Porter, Gabrielle Reeve, and Franz Wright for their inclusion in Best Indie Lit New England.

BILiNE is a new print anthology series showcasing the best fiction and poetry published by independent journals in New England. The first volume features work from forty writers and twenty magazines; it’s a great way to find out what indie magazines are publishing (and to find new places to submit). 

The editors are selling copies of the first print run at literary events like the AWP Book Fair and the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. If you have a Kindle device, you can purchase the ebook from Amazon. You can buy the ebook for your Nook from Barnes & Noble.

The collection includes four pieces that were originally publishing in the first three issues of Printer’s Devil Revew:

Kendra DeColo, “The Dream in Which You Are”
Edward Porter, “A Proposal”
Gabrielle Reeve, “How to Sex Yourself”
Franz Wright, “Autoventriloquism”

What better way to start the new year than with a second chance?

We know we said January 1st, but we’re hungry for more.  More poetry, more fiction, more art, and especially more essays!  If you didn’t get us your best by the time the ball dropped on Monday night, you now have until February 1st to submit.

Check the SUBMIT tab at the top of the page for our guidelines and requirements, and if you’re still not sure, take a look at past issues to see what we’re about.  (They’re all free!)  But to be perfectly honest, we just want to be wowed, no matter what it is you send us.

Happy New Year, and Happy Writing!

Lovecraft fans: Here’s your opportunity to see one of the films discussed by Brian R. Hauser in his essay for PDR, ”Call of the Cult Flick.” 

A local Lovecraft enthusiast has organized a screening of Whisperer in the Darkness at the Somerville Theatre. Reserve your spot today by following this link.

That squeel of delight you just heard? That was us. The latest edition of the New Yorker Fiction Podcast features David Sedaris reading and commenting on writer, filmmaker, and performer, Miranda July’s story “Roy Spivey.”

We’re great fans of both writers and had the good fortune last year of talking with July about her latest film, The Future. If you missed it, you can download and read our full interview here.

For twenty years, the Cantab Lounge, a dingy bar in Cambridge’s Central Square, has been host to the Boston Poetry Slam and some of the best performance poets on the local, national, and international scene. Every Wednesday night the venue gives local poets a chance to share their work in the open mic or slam and features either a headlining poet or theme slam.

Most of those nights, poet Adam Stone is behind the bar. In addition to mixing drinks, he also curates the venue’s weekly writing prompt series, Tips from the Bar. Stone, himself a Cantab “Champion of Champions,” has just completed a book documenting the poetry that’s passed through the venue. The Cantab Lounge Anthology packs twenty years of poetry between its covers, highlighting those poets and poems that have become the stuff of Cantabrian lore.

Tonight, Monday, October 15, the Cantab Lounge will be celebrating it’s storied history and the new anthology. There will be plenty of Cantab regulars performing “covers” of work featured in the anthology, and Stone will be selling copies of the book and taking orders. You can find more information here. 

Listen to a recording of Cassandra de Alba reading “Tchaikovsky, 1944.” The poem will appear in our next issue, due out in October.

Cassandra de Alba’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Red Lightbulbs, Amethyst Arsenic, Neon, and FRiGG. She has represented the NorthBEAST at three National Poetry Slams (with Slam Free or Die in 2008 and Hampshire County Slam Collective in 2010 and 2011) and performed up and down the East Coast with the No More Ribcage tour. 

She has published several chapbooks and is working on another, but title-wise is never going to top 2009’s i am running away and joining a circus whose only act is to make the audience feel really, really bad about being happy. She lives in Somerville, MA.

Join Caleb Cole, an artist whose work will be featured in our Fall 2012 issue, along with fellow photographer Jesse Burke for Masculinity NOW! 

Part of a salon-style discussion series sponsored by the Somerville Arts Council, the artists will take part in a conversation about the role that gender plays in their work. The event is tomorrow night (9/12) at 7:30 p.m. at Arts at the Armory in Somerville. 

Our current issue features work from photographer Caleb Cole, hailed by inBoston Magazine as “shaking up New England’s visual arts scene.”  

Caleb has received numerous awards for his work and exhibited at a variety of venues, including Gallery Kayafas (Boston), the Danforth Museum of Art, Photo Center Northwest (Seattle), Good Citizen Gallery (St. Louis), Childs Gallery (Boston), and Jenkins Johnson Gallery (NYC). He is represented locally by Gallery Kayafas.

Caleb has this to say about a recent project, Other People’s Clothes:

At the heart of my work is a fascination with ambiguities and inconsistencies, an interest in how I go about negotiating areas of grey and how others manage to do the same. When I am in public, I watch people going about their daily routines alone; I wonder about the lives they lead, wonder how they experience the world around them and how they make meaning of it. I spend time inventing stories for them: narratives of isolation, of questioning and searching, of desire, and of confusion. The images in Other People’s Clothes are a product of my exploration of private moments of expectation, a visual expression of my experiences stepping into the shoes of the types of people I see on a daily basis. Each photograph in the series is a constructed scene that begins with an outfit or piece of clothing (either bought, found, or borrowed), then a person that I imagine to fill those clothes, and finally a location where that person can play out a silent moment alone. This moment is the time right before something changes, the holding in of a breath and waiting, the preparing of oneself for what is to come. Though I am the physical subject of these images, they are not traditional self-portraits. They are portraits of people I have never met but with whom I feel familiar, as well as documents of the process wherein I try on the transitional moments of others’ lives in order to better understand my own.

We’ve extended our submission deadline for the Fall 2012 issue to August 15. Fiction writers, we’re especially interested in short story and novel excerpt submissions. We’re still waiting for that one story that’s going to bowl us over–is it yours?

PDR is proud to announce our nominees for Best Indie Lit New England (BILiNE). BILiNE is a new print anthology series showcasing the best fiction and poetry published by independent journals in New England. The first volume will be published in Fall 2012 and will feature works that appeared between 2010 and 2012 in independent literary magazines throughout the region.

Our nominees, from our first three issues, are:

M. R. B. Chelko, from Manhattations
Laura Cherry, “Missing Gloucester Teen Found Dead”
Allan Converse, ”City of Women”
Kendra DeColo, “The Dream in Which You Are”
Mercedes Lawry, “The Same Moon”
Ed Porter, “A Proposal”
Gabrielle Reeve, “How to Sex Yourself”
Ed Skoog, “Hattie’s Hat”
Franz Wright, “Autoventriloquism”

Congratulations to the nominees. For more information and to support the BILiNE project, visit their kickstarter page. A $25 donation gets you a copy of the print book as soon as it’s printed. The kickstarter ends on Sunday Jul 22, 5:00pm.

As of today, we’re officially open to submissions of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art for our Fall 2012 issue.  Check our submissions page for section guidelines and to access our online submission form.

Also, be sure to check out the new section of our site, the bookshelf, where you’ll find books by writers and artists featured in PDR (including the likes of Miranda July, Franz Wright, Ed Skoog, and more).

The new issue of PDR, due out in a few days, will feature an essay by film scholar Brian R. Hauser describing a trip to the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. The festival is a gathering of Lovecraft fans and filmmakers who work outside of the Hollywood system to bring the horror writer’s stories to the screen. The essay will also feature mind-shattering illustrations by Harriet Burbeck.

Check out this trailer for The Whisperer in the Dark, one of the films discussed in the essay … if you dare.

Illustration sensation Harriet “Happy” Burbeck provides drawings of Lovecraftian horrors to accompany Brian R. Hauser’s essay “Call of the Cult Flick” in our Spring 2012 issue.

Happy is a New Orleans comic artist, illustrator, and musician. She has shown her work at a number of galleries in the Crescent City, including Mimi’s in the Marigny, Du Mois Gallery, Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center, and The Candle Factory. 

 She has this to say about what she’s been up to: 

I am in a band called Ixnay, formerly known as The Leah Quinelle All-Stars Featuring Happy. I illustrated the choose-your-own-adventure on that website, which you should not look at unless you are older than 18 and have a high tolerance for dirty words. I have been working with the New Orleans Bookfair for the past four years, and made the poster graphic for the Bookfair 2008-2010. The books to which I have contributed illustrations include Stories Care Forgot, The Chainbreaker Book, and Take Me Out to the Dog Park. I have contributed to many zines, including, but not limited to Full Gallop, Chihuahua and Pitbull, Chainbreaker, Cornfed Hussy, Y’eard Me and Feast Comics Anthology.

My client list also includes Beth’s Books, Garrett County Press, Factory Direct Zine Mail Order, The Vedic Yagya Center, Fitzgerald Letterpress, Louisiana Books to Prisoners, White Rabbit Gallery, Antigravity Magazine, The New Orleans School of Art and Craft, Willamette Week, Skimmer Studio, The Raging Pelican and others. I also have been making a zine called The Nose Knows with three other artists for five years now. Email us at nasalknowledge@gmail.com if you want a subscription.

You can see more of Happy’s work at her website. She also makes drawings and paintings on commission.

One of the great things to come out of our trip down to the New Orleans Bookfair was discovering Ed Skoog, whose work we’ll be featuring in our next issue. 

Ed Skoog grew up in Topeka, Kansas, and has lived in Montana, Louisiana, and Southern California, and now lives in Seattle. He has been a Bread Loaf Fellow, Writer-in-Residence at the Richard Hugo House, and the Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Residence at George Washington University. He has taught at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, Tulane, Fishtrap, and Idyllwild Arts. His poems have appeared in Paris Review, The New Republic, Poetry, Narrative, Ploughshares, Tin House, and elsewhere. His first book is Mister Skylight (Copper Canyon Press, 2009).

For more information, visit http://edskoog.com/.

We’ve extended our submissions deadline for the Spring 2012 issue to February 1. So put the final polish on that poem, story or essay over the holiday break and submit.

So we’re back from the New Orleans Bookfair. Organizer Robin Watt knows how to throw a fair–burlesque and bounce at the pre-party, street bands and readings at the fair, and a word-of-mouth afterparty in an abandoned warehouse with DJs spinning equal parts punk and 1960s R&B. Looking forward to next year …

PDR will have a table at the 10th Annual New Orleans Bookfair, an independent literary festival showcasing local and regional authors, publishers, bookstores, artists, and zinesters.  You can find out more and watch a cool video about the event at their kickstart page.

We’re not exactly local, but we do know what it means to miss New Orleans (Tom, the editor, lived there for two years and tries to get back to visit whenever he can). Also, since we’re an online publication open to submissions from all over, we hope to spread the word about the magazine to readers, writers, and artists in the Crescent City. If you’ll be in town, look for us giving away shirts, buttons, and broadsides.

The Fall 2011 issue of Printer’s Devil Review is here and free to download from our site.

Our second issue features an interview with writer, filmmaker, and performing artist Miranda July, as well as work from emerging and established poets. Stories in this issue range from the big city to the backwoods–a lesbian private dick follows the trail of a killer into the sapphic underground of 1950s New York; a motherless girl in rural Appalachia sets her sights on the bookish neighbor boy. Also in this issue: Resa Blatman’s shaped canvases, teaming with color and critters; and dark, rhythmically illuminated photographs by Brandon James.

If you have a Nook reader, you can buy the ebook now (for $1) from the Barnes & Noble store. Look for the ebook edition soon in the Amazon Kindle store and Apple’s iBookstore. In the next few days, we’ll also be releasing a print-on-demand version to be sold at cost and distributed through Lulu.com.

Thanks for reading, and don’t be shy–comment on our site and our facebook page to let the editors and artists know what you think.

Lush, brooding landscapes of curlicues, spiderwebs, insects, and fruit, all digitally designed and painstakingly cut–this is the world of Resa Blatman, a featured artist in PDR’s upcoming issue. 

Blatman’s sixth solo show is now underway at Ellen Miller Gallery, 38 Newbury Street; her work will be on display through October 18. If you’re in the Boston area, you can catch the opening reception on Saturday, Sept. 17, from 3 to 5 p.m.

For more information, visit http://www.ellenmillergallery.com.

We normally shy away from genre fiction, but The Dying Nude, a novel-in-progress by Allan Converse, is something special.

A historian by profession, Converse carefully researched the lives of gay women in 1950s New York and produced a work that draws equally from the tradition of American crime fiction and the lesbian pulp novel. We’re excited to be featuring a selection from the manuscript in the Fall issue of PDR.

You can find an interview with Allan and hear him reading his work at the site for the Champs Not Chumps podcast. The page also features image galleries of 1950s New York and covers from crime and lesbian pulp novels. You’ll also find plenty of resources for learning more about burlesque, crime fiction, and other topics relevant to the novel.

Our second issue will be out in October, and although we won’t be releasing any previews of contributed work this time around, I’m posting the text of my editor’s note here. What do you think the purpose of art is or should be? You can comment on this post and tell us what you think.

Editor’s Note (PDR Vol. 1, Issue 2)

Kills Bugs Dead. This is probably the best slogan I have ever read. On its own, the phrase “kills bugs” is purely descriptive. It’s obvious and eminently forgettable. But that extra word at the end—its redundant, reassuring finality—that’s what let’s you know: with this insecticide there will be no half-measures. It is Ragnaroach; it is the bugpocalypse.

I’m told that the tagline was penned by Beat Generation poet Lew Welch while he was doing a stint as an adman in New York. The phrase is artful and effective, but is it poetry? Whatever our disagreements about the purpose of poetry in our culture, I think we can agree that selling pesticides is ancillary to that, something tacked on after the fact. Advertising is an activity that makes use of poetry for some purpose not intrinsic to the literary form.

On the other hand, defining art and its purpose is a risky business. It leads so easily to aesthetic prescriptions that stifle experimentation and condemn original work to either obscurity or derision. History shows us that, in authoritarian regimes at least, failure to adhere to the proper style of art-making can have grim consequences indeed. Still, shouldn’t we be able to say something about what art is for and what is foreign to it? 

We can look to ethics, already concerned with how things ought to be, for help thinking through the question of the proper approach to art. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the philosopher Immanuel Kant suggests the following bedrock ethical principal: 

Now I say that the human being … exists as an end in itself, not merely as a means to be used by this or that will at its discretion; instead he must in all his actions, whether directed to himself or to other rational beings, always be regarded at the same time as an end.

Kant argues that we must treat every person we meet as an autonomous being, a consciousness with the capacity to think for itself, set its own goals, and make its own choices. 

If I disregard the interests of another person and exploit her solely as a means to some purpose I have in mind (personal profit, say, or sexual gratification), then I have a distorted relationship to that person.

We don’t have to agree on the precise purposes of art in order to adopt the principle that works of art, like individual human beings, exist as ends in themselves. If we grant that art has its own ends, independent from other dimensions of society (the economy, the state, etc.), then it follows that these ends should be respected.

In practical terms, this means affirming a difference between art that has been allowed the freedom to pursue its own ends and art that has been subordinated to some other purpose entirely. When art is used only to achieve some end external to it, when its autonomy is denied or disregarded, art is inevitably degraded. I’m not arguing for some fantasy of purity—art may pursue its own ends and still manage to sell something or support a political cause in the process. I believe, however, that we should be mindful that the primary purpose of art is probably not to produce profit for commercial publishing houses, to stimulate desire for commodities, or to advocate for a political ideology.

It is the purpose of this magazine to support art on its own terms. Some might even say we take this position to an extreme. Printer’s Devil Review refuses, for example, to subordinate art to the market and turn it into a commodity. We give the journal away for free and license the content in such a way as to facilitate its unrestricted circulation. 

I’m starting to think that we’ve been asking the wrong questions, or at least in the wrong order. What if we asked not “what is the proper function of art?” but rather “what does art want”? How about this for a slogan: Art Wants to Be Free.

Thomas Dodson

Edward Porter’s story “Phil and Emily” explores this premise, imagining a liaison between the reclusive poet and the Union general Phillip Sheridan. As Porter explains in an interview with Bull City Press: 

“I hit on a fiendish device, and walked around for a couple of days giggling to myself, ‘Yeah, tell the truth but tell it slant.’ I take Ms. Dickinson’s advice as gospel: it’s her legend I’m poking fun at. I’ve always wanted to see her portrayed as a sex-fiend. Maybe I don’t trust anyone who isn’t manifestly a sex-fiend, and I’m trying to bring her down to my level.”

Porter’s work has appeared in Best New American Voices 2010, Colorado Review, Booth, and Inch. We’re very happy to report that we’ll be featuring one of his stories in our Fall issue, due out in October.

If you live in the Boston area and have been to an indie film event, a queer dance night, a Dr. Sketchy drawing session, a spoken word performance–basically, if you have been involved in the creative scene at all–you probably know or have heard of of artist and indie impresario Aliza Shapiro. She performs, organizes shows and screenings, promotes her fellow artists, and just generally makes good things happen in the city and beyond.

On Monday, July 25, 2011, Aliza was admitted to hospital and is being treated for a stroke caused by a brain hemorrhage. 

She currently has motor and vision impairment on her right side as well as language impairment.

Aliza’s friends have established Aliza’s Brain Trust with the goal of raising at least ten months worth of living expenses for Aliza as it is unlikely that she will be able to work for a long while. We hope you’ll consider making a donation to help someone who has given so much to support performers, filmmakers, artists, and others.

[I know we’ve been trying to raise funds for PDR, but honestly, if you’ve got money to donate, we hope you’ll send it to Aliza’s Brain Trust first].

We didn’t think our online image gallery did justice to paintings by Sean Flood and photographs by Jarrod McCabe, so we made a new one. We also added a link to the main navigation; that way all you iconophiles can go straight to the images for all of our issues. We’ve posted galleries for the first issue so far, but we’ll put up more in October when we release our Fall 2011 issue.

That’s right, our deadline for submissions to the Fall 2011 issue is August 1st.

Your fiction, poetry, essays, creative nonfiction, painting, or photography could be featured in the next issue of Printer’s Devil Review. Check our guidelines and then submit your work. The editors are always on the lookout for new visions and voices and we like nothing better than helping an emerging or previously unpublished artist to reach a wider audience.

Thanks to everyone that came to the PDR launch party last week–we counted at least sixty people! 

Party-goers were treated to readings from contributors, danced to the Factory Seconds street band, and loaded up on free swag from the PDR merch table. Check out the gallery below for pics from the event.

We’ve been hard at work making goodies to give away at our release party this Monday. We even got our hands on a button-maker this weekend and pressed about a hundred pinbacks; there are nine kinds–collect ‘em all!

PDR is non-commercial and committed to delivering our content and sharing our swag free of charge. There are costs to keeping the magazine going, though, so we’ve added a “donate” button to the site.  We hope you’ll have a look at our campaign at indiegogo.com and see if you’ve got any change between the proverbial couch cushions.

Join us for the party on Monday night at Middlesex Lounge and you’ll also hear readings by Laura Cherry, Christine Gentry, Chris Hall, Norah Piehl, and Kate Racculia. Stick around for music by the activist street band, Factory Seconds, and leave with a free shirt, broadside, or button. See you there!

You can now get Printer’s Devil Review for your iPad, iPhone, or Ipod Touch from Apple’s iBookstore. It costs $1 to download, but you can still get it as a free PDF from our website.  

Also, don’t forget that we’re still passing the hat, looking for friends who want to help us out with donations; we’ll list you in the magazine. Soon, we also plan to sweeten the deal with some swag for donors. Stay tuned.

So, we have lots to tell you:

• As of today, we’re officially open to submissions of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and visual art.  Check our submissions page for section guidelines and to access our online submission form.
• On Friday, we interviewed writer, performing artist, and filmmaker Miranda July about her latest project. You can listen to the interview here.
• Our site has been slowing down or crashing sometimes–our budget webserver just isn’t cutting it anymore.  We’ve launched a campaign through IndieGogo; we’re trying to raise $500 in 120 days to trade up to a server that doesn’t crash all the time. We hope you’ll spread the word and if you’re flush, maybe consider contributing.
• Bostonians, we’re planning a launch party for May or June. We’re thinking a bar; a radical marching band; readings from contributors; and free swag like PDR T-shirts, buttons, and hand-printed broadsides.  How does that sound?