Wherewithal

Wherewithal July 2016 Issue

Geoff Anderson teaches English to foreigners. He tries to let his students do most of the talking in Columbus, OH. You’ll learn he is a fan of the Oxford comma. His work can or will soon be found in Rust + Moth, Cider Press Review, and *82 Review, among others.

Beverly Burch’s fiction and poetry have appeared in New England Review, North American Review, Willow Springs, Tinderbox and Poetry Northwest. Her second poetry collection, How A Mirage Works, won the Sixteen Rivers Press competition and was a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award. Her first, Sweet to Burn, won the Gival Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. Her She is a psychotherapist in Berkeley.

Mariya Deykute is a writer, teacher and performance artist. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts: Boston, but currently lives in Tohatchi, NM on Navajo Nation land and teaches English at the Tohatchi High School. She is a co-founder of the Quincy Art House and the Boston Poetry & Jazz Salon. Her work has appeared in Grasslimb, Salamander, Amethyst Arsenic, Front Porch, Mariyaand elsewhere. She believes in the wilderness above most things. You can find her at mdeykute.com.

Caitlyn Lee  has an MFA in poetry from Eastern Washington University’s Inland Northwest Center for Writers.

Jessie Janeshek‘s second full-length book of poems, The Shaky Phase, is forthcoming from Stalking Horse Press. Her chapbooks are Spanish Donkey/Pear of Anguish (Grey Book Press, 2016), Rah-Rah Nostalgia, (dancing girl press, 2016), and Hardscape (Reality Beach, forthcoming, 2017), and her first full-length collection is Invisible Mink (Iris Press, 2010). An Assistant Professor of English and the Director of Writing at Bethany College, she holds a Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and an M.F.A. from Emerson College. She co-edited the literary anthology Outscape: Writings on Fences and Frontiers (KWG Press, 2008). Read more of her poetry at jessiejaneshek.net.

Amy Lauren Jones is a graduate music major at Mississippi College, where she received her B.M. with a minor in English in 2015. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Lavender Review, GERM Magazine, Vagabond City, and The Arrowhead. She hopes to pursue a doctorate in music while continuing to write about life in the Deep South.

Peycho Kanev is the author of four poetry collections and two chapbooks, published in USA and Europe. He has won several European awards for his poetry and he’s nominated for the Pushcart Award and Best of the Net. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines, such as: Poetry Quarterly, Evergreen Review, Front Porch Review, Hawaii Review, Barrow Street, Sheepshead Review, Off the Coast, The Adirondack Review, Sierra Nevada Review, The Cleveland Review and many others.

Jessica Kim is a queer Asian American woman who spend most of her days working with high school students and writing just often enough. She has been published in Sad Asian Girls Club Vol. 1, Yellow as Turmeric, Fragrant as Cloves: A Contemporary Anthology of Asian American Women’s Poetry, The Reader (Hampshire College), and was recently featured on Rock the Chair by Yellow Chair Review.

Sarah Lilius is the author of The Heart Factory (Black Cat Moon Press, 2016) and What Becomes Within (ELJ Publication, 2014). Some of her poems can be found at Tinderbox, The Fem, Flapperhouse, and Drunk Monkeys. She lives in Arlington, VA with her husband and two sons. Her website is sarahlilius.com.

Derek Otsuji teaches English at Honolulu Community College. His work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, Monarch Review, Poet Lore, and Word Riot.

There are changes a brewing at Wherewithal, and all for the better.  This week we welcome Meg Eden to our staff and she is excited to read your submissions.  We are excited to have a poet we once published return to our fray in a new capacity.

Let’s welcome Meg by flooding our inbox with submissions for our long-awaited fourth issue.  there’s barely a week left so hurry!

Meg Eden’s work has been published in various magazines, including Rattle, Drunken Boat, Poet Lore, and Gargoyle. She teaches at the University of Maryland. She has four poetry chapbooks, and her novel “Post-High School Reality Quest” is forthcoming from California Coldblood, an imprint of Rare Bird Lit. Check out her work at: www.megedenbooks.com

That’s right.  We are opening submissions in honor of AWP!

Wherewithal is there at table 1444, and we would love you to stop buy,  pick up a flyer, a card, and maybe even a book. Join our mailing list and grab a piece of candy.  (I have been told that candy is the key to getting people to visit your booth)

Do you have to be at AWP to submit to us?  Nope. You just have to read the guidelines and love poetry.

Brief guideliens

• 1-3 poems only
• Open to any style but we do shy away from simple and obvious rhyme
• Open to almost all subject but we will not tolerate violence or gore

Submit here

https://wherewithal.submittable.com/submit/56485

Welcome our new reader, to our restructured magazine.

She can hardly wait to start reading your submissions.

Sarah Ghoshal ~ Reader

Sarah Ghoshal earned her MFA from Long Island University in Brooklyn and has two chapbooks, Changing the Grid (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and The Pine Tree Experiment (Lucky Bastard Press, 2015). Sarah has been nominated for Best of the Net and her poetry can also be found in Yellow Chair Review, Mom Egg Review, Arsenic Lobster, Winter Tangerine Review, Reunion: The Dallas Review and Cream City Review, among others. She lives and teaches writing in New Jersey. www.sarahghoshal.com

While away we did create the Wherewithal Year One Anthology, and now we are ready to start building the year two anthology.  It’s time to send us your poetry!

Wondering what kind of poetry we love, and are dying to publish?  Check out F. Douglas Brown from issue three, Shivani Mehta from issue two and John Paul Davis for our very first issue. You can even buy the complete anthology here.
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We’ll be at AWP this year as well, and would love to met all our contributors and add you to that list of poets that often amazes us.

Here we are with Issue three, and a full year in.  We have included our contest winner and finalist, who are amazing in this issue.  There is an anthology coming as well!  Thank you all.

Shinjini Bhattacharjee‘s poems have been published, or are forthcoming in Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Gone Lawn, Crack the Spine, Jersey Devil Press, Metazen, Red Paint Hills Poetry, Literary Orphans and elsewhere. She is also the founding editor of Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal.

Stacey Balkun, author of Lost City Museum, (ELJ Publications, 2016) is a New Jersey poet with her heart in the south. Raised in Piscataway, NJ, Stacey earned her MFA in Creative Writing at Fresno State before moving to New Orleans. Stacey works as a writing tutor at Delgado Community College and volunteers with several literary organizations, including One Book, One New Orleans and Big Class, Chapter 504. A 2015 Hambidge Fellow, Stacey served as Artist-in-Residence at the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Her work has appeared in Gargoyle, Muzzle, THRUSH, and Bayou, among others. She writes for The California Journal of Women Writers at www.tcjww.org.

F. Douglas Brown of Los Angeles is the author of Zero to Three (University of Georgia Press 2014), recipient of the 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and selected by Tracy K. Smith. Mr. Brown, an educator for twenty years, teaches English at Loyola High School, an all-boys Jesuit school. He holds a MA in Literature and Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, and is both a Cave Canem and Kundiman fellow, two organizations that cultivate the poetry of African-Americans and Asians respectively. His poems have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly (VQR), Toegood Poetry, The Sugar House Review, Cura Magazine, Muzzle Magazine, Transfer Magazine and Santa Clara Review. Mr. Brown was featured in Poets and Writers Magazine as one of their Debut Poets of 2014 (Jan/Feb 2015)

Harlow Crandall is from Rochester New York where he hangs out at the dive bar Monty’s Krown. He also writes and fronts his band New City Slang. He is currently working on his MFA in poetry through Queen’s University.

Meg Eden‘s work has been published in various magazines, including Rattle, Drunken Boat, Eleven Eleven, and Gargoyle. Her poem “Rumiko” won the 2015 Ian MacMillan award for poetry, and she has four poetry chapbooks in print. She teaches at the University of Maryland. Check out her work at: www.megedenbooks.com

Alexis Rhone Fancher is the author of “How I Lost My Virginity To Michael Cohen and Other Heart Stab Poems,” (Sybaritic Press, 2014). You can find her work in Rattle, The MacGuffin, Fjords, Broadzine!, Slipstream, H_NGM_N, The Chiron Review, Menacing Hedge, Ragazine, Cactus Heart, Carbon Culture Review, The Literary Underground, and elsewhere. Her poems have been published in over twenty American and international anthologies. Her photos have been published worldwide, including spreads in River Styx, Blue Lyra, Blink-Ink, and the covers of The Mas Tequila Review and Witness. Since 2013 she’s been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes and a Best of The Net award. Alexis is Photography Editor of Fine Linen Literary Journal, and poetry editor of Cultural Weekly, where she also publishes The Poet’s Eye, a monthly photo essay about Los Angeles. www.alexisrhonefancher.com

Michael Wayne Friedman is a student in the MFA in Creative Writing program at Queens University of Charlotte. He lives with his lovely wife and two bat-shit crazy dogs near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. To help pay the bills, he works as a medical writer, preparing drug regulatory and scientific documents. His poems have appeared (or are slated to appear) in Golden Walkman Magazine, Yellow Chair Review, Camel Saloon, The Second Hump Volume V, Plum Tree Tavern, East Jasmine Review, Silver Birch Press, Eunoia Review, and Stray Branch.

Keayva Mitchell is a twenty-two year old currently living in Long Beach, California. Among the many jobs she holds she is an associate editor for a female executives magazine, as well as a sometimes blogger for The Poetry Lab. Her favorite poets include Terrence Hayes, Cristin O’Keefe-Aptowicz, and Rachel McKibbens. She thinks you’re cool.

Cameron Steele is in the second year of her masters in poetry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Her poems and creative non-fiction are forthcoming or have appeared in Red Paint Hill, Ivy Hall Review and Northern Colorado Writers’ “Pooled Ink” edition. Her first chapbook “Attribution” was published in 2014 by the South Dakota State Poetry Society, and her poem “Dreaming of Ducks” won the Academy of American Poets College Award in 2010.

Gillian Wegener‘s chapbook, Lifting One Foot, Lifting the Other was published by In the Grove Press in 2001, and her first full-length collection of poetry, The Opposite of Clairvoyance was published in 2008 by Sixteen Rivers Press. In 2011, she co-edited More Than Soil, More Than Sky: The Modesto Poets (Quercus Review Press). Wegener lives in Modesto where she coordinates and hosts the monthly 2nd Tuesday Reading Series, is founding president of the Modesto-Stanislaus Poetry Center, teaches creative writing to girls in juvenile hall, and serves as the Poet Laureate for the city of Modesto.

Katherine Williams is  an artist, poet, scholar, and as I recently learned an HTML code master. How can one person be so good at so many things? We published her at Wherewithal, because you can’t decline a woman with this kind of talent! Enjoy!

Ode on Red

That last red rim of Helios dropping
Into the wine-dark sea below the Palisades
Thrilled him like original sin

As did sharing a slice
Of one of Geryon’s herd—
Here, watch it bleed when you stick it—

Closing night of the big Viola Retrospective
He thought it was supposed to be Bach
Not glorified loft videos—ditched that—

Took her to the Good Luck for a cosmo
Whole joint upholstered in Red he said My
Favorite compassing her in his mind like suede

His paintings were red his rug was red
The traffic light on his corner, only ever red
He put on Kind of Blue to throw her off a little

The walls nearly bled as he poured
Three fingers of Añejo into a ruby
Tumbler closed his eyes and began

On Modernism

..                              after Wikipedia, “Thing Theory”

Chicken theory
is a branch of critical theory

that focuses
on the role of chickens in literature

and culture.
It borrows from Heidegger’s

distinction
between objects and chickens,

whereby
an object becomes a chicken

when it is
somehow made to stand

out against
the backdrop of the world in which

it exists.

Chicken theorists look
at the role of chickens within literature

—at the fixation
on particular objects. Chicken

theory holds
particularly well as it applies

to the study
of modernism, due to the dictates

of modernist
poets, such as T. S. Eliot’s notion

of the objective
correlative” or William Carlos Williams’s

declaration
that there should be No ideas

but in chickens.

Katherine Williams has authored four chapbooks and read throughout southern California and the southeast. Her work is published in various anthologies and has received a Pushcart nomination. She has a bachelor’s in French, works in biomedical research, and lives on James Island with her husband, poet Richard Garcia.