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On Quixotica: Howard Junker's AN OLD JUNKER

Philip Kobylarz

A cornucopia of urbanity. An armoire of intellectualism. A cabinet of curiosities. A museum of the quotidian. An herbarium of the fruition of a mind. A college of what isn’t taught in the grove. A compendium of compendia.

All of the above describe Howard Junker’s autobiographical-novel-slash-finished-work-in progress, An Old Junker: A Senior Represents—a collection that blissfully defies definition. A series of blogs stemming from his decades-long stint as the editor of Zyzzyva is the literal classification. A more vague attempt towards defining the wealth of knowledge, sentiment, cantankerousness, and insight this volume possesses might just position it somewhere between daybook and memoir.

Shirley Jackson Awards interview Jason Ockert

TIR staff

In April, we announced that Jason Ockert's dark and fantastic short story "Max" (which appeared in TIR 41/1) had been nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award, an annual prize for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.

While the SJA folks haven't yet chosen a winner, they chatted with Jason about his story and posted the interview here: http://www.shirleyjacksonawards.org/blog/2012/06/28/charles-tan-interviews-jason-ockert/ Must be a good sign, right?

AWP Wrap

Erica Mena

Guest blogger Erica Mena is a poet, translator, printmaker, and the co-editor of Discoveries, TIR's forthcoming high school reader. The following is excerpted from her blog, Alluringly Short.

Well, it has been far far too long. I’ve been buried under my thesis (excerpts of which you can read on Words Without Borders here and here) which is inches away from being announce-ably forthcoming in full. So that’s exciting.

Remembering Tom Wegman

Lynne Nugent

We were saddened to hear of the death of TIR cover artist Tom Wegman earlier this month at age 81. A prominent member of the local community, his passing occasioned a remembrance in the Iowa City Press-Citizen. I did not know until then that he had owned a store legendary in town called Things, Things, & Things. Nor did I know that he had become a paraplegic after a 1986 mororcycle accident. I did know that his three covers for TIR in 2003, featuring intricately beaded and insanely colorful roller skates, cowboy boots, and a bug sprayer, have become our most remarked-upon covers to date.

Karen An-Hwei Lee's PHYLA OF JOY

Angela Veronica Wong

Karen An-Hwei Lee’s third collection of poems, Phyla of Joy on Tupelo Press, is, at its heart, a celebration, a request for us to see the beauty around us, and a reminder that even the most minute thing can become miraculous and expansive if we take the time to consider it. In Lee’s poems, we find community, spirituality, and philosophy; we are given exploration of legacy and language. Lee’s first poetry collection, In media res, won the Kathryn A. Morton prize from Sarabande Books and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Faber First Book Award, and her second book, Ardor, was also published by Tupelo in 2008.

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