Potomac Review Issue 51 – Look for It!

At last!  The Potomac Review’s issue 51 is here. If you are a subscriber, you should have received your copy in the mail by now, and no doubt you have already begun reading it. If you would like a copy, click here.

This issue features three fiction contest winners: Shweta Sen’s “The Essay,” Tracy Alig Dowling’s “To Live Without Air,” and Elaine Burr’s “Skipping School.” We hope you will notice the poignancy and polish of the prose in each.

Other notable pieces include but are not limited to Mike Craig’s “Daniel,” a flash fiction piece about a single moment between boys at play that lingers with the narrator to this day. Janice Gary’s essay, “Random Acts,” details her experience of coping with mental wellness during those disturbing weeks when two snipers terrorized the Washington, D.C. area in the fall of 2002. And “Counting,” Eileen Kennedy’s poem about numbers and tallies, reveals a startling reality of our times.

Here’s a complete list of contributors we hope you will enjoy.

Fiction: Dave Barrett, Elaine Burr, Joseph Cavano, Natalia Cortes Chaffin, Gary Ciuffetelli, Mike Craig, Meghan Dombrink-Green, Carol Ghiglieri, Craig Hartglass, Dixon Hearne, Michelle Kaeser, Shweta Sen.

Nonfiction: Deborah Guerra, Jennifer McStotts, Kerry Paul May, Linda Morefield.

Poetry: Labake Akinyosoye, Bill Brown, Bill Christophersen, Jennifer Lauren Collins, Jona Colson, Deborah H. Doolittle, Darren C. Demaree, Daryl Farmer, Tina Raye Dayton, Sonja James, Rebecca Hazelton, Peter Layton, Eileen Kennedy, Tim Leach, Lynn Levin, Terri McCord, Greg Moglia, Kirby Olson, Don Pomerantz, Donna Pucciani, Richard Schiffman, William Snyder Jr., Rose Solari, Sasha West, Michael T. Young, Gerald Zipper.

The Russian Soul: An Interview with Author Nadia Kalman

Volunteer Andrea interviews Nadia Kalman, author of The Cosmopolitans.

Andrea: How did you know that you had to write a novel about a family of Jewish Ukrainian-Americans?

Nadia Kalman: Growing up, I had many chances (bored substitute teachers, no cable television) to watch and re-watch the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Many years later, I became interested in taking the themes of the musical and the Sholem Aleichem stories it was based upon – generational discord, cultural confusion – and applying them to a modern family. Then as well as now, parents and children can have very different ideas about what makes someone a “perfect match.” Then as well as now, misunderstandings can lead to tragedy, comedy or both at once.

Of course, there are differences between my family and Tevye’s. For one, the Jewish traditions the musical celebrates are the same ones the Soviet regime tried to strip away. I began to wonder what “tradition” meant for families like mine and tried to find answers through the characters I invented for The Cosmopolitans.

Andrea: In your novel, you do a great job of switching between points of view (three daughters, a mother, a father and an extended set of family and friends). How did you learn how to communicate point of view so well?

Nadia Kalman: First, thank you! Some publishers turned down the novel because they wanted a single point of view. I knew, though, that I wanted a novel that was like a shtetl, where people meddled in and commented upon each other’s stories. As I wrote, I found it was helpful to follow my curiosity: if I wanted to know what Yana thought of her sister’s marriage, I entered Yana’s head.

Andrea: Why did you decide to tell the story of Russian sensibilities through the mother’s relationship with a talking scrap of her wedding dress?

Nadia Kalman: The elusive identity of the Russian soul is a common cultural trope. The literature is always asking just how great, or base, it really is. Until recently, a show on Radio Svoboda, entitled Encyclopedia of the Russian Soul, explored the question on a weekly, thematic basis. There is even an online quiz in English, no less, that will tell you whether you have a Russian soul, and lend insight on its capaciousness.

In writing this book, I wanted to give the Russian soul concrete form and set it loose on someone. That someone had to be Stalina, the mother. Of everyone in the family, she is the most eager to cut all ties to the Russian past. People like that are often involved in a lifelong, secret argument with a deeply nostalgic part of themselves; or, in Stalina’s case, with a deeply nostalgic scrap of fabric.

Andrea: How did you find your agent and/or publisher?

Nadia Kalman: I found a literary agent through a friend, but that agent was unable to sell the novel. I then began sending it around on my own, to independent presses, and eventually sold it to Livingston. My experience with independent presses in general, and with Livingston Press in particular, has been very positive.

Andrea: How is your book promotion structured? Any lessons you can share?

Nadia Kalman: Before one of my first readings, the organizer of the event, Gabriel Cohen, sent us an essay he had written. I quote a part of it below, because I found it so useful:

And that’s my biggest tip:  think about your reading in terms of what the audience wants. They’re not interested in helping you test your material in order to see how it might go over with future readers. They’re not worried about whether your reading provides the most accurate representation of your book. They’re at your reading for one paramount reason: they want to have a rich, enjoyable live experience. So conceive of your reading as a unique, self-contained dramatic performance, designed to make your listeners happy.

I’d also advise writers to space readings apart from one another, so that friends have a chance to rest.

Andrea: What’s your next project?

Nadia Kalman: I’m writing a novel about a high-school chemistry teacher with Messianic delusions; its working title is The Skeptical Alchemist.  An excerpt from the novel will be published in the next issue of PEN America.

As a child, Nadia Kalman emigrated with her family from the former Soviet Union. Formerly a teacher and assistant principal, she now works as a writer-in-the-schools with Teachers & Writers Collaborative in New York City. She was a two-time fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and has published stories in Subtropics, the Canadian magazine The Walrus, and elsewhere. Her first novel, The Cosmopolitans, won the Emerging Writer Award from Moment magazine and was a finalist for the Rohr Prize in Jewish Literature. Nadia recently received a 2012 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. On June 5, Kalman be speaking at the Long Beach Hadassah on Long Island. On June 7, she will be at the Palisades JCC. And on June 12, she will be at the JCC in Los Gatos, CA.

In the Spirit of H.L. Mencken: Baltimore Nonfiction Writers Showcase Their Talents

Volunteer Alisha blogs about the April installment of Baltimore’s New Mercury Reading Series.

On a recent Saturday in April, I had a chance to tour author H.L. Mencken’s former home, which was officially closed as a house museum in 1997, and now opens only for special functions. Two members of the Friends of Mencken House greeted me outside of the three-story rowhouse. While I chatted with them, a woman walked briskly up to the house, clutching two of Mencken’s books—The Vintage Mencken and Mencken Chrestomathy—closely to her chest. As I stared at her and wondered who she planned to have sign her books, she explained, “I want his spirit to touch the books.”

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers, author of Mencken: The American Iconoclast, led the tour, treating us to recordings of Mencken interviews and offering anecdotes about the author such as his penchant for carrying seeds of morning glory in his pockets so that he could spread them “throughout Baltimore because he loved that shade of blue.”

During the tour, the book-toting woman listened intently to Rodgers. When the group was in Mencken’s study, I noticed that she had placed the books on one of the built-in shelves which were otherwise empty. I wondered perhaps if this was to allow Mencken’s spirit to more thoroughly “touch the books.”

It is with Mencken’s spirit in mind that the monthly New Mercury Reading series in Baltimore was established. The series, named after Mencken’s journal The American Mercury, is going strong as it enters its third year. “We don’t agree with everything that Mencken wrote, but we appreciate his independent thinking and willingness to challenge orthodoxies of all kinds—and the fact that 86 years ago, his Baltimore-based journal became a nexus for freelance writing and spirited debate,” say Deborah Rudacille and John Barry, co-curators of the reading series, on New Mercury’s website.

On Saturday, April 21, the series featured writers Bill Hughes, D.R. Belz, Geraldine Fagan and John Stabb. Bill Hughes—who lists amateur soccer player, longshoreman, attorney, professional actor and photographer among his occupations—opened the evening with a piece previously published in City Paper about Harry Agro, a World War II U.S. Navy Seaman. Hughes’ emotion was evident throughout the reading as he recounted how Agro survived close calls aboard the Luckenbach and Sawokia, both sunk by torpedoes, and endured two years and nine months in a Japanese prison camp. “All of the men caught below deck when the ship was first attacked died. By a stroke of sheer luck, Agro happened to be on deck when the first bomb hit,” Hughes wrote. “Despite serious wounds to his head and leg, he managed to get off of the dying ship, and after spending the night in the water, was picked up the next day by the crew of the Michel.”

D.R. Belz, a Baltimore satirist and author of White Asparagus, moved on to less serious territory with short, humorous pieces, including titles such as “Occupy My Trousers,” “Bibliphrenia,” “Underachievers in Heaven” and “Indispensible Oyster.” In his piece on heaven, Belz entertained the audience with quips like, “You can’t even keep water out of the basement reliably. What have you humans been doing?” Incidentally, Mencken’s basement, which a few of us had explored during the house tour, showed no visible signs of water damage, quite a feat in Baltimore.

The next reader, Geraldine Fagan, a visiting fellow at the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in Washington, D.C., read excerpts of her forthcoming book Believing in Russia – Religious Policy after Communism. Based in Moscow, Fagan has monitored religious affairs across Russia for more than a decade and is currently associated with Forum 18 News Service. Her thought-provoking narrative explores the country’s surprising diversity of religions beyond the Russian Orthodox Church, including Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist establishments, and raises important questions about the role of religion in public life. Remembering my own time in Russia in the early 1990s when I sometimes accompanied my “adopted” Russian grandmother on visits to her Moscow neighborhood’s Russian Orthodox Church, I was surprised to learn of the extent of the country’s religious diversity.

John Stabb finished out the evening with excerpts from his memoir, a work-in-progress titled Government Issue: Creation of a Monster. As the former front man of the D.C. hardcore/punk/pop-rock band Government Issue, Stabb intertwined his personal story with the history of punk rock. He seemed to transport himself back to this time with his heavy, thudding rendition of “Everybody’s Getting Banned”—part punk rock performance, part reading. Later, I found myself wondering what H.L. Mencken would have made of this scene.

The evening offered a little something for everyone—spanning World War II, oysters, religion and punk rock. One could imagine many pieces from this compelling, ongoing reading series slipping easily among the pages of one of Mencken’s The American Mercury—keeping his spirit alive. The book-toting woman on the tour would have appreciated that.

Note: New Mercury is on hiatus in May, but returns in June. Potomac Review contributors Sue Eisenfeld and Alexander Chip will be reading in June and July, respectively.

A Thank You Note

Editor Zachary Benavidez reflects on his time leading the Potomac Review.

When Julie Wakeman-Linn first announced that she would be spending a year-and-a-half abroad in Tanzania, I was envious. Like many of us in the English department at MC-Rockville who also serve the Potomac Review, Julie is a writer. Imagine all the time she would have, looking out at the Indian ocean from her home in Dar es Salaam, drinking something cool, spending her days writing. That’s the life. Indeed, Julie wasted no time setting up Gecko Tails her blog about writing, editing, publishing, and other experiences in Africa. Yes, I said editing and publishing. While in Tanzania, Julie produced Their Voices, Their Stories. The book is a collection of fiction by the Bethsaida Orphan Girls’ Secondary School, and the proceeds go to the school.

Julie will be returning to her post as Editor-in-Chief of the Potomac Review in the fall of 2012, busying herself from one continent to another! Over the last three semesters, while serving in her stead as interim editor, I have learned so much about this machine that is the Potomac Review literary and arts journal. I’ve marveled at the quality of work submitted to us; and I’ve enjoyed extending my reach further into the literary world through conferences, contests, and other connections. An editorship is no easy task: reading submissions, managing interns, staying in touch with the many associate editors that freely give their time to reading submissions, not to mention keeping a blog, building an issue for publication, and keeping up with my own teaching and writing. But what fun I have had!

These past semesters, I’ve had the opportunity to work with some great student interns who have interests in creative writing and publishing. Morgan Moyer, Antonio Reid, Emily Alexander, Bob Harris, Marc Buckhannon, Josh Johnson, and Karolina Gajdeczka really make the daily management of our literary journal possible. If it wasn’t for them, submissions wouldn’t get passed on to associate readers, rejections and acceptances wouldn’t get mailed to contributors, and contests wouldn’t be advertised. Thanks gang!

Early on in my term, I met Andrea Pawley at the Conversations & Connections conference in D.C. She’s a local writer with a full-time job in Washington, but she expressed her interest in volunteering for our journal. I invited her to a few staff meetings, and soon she had ideas for revitalizing our online presence. Because of Andrea’s help, we have regular blog posts, weekly Facebook updates, and a five-fold boost in our online readership! Thanks for your service, AP.

My thanks also to Will Grofic, our managing editor and layout designer, who helped keep me up to date with the literary goings-on both locally and nationally. And last but certainly not least, a big thank you to Mrs. Om Rusten, our administrative aid and webmaster. Om has worked with Julie for years, and she knows the editor’s duties like the back of her hand. Om was able to show me the day-to-day steps I needed to take; she helped me with the many forms I needed to fill out (so much paperwork), and she reminded me of budget demands and important deadlines. This job would be impossible without her.

I’ve also received great support from many of my colleagues in the English department and from Carolyn Terry, Dean of Humanities. Many contributors have also been gracious in their correspondences with me. Some things I’ve learned as editor: rejecting submissions is painful; accepting submissions is rewarding; and I have more respect for the folks on both sides of the submission manager–those writers praying for acceptance and those readers praying to encounter a magical piece of writing.

Adieu, Zachary Benavidez

Conversations and Connections Writer’s Conference: A Reminder of the Creative Forces That Drive Us

Intern Karolina shares her inspirations from the Conversations and Connections Writer’s Conference.

As I moved into the crowded lobby at the Conversations and Connections Writer’s Conference, my eyes zoned in on the refreshments table: there was coffee! Armed with my free caffeine, I was prepared to face the day’s events and was herded into an auditorium where Dave Housley gave a few opening remarks. He congratulated the audience of writers for being up so early on a weekend to hone their craft and network, beginning the day on a positive note.

Since I’m finishing up school (I graduate in December!) and about to enter the workforce, I decided to go to “Writing Outside the Academy: Also Known as Writers Who Have ‘Real’ Jobs” as my first panel of the day. Panel member Amber Sparks aptly reminded us that “we’re in good company” and that the trick is to just find the time, space, ideas and community to be a successful writer, even if writing is just your alter ego. She also offered a useful list of resources for writers on her website. The panelists also suggested, “let writing be your leisure” and “chip away at it” throughout the week to “keep yourself engaged” with the craft, rather than waiting for huge blocks of time to sit down and write for the first time. Though I don’t have a day job yet, this message resonated strongly with me since I am pretty busy—I have a full course-load at school, Mount St. Mary’s University, where I edit the literary magazine, Lighted Corners, and, of course, I also intern at Potomac Review! It may sound silly, but it was actually a relief to me to hear that I don’t have to sit down and write for hours—writing a few minutes at a time in my journal or on scraps of paper still counts.

The panel that I found to be the most inspiring was the last panel of the day. I went to “The Necessity of Being Unusual: 3 Perspectives on Writing.” The panelists were Matt Kirkpatrick, Adam Novy and Tom Bligh. Matt Kirkpatrick started the panel off, claiming that writing consists of three parts: 1) form, 2) content and 3) magic. Yes, magic. Kirkpatrick described magic as the original creative spark we get when we first start writing something. He encouraged nurturing that original “germ of an idea” and suggested that the best writing comes from “following that energy and exploring it.” Tom Bligh explained, “magic is a feeling” that we use to fuel our writing. This panel focused on thinking about writing differently, in a way that nurtures the kind of writing you care about. They recommended thinking about where your ideas come from and what you do to actively create ideas.

After a while, the focus shifted to revision and endings. Adam Novy told us that “revision gets to the heart of what writing is supposed to do” while Kirkpatrick said that “editing is exploratory” and that we should “cultivate generosity” when we are editing our own work. Instead of critically examining the flaws in our writing, Kirkpatrick advised “reading as an explorer and finding opportunities, or places for expansion”—places of magic, where we still had the spark. In other words—follow your creative force. As for endings, Novy suggested that next time you are at a dinner party and someone tells a story, “pay attention to where they end.” Bligh encouraged us to “end in a different way; break the routine.”

The message of the day was clear—nurture your writing. We all took a good step toward that by just going to the conference. The next step will be finding the time and space to develop our writing without getting tangled up in details of craft. We should write what inspires us and focus on sustaining that feeling of “magic” when we write. Going to the conference reminded me of that insatiable urge to tell stories that was the reason I started writing in the first place. I enjoyed the fresh take on advice about writing: overall, it just comes down to finding your creativity and doing everything you can to explore, nurture and develop it.

Potomac Review Blog Volunteer Wanted

The Potomac Review blog is looking for an unpaid volunteer to work on the blog from the beginning of June until the end of August.

Volunteers for the Potomac Review blog can expect to build their online presence and enhance their understanding of literary journal processes while supporting the mission of a journal that publishes fiction, nonfiction and poetry by authors at all stages of their careers.

The volunteer would work with the blogmaster and the other members of the Potomac Review editorial staff to identify two Washington D.C.-area literary events a month to attend and to blog about. The volunteer would also be invited to conduct an author interview and to blog about the writing process. Over the summer, the Potomac Review staff meets monthly after 6pm either at Montgomery College or at a location in downtown D.C. The volunteer would be expected to attend those three meetings, but the vast majority of the work over the summer would be done via email and the phone.

If you are interested in this opportunity, send an email to Andrea Pawley and include a 500-700 word writing sample related to a literary event you have attended. Applications will be accepted through May 25th.

May’s Hot Opener – Fiction by Ian Sax

On the first day of every month, the Potomac Review publishes a “Hot Opener” online. The Hot Opener is often prose or poetry that achieved runner-up status in a previous contest or that the editor chose to highlight from the great stories that the Potomac Review receives but cannot fit into the paper version of the journal.

This month’s Hot Opener is “What She Told Me” by Ian Sax.

Here’s an excerpt:

“She told me she was too young—that she hadn’t yet acquired an understanding of men. He was three years older, twenty-five, the son of a wealthy family in Tai Zhong and working for the largest brokerage house in Taipei…”

Click here for the rest of this month’s story.

If you would like to see a list of all the hot openers, this link will get you there.

Enjoy!