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Mythology of Touch Available for Purchase
Our very own, Mary Stone Dockery, has a first collection of poetry available now!
You should check it out.
This book is available for purchase through this link:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/mythology-of-touch-mary-stone-dockery/1109455601
Also, you can read more about the process and publishing and writing at her blog:
Blue Island Review 2011
BLUE ISLAND REVIEW 2011 is now available for purchase! Thank you so much to our fabulous contributors. Our release party will be held January 21 at the Raven Bookstore in Lawrence, KS at 7pm. Everyone is invited to join in the celebration!
Editor’s Pick – Llike Lungfish Getting through the Dry Season
Any time I read work by Michelle Reale, something happens in the world, something changes and becomes new or different or altered. I am pretty much always left in awe. The Stone Highway Review (friend of Blue Island Review) contributor writes powerful yet subtle pieces that retain both mystery and insight into human nature, all while keeping the reader close and intimate. Her chapbook Like Lungfish Getting Through the Dry Season upholds the expectations I had from reading her work in numerous literary journals. This chapbook is its own strange world, at times surreal yet gritty and entirely now and embedded in poetically seductive language. This is a book about broken families, about struggling childhoods and about how one becomes a woman, or a person, after the influence of imperfect and often hurtful people.
Each piece often reads as if someone just ripped the cigarette you were smoking right from your fingers. The second piece sets us up for a new world, a journey into the strange and different, about a woman who is fleeing possible abuse. The abuse is never named, but only alluded to: “Upon arrival she’d begun to think the shiny white bandages she’d wrapped herself in… might have been a mistake.” When asked where she is going, the character’s arms turn into wings: “fluttering…in gentle arcs.” Reale shows a knack for comparison, when she describes planes in the sky as “steely coffins.” This piece hums with a threatening yet hopeful tone, and sets us up for a collection of pieces that work much in the same way. We may be in an airport or at a hospital or in a car, but often we are in more place than once, and we get there in subtle and soft ways.
The honesty of Reale’s work is clear throughout each piece. The language is crisp, dreamy, and seductive, while remaining unapologetic. Reale isn’t afraid to “go there.” In “A First Time for Everything,” a mother dances the day away in response to a fight with a father. The daughter watches the mother’s dancing, anticipating the father’s return and the fights that could ensue. A story like this could become dramatic or over the top, but Reale keeps us grounded in the language and the sexy scene:
“She begins her dance, her long thin arms wrapped around an imaginary partner. Her beautiful feet, arched as if she were wearing heels that make her look like every man’s dream. I am hung over from a binge with my friends the night before, something that doesn’t register with my mom. When I take a drag from her cigarette, my little sister, still in her nightgown with the sagging ruffle giggles. I hold my fingers up to my lips, shhhhhh, while the smoke unfurls from the corners of my mouth. ‘ Magic,’ she whispers, loving the secret between the two of us.”
The piece is filled with these kinds of secrets. Secrets the reader gets to know about, secrets we may feel left out of, but we don’t feel cheated. We always know enough. “Nostrum” is an example of a story we feel there is much more to, but because our main character is younger and knows less, so do we. This depressing tale of a broken family made me write “Woa” in the margins. First, a child is taken from her father because of a fight between the parents. Then, the father picks up a girl and we get the hint that he sleeps with her, then leaves her behind. The father tells the daughter, “No one can save you, remember that,” giving the piece an anti-evangelical feel, while the father remains “pounding out a furious beat on the steering wheel.”
Another strange piece involves a mother who volunteers to watch a neighbor’s child. The child happens to suffer from some kind of developmental disability. The speaker of this piece does not trust her mother – a common theme in the entire chapbook, and one that is shown for good reason here. This is another piece I wrote “Woa” in the margins many times. The things this mother says are surprising and can really make you gasp:
I will tell you this, though, my mother says, dropping her voice as if Belinda might understand. She will still get her mothly. She touches her head first and then her crotch: Up here has nothing to do with down there. Honestly, can you just imagine?
The mother is even a bit torturous to this helpless child:
My mother blows a stream at Belinda. She laughs when the girl sputters. Belinda’s mouth looks like the downward grimace of the tragedy mask of theater.
And the mother continues to say, “She’ll live a long life ‘cause she won’t have any stress.”
This particular story struck me sensitive to children, but also to those who are silenced in any way. Reale uses her seductive and subtle language to take our breath away, to show us the true darkness that can reside in all kinds of people – mothers and fathers are not the perfect people we should idolize after all. And they are more complicated than simply evil, here. They are troubled people, yes, and yet somehow still retain our sympathy.
Reale’s chapbook is modest in that each piece is quite short and looks as though there is little to it. Yet, each piece contains an urgency and life-like quality that pulls you through them quickly. I read this book straight through each time without stopping. While you may want to take a break and breathe, you most likely won’t be able to because Reale makes us sympathize and care for often grotesque or even borderline gothic characters who simply need to be loved. For example, the intensity of “Hunger” –
I held my arms under my stomach, cradling my girth and nursing hunger pains. I rocked myself back and forth on the curb like I was my own baby.
And again in “Like Lungfish Getting through the Dry Season” –
She spread her fingers in front of her face. Her gestures were like currency…
She skipped out the back door like a sprite.
She would read their futures in his fur.
When I came home after a long day of work not too long ago, I found my dog had chewed up my copy of this chapbook. Somehow he ate the cover page and part of the first page. The cover pages fell off, leaving the rest of the piece intact. This spoke to the strength of the work for me. It strengthens our understanding of these familial relationships through its seductive and smoky language. Through its honesty. The seduction can be a bit creepy in places, but like one of Reale’s narrator’s claims, “there is a first time for everything.”
by Mary Stone Dockery
Stone Highway Review
Check out our friends over at Stone Highway Review and their first issue. I think you will like what you read.
and free download is available here as well:
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/stone-highway-review-volume-1-issue-1/16815928
Don’t forget to find Stone Highway on Facebook and to submit your own work for the second issue coming out in December. Issue 2 will include more poets and more awesome writing.
Weekend Submissions
So, missed the deadline and sad that you can’t submit anymore? Well guess what? Since the 15th amazingly fell on a Friday, I think it’s perfectly fine to stretch the submission period over the weekend. So – tweak your poems, revise, work them out, and send them to us by Sunday night. We want your work. We love reading it. Thank you for choosing Blue Island Review!
Last Few Days to Submit
With less than a week left to submit, I urge you to get your poems to us! We have received many submissions so far, but know there are some of you lagging behind. We have imagined that at the last minute on July 15th, we will receive more submissions in one day than any other day since May, when we first set up a call for your lovely poems.
Remember, we want to read more than one of your poems – it gives us a sense of your work. So, send us three. Also, we prefer shorter poems, 30 lines or less, though we do consider longer pieces. We just want stuff that is awesome. So send us your best work and let us publish you. You will be published alongside so many other talented Kansas poets that you won’t know what to do with yourself. In fact, it might just blow your mind.
Unsure where to submit – click HERE or click on the link above titled Guidelines.
July 15th is the last day!
Those of you with artwork, you have until July 20th to submit. We want your work! Send us your interpretation of Blue Island or of what it means to be a writer in Kansas. We love photography as well!
Any questions? Email us at blueislandreview@gmail.com OR check us out on Facebook!
Thank you for all your work and the chance to read it – we are happy to share this with so many great people and talented artists.
Why Aren’t You Writing?
So you haven’t been writing. I get it. You have many excuses, ones I have used before I am sure…
I’m too busy mowing the lawn, watching my favorite show, eating dinner, doing dishes, surfing the Internet, checking Facebook, sending emails, riding horses, making out with my boyfriend, working, sleeping, showering, eating again, watching more TV, staring at my computer screen, playing Scrabble, drinking a beer, drinking another beer, cleaning the bathroom, cleaning out my closet, rearranging my furniture, driving across the country, watching TV again, shopping, making margaritas, sewing the button on my pants, fixing the printer, pulling weeds, going to the amusement park, eating again, and sleeping, then waking to do it all over again.
Where does writing come in?
The question I have for writers who claim to be too busy and to not have time to write is: What are you hiding from? What are you avoiding?
It seems to me that there is a reason we fill our lives with things other than writing, and we blame not having any ideas, blame writer’s block, blame the busy lifestyle we lead. Yet, there seems to be something in a person’s ability to procrastinate writing to the point that it barely exists, to the point where the writing life is thrust into some other world, where it sits waiting, ideas festering and growing moldy. And that life gets pissy when it’s ignored.
But the question is why do we ignore it?
I think that I have found a possible answer – perhaps we are avoiding the turmoil that IS writing. The pain we experience during creation.
No one ever talks about how much it can hurt to write. Not physically (though my hand and wrists do often feel like they need a break). But emotionally – it can hurt to tap into parts of yourself and your life and to splay them out, open in front of you, where you have to face it. Writing makes you look at the lies you told your best friend. It makes you look at the bad decision you made, when you stole from the department store or slept with a friend’s boyfriend or got arrested for trying to beat up a cop. Writing makes you look at how you truly feel about people in your life – and what reflects back at you can be surprising and hurtful when you discover that a deep love is more complex, that you find yourself despising someone close to you in writing, that you realize part of you sees this person differently than you have cared to admit.
Writing makes us relive events in our lives that we don’t quite understand. And usually these events are painful, emotional, secret. The place we have to go to explore these events is a dark place, and there is pain.
Perhaps we ignore writing sometimes because this can be “too much.” On the other end, while writing is also freeing and cathartic, to get there you have to go through some level of pain. It hurts to push through. And so, we ignore it all together, until it builds so much inside that we have to let it out.
I say write when those scars are fresh, when you can feel the heat still inside of them hissing. This is not the same advice people have given me before – to let things in life settle before writing them. I think if you wait too long, the writing won’t be as powerful, as fresh. And it may hurt more to wait. In the meantime, would you be avoiding your feelings toward that subject? Perhaps partially.
Part of me wants to suggest that you purposefully pull yourself from those topics you are drawn to write about and to force yourself to write something else, to see what happens when you face it sideways instead of straight on. And part of me thinks that we should stop being babies and just write it out, face ourselves, and get over it. Isn’t that what we signed up for anyway when we decided we wanted to write – that we would be in pain, poor, and miserable for much of our waking life?
Ha. Perhaps a too-romantic view, too melancholic. But I do know that if you are avoiding writing, if you fill all your time with things that are less important to you, if you make it a goal to make every day so busy that you CAN’T write, then perhaps there is something you need to consider that you are avoiding more than writing – that you are avoiding a part of yourself, and leaving that part of you unattended for too long can make it really hard to pull them back when you finally realize what has happened.
Go write something. And let the pain come.
Blue Island Review Cover Contest
We need a cover for our second issue. And we want to see YOUR amazing art work.
2010 BIR Cover
Contest is open to those with a connection to Northeast Kansas or Northwest Missouri. There are no age restrictions.
Please keep in mind that we are a regional literary journal and therefore appreciate Kansas and Midwest inspired work. It is not, however, required of your submission. We want you to stun us, surprise us, and redefine Blue Island for us. Make it colorful and make it stand out. Or don’t. It’s your art and we want to see what you come up with. Last year’s cover was inspired by the journal’s name, Blue Island, and so you may also want to keep that in mind as you create your cover.
As of now, you have until July 20th to submit artwork to the contest. If you have any questions, please email us at blueislandreview@gmail.com. Also, find us on Facebook and ask us questions there, if you want.
Though we cannot pay you for your contribution, you will receive two contributor’s copies of the journal, and of course recognition for your artwork in the contributor’s notes, in addition to our love and appreciation.
Please note: Each cover is a front and back – and should be 1688×2625 Pixels at 200pi or better. As you design your cover, please keep in mind that there will be a bar code on the back, lower right hand corner.
Submissions are Coming In!
I am happy to say that so far, we have received a good number of submissions. And we still have two months left till our last day. This must mean a few different things: 1) This means that the journal made some kind of impact this winter, and prompted other people to wish to be a part of it 2) This also means that there are even more writers than we originally knew about, somehow connected to Lawrence, yet floating out there in the world, and now they have a place to connect and 3) This also means that we, of course, rock. The Blue Island Review prides itself on making others feel at home, at helping people realize that writing doesn’t always have to be a lonely and dreadful experience. BIR is a place to showcase that idea of community – to say, hey look over here! There are writers hiding in the corners of coffee shops and I have never met you. There are others hiding in the sociology department at KU, and I had no idea. There are even more of you, others, wandering away from Lawrence and missing us, and hoping to find a way to connect.
What is a Blue Island?
To me, it’s like water, but contained. Islands are surrounded by water, but Blue Island is immersed in the changing and moving world of language. Yet, it’s contained because of space, because of shared memories and histories. Blue Island is a gentle place that sits there like a horizon, waiting.
Or that could be too dramatic. Maybe it’s a band. Or the name of your grandma’s dog in 1902. Or maybe it just sounds good, the long “u” and “i” sounds forcing your mouth into new and strange positions. We can only hope to see you mouthing our name from across a crowded room.
Keep the submissions coming. Tell your friends and tell your friends to pass it on. While we have received a lot – we need more, and we want quality work. Blue Island work. The kind of writing that speaks to communities. Language that is surprising and challenging and new. Images that strike like wicked dreams.
Send. This summer, in all its blue skies, waits.
Blue Island Review 