Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Christmas Special!

Gift subscribers receive a Christmas card and an entire year
of The Chattahoochee Review! Support award-winning writing 
and send a gift that recipients will enjoy year-round.

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Calendar of Events, Spring 2013

Update! Click on image to enlarge:





Past events, Fall 2012. Click on image to enlarge:
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Wednesday, November 14, 2012

MJCCA Book Festival Partnership! November 18th, 7:30!


Visit MJCCA for more information. We hope to see you there!

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Monday, October 22, 2012

Georgia Literary Festival on Jekyll Island in three weeks!

Come see the Hooch on Jekyll Island November 10th! Natasha Trethewey is the keynote! From the web site:

The 2012 Georgia Literary Festival features an array of free presentations and literary discussions, November 9-10 at the Jekyll Island Convention Center and the Jekyll Island Club Hotel. All featured authors have ties to Georgia and represent some of the literary world's most beloved writers. Over thirty authors will speak on their recent and most-treasured literary pieces.



Friday, October 5, 2012

WRITING THE VETERAN EXPERIENCE WORKSHOPS


SPRING 2013:
The Chattahoochee Review and GPC’s Military Outreach Center will present the spring semester session of the workshop series “Writing the Veteran Experience” on GPC’s Clarkston Campus, Tuesday, February 12, 2013 from 6-8 p.m. in room NLRC-2200.

FALL 2012:
Clarkston Campus, Thursday, October 11, 2012 from 6-8 p.m. in room CA-1500.



Workshops are open to all GPC alumni, faculty, staff, and students. For more information, contact Anna Schachner at 770.274.5479, Alicia Johanneson at 678.891.3275, or Lydia Ship at 678-891-3182.



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Friday, August 17, 2012

The Hooch at DBF's Writers Conference, August 31st, 4-6

The Chattahoochee Review will discuss submissions and contributors during the Decatur Book Festival's Writers Conference at Agnes Scott College,on Friday, August 31st, from 4-6. For more information about our free workshop, and to sign up, visit the Festival's website. We hope to see you there!


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Monday, July 23, 2012

Calling Ken Taylor fans!

Three cheers for contributor Ken Taylor, whose poems have appeared recently in Verse Daily and Southword!


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Friday, July 20, 2012

Contributor Lydia Netzer reviewed favorably

Great news at the Hooch! The New York Times recently featured contributor Lydia Netzer's Shine, Shine, Shine.




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Thursday, June 21, 2012

WRITING THE VETERAN EXPERIENCE SUMMER WORKSHOP

The Chattahoochee Review and GPC’s Military Outreach Center will present the summer semester session of the workshop series “Writing the Veteran Experience” on GPC’s Dunwoody Campus on Tuesday, July 10, 2012 from 6-8 p.m. in room A-1100.

The workshop is designed for participants to write about their own experiences of military service, or to share stories of the impact on their lives of friends, parents, and grandparents who have served in the United States Armed Forces.

Workshops generally follow a format that includes:

·         small-group breakouts
·         brainstorming exercises
·         professional writing evaluations and discussions
·         short writing assignments

The workshop is open to all GPC alumni, faculty, staff, and students. For more information, contact Anna Schachner at 770.274.5479, Alicia Johanneson at 678.891.3275, or Lydia Ship at 678-891-3182.

* * *

“We. We together. One being. Flow together like water. Till I can’t tell you from me. I drink you. Now. Now.”Pvt. Jack Bell from the movie The Thin Red Line, which was adapted from the novel of the same name written by James Jones.


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Thursday, June 7, 2012

Contributor Natasha Trethewey Named Poet Laureate

A hearty congrats to Natasha Trethewey, friend of the Hooch and contributor, as the next poet laureate of the United States!

Read more here.

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Thursday, May 3, 2012

Hooch intern Josh Karl wins an Atlanta Writers Club scholarship!

Congrats, Josh!

Watch him accept the award at the Townsend Prize ceremony.



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Friday, April 13, 2012

Townsend Finalist Amanda Kyle Williams Inspired By Niece, by Rebecca Rakoczy, GPC Publication Specialist

Sometimes, writing inspiration comes from the mouths of babes. For Amanda Kyle Williams, it was the flat-out Southern twang that came out of her adopted Chinese niece’s mouth that made her start developing the character Keye Street, the Asian-American protagonist in William’s debut thriller, The Stranger You Seek. The novel is up for the 2012 Townsend Prize for Fiction this month.

Created in 1981, the biennial prize was named for Jim Townsend, the founding editor of  Atlanta magazine and an early mentor to Georgia writers Pat Conroy, Terry Kay, Bill Diehl and Anne Rivers Siddons. Previous winners of the Townsend include Kathryn Stockett for The Help and Alice Walker for The Color Purple.

This year’s event honors ten Georgia writers, including Williams, and will be from 5 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Thursday, April 26th, at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Reservations are available through April 20th at giving.gpc.edu/townsend.

“I’m just thrilled to be on the Townsend list. It surprises me every time I think about it,” Williams said.

For the Decatur author, the road to the Townsend was anything but golden. “I dropped out of school when I was sixteen—I was a really poor performer,” she said. It wasn’t until she was twenty-two years old that Williams discovered she was dyslexic. For years she made a living as a pet sitter and dog walker in Decatur, as well as other odd jobs that have helped form a foundation for her novel.

“The jobs informed my writing in ways that I couldn’t have anticipated,” she said.

That information was important—she had a lot of catching up to do. “I’m going to be fifty-five this year, but when I was growing up, I guess no one knew what the term learning disability meant—it just wasn’t on their radar,” Williams said. “I knew my ABC’s, but didn’t read my first book until I was twenty-three years old.”

When she was finally given some learning tools to help her read, the world opened up to her, she said.

“I went to a librarian and asked her, ‘What would you start reading, if you just started today?’ She recommended Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I think she was a little bit of a sadist,’’ Williams said with a laugh. “But that book was life-changing for me—it was hard, but a love affair with books was born.”

Writing Stranger was a long process as well. She knew she wanted to write crime fiction, but didn’t have the “voice” of the protagonist. “I took some courses in criminal profiling, and tried to understand how profilers handle an investigation. But I didn’t have a main character.”

That was, until she heard her then six-year-old niece say something to her at Thanksgiving. “Bells started ringing,” Williams said. “Here was this gorgeous Asian child, but when she opened her mouth, she sounded like Ellie Mae Clampett. I was so charmed by this kid. Driving home that night, I pulled over the interstate and wrote the very first lines to The Stranger You Seek.”

Her publisher was equally charmed. When she finally finished the book in 2010, Random House offered her a six-figure deal for a series. Her next book, Stranger in the Room, featuring Keye Street, will be released in late August during the Decatur Book Festival, and there is a some “talk about a television series” but she could not reveal the details.

Williams will be on a book tour in July, and will be a featured writer during Thriller Fest in New York and the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival in the United Kingdom. She will sign books during the Townsend event. Book club members are encouraged to bring five or more members to the event, for an opportunity to have one of the authors speak at their club during the year.

For more information about the Townsend Prize for Fiction, and to get tickets, go to giving.gpc.edu/townsend. Tickets are $40 and include entrance to the Atlanta Botanical Garden, dinner and program.

Georgia Perimeter College, the third largest institution of the University System of Georgia, serves approximately 27 ,000 students through four campuses and several sites in metro Atlanta. For additional information, visit http://www.gpc.edu/.



Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Friday, March 16, 2012

Writing the Veteran Experience

Thank you to all participants in our Writing the Veteran Experience workshops! Our next round of workshops, one on Dunwoody campus, one on Clarkston, will be held in the summer, date and times TBA.

If you're interested in attending one of these free writing and literature workshops about the veteran experience (whether your own or someone else's), or if you know someone who might be interested, please contact Anna.Schachner@gpc.edu for more information or check back in the summer.

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Tuesday, February 28, 2012

The Hooch at AWP

The Hooch is presenting a panel at AWP 2013 in Boston: "'Because That's the Way It's Always Been Done': When Literary Journals Face Necessary Change."
Date: Saturday, March 9
Time: 4:30 p.m. to 5:45 p.m.
Location: Room 207, Hynes Convention Center


Literary journals must respond to changing readerships, budgetary constraints, evolving aesthetics, and limited staffing resources. The Chattahoochee Review, the Missouri Review, the Southern Review, and West Branch editors will address achieved results through editorial restructuring, website redesign, press partnerships, increased print and online content, social media outreach, and digital formatting.

AWP 2012:
Please stop by our table at AWP this year for an exclusive chance to buy one of the few remaining copies of our first issue under new editorship, featuring Natasha Trethewey and Aimee Bender! Also up for grabs, our second issue with a focus on Southern lit. We'd love to meet you!

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Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Congratulations to our 2012 Townsend Finalists!

The Townsend Prize for Fiction is awarded biennially to the Georgia writer judged to have published the best book-length work of fiction in the previous two years. The prize was founded in 1980 in honor of founding editor of Atlanta Magazine, Jim Townsend. Past recipients include respected Georgia authors Celestine Sibley, Alice Walker, Terry Kay, Ha Jin, and Kathryn Stockett.

Books are brought to our attention through communication from publishers, agents, and in some cases authors themselves. The final nominees are then selected by The Chattahoochee Review and the Georgia Center for the Book. Determination of the winner is carried out by anonymous, independent judges and announced at an awards ceremony. The next Townsend Prize for Fiction will be awarded April 26th, 2012, at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. Ann Beattie will give the keynote address.


The 2012 Townsend Prize Finalists:

Daniel Black, Perfect Peace (St. Martin’s Griffin)

Lynn Cullen, Reign of Madness (Putnam Adult)

Ann Hite, Ghost on Black Mountain (Gallery Books)

Joshilyn Jackson, Backseat Saints (Grand Central Publishing)

Collin Kelley, Remain in Light (Vanilla Heart Publishing)

Thomas Mullen, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers (Random House)

Andrew Plattner, A Marriage of Convenience (BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City)

Josh Russell, My Bright Midnight (Louisiana State University Press)

Joseph Skibell, A Curable Romantic (Algonquin Books)

Amanda Kyle Williams, The Stranger You Seek (Bantam)



Tuesday, January 31, 2012

The Truths I Told, by Ethel Rohan


Readers of memoir and non-fiction often want to know how much of the author’s work is fabricated. Similarly, readers of fiction speculate about how much of the work is true. My short collection, Hard to Say, won the PANK Little Books 2010 Contest and is now on sale. The collection is largely set in Dublin, Ireland, and contains fifteen linked short-short stories. The parallels between my life and the narrator’s have begged the question: How much in these stories is autobiography? Let’s consult the tell-all table below!


Story Title
Plot Summary
% of Events That Actually Occurred
“Crust”
Adult narrator seeks cures for insomnia, nightmares, anxiety and TMJ.
50%
“Fresh From God”
Child narrator’s mother gives birth to sixth baby and spirals deeper into depression.
50%
“Corruptionists”
Child narrator’s mother defies septicemia and death, but narrator worries the doctors had “somehow switched [her mother] at the hospital or taken too much out of her.”
70%
“Kriegspiel”
Child narrator’s older brother “frightened [her] mind almost out of [her] body,” but the siblings reach the unlikeliest of truces after she burns his favorite toy soldiers. 
2%
“Stung”
Child narrator’s mother is stung by wasp and narrator contemplates the girl in the moon.
70%
“Robbed”
Child narrator witnesses bloodied robbery at her local off-license and is forever linked to the injured storekeeper and his assailants.
95%
“Passages”
Child narrator goes on school field trip to Stone Age passage tombs at New Grange and witnesses a nosebleed that will never leave her imagination.
20%
“Here, Daddy”
Child narrator recounts the worst of her parents’ fights.
70%
“Fracture”
Child narrator prone to breaking bones and running away from home.
60%
“Raw”
Child narrator buries in the back garden the raw liver her mother intended to eat for dinner.
60%
“Wizards”
Child narrator-as-wizard in bedroom scene with her abuser’s young son-as-wizard.
2%
“Split”
Teen narrator’s mother’s psychosis leads to mandatory stay in mental hospital.
80%
“Departures”
Young Adult narrator hosts Bon Voyage party before emigrating to New York.
60%
“Peeled”
Young Adult narrator forms bizarre relationship with college drama instructor.
0%
“Mammy”
Adult narrator keeps vigil by mother’s deathbed & travels across continents and time.
70%


Ethel Rohan is the author of Hard to Say, PANK, 2011, and Cut Through the Bone, Dark Sky Books, 2010, the latter named a 2010 Notable Story Collection by The Story Prize. Her work has or will appear in World Literature Today, The Irish Times, The Chattahoochee Review, The Los Angeles Review, Southeast Review Online, Potomac Review, and elsewhere. She earned her MFA in fiction from Mills College, California. Raised in Ireland, Ethel Rohan now lives in San Francisco. Learn more about Hard to Say at http://www.pankmagazine.com/little-books/. Visit Ethel Rohan at ethelrohan.com.

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Wednesday, January 25, 2012

I Don't Know What to Think About What People Will Think: An Interview with Blake Butler



I wanted to interview Blake Butler for a number of reasons, but in part due to his novel, There Is No Year, released last year from Harper Perennial. He has also written a novel-in-stories, Scorch Atlas (Featherproof Books, 2009), and a novella, Ever (Calamari Press, 2008). He published the chapbook Pretend I Am There But Very Little with Publishing Genius in 2008. His stories, reviews, creative nonfiction, and lists have appeared in many magazines, including Black Warrior Review, Post Road, The Believer, and Copper Nickel. He is the editor and co-founder of HTMLGiant, “The Internet Literature Magazine Blog of the Future.” He runs the reading series Solar Anus in Atlanta, where he lives. I’ve known Blake since 2007, after we’d recognized each other’s work in literary magazines and saw from our respective bios that we both lived in Atlanta. Blake remains not only a good friend, but one of the most dedicated, thoughtful, interesting, and discussion-provoking practitioners of discourse in the English language that I know. To read more from Blake, or to purchase his books, see his blog: www.gillesdeleuzecommittedsuicideandsowilldrphil.com


Jamie Iredell: You've “come up,” as they might say, relatively quickly on the “literary scene.” A couple of years ago you were publishing in obscure literary journals, writing your blog, and publishing your own magazine. Then you started publishing in some “higher profile” magazines; published your first book, the novella, Ever; and started HTMLGiant (with Gene Morgan). Your second book, Scorch Atlas, came quickly thereafter, from the design-savvy small press, Featherproof Books. Finally, you landed a two-book deal with a major New York publisher, and last spring saw the first release as a result, the novel, There Is No Year. You've accomplished much in a short period of time. What would you say you're most proud of, and to what would you attribute your rapid “rise”?

Blake Butler: I'm happy with how things have happened. I honestly try not to dote too long on anything in particular I've done, beyond the moment of it being taken out of my hands. I like to obsess about the thing for years while I can change itthough that obsession never seems to stopso the less I think about where I've been the closer I feel to being able to move forward. I like to look at my books when I'm on the toilet, really. That's the time I give myself to think about me. I do cherish my daily routine, the coming to the desk, the being at the desk, the circling of created space, though at this point I can't tell if that's something to be proud of or something to hide like murder. I sometimes wonder what the effect this daily sinking into total fabrication is going to end up doing to me ten years down the line.  Or twenty. Or two. I don't know. But the pattern and the tunnel of it is the thing itself, and it might also be the thing I should attribute to why I've gotten anywhere at all in what you call a “rise”: the only way I've been able to find myself making something I would ever show anyone else is by beating my head against it until I can no longer recognize it as mine.

JI: Of your three books, each seems to focus (maybe obsess is the better word?) on a few particulars. All of them are concerned with families and familial relationships. Ever and There Is No Year both take place mostly inside a home, and that home becomes a character itself, shifting and changing, full of strange phenomena. To a lesser extent Scorch Atlas also focuses on architectural events, but that book is filled with apocalyptic weather. In Scorch Atlas it feels like the external environments of each story become active players. These elements are mutable it seems, from one perspective at least, so that the humans must react to them. It feels like Naturalism in some ways, like Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat." Why does your fiction tend to move in this direction? Do you see these elements as characters no different than the unnamed humans who occupy your fiction?

BB: I think instead of seeing the inert as characters, more often I don't see characters at all. The construct of a “character” to me is automatically damning because it kind of sets up this framework for the creation that insists it is a stage set, or that there is something like the creator lurking behind it, which I don't like. Your term “active players” here is closer to what I might think of things as, though really I try not to think about the elements as objects or as personas, but as extensions of a kind of light or air around the body of what the book is.

JI: You have a nonfiction book released last year from Harper Perennial, titled Nothing: A Portrait of Insomia. Tell me about that book. How was the experience of shifting from fiction to nonfiction? Did you do a lot of research for the book? How did you like that? Would you say that this book will be informative, educational, academic?

BB: I had a lot of fun playing with Nothing. It began with the idea of writing a full-length piece of nonfiction based on my experience with sleep trouble and the consciousness of that, and kind of wormed into a hybrid of a lot of different forms, historical, scientific, fantastical, remembered, dream-life, fantasy, hypnotic research, close reading, etc. I ended up writing about 150,000 words for the first draft, which then I cut down to nearly half, so it's a pretty condensed object, and I think it takes on a lot of different approaches and invokes a different kind of air than I'd expected or than I've experienced before. I did do a lot of research, and I had fun using outside sources for once both as a fuel and as jumping-off points. There's a lot of information and metanarrative pulled out of both how sleep and sleeplessness works and its effects both on me as an individual, and kind of the whole scope of existing as human while the onslaught of want for our attention and entertainment continues to gather up in this weird ball of air that seems to be continually rising over everything. I really had a blast melding all these things together and playing with them and bending things for pleasure, in a different way than fiction allows. It definitely expanded my idea of how to write, and my proclivities. I don't know what to think about what people will think of it, but that's maybe the best brain space there is.


Jamie Iredell is the author of two books: The Book of Freaks (Future Tense Books, 2011), and Prose. Poems. A Novel. (Orange Alert Press, 2009). 

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Editor Emeritus Lawrence Hetrick reviewed favorably

The Florida Book Review features a review of Lawrence Hetrick's Derelict Tributaries. Congrats, Lawrence!

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Wednesday, January 11, 2012

2012 AWP Annual Conference, Chicago, March 1st-3rd

The first, double-issue under new editorship is sold out - except to AWP attendees! Join us during the first weekend in March at AWP's bookfair, where The Chattahoochee Review will be selling discounted subscriptions as well as all of the issues under new editorship, including the latest, our Southern Lit issue.

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