SHENANDOAH Considering Fiction, Non-fiction Submissions

slogoAs of Monday, September 22, Shenandoah will be considering submissions of fiction and non-fiction for the spring, 2015 issue.  Manuscripts should be submitted through our submissions management program, which can be accessed by selecting SUBMISSIONS tab on the top tool bar on the homepage and following instructions from there.  This window should be open until early December.

The site will open to submissions of poetry and flash fiction in early October and will remain open until early December.  In November we will conduct our annual Graybeal-Gowen Contest for Virginia Poets.  See contest rules at our website (shenandoahliterary.org).

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feathersSHENANDOAH is a 24-7, no-fee journal, but we do pay out contributors, with a minimum of $50 for non-fiction features, flash fiction and poetry and an overall maximum of $200 per piece.  Exceptions are made in circumstances where an extended essay is assigned.

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[cover art by Suzanne Stryk]


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

Scratching the Surface of Place and Space

Screen Shot 2014-05-27 at 11.59.53 AM
Shakespeare’s birthplace

For my spring term class at Washington and Lee, I was lucky enough to attend an English class in England. The class was called “Shakespeare in Performance,” which, as you can probably guess, entailed mainly plays and site seeing. While I learned a great deal from the sites—particularly in Stratford-upon-Avon, where Shakespeare’s birthplace is located, I was surprised to find that I felt more awe at simply being in the same physical space as the bard. It wasn’t the plaques or the preserved walls of the Shakespeare sites that struck me; rather, I felt an idealistic sort of second hand inspiration from soaking up the air he breathed, the views he saw from his window, the ripples on the river across from the Globe theater. I began to think that literary place and space are more important to literature than I had once thought.

This notion grew stronger when, while in London, I walked through Bloomsbury square, the meeting place of The Bloomsbury Group. There aren’t any markers or signs designating this lovely but unremarkable park as the hub of literary inspiration (or even just gossip among literary figures), but the knowledge that I was in the same small space that these writers congregated in had more of an impact on me. I imagined I could hear their voices in the trees.

I did, however, find a meaningful plaque in an unexpected place: one day, I made a solo journey to the flat of Hilda Doolittle, or H.D., one of the first poets that I fell in love with, who lived in London for significant periods of her life. I sat shamelessly on her former stoop for thirty minutes before the flat’s current resident walked up and gave me a (deserved) odd look. I am slightly ashamed to say that I asked her to take my picture in front of the flat. As meaningful as the experience was, I walked away wondering if, had there been a plaque on any of the given flats in that area, would I have felt differently? Would I have felt less magic sitting on the stoop of a random strange but thinking it had once held H.D.’s erratic and genius brain?

A large part of our class consisted of this same question: what difference in understanding the original text does seeing Shakespeare in his original context make? I did feel lucky to join the same throng of famous writers and anonymous individuals who have made a pilgrimage to carve their names into the window of Shakespeare’s birthplace, to soak up that same weird presence.Screen Shot 2014-05-27 at 11.59.44 AM

Here’s how I answer the question: even if it was all a hoax, there is something wonderful about knowing that, even if you don’t know for sure, you are in the presence—the same space—as a writer that you admire. It’s sharing the same real world as someone whose textual worlds you have become a part of, and it allowed me to experience those textual worlds in richer detail. I can’t help but think that, ultimately, place does matter when it comes to understanding an author. What do you think?


Annie Persons is currently the managing editor for Shenandoah. She is a junior English major and Creative Writing minor at Washington and Lee University. Her favorite pastimes are reading and writing, and she hopes to continue engaging with literature for the rest of her life.

BEVEL SUMMERS PRIZE CLOSED

The deadline for the Bevel Summers Prize for the Short Short Story has passed.  Since the response was strong (over 500 stories), it will take some time to judge.  The winner will be announced in June.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

The New Boy Scouts of America

bearbowI hated being a Boy Scout for no reasons related to their recent and applaudable decision not to exclude gay Scouts.  I hope they’ll also promise not to allow bullying or torturing the gay members once they’ve enlisted, and I do know a little about old-style bullying and torture in the noble arena of scouting.

When I was twelve or thirteen, spindly and timid, I was exiled in July to Camp Steere to master archery, canoeing, Indian lore and mess hall deportment.  I did learn how to play “Soupy, Soupy, Soupy” on a bugle, construct a wikiup, tie a bowline on a bight, paddle with a J-stroke and  hit a towed cardboard white tail with an arrow from my trusty Bear recurve bow.  I was assigned to share a cabin (a three-sided Adirondack, to be exact) with a trio of older boys who were longtime running mates with all the wit and panache of Larry, Moe and Shemp but who had a vast vocabulary of insults and ultimatums.  They were big and rough, unkempt smokers and spitters, cussers and head-slappers, all with a taste for arson.  They turned my life into a combination obstacle course, stealth experiment and shame-assessment retreat.  I was no angel, mind you, but I was ill-equipped to handle even one of them physically (a single try persuaded me).  It didn’t help that I was bookish and wore specs.

My tormentors called me Whistle, because I did that a lot, perhaps “against the dark,” and they made me their lackey.  All I could do was set occasional traps and snares for them which could not be traced back to me, deny all accusations and snicker on the sly.  (The Texas Pete kick in the Kool-Aid?  The  copperhead in the shower?  Yeah, Three Musketeers, that was me, Edmond Dantes.)  My vengeful gestures were pretty much unsatisfying, and they were the worst part of scouting, even more horrible than the next scoutmaster I served under with his shaved head, jackboots, swagger stick and a terrier’s voice.  After a few months under his tutelage, B.S.A. meant something entirely different to me, and I soon, as they say, left the organization to spend more time with my family.

copperhead2

I’m sure the BSA has evolved and improved, making it difficult for boys like my tormentors to thrive, but the recent announcement of tolerance has set me to thinking what other changes might be called for to create a true organization for Our Time.  No doubt they’ve revised their merit badge menu, but I’ve thought up some new (and pretty obvious) merit badge options, because given our current cultural climate, who knows what will be necessary to follow the motto and BE PREPARED?

Blogging
Facebooking
Poetry as Self-Healing
Sports Team Management
Gator Rasslin
Reality Show Development
Hard Drive Dynamics
Lose Weight Overnight!
Mortgaging
Thumbsmanship for Marbles and Texting
Sportscasting
Pirate Web Design
Storm Chasing
Locksmithing
Atheism
Extreme Cell Tower Scaling
Scrapbooking
Deconstructing the Beatitudes
Sommelier
Foodie Travel
Apocalypse Forecasting
Apps for Survivors
Industrial Espionage
Zombie Control
Art Restoration
Auto Detailing
Pawn

What ideas do you think the B.S.A. needs?  Post a comment below.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

Sentry

By Brendan Galvin

Thistle, you look like another
of evolution’s jokes, impossible
as a great blue heron seems
impossible, though you both
are brilliant survivors.

Still, mixed metaphor,
it looks like someone
hung you all over with
shaving brushes nobody
soft-handed could wield,

then loaded one of those
salad shooters they
used to hawk on TV
and fired green sickles
and scimitars at you,

until, sentry at my door,
you look like a gallowglass
loyal to no one but your own
stickle-backed containment.

I dubbed you Captain Barfoot,
though I know from long
acquaintance that a change
of air will turn you to a mentor

white and silken, proof
that the pilgrim in us all
must cede his spines
and hackers to endure.

 


maddieMaddie Thorpe has twice served as a Shenandoah intern, once as Poem of the Week Editor and once as Social Networking Editor.  She is from Southern California and will take a degree in English from Washington and Lee in spring of 2014.

Jake

How often I’ve heard the phrase “with a heavy heart” as a place-keeper while someone seeks fresher words to express grief and the plea for comfort.  I usually flinch when I hear the phrase, yet right now its drumbeat seems the measure of my pulse and breath.  News of Jake York’s death came like a fist to the chest, and the shock lingers.  But “came” isn’t right, because it’s still coming, new again every few minutes.  I suppose this is how denial operates, my consciousness and body saying “no” every time I allow my mind to  linger there.  This is what they mean by “bereft.”

Pretty melodramatic, I realize, but I knew Jake for nearly twenty-three years and, even though he had been a brother-at-arms and friend for a quarter of a century, a contributing editor to Shenandoah for a decade, I still remember him as an Auburn undergraduate – willowy, inquisitive, empathetic, intellectually restless, evangelistic in his belief that reading and writing poetry will make our hearts better.  He was a skilled classical guitar player, an active member of St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church, a soft-spoken, almost shy young man who would not allow his bashfulness to inhibit expression of what he valued and believed.  I taught him in five courses and directed his honors thesis, a chapbook of poems called “Masters of None,” and I knew that I had a live one on my hands.

We had many conversations in my office about the history of the South, Warren and Faulkner, O’Connor and Wilbur Cash, Jim Dickey, but also Aquinas and St. Paul, Euripides and Dickinson.  Eventually, he grew a little embarrassed about coming so often, because he feared he was monopolizing my time.  My pleasure in his company also began to be complicated, as I sometimes experienced a little dread about what new inquiry or discovery he might lay at my threshold next, what crystalline insight he’d had about things I hadn’t even considered.  He was the sharpest and most insatiable student I ever had, and because of that, my best teacher.

Many others can speak of the excellence of his poetry, the evolution of his craft until his words seem shaved from a bar of silver, the honing of his instincts toward a few central issues – how to repair the damage one man will do to another, how to makes the words of elegy serve as actions, how to navigate the flood of injustice in a way that will redress and rescue, all while still making the language dance.  Central issues, but never in isolation from the question of how to be an ethical and useful human being.

For Jake’s first book, Murder Ballads, I wrote the following passage, and in my current unsettled state of mind, I doubt I can improve upon it:

Viewed through the polished, complex lens of Jake York’s demanding poetic, the shackles and red-clay rhetoric, banjos and catfish of the Old South emerge new-fangled and political.  York’s “harmony almost gospel” is precise, demanding and exciting, and whether he is rendering “the ember burrowing/like a mite in the dead bird’s wing” or wind shaking the willows and scorched corn, he lets us know that it is not business-as-usual in Deep Dixie.  Readers of Murder Ballads will witness the transformation of landscape and language as fireflies, Orion and sparks from the Magic City’s Bessemer furnaces conspire to light even the darkest secrets, and few will escape this wonderful book unscathed and unblessed.

Jake was not afraid to follow his quest for disclosure, justice and healing no matter how far it took him nor into what swamps and among what how many injuries.  I will admit to having misgivings about some of the manifestations of his mission, but I never doubted the conviction behind them or failed to trust the candor and skill. He was an activist for poetry, a real barnstormer for it, but also an agent of change and bringer of light.  Yet I never saw him setting the fierce issues of craft aside, as he struggled to bring mind, heart, force and finesse to every poem.  As a result, his poems are not just written but wrought, which in my scheme of things is what makes words last.

Yeats wrote in “The Fisherman,” thinking of the man he watched angling and the ideal Man beyond that one, that he hoped “Before I am old/I shall have written him one/poem maybe as cold/and passionate as the dawn.”

For all his heat and fervor, Jake never abandoned this demanding aesthetic, which is never for me separate from “spiritual.”  When I look at the poems in Murder Ballads, A Murmuration of Starlings and Persons Unknown, I see how often he struck the mark.  I will be in all ways poorer for his absence as a voice and a presence and will never again sit down to write without summoning his spirit.  In that respect, I’m sure I am one among many and hope to find some consolation in the place where our lamentations and splendid memories of him collect, all of us scathed and bereft, but blessed.

 


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

SHENANDOAH and Literary Community Mourn

Shenandoah and the rest of the American literary community mourn the loss of Jake Adam York, who died Sunday after a massive stroke.  He was 40.  Jake had been a Contributing Editor to this magazine for over a decade and studied with me at Auburn University, where he wrote a collection of poems for his honors thesis.  I’ve never taught anyone else who so swiftly surpassed me and gave the full measure.  I’ll say more when I can get collected and words come back to me.


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

Halloween Deadline: ELIXIR Press Poetry Contest

The deadline for the Elixir Press Poetry Awards is October 31, exactly one week away.  Manuscripts must be submitted via the post office and via the Elixir Press Submission Manager.  This competition is open to all poets, regardless of publication history.  Two prizes will be given, the Judge’s Prize with an award of $2500 and the Editor’s Prize with an award of $1500.  Both prizes include publication by Elixir Press.  The entry fee is $30.  Please visit the Elixir website for complete guidelines.
www.elixirpress.com


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

 

Reading with Senses

The human body has five, equally important senses of perception- touch, smell, taste, hearing and vision. When reading a piece of fiction or poem in the traditional manner, one needed only two of these senses: seeing and touching. You held the book or paper in your hand and used your eyes to visualize the words. However, with technology and the Internet, there is an opportunity to employ additional senses to absorb and appreciate literature. As an online publication, Shenandoah is entrenched in this new, evolving digital world. Poets can now record their poems, giving readers the choice to listen to their work. Though this is not available for the fiction and non-fiction genres, the act of reading stories online gives the reader an entirely diverse experience. Scanning through a webpage requires slightly more effort and concentration, and it is tempting to scroll through less interesting passages in order to reach the climax or ending. As well, you cannot highlight or make notes in the margins, which limits the interaction with the author’s words and intended message.

This begins a debate, one that I have thought about a lot recently as I listened to books on tape during long, monotonous road trips. How is the art of listening to a creative piece different from tangibly, physically holding and reading it? Arguably, you are using the same amount of senses since eyesight is traded for ears and their ability to hear. Auditory “reading” allows you to multitask, as books become even more transportable. With this benefit comes the drawback of unconcentrated attention and the potential for daydreaming and images of to-do lists. Though I admire the convenience factor of downloadable books, I will not trade my beloved paperbacks for an e-reader in the near future, nor do I envision transitioning to a solely auditory consumption of literature. After going back to one of the books I listened to earlier this summer, I discovered the act of reading gave me the ability to examine the author’s syntax and to appreciate word choice to a greater extent as sentences can be read again and chapters pored over with an alert eye. Though Shenandoah is online and the act of possessing, touching and reading an actual journal is not feasible, the other possibilities associated with a literary journal have subsequently expanded. Images can be incorporated into the stories, either as supplemental information or simply as a thematic or decorative addition to the webpage. Videos are increasingly popular as supplementary elements to literature since poems can be presented in song form or simply recited in a more visually appealing way. Essentially, the simple experience has become multidimensional. Although I don’t foresee literary journals, particularly Shenandoah, being replaced by videos or audio recordings of poems or fictions, I do think it is important to be cognizant of how technology enhances, or detracts from, the way we interact with literature and creative works.


Melungeons: Mysterious Origins of an Appalachian Subculture?

Or maybe “subculture” isn’t the right word, nor “race” nor “ethnicity.”  Whether born of the invisible incursions of Portuguese, the wayward Welsh led by Madoc, the intermarriage of whites (Lost Colony survivors among them) and Indians, the weddings and progeny among Sub-saharan Africans and Europeans or other nearly-untraceable groups of triracial isolates, the Melungeon people of the Appalachians have long provided an enigma for ethnologists and sociologists, as well as readers, as the mysteries associated with Melungeons have led many writers to treat them as exotic and “Other.”

And it’s easy enough to see how “Melungeon” quickly became a defamatory epithet.  I remember being told as a boy that Melungeons (as well as a woodswitch named Sally Soapsuds, ghosts and fugitives from the chain gang) would snatch me up if I didn’t behave.  We didn’t live in the Appalachians but in its played-out foothills, and all I was told about them was: they’re savage, maybe cannibals; they’re dark but often have blue eyes and gums and “English” features; they lurk (importantly loaded word for a boy) in the wilder spaces and don’t fit in with “white culture,” though they’re neither Indians nor African-Americans (not the term of preference back then).  With the danger ascribed to them, they also had a kind of outlaw glamor, and I preferred inventing their stories whole cloth to responsible investigating.

A few years ago I did do a little inquiring and read Lisa Alther’s Kinfolks, which chronicles her quest to see if she was part Melungeon.  The vague identity of the group was beginning to be adopted by people who yearned to be associated with the exotic; few people until the late twentieth century had ever referred to themselves as Melungeons, but the stigma was transforming to a badge of courage.  And now Alther, a card-carrying Appalachian and a novelist, was determined to get to the bottom of the question.  She didn’t, but from her book I gleaned what I wanted to know for my own fictive purposes– that the group [s] tended to keep to themselves and to suffer both legal and extemporaneous persecution, that they were convenient scapegoats.

Preparing to teach a course on Appalachian Literature and Identity, I decided to pursue information on this group, to see if the whirlwind of questions about their source and nature could shed some light on the larger quest of Appalachians to shed stereotypes and reveal their actual selves, individually and collectively, to shed the trappings of Snuffy Smith, Jed Clampett and the cartoon moonshining hillbillies so many associate with American highlanders.

The two most extreme theories strike me as too simple and untrustworthy: 1) the whole notion of Melungeons is fabricated by offspring of white persons and persons of color to dodge the long-standing prejudices against the latter; 2) some exotic group —  formed long ago from intermarriage of rogue (or lost) explorers, Native Americans and strays– has a cultural identity called “Melungeon,” which would clearly delineate them from mainstream Appalachians.

Although phrases like “Melungeon culture” are scattered through the texts from the many theorists, I’ve yet to read anything about Melungeon music or handcrafts, religious practices, dialect, poetry or cuisine separate from Appalachian culture, so I’m very curious to hear about their distinct crafts and ways.  The good news in this may be that the people once called Melungeons from afar and who now identify as such were just about as homogenous (or diverse) as other Appalachians.  It’s true that both Alther and her scholarly cohort Wayne Winkler conclude that the demographic is growing more and more rare, due to the ease of Melungeons in assimilating, shadowing into our now-diverse culture.  However, none of this diminishes the angst that arises when someone looks in the mirror to ask the question that sets the stage for Hamlet: Who’s there?”  In Chris Offutt’s story “Melungeons,” one of the principals the title refers to recounts being threatened  as a schoolboy that “the Melungeons will get you.”  Imagine what a scourge to one’s sense of self that must have been.

One of the difficulties in tracing the history of Melungeons (the word may come from the French melange, though there are other theories, Turkish words, Saxon, Portugese) is that migration theories abound, and all can be argued for without resorting to high myth or low reasoning.  However, I have not found that the Melungeons are known for distinctive religious practices, particular music, a recognizable dialect or body of folk lore or craft.  They seem to be amorphous, a melange indeed of many people whose appearance set them up for exclusion and who sometimes found themselves, as the shunned or hounded often will, banding together for defense.

Recent DNA studies tell us more about the formation of the Melungeon identity that we ever knew before, and I’m still sorting out what I think of them, but I can’t recommend a better place to begin an inquiry than with Offutt’s story (from Out of the Woods.  The Melungeons in the story act out of a stern and painful code, but they do it in the midst of beauty and for reasons anything but chaotic.  It’s a story about feeling who you are, constructing who you are, embracing who you are, regardless of the consequences, and it suggests, especially by the story’s ending, that dignity is achievable among even the least conventional subcultures.

I’d love to receive some comments on what I’ve put forth her or omitted to say.  The comment field appears below.

 


recent-meR. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.