upstreet 5 features Hemley interview

upstreet number five, which is now on sale, features a 20-page interview with Robin Hemley, director of the nonfiction writing program at the University of Iowa, and author of the recently released memoir, Do-Over! In Which a Forty-Eight-Year-Old Father of Three Returns to Kindergarten, Summer Camp, the Prom, and other Embarrassments. Robin, currently in the Philippines on a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, also teaches in the MFA in writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

This year’s issue, at 224 pages, received the largest number of submissions in upstreet’s five-year history. It contains nine short stories, selected from 1,178 submitted; nine creative nonfiction pieces, chosen from 358 submitted; and 28 of the 2,053 submitted poems.

The 42 contributors to upstreet number five are located from Seattle, Washington, to Birmingham, Alabama, from Portland, Maine, to Kentfield, California, and outside the country in France, Sweden, Scotland, and Hong Kong. Their levels of experience range from a MacArthur Fellow and a member of the Nevada Writers’ Hall of Fame to an author whose first published story appears in this issue. upstreet is proud of the geographic and experiential diversity of its contributors. We hope we will continue to attract high-quality submissions, both from established authors and from the new voices whose discovery makes publishing a literary journal such an exciting and rewarding enterprise.

Marshall Jon Fisher publishes book on "the greatest tennis match ever played"

upstreet number one poet Marshall Jon Fisher (“Cannibals”) has published A Terrible Splendor (Crown/Random House, 2009), an account of the 1937 match between the world’s No. 1 tennis player, American Don Budge, and No. 2, the German Baron Gottfried von Cramm. In this last match of the Davis Cup semifinal, held at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, more was at stake than national pride and a tennis trophy. That day, as the swastika, the Union Jack, and the Stars and Stripes flew together over Wimbledon’s Centre Court, 22-year-old Budge was on his way to becoming a superstar, and 28-year-old von Cramm, who had refused to join the Nazi party, feared he was on his way to prison—or worse. This story of the gripping five-set contest between the world’s top two tennis players on the eve of World War II has been widely reviewed; here is a sample—

The San Francisco Chronicle, April 19, 2009: Joel Drucker calls Splendor “enthralling,” “a gripping tale,” and writes, “Wedding the nuances of a sport to broader historical events is a challenge, but Fisher pulls the task off with supreme finesse, at once revealing the triumph and tragedy of a remarkable tennis match.”

The Washington Post, May 3, 2009: “Marshall Jon Fisher has gotten hold of some mighty themes: war and peace, love and death, sports and savagery. …As the match enters its final set, all the narrative pieces lock together, and A Terrible Splendor becomes as engrossing as the contest it portrays.”

Vanity Fair, May 2009 (”Hot Type” column): “For his smashing serve and spectacular rallies between sports history and political drama, game, set, and match go to Marshall Jon Fisher’s A Terrible Splendor.”

The New York Times Book Review, June 21, 2009: “Absorbing…puts readers at the edge of their seats…. [Fisher’s] nuanced portrait…shows how, with unflinching generosity, von Cramm stoically endured his tribulations.”

Marshall Jon Fisher played varsity tennis at Brandeis University and has worked as a sportswriter in Miami and a tennis pro in Munich. He holds an M.A. in English from City College of New York. A freelance writer and editor, he has written for The Atlantic Monthly on topics ranging from wooden tennis racquets to Internet fraud, and his work has also appeared in Harper’s, Discover, DoubleTake, and other publications, including Best American Essays 2003. His book The Ozone Layer (Chelsea House, 1992) was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the best books of 1993 for teenagers. His book (with his father, David E. Fisher) Tube: the Invention of Television was published by Counterpoint in 1996 and in paperback by Harcourt Brace in 1997. Their second book together, Strangers in the Night: a Brief History of Life on Other Worlds (Counterpoint, 1998), was selected by the New York Public Library as one of the twenty-five Books to Remember of 1998.

Marshall lives in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts with his wife, Mileta Roe (a professor of Spanish and comparative literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock), and their two sons, Satchel and Bram. For more about A Terrible Splendor and its author, visit his website.

Four upstreet authors in newField Guide to Writing Flash Fiction

Three of the 25 contributing authors to the new Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction (Rose Metal, 2009) are upstreet authors: Randall Brown, Michael Martone, and Bruce Holland Rogers. Also, one of the sample flash fiction stories in the book is by Lydia Davis, who was the interview subject in upstreet number two and has a short story in number five.

upstreet welcomes submissions of flash, sudden, and/or quick fiction--otherwise known as the short-short story. For examples of fictions under 1,000 words that have appeared in upstreet, see number two (Linda Pierce, "Neighbors"), number three (Molly Ritvo, "Babysitting;" Katy J. Vopal, "Howled"), number four (Randall Brown, "Patterns;" Molly Ritvo, "April 4, 1968"), and the upcoming number five (Lydia Davis, "An Awkward Situation").

Creative nonfiction pieces (prose poems/lyric essays) of under 1,000 words have appeared in upstreet number one (Anna Viadero, "At the Table"), number three (Kathy Briccetti, "Slow Dancing to a Fast Song;" Lorene Delany-Ullman, "Filler;" Bruce Holland Rogers, "Something is in the Air;" Max Ruback, "Soldiers;" Kiki Smith, "Babycakes"), number four (Jen Bills, "The Stairs are Broken So I Took the Elevator Again;" Daniel Hales, "Run Story;" Tiff Holland, "Ooh Baby"), and number five (Chris Gordon, "You Were Always on My Mind;" Catherine Harnett, "Automat;" Tiff Holland, "Eidetic;" Joanna McNaney, "Learning How to Smoke").

Flashers of both genres are advised that the submission period for upstreet number six will be from September 1, 2009, to March 1, 2010. We'd be happy to hear from you.

upstreet poet Carvalho releases audiobook

upstreet number one poet Edward J. Carvalho ("God Was Like an Endless Night") has released his first audiobook, Chants from the Seven Cities (Guerrilla Ignition, 2009), available in CD and MP3 from CDBaby.com and Amazon.com. The 17-track playlist was selected from Carvalho's full-length poetry collection, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short (Fine Tooth Press, 2007), and new, previously unpublished work. The audiobook was recorded in a two-hour marathon session by producer, publisher and upstreet number one poet Synnika Lofton ("A Revolutionary Mood") in Norfolk, VA. The cover artwork is by Jason Beam.

Edward J. Carvalho holds an MFA from Goddard College. He is a PhD candidate in the Literature and Criticism program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where he is a teaching associate in the English Department and received the 20th and 21st Annual IUP Doctoral Fellowships (2006, 2008). His work, twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, has appeared in Quay, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, and other journals. He was guest editor of David B. Downing's Works and Days journal on "Academic Freedom and Intellectual Activism in the Post-9/11 University" (Fall/Spring 2009), which features his interviews with Noam Chomsky, Martin Espada, and Cornel West, and was discussed on Stanley Fish's New York Times blog. His collection, "If the Radiance of a Thousand Suns": Songs of the American Hiroshima, is forthcoming from Six Bad Apples Press (2009).

Ten Fletcher essays selected for 2009 publication

upstreet’s Creative Nonfiction Editor is on a roll—or so it seems. Nine essays by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher have been selected for 2009 publication in five literary journals. They are:

“Inheritance,” New Ohio Review, Spring 2009.
“Windows,” “Monster,” and “Stray,” Grasslands Review, Summer 2009.
“Rings,” Dos Passos Review, Fall 2009.
“Relics,” Palabra, Fall 2009.
“Wreath,” “Brotherhood,” and “Ash,” Water~Stone Review, Fall 2009.

Also, Harrison’s essay, “The Beautiful City of Tirzah,” will appear in Sue William Silverman’s forthcoming book, Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir (U. of Georgia Press, June 2009), a textbook and anthology for beginning and experienced writers who want to craft compelling art out of personal experience. This is the essay that was selected by Michael Martone and Lex Williford for The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (Simon and Schuster, 2007), and by the Pushcart editors for a Special Mention in the 2008 Pushcart Prize anthology.

Nice going, Harrison.

upstreet fiction editor signs Viking Penguin novel contract

upstreet Fiction Editor Robin Oliveira has signed a contract for her novel, My Name is Mary Sutter, with Kathryn Court at Viking Penguin. The contract, for an undisclosed sum, was described as “the deal of the week” by Publishers Marketplace, calling the deal “a pre-empt,” which is a situation in which a publisher especially eager to get a book offers a large enough advance to make an immediate deal.

Set in the mid-19th century, Robin’s novel follows the aspirations and difficulties of a brilliant, somewhat odd, yet remarkable young midwife from Albany, NY, whose lofty hope of becoming a surgeon far exceeds what her family and the physicians and medical schools of her time are willing to accept. She travels to Washington, DC, to work in the Civil War hospitals, only to find the challenges formidable and the pull of home unavoidable. A chapter of the novel, which is scheduled for June 2010 publication, appeared in the July 2008 issue of Provincetown Arts magazine.

In 2007, Robin won the $10,000 15th annual James Jones First Novel Fellowship, awarded to an American author of a first-novel-in-progress by the James Jones Literary Society and Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, PA. Born in Albany, NY, in 1954, she earned a BA in Russian from the University of Montana and continued to study at the Pushkin Language Institute in Moscow, USSR. She became a Registered Nurse, and then worked as a bone marrow transplant and cardiac care nurse in Seattle before earning an MFA in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2006. She has been Fiction Editor for upstreet three, four, and the upcoming five, which will be released in late June of this year. Robin lives in Seattle with her husband, Andrew Oliveira, their daughter, Noelle, and their son, Miles.

upstreet number four wins IPPY Bronze Medal

upstreet number four has been named the Bronze Medal winner in the anthologies category of the 2009 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY). These awards, chosen from 3,380 entries in 65 national categories (there is no literary journals category), have been given annually for the past thirteen years in recognition of excellence in independent publishing.

upstreet number four, which was released in June of 2008, features a 24-page interview with Indiana-born author Michael Martone. The 36 poets and prose writers whose work appears in this issue include finalists for the 2007 National Book Award (David Kirby) and the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award (Michael O’Brien), a winner of the World’s Greatest Short Story Contest (Michael Martone), a 2008 IPPY Bronze Medalist (Karen Chase), a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow (Bill Zavatsky), and the winner of the 2003 Governor General’s Award for English Fiction, Canada’s highest literary prize (Douglas Glover). Their work has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, Best Canadian Stories, and the Norton anthologies. Besides these accomplished authors, upstreet number four includes many whose publication careers are just beginning. We are very pleased about this, since upstreet was founded with the vision that it would ultimately be a mixture of established and emerging writers.

In the IPPY anthologies category, the 2009 Silver Medal winner is Listen to Me: Shared Secrets from WriteGirl, by Keren Taylor (WriteGirl), and the two books tied for the Gold Medal are A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection, edited by Stacy Bierlein (Other Voices Books), and And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women, edited by Muneeza Shamsie (The Feminist Press, CUNY). The medals will be presented at an awards ceremony and reception in New York City on Friday, May 29.

Our thanks and congratulations to everyone who has been a part of upstreet number four.