Friday, September 13, 2013

New blog has arrived!

The Hooch got a makeover! Please visit us at www.the-hooch.com.

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Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Friday, August 2, 2013

Adopt The Chattahoochee Review!



Lit Mag Adoption Program

 TCR is continuing its Classroom Adoption Program by joining CLMP's Lit Mag Adoption Program to offer more students the best value around for a literary journal in the classroom. Students can discover what's happening in the literary world now for $3 an issue, including shipping! Find out why creative writing and literature classrooms from GPC to SCAD have adopted The Chattahoochee Review. Limited slots available, so visit CLMP for more info or email Lydia.Ship@gpc.edu to reserve copies.


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Tuesday, June 18, 2013

TCR Guest Author Kimberly Brock wins Georgia Author of the Year Award!

A hearty congrats to the kind and lovely Kimberly Brock, Winner of the 2013 Georgia Author of the Year Award for her debut novel, The River Witch! Like we were sayin', she's awesome!


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Thursday, May 30, 2013

Register for TCR's Writing the Veteran Experience Summer Workshop!

Update! Next workshop is October 15! Check back for more info.


The Chattahoochee Review (TCR) and GPC’s Military Outreach Center will present the Summer Semester session of the workshop series “Writing the Veteran Experience” on GPC’s Clarkston Campus, Wednesday, June 12, 2013, from 6-8 p.m. in room CA-1500.

The free 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. 

The workshop welcomes participation from GPC students who are ASMs, OIF vets, and/or OEF vets; GPC alumni, faculty, staff, the general public and members of student veteran organizations attending other colleges and universities are also welcome.

Prior writing experience is not required; however, if participants have works in progress or completed compositions to share with a group, they are encouraged to bring them. Those works will receive consideration for inclusion in GPC’s award-winning student publications. 

  • Enrollment for the workshop is limited, so registration is required. 
  • To register or to find out more about the workshop, contact Alicia Johanneson, TCR’s literary events editor, at 678.891.3275.
  • Light refreshments will be served courtesy of The Chattahoochee Review.
 
Main workshop facilitators include:
Retired Colonel Robert G. Knowles, GPC’s Military Outreach Center
Anna Schachner, TCR editor
Lydia Ship, TCR managing editor

Friday, April 19, 2013

CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT: AMINA GAUTIER



Amina Gautier is the winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction for her short story collection At-Risk. More than seventy-five of her stories have been published, appearing in Best African American Fiction, The Chattahoochee Review, Glimmer Train, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, and Southern Review, among other places. Her stories have won the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize, the Danahy Prize, the Jack Dyer Prize, the Schlafly Microfiction Award, and the William Richey Award as well as scholarships and fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, Sewanee Writer’s Conference, and Ucross Foundation and artist grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Gautier’s fully-imagined and poetic story “Bodega” appears in our upcoming Spring issue as the inaugural Winner of the Lamar York Prize for Fiction. We asked her to share some thoughts on the story with TCR readers.

What was the inspiration for “Bodega”? Tell us about how you came to write it.

Although I have lived in a number of towns and cities, I am a native New Yorker and being a New Yorker is something one is born into, something one can never stop being no matter where one moves and takes up residence, something one can never "pick up" if one has moved to New York from some other place. When you are a native New Yorker, you are a child of bodegas, neighborhood stores. Depending on the section of New York that informs your background, these bodegas are sometimes the only places in your neighborhood for grocery shopping. Oftentimes a neighborhood may have only one supermarket—a C-Town, Key Food, Pathmark or Associated for the entire community. For some folks, that supermarket might only be two blocks away; for others, it might be twenty. The bodega suffices as a convenient place to obtain groceries, certainly, but also as a reminder of one's own marginalization, a sign post that reminds one of the social and economic disparities in one's community that have made the bodega both necessary and profitable in the first place. The bodegas are permanent neighborhood fixtures. As a child, you pass these bodegas and drop in every day on the way to school and—later—on the way to catch public transportation. You gain a familiarity with those proprietors that you never seek with the cashiers in your local supermarket. The owners are people you come to know. Their faces are ones you come to recognize and know well during the long years of childhood.

Protagonist Nelida is an unlikely business woman, unlikely surrogate mother, unlikely migrant. Is she representative in a way that’s important to your vision as a writer? 
Nelida is an important character for me as a writer because she embodies "between-ness." In this particular instance, she is representative of cultural, political, social, physical, and linguistic between-ness, but the various forms "between-ness" can take is something I have always explored and continue to explore in my fiction and my many short stories.

The story follows Nelida through a routine hour, the hour before she opens her family’s bodega, “the quietest hour of the day.” As a writer clearly interested in characterization, interiority in particular, and sentence-level beauty, how much attention do you give to pacing? Were you thinking of immediacy when you chose to have Nelida search for a letter from her son? How important is urgency, in your opinion, to a general literary audience?
I am always aware of pacing and I manipulate grammar, punctuation and stylistic conventions (synecdoche, metonymy, repetition, sibilance, etc.) in order to control the pacing of a story at the level of the sentence. However, I think there is an important distinction to be made between "urgency" and "quickness." As a writer, I am always interested and invested in "urgency," that pressing importance that guides one sentence into the next and goads a character from a state of inactiveness into one of activeness, but I sense that much of the general reading audience is more invested in quickness. When I hear books praised for the speed with which they were written, or the speed with which they can be read, I am completely puzzled as to why speed has become the criterion by which we express our preferences. I associate speed of writing with sloppiness of thought and craft.  I certainly associate reading a book quickly with not reading or understanding it thoroughly. If you read so quickly that you never put the book down and are done with it two-to-three hours later, have you actually taken the time to understand it, to savor its language, craft and structure? Will you remember any poignant or resonant lines a week/month/year later from a book consumed so quickly? You’ve gulped down a meal. Sure, you ate it quickly and moved on to the next thing on your agenda, but did you really taste it? The books I enjoy most are the ones which compel me to put them down every so often because I have read something in them that I must ponder, just as the meals I enjoy most are the ones that compel me to put the fork down every so often because I have tasted something that I must savor.

When did you have a sense of how “Bodega” would end? What advice would you have for writers in general about a story’s trajectory, and where it ends up?

I envisioned the ending somewhere between the third and fifth draft, so, somewhere in the first month of working on the story. Although I worked on the story for another six months and played with the ending several times during several more drafts, the essentials of the ending were conceived early on. My advice would be: Don't force the writing. Follow the ending you believe you wish to pursue, while leaving yourself open to consider other endings that will suggest themselves as possibilities through the process of revision. Sometimes the ending is written first, sometimes it is written last. Sometimes the ending becomes the story's middle; the writer gets to what he or she thought was the end and realizes the story must go further. Sometimes the original ending turns out to ultimately be clunky, superficial, cliché, trite, too neat—such endings must be abandoned without remorse. Sometimes the original ending a writer conceived is not the appropriate ending for that story; sometimes it is meant to be the ending of some other story the writer has yet to write.

Where do you go for writing inspiration in general?

I go "outside" and "inside," which is to say that I go "outside" in the literal sense, i.e., I leave my home and engage with whatever landscape I happen to be part of at that time. It means I take trolleys and trains and walk around and look at various businesses, buildings and structures. It means I walk around and along lakes, ponds, rivers, beaches and paths and look at houses, hills, skies and cliffs. While "outside," I observe the world around me and look for things I wouldn't normally notice when I am rushing; I look for things I can only see when I am taking my time. Then I go "inside" which is to say I retreat inside my head to think over that which I have seen and interpret what it all means.

What are you working on now? What can readers look forward to?

Readers can look forward to more stories about Nelida and her family and about the characters who live across the street from her bodega. Two other stories involving these characters have recently been published in Southwest Review and Kenyon Review and I find that I am still thinking of them. I am not done with them yet.


Subscribe now to read “Bodega” and the Lamar York Prize in Nonfiction Winner, "Coyote," in our upcoming Spring issue. Your subscription will include our Fall/Winter double-issue with a special focus on "The Animal."

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Wednesday, April 10, 2013

TCR Celebrates New Books by Editors Michael Diebert and Louise McKinney!


In Life Outside the Set, Michael Diebert weaves together frayed threads in the tapestry of human experience. Rooted in memory and mind, these poems illustrate frustration with being caught between the Scylla of the hazy wished-for and the Charybdis of the ad-libbed actual, but they also insist on the beautiful and wondrous as, in Robert Frost’s words, a “momentary stay against confusion.” From a variety of viewpoints, with equal doses of puzzlement, wryness, and exhortation, this debut collection re-advances the possibility that beyond the ground-bound and temporary, there might be something better.

Available from Amazon and Sweatshoppe.  



The Woman Who Drank Her Own Reflection is a new title in Guernica  Editions’ Essential Poets series. With this collection Louise McKinney gathers together poems published in a number of North American journals, and which were shortlisted under a different title for the Texas Review’s annual poetry prize. Writes Lawrence Hetrick, author of Derelict Tributaries, “Louise McKinney’s generous poems are all the more interesting for being grounded in a variety of distant places. Yet their landscapes are finally within, spirit being awakened by the poet’s words. These poems offer rare gifts of new language and expansive humanity.”

Available from GuernicaAmazon.com, Amazon.ca or Amazon.co.uk. McKinney’s first book, New Orleans: A Cultural History, is available from Oxford University Press.

Monday, March 18, 2013

Lynn Cullen, Ann Hite, Amanda Kyle Williams Reading & Signing!

(click to play audio of the reading)


2013 Georgia Women's Conference

Please join The Chattahoochee Review and the GPC Diversity Alliance this Friday, March 22 for the 2013 Georgia Women’s Conference. In keeping with the conference’s theme—The Female Perspective in Scholarship, Art, and PoliticsThe Chattahoochee Review will spotlight a variety of local women fiction writers, nonfiction writers, and poets.

From 10:45 a.m. to 12:15 p.m., the journal hosts The Chattahoochee Review Guest Author Series showcasing the renowned 2012 Townsend Prize for Fiction finalists Lynn Cullen (Reign of Madness), Ann Hite (Ghost on Black Mountain), and Amanda Kyle Williams (The Stranger You Seek). All three writers will read from their works and participate in a panel discussion about writing within their specific genres: historical fiction (Cullen), Southern/regional fiction (Hite), and mystery/detective fiction (Kyle Williams).

From 1:45 p.m. to 4:15 p.m., The Chattahoochee Review’s Women Writers Panel will feature seven writers from GPC’s faculty and the Atlanta literary scene. The featured panelists from GPC include Lita Hooper-Simanga, Associate Professor of English, whose collection of poems, Thunder in Her Voice: The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize; Louise McKinney, Assistant Professor of English, whose first volume of poems, The Woman Who Drank Her Own Reflection, was shortlisted, under a different title, for The Texas Review Press’ annual prize; Anna Schachner, Associate Professor of English and editor of The Chattahoochee Review, who has published many stories and received the Frank O'Connor Award for Fiction and the Southern Women Writers Emerging Fiction Writer award; and Lydia Ship, managing editor of The Chattahoochee Review and winner of the 2012 Matt Clark Prize in Fiction, whose short stories have been widely published and nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize.

The Atlanta writers include Amanda Gable, novelist and educator, whose first book, The Confederate General Rides North, was selected by the Georgia Center for the Book as 1 of 25 Books All Georgians Should Read and garnered her the 2010 Georgia Author of the Year Award; Beth Gylys, poet and Professor of English and Creative Writing at Georgia State University, whose collections of poetry, Spot in the Dark and Bodies that Hum, won the Gerald Cable Poetry Award and The Journal award in poetry presented by Ohio State University, respectively; and Kate Sweeney, radio producer and freelance writer, whose radio stories have won her a number of Associated Press Awards and two Edward R. Murrow Awards, and whose popular bimonthly nonfiction reading series, True Story, was voted a Best Literary Event of 2012 by Atlanta Magazine. Her book American Afterlife is forthcoming from The University of Georgia Press.

Both events hosted by The Chattahoochee Review at the Georgia Women’s Conference will take place in the JCLRC Auditorium (CL-1100/1001) on the Clarkston Campus and will be followed by book sales and signings.

 Registration fees for the 2013 Georgia Women’s Conference are as follows:
  • General Admission: $50 per person
  • Student Admission (with appropriate I.D. cards) $5 for GPC students; $15 for non-GPC students
For more information about the 2013 Georgia Women’s Conference, contact Professors Mike Hall (Michael.Hall@gpc.edu) and Carissa Gray (Carissa.Gray@gpc.edu), and conference organizer, Tiffany Delvalle (Tiffany.Delvalle@gpc.edu)
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 The Chattahoochee Review Guest Author Series was created to connect the strong, vibrant, and diverse literary community The Chattahoochee Review has built over the course of its 33-year publishing history to the college’s EDGE Quality Enhancement Plan such that students will have a greater opportunity to engage with real-world writers who can better shape their writing and understanding of literature in all of its forms.

Monday, March 11, 2013

Natasha Trethewey chooses TCR for Library of Congress!

From an article by Beverly James for GPC's In the Loop:

The Chattahoochee Review, Georgia Perimeter College’s literary magazine, is now available at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C.

According to the magazine’s editor, Anna Schachner, a request came from the current U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Tretheway for copies of The Chattahoochee Review to feature in her office at the Library of Congress. “It is one of her favorite literary journals, and Natasha wanted copies to distribute to guests that she receives in her office,” Schachner explains. Tretheway is a resident of Decatur and has been a long-time supporter of Georgia Perimeter’s literary endeavors.

“Having our journal in the Library of Congress is an honor–and a milestone–for The Chattahoochee Review,” said Schachner. “Our editorial staff is so excited and proud to see our journal getting out there in the world and gathering accolades along the way. The Review is indeed growing and growing.”

The Chattahoochee Review has appeared regularly since 1981 and has expanded its focus to include both international readers and writers.

Monday, March 4, 2013

Saturday at AWP 2013, Boston!

Please join us at our AWP panel, "'Because That's the Way It's Always Been Done': When Literary Journals Face Necessary Change."

Overview: 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.

Date: Saturday, March 9
Time: 4:30 p.m. to 5:45 p.m.
Location: Room 207, Hynes Convention Center


We hope to see you there!


2013 Lamar York Prize Winners and Finalists

Thank you to all entrants in the Lamar York Prizes for Fiction and Nonfiction for sending us great work and for making our prizes a success. On the task of selecting favorites (always subjective, of course), we were honored to consider so many fine submissions and to hand our judges such a gratifying challenge. We encourage all of our entrants to keep writing, and to keep reading literary journals like ours. All entrants receive a subscription, and we hope they are encouraged by their fellow writers.

2013 Lamar York Prize Winners and Finalists


Winner in Nonfiction

“Coyote,” Ming Holden


Winner in Fiction
“Bodega,” Amina Gautier


Finalists in Nonfiction
“Söyleyelim,” Delaney Nolan
“Netting the Air,” Ron Tanner
“An Appearance of. . . Noctiluca,” Jeffrey DeLotto
“Sudden Death: A Eulogy,” Jacob Appel
“Tableland,” by Jeffrey Schneider
“Father-Daughter Dance,” Sue Lick

Finalists in Fiction
“Winnemucca,” Ron Tanner
“Patience, Jackass,” Frank Soos
“The Tourists,” Gregory Brown
“The Rat,” Kathleen Spivack
“The Eel,” Jill Koenigsdorf

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

CONTRIBUTOR SPOTLIGHT: MARY MORRISSY



Mary Morrissy is the author of two novels, Mother of Pearl and The Pretender, and a collection of short stories, A Lazy Eye. Mother of Pearl was shortlisted for the Whitbread (now Costa) Award; The Pretender was nominated for the Dublin IMPAC Award. She was a recipient of a prestigious Lannan Foundation Award and her short fiction has won the Hennessy Award and been anthologized widely in the UK and Ireland. Her next novel, The Rising of Bella Casey, is forthcoming in 2013.
Morrissy’s lyrical and compelling story “Miss Ireland” appears in our upcoming double issue with a special focus on Ireland. We asked her to share some thoughts on the story with TCR readers.

What was the impetus for “Miss Ireland”? Tell us a little about how you came to write it.
“Miss Ireland” had its genesis in a story from my childhood that my mother used to refer to in hushed tones. A young mother had gassed herself and her two young children in a house on our street—this was before I was born so I never knew any of the details. But it stayed with me, mainly because as a teenager I was convinced that nothing ever happened in neighbourhoods like ours—suburban, respectable; this incident, mystifying and shocking, was in direct opposition to my lofty, adolescent view that I was surrounded by placid, self-satisfied dullness in a place where nothing happened. 

“Miss Ireland” begins dramatically: “The maid stuck her head in the gas oven one Sunday afternoon in the Devoy house, 27 Vandeleur Drive, but not before she had fed and changed the baby—Fergal, it was—and put him down for his nap.” Conflict increases all the more when, in the same paragraph, the mother of the household reacts with “selfish relief.” Family dynamic creates much of the tension in “Miss Ireland,” before and after the suicide. How did family roles and plot structure evolve in revision?
My original idea was to write the story from the point of view of the maid, then Irene appeared and took over, I’m afraid. It seemed more interesting to view Quinny through her eyes because Irene can’t recognise what’s in front of her. In many ways, that is Quinny’s tragedy—that she finds herself in a world that won’t or can’t empathise with her situation and that world is the family. Although the story is set in and plays out within the family, I’m hoping it has wider resonances. One of the debates that has exercised public interest in Ireland is how much ordinary people knew about the maltreatment and abuse of children in state and church care during this period. The answer, I think, is that they knew and they didn’t know—much like Irene, who instinctively senses Quinny’s plight, but consciously hasn’t a clue.
   
How would you consider the story to reflect or comment upon your experience of Ireland?
The story is set in the Sixties in Ireland, in 1965 to be precise. (The 50th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising is mentioned as “upcoming.”)  In nuance, it reflects the period of my childhood. The very fact that there are still maids in evidence speaks of a time that seems pre-historic, even to me. The Sixties came late to Ireland, so my memory of the decade was one of traditional, conservative values. What drives Irene, the mother in the story, is a sense of respectability and constraint. At that time there were very well-defined roles imposed on women and men and the influence of the Catholic Church was paramount. A sub-theme in the story is an exploration of national and female identity—Irene has represented Ireland in a beauty contest, but Quinny represents an altogether different version of the female, Irish experience of the time.

Where do you go for writing inspiration in general?
For novels, I can never predict where the idea will come from. My novels have been historical but only because the stories that have really fired me happen to be from the past. I can’t really say why a baby kidnap in Dublin of the 1950s (my first novel, Mother of Pearl) or the story of Anna Anderson, the woman who spent her whole life insisting she was the Russian Grand Duchess Anastasia (The Pretender, my second novel), captured my imagination. What unites them is that they feature real people and inhabit a territory somewhere between fiction and biography.
My most recent novel, The Rising of Bella Casey, is the story of a 19th century schoolteacher whose life is turned to ruin by a secret sexual obsession. It’s based on the life of the sister of Irish playwright Sean O’Casey, whose writing about her is woven into the narrative. The trajectory of Bella’s story is heartbreaking, a riches-to-rags narrative, and once it took hold it just would not let go.
My short fiction is usually more personal and generally contemporary—the smallest trigger can set an idea whirring, sometimes an image, something someone says, chance encounters, memories.

What are you working on now? What can readers look forward to?
“Miss Ireland” is part of a linked cycle of stories that I’m close to finishing. After that, I have two novels in line waiting to be written. My novel The Rising of Bella Casey is due to be published in 2013.
    
Subscribe now for $16 to read “Miss Ireland” and many other Irish pieces in our Irish double issue! Your subscription will also include a spring issue featuring the winners of our Lamar York Prizes for Fiction and Nonfiction.