August!

August is the month of the shower of stars--the Perseids--and the month of mosquitoes eating you when you go out to watch. Despite the mosquitoes, Common Ground Review is looking at poems on stars this month and until September 30th for our first theme issue.  Thank you for sending us poems!  The stars don't have to be celestial--they can be celebrities, or asterisks, or anything starry that you are intrigued by.  We are accepting other poems, too.  Officially that deadline is August 31st, but we keep reading until the issue is full.  And we are also catching up on the backlog.

Our Fall/Winter issue spotlights a work of creative non-fiction.  This can be on any subject, but it must be relatively short-- less than or equal to 12 pages (double-spaced).  If you have any questions, you can ask Dan Bevacqua, our Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction Editor.  And now, let's not dwell on Fall/Winter.  It's still summer, and for a few short days, still summer vacation!

Here in western Massachusetts, the gladioli are blooming, the tomatoes are turning red, the weeds are thriving...and we start a new semester at Western New England on August 25th, so it's been busy.  We've run into a delay in printing the Spring/Summer issue--sizing the cover properly.  But we think that's been resolved, so we should be getting the issue out to our contributors (and anyone else who'd like an issue, a bargain at $10 including mailing costs) as soon as we can.

We also ran into a delay starting Submittable, but that should be available very soon--the Submittable programmers are working on upgrades this Saturday (August 23rd, also the day of the new Doctor Who episode), and we realized it would be smart to start up after those upgrades were in place. 

Stay tuned...Our next theme issue will be on food!

July!

Here’s what’s happening right now:

FIRST

We are in the process of switching from straight email submissions (which we have no good way to keep track of) to Submittable.  We hope this will enable us to respond to submissions much more efficiently.  At the moment, I’m creating descriptions and setting up links; there’s some HTML code to put in, but you should see the link to submit work via Submittable on this website by the end of July.  Of course we will continue to accept work though the regular mail.

Recently the esteemed literary journal Triquarterly has been in the news for sending a letter that apologized for a backlog and returned submissions unread.  We sympathize both with the writers whose submissions were not read, and with the editors of the magazine.  In our situation, we will continue to work through our backlog and to read all submissions sent before the installation of Submittable, as well as those sent by way of Submittable.  This takes time, and we apologize for the wait, which in some cases has been very long indeed. 

However, please be aware that we allow simultaneous submissions, and we are genuinely pleased (if sometimes annoyed with ourselves and our own slowness) when you tell us that you are withdrawing work because it has been accepted elsewhere.  It may be that just the act of sending work to us will bring you luck!

SECOND

We are proof-reading the Spring/Summer issue, which is looking great--and that isn't even including Lorna Ritz's gorgeous cover.  We hope to be able to send it to the printers by the end of July.  At that point, we will start focusing on submissions for the Fall/Winter issue. 

Thank you, everyone who has sent us work--we really appreciate it!

Mid May

And what is happening here?

I am relieved to say that the Fall/Winter issue finally came out! 

Our judge, Karen Skolfield, determined the 2014 Poetry Contest winners and Honorable Mentions.  We will be posting those and comments on the Contest page shortly.   We are sending letters to the other entrants this week.

We are continuing to read submissions for the Spring/Summer 2014 issue, which we hope to be able to send to the printers in June. 

**Inspired by last year's graduation speech given at Western New England University by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, we have decided to make the next Fall/Winter issue a theme issue.  The theme is stars--whether celestial, or in the realm of celebrities, or the symbols used to indicate excellent food, or some other variant is up to you.** 

We will continue to accept poems on other topics, but we're looking forward to seeing what you send!

We are also still looking for short stories and short non-fiction (10-12 pages) for our Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter issues, respectively.

The Proof Is On the Way

Have you ever clicked on to the link to a package coming your way via FedEx or the Post Office, thinking, I hope it's here soon!, only to find that it won't arrive (apparently) until next week?  Here it is four days into Spring (technically), and I am waiting for the proof of the Fall/Winter issue; as soon as I can okay it, we can get the magazine to you!  I keep looking out the window hoping that a delivery van will drive up.  I'm also hoping that the Nor'easter projected for tomorrow night will miss us, but if not, maybe it will be the last of the wintry storms that have delayed us so much this year.

In the meantime, we have great news about our Poetry Contest Judge, Karen Skolfield--her book, Frost in the Low Areas, just won the New England PEN Award for Poetry!  It is well deserved--the book is wonderful, and I'm only bragging a little when I say that we had the wit and foresight to print two of the poems in it in Common Ground Review 14.1 (the one with the cat on the cover).

Finally, we are still reading submissions as far back as from last summer for consideration for the Spring/Summer issue, and with any luck, we may be able to get that issue out when it is actually still Spring/Summer.  (Probably Summer.  But Summer 2014.)

Thank you for your patience!  and let us know if you'd like a copy of the magazine, or a back issue.

Snow Days, Sneezes, and COLD

Snow days are joyous things--especially when the forecast got it quite wrong, skies are blue, and schools are closed (having believed the forecast).  That's the perfect time to play, make hot chocolate for the happy children zooming about the house like self-propelled rockets, and wonder when you're ever going to finish formatting the magazine.  It's 16 degrees today, going below zero by about that much tonight, and I at least slow down a bit in the cold.

The good news is, we are formatting the Fall/Winter issue, which should be ready in February. 

More good news, we are accepting entries for the poetry contest (judge to be named soon).  And of course, the poems we are reading now are being considered for the Spring/Summer issue--whether they have been sent recently or whether we are just getting to them.  The reading is going on apace; notifications are following a little more slowly.  (If only we could harness the children's energy--those rockets could get letters to you in record time!)

Thanks and Apologies!

Tonight is the start of Yom Kippur—which my son has learned to call, “I’m Sorry Day.” 

“What have you got to be sorry for?”  I asked him.  “Nothing,” he said.  I should be so lucky.  (And so blithely confident, but that’s another topic.)

Let me start with thanks: thank you –thank you VERY much to everyone who sent in submissions by the August 31^st deadline: we will be considering everything for the Fall/Winter issue—including those pieces which were sent months ago to be considered for a previous issue. (I’m so sorry!) We are catching up, but over the summer, we had a skeleton crew (just me, for the most part), and although we have reviewed much of the work that came in, we have not had time to write and send all the letters out. 

After the High Holidays, we will be back to a normal schedule, with regular editorial meetings.  And we will contact everyone who has sent us work.

I’d also like to thank everyone who contributed to the Spring/Summer issue, which is now available, and I would especially like to thank DAN BEVACQUA, our fiction/non-fiction editor, whom I inadvertently left off the masthead, but to whom we owe a wonderful short story by MATT ROSSI.

I owe one more apology to our first-prize winner, EVE FORTI, whose poem we printed without noticing a few mistakes.  We will be posting the corrected version soon so that you can see it as she meant it to be: go to the Contest section of the Common Ground Review website and click on her name.  If you click on the poem title, "Beautiful," you will see comments by this year's contest judge, IAIN HALEY POLLOCK.  (Thank you, Iain!)

The next blog will be about revising poems—several of our poets have agreed to let us post copies of versions they originally sent us, in contrast to the versions they finally wished to have us print.  In some cases, we went with the revision; in others, we went with the original, and we will talk about why we made those choices..

We have also been discussing having a theme issue, and we would love to hear your ideas on what theme(s) you’d like to write about.

Thanks for reading this—a happy, healthy, sweet new year to you, and well over the fast!

Spring/Summer 2013 Cover?

Common Ground Review's art editor, Lorna Ritz, had a grant to paint sand dunes in Cape Cod while she stayed in a shack without power or hot water.  We thought the ocean might be a great cover for the Spring/Summer issue.  (This June we are busily catching up on a year's backlog, selecting poems for the issue, debating, contacting people...and our contest judge, Iain Haley Pollock, is doing his part, too!)

For now, here is the possible cover, and some excerpts from Lorna's diary about her time on the dunes:

1 May.   It was pure joy to set my easel up on the cliff again. My entire color pallet changed from lush Western MA. I had to mix the colors together to very specifically find what color this place is. The ocean constantly moves and changes.

2 May By now I have lost track of days… Yesterday I got lost in the dunes again. What should have taken me 1 + hrs. to return to my shack turned out to be many more hours. I again got disoriented and lost my sightlines as I descended deep into the crevices of the dunes; when I climbed back up in sand, my sightlines were gone, so, I walked the wrong way. ... Jesse said , ‘Me and my wife never get lost. “ He added, 'you should have map quested the dunes."  (Impossible, in this case: I even had a National Park Service map which is of no help when disoriented).  A P'Town artist told me that people get lost all the time, many having to sleep outside in the night, in the cold, because they can’t find their way out. It was my instinct that got me ‘found’ each time.

2 May Today was my happiest day (not getting lost)!    Last night before I went to sleep, I lay flat under the mysterious sky full of brilliant stars, listening to ocean waves. The combination has put me in a good mood for a lifetime. I did another ocean drawing, paying attention only to the waves coming up onto the dunes. !!!!