Call For Submissions: Cartographie Curieux

Greetings Friends, Acquaintances, One-Night Stands, Frenemies, Editors, Classmates, Professors, Colleagues, and everyone else,

We are pleased to present a call for submissions from our new Web Journal: Cartographie Curieux. Cartographie Curieux is interested in the curious geographies that everyone must navigate as they travel through life. We are obsessed with finding ourselves and we are looking for some good maps to get us there. We think you may be (or know) one of the talented cartographers we are looking for: please send us submissions of any kind: poetry, fiction, nonfiction, interviews, and of course, images which engage with the idea of maps. Surprise us!

Check Out Our Nascent Website: ttp://www.cartographiecurieux.com

And LIKE us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/CartographieCurieux

We review and publish submissions on a rolling basis and plan to publish our first work in April of 2012. Some maps we’d love to publish:

Fantasy, blueprints, schema, diagram, to buried treasure, to nowhere, home, the backyard, offices, alleys, migration patterns of Canadian Geese, birds-eye view, the body, heaven, hell, daytrips, the mind, maps best viewed with red-blue 3D glasses, your career, well-intentioned but inaccurate, our career, fog density patterns in San Francisco, dungeons and dragons, territories, a backpack, macro and micro economies, the ocean floor, the highest points in Iowa, cotton candy trade-routes, maps that require a QR Code reader, “Family Circus” style misadventures, sculptural, ideas, the internet, the blogosphere, outlines, maps that employ erasure, sunken cities, invisible cities, as-yet-unbored subway lines, bird houses, carpet stains, concentrations of all-you-can-eat buffets in Ohio, and geographies we can’t imagine without your help…

Send All Submissions here:

submissions @ cartographiecurieux.com

Thanks in advance for your support; we hope your work finds its way to us soon.

Best,

Ori Fienberg
Michael Allen Potter

P.S. And LIKE us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/CartographieCurieux

5 Months of Notepads

Last night, at the Prudential Center's Barnes and Noble, my Mom, apparently not remembering this post asked me again why I don't use Moleskine notepads.

The simple reason is that they just don't meet my needs, as I outlined in the previous blog post. This picture, which includes a handful of the notepads I've been filling over the past few months, illustrates another reason that I didn't think of before: variety. Moleskines are classy, but they're also fairly staid. I think they make a few in pastel colors, or other "designer" editions (with corresponding designer prices). There's something highly pleasing to me about having different notepads with different colors and designs; it reminds of the pleasurable chaos of ideas coming into being. I just can't imagine being as happy going through a homogenous stack...

U:35 Reading, Tuesday 3/6, Marliave

I will be reading along with Ron Spalletta and Emily O'Neill Tuesday night at the Marliave.

Of course, Tuesday has already passed, so I sort of drophttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifped the ball as far as pre-event self-promotion, but here's a little post-event self and series promotion.

Daniel E. Pritchard, Editor of Critical Flame started the U:35 Poetry "a Reading Series of Apostate Youth" after overhearing a group of older poets proclaiming that really, the true writing of poetry doesn't begin till poets are at least 35 years old.

The series is held bimonthly, upstairs at Marliave, which is a cozy venue, and serves up some tasty bar food.

The reading was a grand success and I look forward to attending more in the future.

Editor's Choice. . .

I'm please to announce that my submission for the Mid-American Review's 2011 Fineline Contest "for Prose Poems, Short Shorts and Anything In Between" was selected as a Finalist, and ultimately will be published as an "Editor's Choice" in the spring issue, available at the 2012 AWP Conference.

The name of the piece is "Sidekicks" and it features detective work, bartenders, mechanical bulls, and real bulls.

Over the past few years I've been a Finalist for several writing contests, but never a winner, and I think this was a very near breakthrough. Maybe "Editor's Choice" was a breakthrough.

What do you think, can I call myself an award-winning poet now?

My Unique Name --- An Interlude

I am the only "Ori Fienberg" in North America, and for now, if Google is to be believed, the world.

Some of this is because "Ori" is a unique name outside of Israel. Some of it is because "Fienberg" is a unique spelling (The likely apocryphal story of why the family name is "Fienberg" is worthy of it's own post on another day).

When I first started to care about what popped up when someone searched for me on the internet I would always start by typing in my name without quotes. Invariably I would be prompted: "Do you mean Ori Feinberg?" Who was this person who shared my name, but for a slight spelling variation (also, I don't know his middle name)? Why did Google prefer him over me? What did I have to do to be the dominant "Ori F---berg" (there's also an "Ori Fineberg" in Israel)? Apparently Mr. Feinberg has an MA in Contemporary Art, and at the time was an aspiring gallery owner. Every now and then I'd receive an e-mail intended for Mr. Feinberg, sometimes in Hebrew, which I'd forward along to him.

Last night I was checking my e-mail and saw that one of my colleagues had sent out a general update in which she instructed students who did not know their Workshop times to e-mail me. Great! But evidently she doesn't know how to spell my last name because she gave them the g-mail address for Mr. Feinberg. I e-mailed the students with my real e-mail (which the students and my colleague should have anyway), and then I sent an e-mail to Mr. Feinberg, apologizing for the random queries he might get, and asking if he could please forward them to me.

Later this morning he replied to say he would (he never has before, and given how often my name is spelled wrong on name tags at events, I can't imagine that he hasn't received anything before), and then suggested that in order to avoid this in the future I should change from g-mail to Yahoo. While I can't help but feel some small connection to Mr. Feinberg, in part because of our names, and in part because we both value the arts, his response seemed rather presumptuous. I never told him he should change *his* account when I received his e-mail.

Perhaps his suggestion stems from some insecurity: not long after I discovered he existed through Google's suggestions I eclipsed "the other Ori F" in internet presence. I suspect when he Googles his own name it asks him if he meant "Ori Fienberg." I've been there, so if this is the case I understand his irritation. But despite this and the minor inconvenience he may have had in the past when he deleted messages intended for me and now when he may choose to forward me a few student e-mails, I don't have any plans to change the main e-mail account I've had for 7 years.

Short and Sweet

The end of the year is approaching, and as I do each year about this time I take stock of the writing I've sent out to literary journals. Around fall, when my submission fatigue set in, it appeared that this would be a bumper-year for publications, however after several publications dates were postponed, it ended up just keeping pace with past years. Here's a selection from/of pieces that appeared on the world wide strangeness this year:

". . . His fingertips are like gentle sandpaper, soft from years of rubbing." - from Night Hungers, in Kill Author

"On the horizon a red sunset walls off the earth from grey rain clouds." - from Brick Harvest, in The Prose Poems Project

"Naturally, it is important for all business to be conducted reclining." - from To the Heart, in the Nashville Review

I know of a few pieces I'll have published in 2012, and meanwhile here's a final piece for 2011. After I submitted to Serving House Journal I had a brief exchange with the editor, Steve Kowit, about one piece, then SHJ decided to publish another and forgot to tell me.

No matter; it's so small (the smallest I've ever had accepted) that I might have forgotten to tell me too. You can read it here:

"At night, cars with one burned out headlight pretend to be motorcycles."


Thanks for reading. Happy Holidays and New Year!

Reflections: on the Death of Literary Journals

This morning I had a little free time and so I checked in on some of the internet publications I enjoy. I started by checking to see if Slurve Magazine, "The Arts & Culture Review that Masquerades as a Baseball Publication," had bit the dust yet.

Slurve was one of my first publications. I'd heard from a writing peer that she had been published there, and as I was somewhat publication-lite myself, and interested in having at least some work available online to the three people each year who probably Googled me, I decided I'd check them out.

Slurve was nascent. I looked around and liked the potential. The published contributors each had "baseball cards" with their stats and author info. I had just finished an essay about baseball cards and so it tickled my fancy. The editors asked not for "submissions" but for "tryouts," in all genres, including reviews and political commentary. This, I thought, seems like a good idea.

I submitted several pieces, had three accepted and published just a few months later. Not to say that I've had any pieces published that I'm not proud of, but I especially like the three they selected: an alternative-universe piece about baseball and poetry, and two about growing up in slightly odd ways. I was pleased to have them available to the world.

But they never managed to get my baseball card up on the site. And after another three months no new work had been posted. Then another three months passed. About two years later I checked in and discovered that the Slurve team was under new-management. The Head Coach had been jettisoned. The team had been moved from Boston to Los Angeles. New work was coming soon. It didn't come that soon. I stopped checking Slurve for new writing and instead visited periodically to see if it had died yet.

Their Facebook page indicates that the new work did come, and that in fact for at least a few months this year Slurve was posting regularly, however as of today, it's gone. I expected the end for so long, but that it's gone I'm a little surprised. Publication by Slurve was a minor milestone in my young writing career, and now they're gone. Selfishly, I guess I'm glad that their literary career petered out before mine.

Fortunately, internet is filled with many worthy little literary journals (both original and offshoots of print publications) that collect pieces you could never hope to run across in the Paris Review or Poetry, or some other high-falutin' journal, but are nevertheless beautiful and provocative. Through submissions and word-of-mouth I've discovered dozens of them (too many to read regularly) including elimae, which merrily trucks along in minimalist glory and PANK, which I check somewhat more regularly, and not just because they've published me.

Within the last couple years I also discovered two other journals whose format I especially liked, Wonderfort, and Abjective. Both featured one author or collaboration a week, a format which I found both simple and pleasing. To be fair (or maybe a little unfair), Wonderfort appeared to be a rather direct parallel of the style of Abjective, and the editor of one was published by the editor of the other at least once. Maybe it would be better to say they had a rapport.

Regardless, when I checked them today only Abjective remains online, for now displaying the somewhat terse message: "ABJECTIVE no longer publishes". If you go to the main site it displays random pieces from its archive, which are filled with many delightfully strange pieces.

Wonderfort, on the other hand, is completely gone. Where did it go? When was the fort breached? When did the wonder stop?