Out & About

Ian Doherty, a creative writing student at Susquehanna University, recently conducted this Q&A with me for one of his classes. We briefly discuss the origins of [PANK], the state of the magazine, and a few things in between.

Doherty: How did [PANK] start?

Seigel: In 2005, I got a job teaching creative writing at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, MI. In 2006, there was $300 in a fund dedicated to a then defunct in-house student litmag. The chair handed it to me and said, essentially, use it or lose it, no strings attached. I scraped together an additional $3500 from the chair and my dean, found an undergrad assistant, and started the magazine. The student named it. I invited friends and colleagues from my MFA days to submit. And I handed out copies of the first issue for free at the 2007AWP in Atlanta. We put up a website that year that just had submission guidelines on it. We managed a second print issue in 2008, the same year Roxane Gay came on board. We launched the online magazine that same year. 2008 was, in many ways, the year things really got started. That’s the nutshell, anyway.

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Out & About

Paper Darts, one of my personal favorites, had a couple nice pictures of our AWP book fair table and some nice things to say about us on their blog.

“It’s no surprise that PANK has one of the sexiest displays at the bookfair. Their table is overflowing with their bold and finely designed merch—the trick is fighting through the throng of PANK lovers to get close enough to reverently touch it all.” -Paper Darts

*****

If you see [PANK] out and about, snap a photo and send it to editor@pankmagazine.com.

 

AWP :: Gird Thy Loins

The conference itself sold out at 9,500 participants. The book fair exhibitor tables and booths sold out, as well, and while I don’t have the energy to count up the total (something like 500, I think), suffice it to say there’s a whole lot of pressing and litmaging and mfaing going to happen. There are also something like 400 AWP sponsored events and hundreds of associated offsite events. Not to mention the fact that this is Chicago we’re talking about, a city that manages to get litbusy perfectly well on its own without the additional help of AWP. Add in the frenetic insecurity of most of the writers in attendance, their mad scramble for status, position, affirmation, and attention, add in the drinking and the wonton sex, and…

Here’s a nice primer from TMR editor Michael Nye.

And another from Courtney Maum at Tin House. 

You get the point.

I’ll be attempting to post a daily pankish recap of the experience. So if you can’t be there in person, Abby, Roxane, and I will do our best to bring our cattiness home to you. Stay tuned.

If you are  trimming up the moustache in preparation for the big event, here’s a list of where you can find a [PANK] fix amidst all the hustle and chaos.

AWP BOOK FAIR, THURSDAY-SATURDAY, ALL DAY :: Stop by the bookfair, table L14, to say hello. Roxane and I will be there, as well as lovely assistant editor Abby Koski and a guaranteed ragtag assortment of our nearest and dearest [PANK] collaborators. We’ll have signed copies of Ethel Rohan’s Hard to Say and Matthew Salesses’ Our Island of Epidemics for sale. We’ll have copies of [PANK]5 & 6, too. And swag, mountains and mountains of it.

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Congratulations Robert Swartwood!

Seven Items In Jason Reynolds’ Jacket Pocket, Two Days After His Suicide, As Found By His Eight-Year-Old Brother, Grady” by Robert Swartwood, which appeared in the April 2010 edition of PANK, was just selected as the runner-up of the 4th Annual Micro Award! This is the third time a PANK story has received some kind of recognition from the Micro Award. We are thrilled.

Congratulations, Robert! Well-deserved

Future=Present=Past=PANK

pankcover lores1. PANK 5 will assemble an army. PANK 5 will give birth to a dancing star. Poetry, prose and ecstatic otherness from  Deb  Olin Unferth, Lucas Southworth, Emily Kiernan, xTx, Sheldon Lee Compton, Kaitlin Dyer, S.J. Fowler, Marcus Wicker, Christopher Phelps, J.A. Tyler, Michelle Dove, Lindsey Drager, Jamie Iredell, Rob Roensch, Eugenia Tsutsumi, Tim Tomlinson, Brian Oliu, M.E. Griffith, Clark Knowles, Phil Estes, Laura McCullough, Lauren Foss Goodman, Neal Peters, Colleen O’ Connor, Nickolas Butler, Luca Dipierro, Matthew McBrearty, Chelsea Laine Wells, Donna Vitucci, Jim Daniels, Troy Urquhart, Jessica Berger, Ori Fienberg, Toshiya Kamei, Rion Scott, Mark Baumer, Jonathan Callahan, Josh Kleinberg, Melissa Broder, Traci O’ Connor, Nick Ripatrazone, Arlene Ang, Tasha Matsumoto, Gabriel Welsch, Mindy Hung, Mabel Yu, Kathleen Heil, Nancy Carol Moody, Eileen D. Escabar, Janey Smith, Andrea Kneeland, Emilie Lindemann, Kuzhali Manickavel, Teresa Milbrodt, Valerie Suffron, Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdao, Amber Sparks, Lydia Ship, Rachel Yoder, Christina Frigo, Megan Falley, Alexis Orgera, Elizabeth Hildreth, P.F. Potvin, Elizabeth Hildreth, Brian Russell, A. Papatya Bucak, Todd McKie, Christina Murphy, Elizabeth Wade, Kyle Minor, Mark Neely, Ben Jahn, Andrew Farkas, Liana Jahan Imam, Lauren Becker and Lauren Wheeler. Pre-order yours today.

OURISLANDcover-lores2.  Matt Salesses’  Our Island of Epidemics is now available for order  here and they are going, going fast. These fourteen tiny tales recount the story of a community of island dwellers who catch their island’s strange and fleeting epidemics—memory loss, unrequited love, magic, extrasensitive hearing, talking to animals, dissociation—and the relationship that the people of the island have with their home, with each other and with the diseases. That is, until one man becomes immune.

“One of the great feats of fiction is to create a world where anything can happen. Matthew Salesses has done this with  Our Island of Epidemics and, in doing so, he has revealed the great difficulty of the human condition.”  —Michael Kimball, author of  Dear Everybody

Contract some Salesses live,  11/7 at Abe’s Bar in Providence, RI (Cousins Reading Series).

images3. We’ve come upon an unexpected stash of PANK1. For a limited time, order any  $10 worth of PANK at the PANK store and we’ll throw in a free copy of PANK1 until they’re gone.

Get thee to the PANK STORE today!

Poets & Writers likes us – they really, really…

2010novdec_web_0Actually, I still don’t think P&W knows we exist. Otherwise we would have had a cover by now, no? Regardless, on page 82 of the new Nov/Dec issue, in an article titled “The Journals Agents Are Reading,” Diana Finch of Diana Finch Literary Agency name-drops us in a roundabout way. That’s it, really, but still, desperate egos call for desperate validation, and this is the first time that PANK’s name has appeared in a P&W article. So we got that going for us on this lovely Monday.

Poets & Writers likes us – they really, really…

2010novdec_web_0Actually, I still don’t think P&W knows we exist. Otherwise we would have had a cover by now, no? Regardless, on page 82 of the new Nov/Dec issue, in an article titled “The Journals Agents Are Reading,” Diana Finch of Diana Finch Literary Agency name-drops us in a roundabout way. That’s it, really, but still, desperate egos call for desperate validation, and this is the first time that PANK’s name has appeared in a P&W article. So we got that going for us on this lovely Monday.