Wheelhouse/PRESS & Other Simulacra

I'm beginning to get very excited about the next Wheelhouse, which features a double issue, or, rather, a regular issue of the journal plus online PRESS Literary Conference anthology (see PRESS post below for details). The design is really taking shape--thanks to Meghan McNealy, poet and book artist. Before all I could see were (very good) formations of marks on stacks and stacks of paper. Now I'm seeing shapes. We aim to get proofs into contributor hands by (very latest) June 24, and to get the issue and anthology out very soon afterward.

Above is the mock-up of the PRESS Anthology cover. Who knows, by the 24th we might scrap it for another cover, but at this point I hope not. Contributors to the anthology include:

Rodrigo Toscano
Kristin Prevallet
Jules Boykoff
Kaia Sand
Roger Farr
Laura Elrick
Leonard Schwartz
Meghan McNealy
Tung-Hui Hu
K. Lorraine Grahm
Tom Orange
Sarah Mangold
David Wolach
Jessica Baron
Steven Hendricks
Daniel Brohzutsky
Mark Wallace

And contributors to Wheelhouse 8 include:

Zach Schomberg & Emily Kendal Frey
Summer Block Kumar
Ryan Daley
Deborah Poe
Garth Graeper
Marja Hagborg
Joel Chace
Kristina Marie Darling

Elizabeth Bryant

and several others. See post below, as with all this lovely work coming out, we'll also be releasing, hopefully within the next few days, three new chapbooks by:

Thom Donovan
Juliet Cook
Matina Stamatakis/John Moore Williams

More chapbooks on the way after that, so Wheelhouse has been busy, due in large part to reup of the Wheelhouse Arts Collective. Since Wheelhouse's active members moved all over the place two years ago, we'd been working primarily as a journal of two editors--Eden Schultz, our arts director, and myself, the editor of the journal and press. In the past few months we've expanded, and now editors Meghan McNealy, Lionel Lints, Andrew Csank, Kate Robinson, and Gianna D'Emilio have come on board. All recent graduates of Evergreen's writing and book arts program, they're younger and more energetic than I am. So, Eden finally has some company that can keep up. Stand by for the work that is due out; I hope we, as a press, can continue to do such fine poetry, essay, prose, etc, the justice it deserves.

Tentative Guest Lineup for PRESS 2009-10

As Wheelhouse Magazine & Press puts its final touches on the PRESS 2008-9 Anthology, The Evergreen State College and Wheelhouse Magazine & Press, along with other generous donors, are gearing up for PRESS 2009-10 - details on events and schedule as they come. Here is the (very) preliminary list of guest poets who will read from & perform their work and contribute to program workshops next year (subject to change):

Eleni Stecopoulos, author of, most recently, Autoimmunology and Armies of Compassion

David Buuk, author of, most recently, The Shunt (see initial thoughts post below)

CA Conrad, author of, most recently, The Book of Frank and Deviant Propulsion

Erica Kaufman, author of, most recently, Censory Impulse, curator/publisher of Belladonna Books / The Belladonna Reading Series

Kythe Heller, author of, most recently, Immolation

Wheelhouse Updates

Rodrigo Toscano & Tom Orange in Rodrigo Toscano's Collapsible Poetics Theater, PRESS 2008, The Evergreen State College




SPECIAL PRESS ANTHOLOGY COMING THIS MONTH

One year ago Wheelhouse Magazine & Press, in concert with The Evergreen State College (and other donors - see website list), hosted what has now turned into an annual event: PRESS, a set of workshops, discussions, readings, and performances committed to working through the myriad intersections between text arts and left political movements. What, for instance, are we as writers doing? What are our organizational politics and/or our poetics? Rob Halpern & NONSITE COLLECTIVE kicked off this year's PRESS, and a day-long set of workshops and performative events are closing us out.

We at Wheelhouse are hard at work at finalizing the collection of submissions. We're in the home stretch of designing and producing this new special issue of Wheelhouse, the PRESS Anthology, PRESS:ESC (cover design by Andrew Topel). In this issue, new work from:

Rodrigo Toscano
Kristin Prevallet
Jules Boykoff
Kaia Sand
Roger Farr
Laura Elrick
Leonard Schwartz
Meghan McNealy
Tung-Hui Hu
K. Lorraine Grahm
Tom Orange
Sarah Mangold
David Wolach
Jessica Baron
Steven Hendricks
Daniel Brohzutsky
Mark Wallace

... and several other writers involved in last year's discussions. We're excited to re-up this conversation, to broaden and torque it via recontextualization and imminent critique, to extend our dialogic processes. Thanks to all the contributors, donors, and organizers of PRESS for making this issue come to life. Keep an eye out - slated release date, June 15.

FORTHCOMING CHAPBOOKS

The open chapbook submissions reading period has now closed. Check here and the Wheelhouse website (or the Wheelhouse Facebook Group Page) for future reading periods. If you have not heard back from us with regard to your submission, please be patient - we'll be in touch soon. Look out for new chapbooks fothcoming (more to come for this year) by:

Juliet Cook
Thom Donovan
Matina Stamatakis and John Moore Williams
Dorothy Lang and Jeff Crouch
Felino Soriano
Elizabeth Kate Switaj
Lars Palm
Laura Carter
Ed Baker

... plus...

DZANC BOOKS & STORY SOUTH AWARDS

Congratulations to Tom Sheehan. His prose work "Knickers" was selected by Dzanc Books' as one of the "Best of the Web 2008." "Knickers" will be published in Dzanc Books' Best of 2008 anthology. Congratulations also to CL Bledsoe. CL's "Leaving the Garden" was chosen by Story South's Million Writer's Award as one of the Notable Stories of 2008. A huge thank you to Tom, CL, and Dzanc Books and Story South - and the judges for these awards. Go to Dzanc Books to pre-order the Best of 2008 Anthology, and while you're at it, order the Best of 2007 Anthology, with two works from Wheelhouse contributors. Dzanc Books is a not-profit press; proceeds of book sales go to help their urban schools writing initiatives, as well as several other good works.

ALERT FROM AMY KING: READ THIS, THEN ACT!


message 1: by Amy (new)
04/13/2009 09:49AM

135295 A couple of months ago, Amazon quietly unleashed some sort of campaign to strip certain books of their sales rankings. Unfortunately (& not so coincidentally), most of the books targeted fell under the “Gay/Lesbian” category. Once removed from the sales rankings and placed within the “Adult” category, these books no longer show up in search engines or in Amazon searches. In other words, sales death. How to kill gay books in one easy step? Watch while Amazon quietly removes gay and lesbian titles and renders them invisible. Censorship at its deadliest. Many good people have already been posting and protesting, and though you may not rely on big name middlemen for your goods, much of America does. Make it your business to send a word of protest Amazon’s way!



~~~~


UPDATE – I just checked. I’M THE MAN WHO LOVES YOU, my book of poems that has less sexual content than the abstinence-promoting, Twilight, has been relegated to the “Adult” category because I happened to have labeled it, myself, Gay and Lesbian. Go figure. It ain’t even erotic poetry,peeps!
http://www.amazon.com/im-man-who-loves-y...

Lots of links to folks reactions on my blog: http://amyking.org/

The Huffington Post -- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/emma-rubys...

A Petition -- http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/in-prot...

And of course, more seed for the campaign to use places like SPD (Small Press Distribution), indie bookstores, etc.

I'd check your own book if there's any GLBT interest in it -- anyone can label your book as such, which Amazon will have used to remove your book from their search engines.

Best,

Amy

_______


Amy's Alias
http://amyking.org/

Rob Halpern at Evergreen May 27th (spread ---> word)

Wheelhouse Magazine & Press Press Anthology, among other sundry things

Jules Boykoff & Kaia Sand, evening reading (Photo Courtesy of Tom Orange)

File under: Better Never Than Late?




Here (where? who? how?) at Wheelhouse Magazine & Press we're in the home stretch of our yearlong quest to put out our special PRESS Anthology [PRESS ESC] issue. The project is the immolation dross of last year's PRESS Literary Conference, a Wheelhouse/Evergreen State College co-sponsored event that responded in myriad ways to the multiple question of how and whether experimental text arts engages left political movements. We worked in small groups, formed panel discussions and small projects on urgent, intersecting, problems: the anti-war movement and poetries; globalism and globalization viz. translation and the problematic of, to paraphrase, "an imaginary colonialism that responds to the new colonialism, often couched as POST-colonialism"; towards a poetics of disability; performative and interventionist poetics after Situation (Jules Boykoff and Kaia Sand); work on individual writers and collectives (Toscano and Collapsible Poetics Theater, revisiting Mac Low, among others); new media and new poetries - the list is, well, quite long.

Now, with new hands on deck--editors Gianna D'Emilio, Lionel Lints, Jenny Paris, Meghan McNealy, and Andrew Csank--we're collecting our last set of submissions. Rather than a "proceedings" of the conference, due to the performative and ephemeral nature of the work presented and wrestled with over the three days, we decided that it would be more interesting, more lively, indeed more urgent, to publish an anthology that accounts for work that was shared last year, but also new work, from as many of the contributors as we could accommodate.

Very excited to have further exchange, as a year has passed, as our political environments have necessarily shifted, to see what contributors are up to. Of particular note is the work of Rodrigo Toscano. His Collapsible Poetics Theater has moved more deeply into the gestural and combative - for more on such developments, look out for a forthcoming essay in Jacket by Wheelhouse contributor Jason Conger. Also of note, for me anyway, is the near total developmental shift I've seen in the upcoming writers, many of them Evergreen students or recent graduates. As Mark Wallace mentioned not too long ago on his blog, I'm not quite sure what the "youth of today" is up to poetically, what to say of anything approaching trend lines or tendancies or - but collaboration is a thread that I'm delighted to find over and again, in new and deliberate ways. Not to mention the number of PRESS participants who, after graciously coming out to the woods for a weekend, have since come out with new books or first, done new activist work. So, despite my worries that the time lag would prove too problematic, I'm discovering that a year between process and publication has given us, collectively, time to do what we do such that some fascinating emergence comes with juxtaposing the two - the events and the forthcoming book. New books of note (or that come to mind & I'm sure there are others I am forgetting) come from Toscano, from Kristin Prevallet, from Zhang Er (her edited volume of translated contemporary Chinese poetry has been one of my main resources this year), from Jessica Baron, the Belladonna crew (happy 10th anniversary!), Lindsey Boldt, K. Lorraine Grahm, Mark Wallace, and a gorgeous set of cycles, soon (I am certain) to be collected as a full book, by Laura Elrick. Oh, and me - my bestseller.

Still hoping to hear from several participants - so if you are reading this, saying, "hey, I participated in PRESS & have not gotten an email solicitation for materials up to 15 pp" --- CONTACT ME. And SOON (by May 30), as this year's Recessionary PRESS literary conference will coincide with the anthology from last year's. And this year's, despite the economic crises, perhaps because of it, will be a fascinating focus on performative events - derive-esque work, spread out through the city of Olympia, and over a week - with Rob Halpern & the NONSITE COLLECTIVE starting us off. SO: contact me. Tracking you down is very difficult, especially when you are running from the law. Quite simply, you are difficult to locate. We at Wheelhouse do not condone the GPS tracking device. Not even Google maps, as useful as they are.