News and Notes

posted Jun 24, 2008

© Dan Lloyd Taylor

From that height, he sees the woman and the child walking together under the far trees, their slipping away from him as his own life has—and that is the moment he lets go, throwing himself higher, farther, into the light that will burn him clean.

Peter Christopher, “The Flight”

Peter Christopher was a gifted writer and by all accounts a generous and talented teacher, and now he’s gone. When we heard of his passing, we felt a double regret—we’d lost not just him, but the chance to read the work he’d have produced, had he not died so young. If you know only “The Flight,” which we published in Issue 3, do track down his 1989 Knopf collection Campfires of the Dead, from Amazon or your favorite local bookstore. As you read it, you’ll share our sorrow. Goodbye, Peter.

Alumni notes

Greg Ames’s ("Biographers," Issue 2; "The Snowing Loneliness of Buffalo," Issue 17) first novel, Buffalo Lockjaw, will be published next April by Hyperion.

Sally Ashton ("Rapture" et al., Issue 20) will be guest-blogging on the Best American Poetry site from June 29 through July 5.

Meghan Austin ("Pittsburgh," Issue 26) has fiction in the latest Mississippi Review, and forthcoming issues of The 2nd Hand and Dicey Brown.

David Barringer’s ("Vampires," Issue 8) been as busy as always, designing Opium’s “Go Green!” issue, as well as book covers for David Gianatasio’s Mind Games and Jackie Corley’s The Suburban Swindle. And his novel American Home Life is now out in paperback.

Caren Beilin ("Three or So Uses of the Crab Apple," Issue 21) has fiction due in current or forthcoming numbers of LIT, Fugue, 5_trope, The Lifted Brow, and New River Journal.

Sadiq Bey’s ("8/30/39" and "8/24/39," Issue 11) recently collaborated with digital artist Claire Davies on a short film, Triple Aries, which was shown at Berlin’s Zebra International Poetry Film Festival.

Matthew Byrne ("In Defense of the Book" and "Of This Our Burgeoning District," Issue 13) has poetry in recent or forthcoming numbers of Kenyon Review, Poet’s Ink, Spoon River Poetry Review, Sunken Lines, Thick with Conviction, and The Vocabula Review.

Jimmy Chen’s ("The Wall and the Wilderness," Issue 21) story “The Unrealistic Philosopher” was recently named a Million Writers Notable Story for 2007.

Susan Daitch ("Jnun in the Age of Metal," Issue 14) has fiction up at Guernicamag, International Literature Quarterly, and The Brooklyn Rail.

Tara Deal’s ("Cloudland" and "La Jupe Jaune," Issue 19) novella Palms Are Not Trees After All recently won the 2007 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize, and is due soon from Texas Review Press; the first chapter is available now from Tars’s website.

Josh Dorman’s ("Ghost Birds" et al., Issue 9) work was recently featured in “Babel,” an exhibition at Chelsea’s Mary Ryan Gallery.

J.J. DeCeglie ("Summer Spent," Issue 21) has just released a story collection, In The Same Streets You’ll Wander Endlessly.

Michael Kimball ("Dear Old Woman,," Issue 23) has new fiction in Keyhole and New York Tyrant. His third novel, Dear Everybody, is due in September from Alma Books.

Matt Leibel’s ("Paper Girl," Issue 18) story “The Brief, (Nearly) Exemplary Career of a Madman” recently won first prize in the Berkeley Fiction Review’s Sudden Fiction Contest, and was a finalist in Opium’s 250-word Bookmark Contest. He has work forthcoming in Quarterly West, Diagram, and St. Ann’s Review.

Peter Markus’s ("Our Father Who Walks On Water Comes Home With Two Buckets of Fish," Issue 2; "Our father in the belly of the fish," Issue 26) Bob, or Man on Boat is out now from Dzanc Books.

Michael Martone, ("Four Alabama Seasons," Issue 25) whose new book is Racing in Place, will spend the summer at conferences in Vermont and Minnesota, the fall on the 3rd Double-Wide World Tour of Indiana, with readings in Goshen, Greencastle, Crawfordsville, and Fort Wayne, and the next school year at the University of Montana and the University of Utah.

Andrew Milward’s ("Silver Creek, 1969," Issue 23) story “The Burning of Lawrence,” which originally appeared in the Zoetrope, was recently named a finalist for the National Magazine Award. Having just graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he’s moved to Madison, where he will be the James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing.

Amanda Nazario’s ("My Signature Moves," Issue 27) essay/story “The Collected Works of Sara Ruiz” is due soon in Alligator Juniper; her short-short “Don’t Look Back in Anger” is up now at Spindle. She’s headed to the Sewanee conference this summer on a Tennesee Williams scholarship.

Andrew Roe ("Mexico," Issue 22) has fiction in recent issues of Juked, elimae, and Night Train.

MP3s of Thaddeus Rutkowski ("Dear Daughter," and "Waiting for the Phone to Ring," Issue 15) reading several of his poems are now available from PENNsound, while White and Wong, his new chapbook, can be had for a mere six smackers from BoneWorld Publishing, 3700 County Route 24, Russell, NY 13684. His story “Shots and Flames” is just out from First City Review.

Alphonso Bow, a feature film written by M Sarki, ("Everything for Moppel" et al., Issue 3) is set for release later this year, from Nut Bucket Films.

Kevin Sampsell’s ("Sharon Calls," Issue 20) story collection Creamy Bullets is out now from Chiasmus Press, and features “Sharon Calls,” originally published right the hell here.

Liana Scalettar’s ("Flowereaters," Issue 12; "Journal for the Academic Study of Magic," Issue 26) “Journal for the Academic Study of Magic,” also originally pubbed you know where, was recently featured in e-scene.

Matthew Sharpe’s ("Jamestown" and Interview, Issue 24) novel Jamestown is out in paperback, from Harcourt.

Laura Tanenbaum’s ("Middle-Aged Men on Planes," Issue 25) story “Old Movie Stars” recently appeared in Steel City Review; she has another piece forthcoming in Open Letters Monthly.

Lee Upton’s ("The Broom" and "Apology to Keats," Issue 1; "The Decorator Crab," Issue 17) fiction has appeared most recently in Conduit, Freightstories, Short Fiction, Idaho Review, and Epoch.

Shawn Vandor, ("Man Killing Minotaur," Issue 6) a frequent contributor to Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, has a story collection, Fire at the End of the Rainbow due out this fall from Sand Paper Press.

Jillian Weise, who recently accepted a teaching position at Clemson, and a Fulbright grant to work in Argentina, ("How to Treat Flowers," Issue 27) has poetry forthcoming in Pax Americana and Pleiades.

We encourage all our alumni to keep us updated on the latest in their lives, by dropping us a line at ’alumni AT failbetter.com’.