The Chattahoochee Review

Congratulations to our 2012 Townsend Finalists!

2012-02-22T14:19:00.000-08:00

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)

Purchase Townsend Tickets

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The Truths I Told, by Ethel Rohan

2012-01-31T11:47:00.000-08:00

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

2012-01-25T14:28:00.000-08:00

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 it—though that obsession never seems to stop—so 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).

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Editor Emeritus Lawrence Hetrick reviewed favorably

2012-01-24T15:06:00.000-08:00

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

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

2012-01-11T14:13:00.000-08:00

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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2011 Other Words Conference, St. Augustine, November 10th-12th

2011-11-02T14:11:00.000-07:00

The Hooch will be in St. Augustine next week for panel discussions, readings, and promotion of our new issue, the best yet! We invite you to stop by our booth and pick up a copy.

Learn more about the Other Words conference.

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Crossroads Literary Conference and Festival, October 2nd

2011-09-16T13:27:00.000-07:00

TCR will have a booth at the Crossroads Literary Festival and Conference in Macon, Georgia, on October 2nd. We hope to see you there!

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Contributor Kevin Wilson reviewed favorably

2011-08-16T15:49:00.000-07:00

The New York Times recently featured contributor Kevin Wilson's The Family Fang: A Novel. Congrats, Kevin! Read his story "A Series of Lessons" in our new issue.

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Decatur Book Festival, September 3rd-4th

2011-08-08T16:03:00.000-07:00

The Chattahoochee Review will have a booth at the annual Decatur Book Festival on Saturday and Sunday of the first weekend in September. We will offer discount subscriptions and back issues along with the new issue under new editorship, which features Aimee Bender, Natasha Trethewey, and Wells Tower. We hope you'll stop by and say hello!

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