On a bright Friday morning in late April, I met up with Michele Kotler, Founder and Director of The Community-Word Project (CWP) for a classroom visit to PS/MS 279 in the Bronx. In their own words,

CWP is a New York City based arts-in-education organization that inspires children in underserved communities to read, interpret and respond to their world and to become active citizens through collaborative arts residencies and teacher training program.

David Ciminello and Students

The K-8 Captain Manuel Rivera, Jr. School bustled with activity. As we entered a classroom packed with 26 fourth-graders, David Ciminello greeted us. David brought poetry, visual art, and performance art together as part of his year-long Teaching Artist residency with CWP.

That spring morning, Mr. Ciminello opened class with vocal calisthenics—a chorus of “Oh I feel so good”—that had the students gleefully chanting those words in the attitude of bacon frying, the color orange, and New York City.

David introduced the subject of the day—Odes—by asking a student to read “My Mother” by Melvin E. Lewis and asked the class to offer ideas on the sensory detail, metaphor, and anaphora of the poem. The students then launched into writing odes to community superheroes. Many of the children chose a parent, sibling, or caretaker and focused so completely on the task at hand that they hardly noticed when the principal announced through the P.A. system that the billowing smoke outside came from a blaze at a dry cleaners some blocks away. Ms. Thomas, the class’s teacher, moved among her pupils offering encouragement.

As the students read out lines from their odes, it was clear the muse thrived among the young poets:

My mother is a steaming bowl of water when she gets mad

My dad is peace
Even when he’s fighting in the war

My mom is the moon, following me every step I take

Michele Kotler in the classroom.

CWP has been working with PS/MS 279 for seven years, and the relationships Ms. Kotler has built up within the school over time could be seen in the enthusiastic greetings by teachers and administrators in the hallways. Since its inception in 1997, CWP has served more than 10,000 students and currently has resident artists in 16 New York City public schools.

The arts have suffered in many public schools as they face budget shortfalls, increased standardized testing, and difficult either/or decisions. I take heart that nonprofits like CWP marshal resources, and resident artists, to infuse a bit more poetry, art, and literature into those classrooms. CWP is one program of many—which organizations or individuals in your community have championed literature and the arts for young people? Maybe you’re one of them. If not, consider getting involved.

• Make a virtual visit to a CWP classroom:

• See some of the CWP students’ murals and poems:

• Interested in making a difference in your own community? Applications for CWP’s 2011-12 Teaching Artist Training and Internship Program are now available. Says the website, “Through our rigorous, year-long Teaching Artist Training and Internship Program, professional writers, visual artists, and performers learn to transform their talents into creative teaching tools to inspire at-risk young people. Every year, over 40 artists graduate from our program, ready to help underserved students gain the literacy, creative thinking, teamwork, and public speaking skills they need to thrive, inside and outside the classroom.” To learn more about the program and apply, visit the CWP website. Applications are due September 21, 2011.

Even people actually going to AWP are welcome to join the party – check in online once you’ve taken in all the panels and book fair you can absorb for the day.

There are email updates, a website, and a Facebook page with all the latest. Meg even made a series of videos last year, featuring her with an otter-like friend (perhaps an actual otter – I’ll let you be the judge). Without further ado, here’s where you can find the goods:

Also, Fiction Writers Review will be participating in the yAWP by selecting from this year’s yAWPers one lucky winner of a signed copy of Alison Espach’s novel The Adults, and one lucky winner for a signed copy of Erika Dreifus’s story collection Quiet Americans. Since both Alison and Erika will be doing signings at our table on the Friday of AWP, we wanted to spread a bit of the book-love around. Stay tuned to Meg’s site for further details of the give-away next week. Viva la yAWP!

The Fiction Project is an opportunity to tell stories in a different way by fusing text and visual art. Add your voice to this year’s coast-to-coast tour and create new work grounded in the act of writing. After traveling across the country, the Fiction Project will enter into the Brooklyn Art Library’s narrative collection, archiving your stories to share them with the public.

Anyone – from anywhere in the world – can be a part of the project. To participate and receive a journal that will travel with the 2011 tour, start by choosing a theme to the right.

The themes (there are dozens) range from “It will be fun, I swear” to “Things that changed other things” to “Lines and grids” – open to interpretation and enticing, as you can see. The deadline to sign-up for this year’s Fiction Project is March 31, 2011. Your stories and drawings could go on an odyssey from Winter Park, Florida to Seattle, Washington – a nice new year’s present to them, don’t you think?

A group of publishing professionals, Do the Write Thing for Nashville, is working to raise money for flood victims by auctioning off signed copies of books, manuscript critiques by agents and editors, writing retreats, and other lit-related swag. So far, the group has raised $5,000, with many more auctions still to come.

Want to help? Items up for bids are listed on the group’s webpage, and bidding is open for three days. See the full rules for details. You can also follow the group’s auctions on Facebook. And, of course, you can donate directly to help the city of Nashville; here’s a list of organizations accepting money, clothes and food, and time.

To participate in Short Story Month 2010: The Giveaway Project:

• (1) This month, post an entry on your blog recommending a recently published short story collection (or two, or three).
  The post can be long or short, a review or merely a rave. The one requirement is that you, the blogger, have read and loved the book(s) in question.
• (2) Offer a copy of the book (or each book) as a giveaway to one lucky person who comments on your blog.
  You can choose the winner through a drawing, or by the wittiness of his/her remarks, or by whatever criteria you choose. For FWR’s posts (we’ll have three giveaways), we’re asking readers to tell us about (or at least the name of) a collection they love or one they’re looking forward to reading. Comments that don’t mention a specific collection will not be eligible for the drawing.

[NOTE for blogger-authors: You can absolutely give away a copy of your own collection--but in an effort to keep this as much about community as publicity, please also offer to give away a second book that isn't one of yours.]

• (3) Announce the winner(s) on May 31, 2010, and arrange to send out copies of any books you are giving away.

If you’re participating, drop us an email at fictionwritersreview@gmail.com to let us know. We’ll add you to the list of participating blogs/sites and link to you from this frequently updated page on our site.

So far, participating bloggers include:

- Fiction Writers Review: Anne Stameshkin / Giveaway: If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This by Robin Black.

- Practicing Writing: Erika Dreifus / Giveaways: Who I Was Supposed to Be by Susan Perabo and The Pale of Settlement by Margot Singer

- Fiction Writers Review: Celeste Ng / Giveaway: Southern Cross by Skip Horack

- Fiction Writers Review: Lee Thomas / Giveaway: Short People by Joshua Furst

- Replacement Blog: The Replacement Press / Giveaway: If You Lived Here, You’d Already Be Home by John Jodizo

- Fiction Writers Review: Jeremiah Chamberlin / Giveaway: What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

-Before There Were Children: Lucy Blue / Giveaway: Going Away Shoes by Jill McCorkle

I loved this morning ritual, which is why I never complained about getting up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday to trudge to work. I liked it for many reasons, not just the pastries. For one, New York publishing was closed, which meant I didn’t having anyone from accounts payable telling me that I owed them tens of thousands of dollars and that a collection agency—always, always from Texas—would soon be contacting our business. So that was good. But more importantly (and more seriously) I loved the interaction with our regular customers.

Jeremiah and Dean, 1998: photo credit James Wilson

Paul, who read the Financial Times and who was originally from London, would typically be the first to arrive, often before I had even unlocked the door. He urged me to read Penelope Fitzgerald, and eventually gave me a copy of The Bookshop to be sure I did. Then came the psychology professor and his wife, both of whom loved to hit the Saturday Farmer’s Market early so they’d have their pick of produce. He raved about Oliver Sacks, she about Rohinton Mistry. One by one, the familiar faces came through the door. I don’t remember everyone’s name, but to this day I can still tell you what they read.

Now, before I paint too bucolic a picture of bookselling, let me say that managing an independent bookstore was one of the hardest jobs of my life. In addition to the aforementioned accounting departments of publishers, and the constant threat of going out of business, there was an endless amount of work trying to bring in books that readers would love, finding ways to connect those books with the right audience, arranging author visits, haggling with advertisers, sitting on downtown development committees, and then the general headaches of staffing a store with human beings—some of whom were not inclined to work, others who were inclined to sleep in, and the occasional few who were inclined toward theft.

photo credit: Julio Garciah

But much of the time—particularly those Saturday mornings with their dependable rituals—I was able to talk with fellow readers who were enthusiastic about books. How we read them, why we read them, where we read them—you name it. And whether mysteries or metaphysics, non-fiction or nature writing, Chaucer or children’s literature, there was a world of writing to discuss, much of which I had never heard of. I loved nothing more than learning and contributing to that community.

It is this same sense of community that we try to foster at Fiction Writers Review. One that is made up of tastes and interests as divergent and varied as our contributors. But if there’s one unifying element, I have to say it’s that very same enthusiasm for books. An unabashed, unapologetic, earnest love of “shop talk.”

Talking shop is how I think of everything that we do at our site. For example, we aren’t interested in reviews that are purely evaluative. The “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” assessment of a book doesn’t interest me, or our fellow editors. Nor do we find much use for plot summary. After all, we’re not trying to help you figure out whether you want to read something based on its worth or subject matter. Instead, we push our writers to think of everything in terms of craft. Not “did I like it,” but what was the author doing stylistically that’s interesting to think about?

original illustration from

A good review should leave a reader with a new way of seeing the craft of writing, regardless of whether he or she ever picks up the book in question. Similarly, we publish in-depth interviews, most of which run 4,000-6,000 words. This allows enough time for a genuine dialogue to develop between interviewer and author, for the conversation to move beyond talking points. Most importantly, it becomes an actual exchange between two individuals who share a love of a thing. Likewise, our essays are guided by the interests and point of view of our contributors. We’ve published essays ranging from a re-reading of Chekhov’s famous “Lady with the Pet Dog” to a memoir of recovering from total hip replacement surgery while reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, to an exploration about why the next Great American Novel might just be a video game.

At the same time, however, Fiction Writers Review isn’t a wiki. This isn’t a posting board. While democratic in terms of content and contributors, there is rigorous editorial oversight, both in terms of what gets published (we often receive several submissions a day) and the multiple rounds of editing that occur with every piece, some of which have taken more than seventeen drafts over the course of five months to reach successful completion.

Now, none of this is unique to an online literary journal. The best print journals have rigorous acceptance and editing standards, they publish a range of essay topics, they feature sustained interviews, and they focus their reviews on thoughtful analysis. But what we also have is what the bookstore provided me: sustained, regular interaction. Almost every day we post new content on our blog—whether industry news, calls for submissions, news items, or general whimsy—and every three to five days we publish a new feature. So each day a reader visits the site, it feels as if there’s an ongoing conversation taking place. This is further underscored by the fact that readers can leave comments and questions and links to related material in response to the work itself. And if a particular author’s work interests them, at the end of each feature we also have a wealth of other resources they can explore—video clips of readings, podcasts, links to further interviews, reviews, and original work by the subject, as well as suggestions for other writers undertaking similar projects.

It is this ongoing dialogue that lends this particular venture its deeper sense of community, for me. Though I subscribe to Zoetrope and Tin House and the New Yorker and Poets & Writers, and an embarrassing number of magazines with glossy covers whose names I won’t speak here, to say nothing of quarterlies ranging from AQR to MQR to VQR—all of which I read and love—I don’t converse with them daily. Fiction Writers Review, on the other hand, is my water cooler. And there is something about the immediacy and closeness that is valuable.

The clearest example I have of this is when Barry Hannah passed away in early March. The news of his death was leaked via Twitter, and was quickly picked up by online journals like HTML Giant, The Rumpus, and The Millions. Long before the New York Times or any other periodical was running the story, a real-time outpouring of sympathy, as well as a wealth of tributes to his work and teaching, was unfolding from his friends, former students, and admirers. I was one of those individuals. Barry was my teacher at the Sewanee Writers Conference several years ago, and I spent the day after his death re-reading his work, meditating how it had shaped me, and writing a short essay about his influence. Because we are an online journal, we were able to publish it on our blog that very day, and within hours it was picked up and re-published (or linked to) in dozens of places across the country. [Here's the essay in its later, expanded form.] This is another unique aspect of online literary journals and they way they foster community: the work is shareable. Immediately. So there is not just a community of readers of our journal, but also a community that exists among online journals.

But perhaps most importantly, I believe that online journals like Fiction Writers Review provide a unique place for emerging writers to join the conversation. After all, few print journals accept book reviews from individuals who haven’t yet published a book themselves. And even if they do, they rarely take unsolicited work. So how does an emerging writer enter this critical dialogue? Here they can. Likewise, the interview is a form that doesn’t have a prominent place in most journals. The average quarterly only publishes one an issue, meaning four a year. Here, we often have more than one a week. And while most publications seek creative nonfiction that is predominately literary journalism or personal narrative, here we are looking for meditations on craft and the writing life.

Again, all of this is “shop talk.” All of this is about bringing together people who believe that talking about writing matters. This is what I found so enriching and gratifying about my bookstore experience all those years ago—what I looked forward to every Saturday even more than those marzipan croissants. Because the best conversations are not only ones that include us, but also ones that are ongoing and endlessly evolving.

Editor’s Note

FWR at AWP: Dean, Mike, Valerie, Jeremiah, Anne, Zachary, Margaret, and Natalie

This essay was originally delivered as a talk at this year’s AWP Writers’ Conference (in Denver) as part of the panel Evolution of the New Media: Online Literary Journals in 2010. Joining our Associate Editor, Jeremiah Chamberlin, were Dan Albergotti (Waccamaw), Dan Wickett (The Emerging Writers Network and The Collagist), and Terry Kennedy (storySouth). The panelists’ presentations ranged from the evolving aesthetics of online journal design to the ways in which lit sites and blogs foster an extended literary community for writers. More than 100 participants attended the panel, which sparked a lively debate (one that continued afterward) on such issues as the sustainability and funding of online projects, the commitment to editorial excellence in a digital landscape, and the future of publishing in this medium. FWR was honored to share this event with such respected journals/editors, and also to have so many readers and contributors in attendance. But for those who weren’t able to make it this year, we wanted to share Jeremiah’s talk with the rest of you at the literary “water cooler.” – Anne Stameshkin

Extras

- Visit and read our fellow panelists’ lit sites and journals: The Emerging Writers Network, The Collagist, storySouth, and Waccamaw.

- The following video, an introduction to each of the online lit journals and communities featured at The Evolution of the New Media session, was designed for and screened at the panel:

A lot has been given to us at Greenlight Bookstore. It’s high time for us to give back.

The earthquake in Haiti has affected many of our Brooklyn neighbors, and we want to do what we can to assist in the relief efforts there.

So, this weekend, Saturday January 23 and Sunday January 24, Greenlight Bookstore will donate 10% of all sales before tax to the American Red Cross for Haiti relief.

With your purchase at Greenlight this weekend, your book-buying dollars can contribute to something greater. And read on for a chance to partner with co-owner Rebecca Fitting to do even more good.

Thanks for all the support you’ve offered us. We hope you’ll join us in offering our support to the organizations working to help the people of Haiti.

Best,
Greenlight Bookstore

A challenge from Rebecca

At Greenlight we have been very fortunate in the short life of our new bookstore and we are mindful of it every day. We are thankful for our store’s good fortune, and for our own personal fortune for living in a part of the world that has an infrastructure and amenities that are sorely lacking elsewhere. The past week’s news about Haiti is an especially tragic event and it makes us want to give back in return. With that very much in mind, Greenlight Bookstore is pledging to donate 10% of our store’s sales for Sat 1/23-Sun 1/24 to the Red Cross for aid to Haiti.

Taking this a step further, if any customer is willing to match the bookstore’s donation of 10% of the weekend’s sales, I will also personally match what the store donates. Just think – if you pledge to match Greenlight Bookstore’s donation, all of a sudden one sum becomes tripled because I will do the same. That’s some strength in numbers, for sure, and it would mean a lot to me if one (or a few) of you would step up to this challenge.

If you stop by the store today, author Nick Flynn will be signing copies of his new memoir, The Ticking is the Bomb (portions of which appeared in Tin House, Esquire, and Open City), at 3 PM.

Greenlight Bookstore is located at 686 Fulton Street (corner of S. Portland) in Brooklyn, NY. / Hours: 10 AM – 10 PM Monday through Saturday, 12 noon – 8 PM Sunday

Eugene Cross

Fiction writer and Penn State Erie lecturer Eugene Cross has won the 2009 Dzanc Prize. The $5,000 prize is based on a manuscript-in-progress as well as a proposal for a writing-related community service project. Dzanc writes:

Cross was selected from more than 100 applicants for both the quality of his fiction writing, as well as his proposal to set up and run a progressive series of creative workshops for refugees from Nepal, Sudan and Bhutan, in Erie. For his community service, Cross will conduct three 4-month workshops in concurrence with an ESL class currently being taught. We at Dzanc found Eugene’s conviction in the importance of providing the tools for self-expression to these displaced individuals to be a monumentally significant undertaking. Eugene’s work will help people going through an extremely tough time find a means of expression and a way to share their experiences.

I had the pleasure of meeting Eugene this past August at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, so I can add that this the committee has picked a thoughtful, kind, and very talented writer. You can read his short story “The Brother” in Narrative. Congratulations, Eugene!

Learn more about the Dzanc Prize and Dzanc Books on their website.

[Previously on FWR]

Keyhole Press Joins Dzanc Books