1. In case you haven’t heard, AWP is just around the corner.
You can meet the PANK editors at the Bookfair (Space A E10), all day every day during the conference. We’ll be having a fun giveaway and we’ll be selling PANK 4 and How to Take Yourself Apart, How to Make Yourself Anew.
You can also find us at our panel, bright and early at 9 am Thursday morning in Room 303 of the Colorado Convention Center where we will be doing this:
R118. The In Sound from Way Out: Submission to Publication. (M. Bartley Seigel, Margaret Bashaar, Aaron Burch, James Grinwis, Roxane Gay) Editors from four eclectic little magazines—Bateau, Hobart, PANK, and Weave—unpack their editorial projects and processes, quirks and anomalies, across genres, and invite questions to initiate dialogue among panel and audience members.
When we’re done unpacking, we’ll also be hosting a reading with DOGZPLOT at Forest Room 5 at 7:30 p.m. where you can hear some great people read. Who? Aaron Burch, Beth Thomas, Tim Jones-Yelvington, JA Tyler, Erin Fitzgerald, Molly Gaudry, Kathy Fish, Angi Becker Stevens, Matt Salesses, Pedro Ponce, Bill Barr, Jac Jemc, Maggie Glover, Lauren Becker, Kyle Minor, and Nicolle Elizabeth! That’s WHO! No gimmicks, no polka bands, no strippers (though we did consider these options carefully and seriously)–just great writers, alcohol and if the Internet is any indication, bad service.
As a public service, I have located some Starbucks locations for us via Google Maps.
Awesome, yes?
2. Writers! What is up? Your submissions as of late have been just so damn good. Seriously, I don’t know what’s going on in Writerville or what pacts you may have made with the Underworld, but pat yourselves on the back. You’re making it both very easy and very hard to be an editor these days.
3. We quietly removed our submission guidelines about a month ago and we have some news to report. There is no news! There has been very little change except a noticeable uptick in submission quality though I don’t know if these two things are correlative. There have been a couple angry missives from writers demanding guidelines but other than that, it has been business as usual. We’ve also started getting much longer stories but they’ve largely been excellent so it has been really awesome to get to read the kind of long, meaty work we weren’t seeing as much of before.
4. For a friend: OH SNAP!
5. I read two amazing books–Normal People Don’t Live Like This by Dylan Landis and Dear Everybody by Michael Kimball. These books were the kind of good that leaves my soul satisfied, that inspire me to be a better writer, so if you haven’t read them yet, please see about doing that so we can talk about them. I’d write more on these books here but I’m writing about them more somewhere else.
6. I watched three movies, one was excrement, one was okay and one was great. I felt like a cinematic Goldilocks.
The excrement was an abomination of a movie called Nothing Like the Holidays, with Grace Adler and a bunch of other random people, about a Puerto Rican family gathering for the holidays and all the family secrets and drama come out and we’re supposed to feel good about family afterwards but mostly I felt profoundly sad. You’ve probably seen this movie once or  twice already. This installment of the family at the holidays movie was derivative and the acting was so uncomfortable as to make me wonder, for a moment, if this wasn’t some kind of joke. The movie was dreckitude… dreck, as in a wreck. If you watch ANTM you won’t have to click that link. If you don’t watch ANTM, sad. Click, learn, respect.
The okay movie was Adventureland. It was another one of those movies that doesn’t do much to differentiate itself from its ilk but I do enjoy a good coming of age tale so this movie was mostly inoffensive and Ryan Reynolds always makes things easier to swallow. Kristen Stewart was also in the movie and she did her disaffected sneer and pout thing quite well. I love that about her. She is so consistent.
The great movie was (500) Days of Summer which I thought was very smart and beautifully designed and the writing was so strong that I felt like I was reading a book while I watched the movie. The only part of the movie I thought was a bit much was Joseph Gordon Leavitt. He’s just so precious and twee in this movie and I wanted him to butch it up a bit and make me believe that a hot girl would fake date him. This movie is still worth watching. I think you guys will enjoy it though I’m pretty sure I’m the last person in the universe to see this.
7. If you take LOST seriously, and you should, you can get your Dharma Initiative food product labels here. Internet=magic.
8. Do you need some writing tips? Here you go.
9. I’m reading Adam Gallari’s We Are Never As Beautiful As We Are Now and it is pretty great. The Rumpus agrees. We’ll be reviewing it soon though I don’t know how the reviewer feels about the book.
10. Really, though. WTF is a kraken and why does it always need to be released?
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