Sunday, September 26, 2010

New Creative Nonfiction Editor

Beginning with the upcoming seventh issue, Richard J. Farrell (above, with Maggie, 9, and Thomas, 5) of San Diego, CA, will be upstreet’s Creative Nonfiction Editor. He replaces Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, who held this position for the previous four issues.

A 1991 graduate of the US Naval Academy, Rich earned an MA in Secondary Education from Webster University, St. Louis, MO. Following his career as a Naval aircraft pilot, he taught science, math, and history at Cathedral High School in San Diego. He is currently a candidate for an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, Montpelier, where he has worked with authors Jess Row, Ellen Lesser, Douglas Glover, and Philip Graham, among others. He has been a submission reader for the literary journal Hunger Mountain, and for its Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize, and is a Contributing Editor for Glover’s literary blog, Numéro Cinq.

Asked to comment on what he would look for in a creative nonfiction submission, Rich said: “Good writing allows a reader to explore different worlds, to inhabit different bodies, and to understand different minds, but in the end always takes us home to ourselves. For upstreet, I want to find that careful writer who crafts the mysterious mixture of thought, emotion, and soul. The creative nonfiction genre encompasses so much, but is unified by an attention to, and a love of, language. I don’t believe in boundaries. In the end, good writing always finds a way to transcend whatever restrictions hold it down.”

Submissions for upstreet number seven opened September 1, and will close March 1, 2011.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

upstreet call for submissions featured
in Poets & Writers’ Literary MagNet

upstreet is one of six journals appearing in the Literary MagNet column of the September/October issue of Poets & Writers magazine. The item reads: “upstreet (http://www.upstreet-mag.org/), the annual journal founded in 2005 by publisher and editor Vivian Dorsel and based in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, is now open for submissions. Writers are invited to submit poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction for the seventh issue, due out in July 2001. Visit the Web site for complete guidelines.”

The upstreet Submission Manager went online at 1:30 this morning, and will take submissions for number seven until March 1, 2011. upstreet number six, which came out in June, contains an interview with memoirist Sue William Silverman, and work by David Jauss, Douglas Glover, Karen Chase, Mark Halliday, Jeffrey Harrison, and many other distinguished writers. The sixth issue received a record total of 3,681 submissions—1,331 stories, 1,952 poems, and 398 essays.