Getting work out there.

Thank you, Hotel Amerika, for taking my prose poem, Woof, and my whatever-it-is-lyric-essay(?), Exclusions. Can't wait to see them in the special spring issue, "Aphorisms."

Fresnel lens + eyeballs = weird.

This blog so messy, so, so messy.

I swore that, if I ever did this blog thing, my pages wouldn't look like those designers' nightmares you so frequently run into around the web. But, sure enough, that's basically exactly what I've made.

No much news lately. Couple pieces in the most recent Midway Journal (Volume 5, Issue 3). Best thing is, the next person down from me is my friend, and fabulous poet, Colleen McCarthy. I especially love "Hide" - it's luscious.

I managed to get a stack of submissions and grant proposals and contest entries in the mail in the last couple/three weeks. Now it's time to sit back and wait for the thousands of dollars to roll in.

Make sure you get on over to matchbook: stories quite short plus critical thoughts and submit an entry for their Ad Story project. You're gonna love the idea - it's super dorktacular.

Essay Daily: Not Really So Daily: Things I'm fond of that can be found in a review o...

Although I've already shown this off to a number of people, in emails, on Facebook, etcetera, I figure I might as well put it everywhere I can and at this point the only location lacking a link is now (well, not really, not anymore) this blog.

I was contacted by Craig Reinbold, a staff writer from Essay Daily, who was writing a review of South Loop Review Volume 12, and was particularly enamored by, and also somewhat puzzled by, my piece with the spurious title, "Untitled". Craig was intrigued, but felt the piece needed more, and was curious about how I saw the little "art exercise". Did I view it as an actual construction project? What was the piece doing, exactly?

I explained how "Untitled" came about, that the exercise in South Loop was actually just the first page of a four-page essay, and that I personally have a hard time seeing it stand on its own. Neither the first nor the second part entirely works without the other (the first even less so without the second). In retrospect I was probably too eager to see the piece in print, and probably shouldn't have released it in pieces this way. But the article in Essay Daily is a marvelous vindication of my feelings that the exercise cannot stand alone, and that it was kind of a weird editorial decision to excerpt it this way.

Essay Daily: South Loop Review Volume 12 review

Here's the portion of the piece that SLR12 took:

One of the undergraduate editors of South Loop wrote some short reviews for everyone who read or spoke at their publication party. She was very kind and generous with nice comments, and I thank her.

South Loop Volume 12. Reviews of the readers from Enjolique Bender.

South Loop Review Publication Celebration

If you're in Chicago on Thursday, October 21, swing by Columbia College to hear me read at the publication party for South Loop: Creative Nonfiction+Art Issue 12. My good friend, Holly Vanderhaar, will be reading as well, and it'll be Chicago in October, and that's just dandy. Even better, the event is part of the Creative Nonfiction Week at Columbia - there should be plenty to do and lots of great people to talk to.

South Loop Review

3:30 PM

Columbia College

618 Michigan Avenue

2nd Floor at Stage Two

Chicago, Illinois

Current publication info:

"The Myth of the Prose Poem" will appear in Sentence 8. Summer 2010. Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics is edited by Brian Clements and published by Firewheel Editions.

http://www.firewheel-editions.org/sentence/current.htm

"Good Idea #3: peanut butter" and "Measurement of a Man" will appear in South Loop Review: Creative Nonfiction and Art #12, fall 2010. South Loop is the literary journal of Creative Nonfiction Program at Columbia University and is edited by RéLynn Hansen.

http://cms.colum.edu/southloopreview/

"Good Idea #3: peanut butter" also received an honorable mention in the Fourth Genre 2010 Michael Steinberg Essay Contest. The contest is held by Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, the nonfiction literary journal of Michigan State University. The journal is currently edited by Marcia Aldrich; the contest submissions were judged by the journal's founding editor, Michael Steinberg.

http://msupress.msu.edu/journals/fg/