The Blog

Two of our own!

Mon, 03/21/2011 - 12:00am

TIR staff

We want to issue a big Congratulations to two recent Best American award winners!

First, congratulations to Maggie McKnight. Her graphic memoir "Swingin,'" from our Winter 2008-09 issue, was chosen as a Notable Comic in the 2010 issue of Best American Comics. See an excerpt here.

And Anne Marie Rooney's poem "What my heart is turning," which appeared in our Winter 2009-10 issue, will appear in the 2011 issue of Best American Poetry. Anne Marie was the winner of the 2009 Iowa Review Award in poetry.

Read-only versus writable publishing

Wed, 03/16/2011 - 12:00am

Russell Valentino

These are relatively new terms for me, I'll admit, which means I'm only slowly getting a sense of what they suggest conceptually.

Here is a fairly strong statement of the writable future of publishing, by Terry Jones: http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/12/the-future-of-publishing-is-wr-1.html.

And a little excerpt, in case you're glued to this screen, as is only fitting:

"Publication of information obviously includes traditional media, such as books, newspapers, magazines, music, and video. But we can generalize considerably to include blogs, tagging (e.g., Delicious, Flickr), commenting systems, Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace.

Literary Death Match Part Deux, March 2

Thu, 03/03/2011 - 12:00am

Russell Valentino

The literary death match returned to town last night, and I was able to get out for a change.Here's the blurb from the lit death match website.

"The doozy of a lineup features Guggenheim Fellows Robin Hemley (author of DO-OVER!; Defunct Magazine editor) and Chris Offutt (Kentucky Straight; The Good Brother), poet extraordinaire Micah Bateman and Essays Editor of 

Patrick Madden's QUOTIDIANA

Sun, 02/27/2011 - 10:29pm

Amanda Dambrink

“A quick ear and eye, an ability to discern the infinite suggestiveness of common things, a brooding meditative spirit, are all that the essayist requires.”
—Alexander Smith, “On the Writing of Essays”

So begins the first of eleven personal essays in Patrick Madden’s premiere collection, Quotidiana, and the truth of this statement comes to bear on the entire book. Here the author brings together meandering meditations on laughing, death, garlic, hope, gravity, family, asymptosy, singing, hepatitis, and finity. Nothing extraordinary as far as subject matter goes, perhaps, but apply the “quick ear and eye,” the discernment and meditation of a writer like Patrick Madden, and these essays form a collection that mines personal experience and leaves readers the richer for it.

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