Soundings East

Soundings East is the literary journal of Salem State University, published annually with support from the Center for Creative and Performing Arts.

[soundingseast]

Soundings East, the literary journal of Salem State University, is published annually with support from the Center for Creative and Performing Arts. Founded in 1973, the journal is among the oldest in the country to publish quality poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. The magazine is edited by upper-level creative writing students under the aegis of an Advisory Editor from the writing faculty. We accept simultaneous submissions but ask that authors label them as such, and contact us immediately if they are accepted elsewhere. Our reading period is September 1 to February 15; we'll do our best to respond within three months. Contributors will receive two copies of Soundings East Vol. 39. Upon publication, all rights revert to authors.

It’s September, and we’re accepting submissions for volume 39. Send us your best creative nonfiction, poetry, and fiction. 

[soundingseast]

2016 Claire Keyes Poetry Award

The winner of the 2016 Claire Keyes Poetry Award is Mark Wagenaar!

(photo credit: Wagenaar’s Twitter account)

Mark Wagenaar is the 2015 winner of the Juniper Prize, from UMass Press, for his second book The Body Distances. His first, Voodoo Inverso, was the 2012 winner of the University of Wisconsin Press' Felix Pollak Prize. He was the 2014 winner of the New Letters Poetry Prize, the Southern Indiana Review’s Mary C. Mohr Prize, and The Pinch Poetry Award. He recently served as the University of Mississippi’s Summer Poet in Residence, and this year he is the Hall Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing. Recent acceptances or publications include The New Yorker, Crab Orchard Review, FIELD, and Southern Review, amongst others. He and his wife, Chelsea Wagenaar, are doctoral fellows at the University of North Texas, in Denton, where they live with their six month-old baby, Eloise Virginia.

The judge for this year’s award was Ross Gay, whose third book, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude was also a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry and nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Gay teaches at Indiana University.

Six of Wagenaar’s poems will be published in Volume 38 of Soundings East, which is slated to debut at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in a few weeks. Hope to see you there!

[poetsorg]

Mark Strand, born this day in 1934. Read his work at Poets.org.

[poetsandwriters]

One of the amazing things about what I do is you don’t know when you’re going to be hit with an idea, you don’t know where it comes from…Writers are people who have greater receptivity to language, and I think that they will see something in a phrase, or even in a word, that allows them to change it or improve what was there before…You learn more about yourself the more you write, but that’s not the purpose of writing. I don’t write to find out more about myself. I write because it amuses me.

Mark Strand (via poetsandwriters)

[soundingseast]

From Ross Gay and January O’Neil’s reading this past Thursday! A night to remember.

Gay is judging this year’s Claire Keyes Poetry Prize. Winner to be announced soon!

(photos from Salem State University’s Center for the Arts)

[soundingseast]

January O’Neil and Ross Gay will read tonight in The Metro Room of the Ellison Campus Center. 7:30 PM. Hope to see you there!

O’Neil, along with being a faculty member at SSU, is the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. The lineup this year is sublime. Soundings East will have a table at the Small Press Fair! Volume 38 will launch. You won’t want to miss it.

[soundingseast]

“Wreckage” by Stan Lee Werlin

At 1:31 PM, David Valensky jerks the dusty, bug-spattered rental car into the open left lane for the fifth time and bears down again to pass the vehicle they’ve been tailing since leaving Canyon de Chelly. It has grown from an indistinct gray hump to a maroon SUV bearing Utah plates with the numbers and letters partially obscured by a layer of thick, baked-on mud, and now they’re climbing up its backside.

He glances over at Svetlana. The rising heat and the endless smooth motion of the car lulled her to sleep thirty minutes earlier. She hasn’t gained much on the horrendous fatigue she accumulated before they started this vacation, and he knows she’ll now sleep for several hours, deeply and without dreams. A thin sheen of perspiration moistens her neckline as the air conditioning strains to keep up with the blazing mid-day sun. The pink tee-shirt she picked up in Moab is already damp and rumpled, a look she hates.

1:32 PM Staring out over the brown, patchy landscape, he thinks back on the last ten days. The vacation has been a disaster from the get-go. They had bickered fruitlessly on the plane to Salt Lake, arguing about the inconsequential and ridiculous, his failure to pack the prescribed number of briefs, her forgetfulness in leaving behind the hiking boots. Each of them knew these things were their combat camouflage, desert gray ovals fused with irregular sandy white circles, mountain greens interwoven with earthy browns, the uniforms of illusion they wore with each other so they could sidestep the deeper truths. They shielded themselves brilliantly from each other’s armaments, the cache of weapons that, if ever unleashed, would surely strip away the cover-ups, unmasking disappointment and failure.

...

To keep reading “Wreckage,” see Issue 53 of Prime Number Magazine. Werlin’s story, “A Parch in a Jinapear Tree,” appears in Volume 37.

[soundingseast]

THE DEATH OF FRED ASTAIRE by Leslie Lawrence

As a child of the sixties, Leslie Lawrence knew she didn’t want to duplicate her parents’ lives, yet she never imagined she’d stray so far outside the lines of their—and her own—expectations. The Death of Fred Astaire opens with the story, both wrenching and funny, of how Lawrence says her goodbyes to the iconic images she’s held since her youth; she then proceeds to bear a child and raise him with her lesbian partner. Some essays in this debut collection reflect on legacies Lawrence inherited from her Jewish family and culture. In others, she searches gamely for a rich, authentic life—a voice, a vocation, a community, even a “god” she can call her own.

Always a seeker, an adventurer resisting fear, Lawrence, a city girl, creates a summer home in the back woods of the “Live Free or Die” state. She attempts the flying trapeze and takes part in a cross-dressing workshop. Traveling alone to Morocco, she assists a veterinarian tending to an ailing donkey. Teaching in a vocational high school in Boston, she questions her methods and assumptions about race and class. With rare honesty, she confronts the complexities of motherhood, of caring for her ill partner, and of widowhood. In “Wonderlust,” the collection’s most ambitious piece, she explores the role of beauty and creativity in our spiritual lives, revealing how lifelong learning in dance, music, and the visual arts can make us all more alive even as we age.

Ranging widely in length, subject, and style, these personal essays place Lawrence among today’s most vital writers of creative nonfiction. Her warmth and wisdom, her distinctive blend of humor and pathos, her reverence for what sustains us—food and family, community and beauty—all make this a book you’ll want to share with those you love.

The Death of Fred Astaire is out this May from SUNY Press. To read Lawrence’s essay, “Andee’s 50th and The Way We Live Now,” see Volume 37.

Submissions close tomorrow!

[soundingseast]

“Another Art” by Jill McDonough

The art of finding isn’t hard to master, either.  We find so many things, past or

present.  Your way home.  Yourself.  In a pickle, a jam.  Find something every day: steel bristle

from the street cleaning truck, lucky penny on the ground.  Then practice finding many,

finding more:  ten dollars in your winter coat, a stolen hour, lunch with this woman you love.  The pollen

from stargazers staining her shirt. In the wine, find stonefruit, ash.  Share the dessert.

Find a volunteer melon in a weed-choked bed, scrap of paper scrawled with what the doctor said.

Those seeded crackers we ate with lobster salad that time.   Your lost earring.  Your friend from junior high, online.  

And finding you—a miracle.  What are the odds? I find myself on my knees.  Weeding, thanking god.

(Originally published in Memorious, issue 25) 

Jill McDonough has 3 poems in Volume 37. 

Submissions, both general and for the Claire Keyes Poetry Prize, close March 1st!

[soundingseast]

Military Insanity, Menstruation, and Migration among Nonfiction in Gulf Coast

Though not entirely sure why Jason Arment’s essay, “Double Entendres” was placed in the Childhood section of Gulf Coast’s Winter/Spring 2016, I suspect it may have to do with perversions of power and pack bullying that blast the weakness of innocence from the battlefield. This haunting piece stayed with me as a reminder of collateral damage where no one dares to look.

Gulf Coast’s fine collection of nonfiction contains two other standouts:  “Apricots,” a dreamy memoir by Aurvi Sharma about “becoming a woman” in India, which won the 2015 Gulf Coast nonfiction prize, and Patrice Gopo’s “Holding On,” a memoir about migration with sections that move back and forth in time from Zimbabwe to Jamaica.

Another review by Laura Smith (our fabulous Nonfiction Editor)

Submissions for Issue 38 and the Claire Keyes Poetry Prize are open until March 1st!

[soundingseast]

Review of EC Hanlon & Caroline Leavitt at the Salem State Writers Series

(photo credit: Caroline Leavitt)

That was a truly special Writers Series event last night, with chairs arranged on the diagonal for intimate readings by SSU Creative Writing alum EC Hanlon and NYT bestseller Caroline Leavitt. Hanlon read a brief section of literary fiction that left me wanting more as the plot twisted with the revelation of a character's agoraphobia in the workplace and at home. Leavitt was dazzling as she recalled the rigid 50s-- McCarthy's ideological war on Communism, neighbors watching each other. "Do they read books? Communist!" The classifieds separated jobs for men and women, and there were no good jobs for women. Leavitt took us on a magical ride through the 60s and 70s, when heroin showed up and everything got bad--performing this memoir without notes, and told us about her persistent efforts to publish her work, despite those who would dismiss it and discourage her. In short, she said, "Never, ever, ever, ever, ever give up!"

Review by Laura Smith (our Nonfiction Editor!)

Be sure to also check out Joe McGurn’s review of Leavitt’s reading, published on Red Skies, SSU’s online magazine!

Submissions for Issue 38 and the Claire Keyes Poetry Prize are open until March 1st!

[soundingseast]

Salem State University Student Artists: Submit your cover image to Soundings East! Guidelines: Submissions may be color or black-and-white for a trim size of 6 x 9 inches. Black-and-white art will also be considered for inside pages. Please scan your work and email it by March 1 to [email protected] with the words "Soundings East Cover Contest" in the subject line. Include a brief bio in the body of the email with your full name and anticipated year of graduation. Selected contributors will receive two copies of the issue, which will debut at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in early May

[soundingseast]

Review of “It’s The Land That Wants You” by Heather Beecher Hawk

Here is Lisa Danca’s review of Heather Beecher Hawk's work of creative non-fiction, "It's The Land That Wants You,” published in the current issue of Austin Peay State University's literary journal, Zone 3.

"The best work of creative non-fiction I’ve read this week is 'It's The Land That Wants You' by Heather Beecher Hawk. It details Hawk's experience of visiting a place she frequented as a child."

Submissions for Issue 38 and the Claire Keyes Poetry Prize are open until March 1st!

[soundingseast]

Review of “At Sea” by Jaclyn Moyer

If you're looking for an excellent piece of creative non-fiction to read, pick up the Fall/Winter 2015 issue of december (volume 26.2) and read "At Sea" by Jaclyn Moyer. With stunning descriptions and enticing prose that never falters, Moyer offers readers a unique view of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami from an island off the coast of Thailand. "At Sea" is a story told at a distance from the heart of the devastation. The reader walks side-by-side with the narrator, sharing in her fearful speculations about the disaster and gazing upon images that are both beautiful and haunting. A story that is rich in detail and rich with the sense of human warmth that makes non-fiction wonderful, it is a tribute to resilience in the face of total loss. A quote:

“I didn't understand how she could be so certain. Her home had been transformed -- surely her friends and family were impacted, businesses lost, houses destroyed, people hurt or killed. Still, Sarah's voice was soothing, her fingertips cool on my forehead, and I said, I know, even though I didn't.”

Review by Mike Rand

Submissions for Issue 38 and the Claire Keyes Poetry Prize are open for one more month! Until March 1st.

[soundingseast]

A few photos from our issue 37 launch party this past Thursday. Pictured, in order, are Emily Jaeger, reading from three poems published in the issue; Clems Schoenebeck, reading from “Vespers”; and Wendy Darwin Wakeman, reading from “Helen Marshall’s Beard.” All photos taken by marvelous Managing Editor Cathy Fahey.

Hope to see you next year at the launch party for issue 38!

[soundingseast]

Also, next Thursday poet Frank Bidart will be reading at Salem State to kick off the Salem Lit Fest! Go here for more info.

[soundingseast]

A few photos from the Boston Book Festival this past weekend! When we weren’t busy talking to passersby about our magazine, or chatting with Lee-Ann and Erin from Mud Season Review, we were posing.

In the first shot (photo credit to our fiction editor Susan Walker), from left to right: her daughter Meaghan, staff members Mariah Rivera, yours truly, and Jessica Tower, as well as co-editor of Mud Season Review Lee-Ann Wilder.

In the second photo (credit to Meaghan), clockwise: yours truly, Susan Walker, managing editor Catherine Fahey, Jessica Tower, and Erin Post, poetry co-editor of Mud Season Review.

See you next year!? Or this Thursday? Kris Saknussemm will read in the Ellison Campus Center.