PRACTICE: NEW WRITING + ART

- PRACTICE: NEW WRITING + ART will be available shortly via Small Press Distribution. Thank you, SPD. (Check back if the magazine has not appeared on their site. In the meantime, you can order issues 1 + 2 here via Paypal.)

- Submissions: As of July 1 we are reading work for ISSUE 3, due out in early 2008. See below for more information.

- Our utterly bare-bones website will be replaced shortly by something equally bare-bones but nicer looking. FYI.

- In response to questions about subscriptions: a donation (via check or Paypal to editor@practicejournal.com) will guarantee to you a copy or copies of the next issue.

Many thanks for the interest and support. Please stay tuned. 

Posted by Practice at 04:53 PM | Permalink

Practice Press is happy to announce the arrival of the second issue of PRACTICE: NEW WRITING + ART.

The journal includes a detour into landscape, nature, encounter, memory, and history - among other diversions - and features new work by:

Christian Peet (ten postcards/poems from Big American Trip);

Brandon Shimoda (seven poems from Lake M);

Allison Cobb (poetry/essay: Green-Wood);

Rusty Morrison (five poems from Landscape, Not Fable);

J. Michael Martinez (two poems);

Ed Skoog (two poems);

Danika Myers (seven poems from My Risky Undertaking);

Joshua Edwards (four poems from The Departures);

Dieter Graf (a long poem: Record Player);

Mark Yakich (two poems);

Grzegorz Wroblewski (five poems);

Tony Lopez (Only More So); 

Renee Angle (Salamandra, Salamandra);

Michael Heller (three poems from The Tibet Sequence);

Alec Finlay (a conversation about his worldwideletterbox project, and ten circle poems);

Dan Fost (a travel essay/memoir that takes us to the mouth of an erupting volcano in the South Pacific);

Paddy Sutton (four photographs from the Atlantic series);

Shawn Records (five photographs);

Mary Daniel Hobson (three images from Bottle Dreams);

Aaron Cruse (five photographs);

Emily Ginsburg (three images from Social Studies);

Peter Koch (four excerpts from the Nature Morte manuscript/portfolio);

and Colette Calascione (five paintings - and one cover). 

Editor: Adrian Lurssen

Poetry Editor: Susan Tichy

Art + Design: Merel Kennedy and Holly Holmquist 

Printer: Hemlock, British Columbia, Canada

Or to order by mail, send a check for $15 ($12 + shipping) to the address available on this site.

-Thanks to the artists and writers for trusting us with their work. Thanks to friends and family members (see page 184) for funding this issue. Thanks to the Practice Press board of directors for their support. Thanks to all for your interest.

-Practice Press is a 501(c)(3) literary arts organization. Donations are most welcome and tax-deductible. Please send a check to the address available on this website, or via PayPal.

Posted by Practice at 11:10 PM | Permalink

As of July1, 2007, we are considering work for ISSUE 3, with a planned pub. date of early 2008.

We are looking for poetry, prose (fiction + non-fiction), visual art, and whatever blurs the lines among these genres. Submission deadline is August 30, 2007.

We are interested in breaking down the barriers between traditional and experimental by ignoring them. As we said in the debut's introduction: regardless of genre or style, often the most intelligent pieces seem a little like travel, which means they require attention and you might get lost in them. We are also interested in inclusion and engagement and these goals transcend any one aesthetic. The first two issues will give you a sense of what we like, although we won't necessarily be repeating what we did there but building upon it.

We are also accepting queries regarding interviews in ISSUE 3. If you'd like us to consider an interview, or an idea for one, please e-mail a brief synopsis to editor@practicejournal.com. (Issue one interview was with Semezdin Mehmedinovic; issue two with Alec Finlay. Both included new work by the subjects.)

We pay a flat fee of $200, five copies of the issue in which your work appears, and fine loose-leaf tea. Rights revert to author/artist upon publication.

Please send work to editor@practicejournal.com. Include "submission" as first word in the subject line, followed by your name. Also include your last name in the title of the attached file. Send everything in just one file. (We like to publish a larger-than-average sampling of each contributor's work. Please keep this in mind when considering how much to submit. Roughly ten pages is a good place to start.)

Writers: please attach RTF or Word files. Only send work previously unpublished in English. (Translators, please provide information regarding permissions.)

Artists: please start with links to web sites showing your work.

Posted by Practice at 09:52 PM | Permalink

PRACTICE: NEW WRITING + ART issue one is still available. Get a copy while you can.

The first issue includes:

Poetry by Dan Beachy-Quick, G.C. Waldrep & John Cross, Graham Foust, Eleanor Graves, Christi Kramer, H.L. Hix, Janet Holmes, Aaron McCollough, Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Rod Smith, Peter Streckfus, Cole Swensen, Susan Tichy, Caroline Walker, and Joan Wilcox. 

Prose by Betsy Andrews, Jamy Bond, Gerald Tiffany, and Gabe Weisert.  An interview with Semezdin Mehmedinovic by Brian Brodeur.

Art and photography by Karen Barbour, Angela Buenning, Paula McCartney, Ryan Mrozowski, and Anne Wilson.

(If you e-mailed a freebie request prior to this posting, you will receive one.)

We received a tremendous amount of kind and excellent feedback for issue one (including an award for design excellence from Mohawk Paper company). Alas, we haven't yet asked any of our new friends if we may quote them on this site, and so -- we're going to do it anyway. We've eliminated names to protect the innocent but will credit people once they've allowed it. Here is some of the feedback:

"I think it's the most beautiful journal I've ever seen." - excellent poet with hyphenated last name (you'd know it if we used it here).

"I'm very glad to have stumbled into this particular gravitational pull." - professor and director of certain amazing and well-thought-of Books Arts program in the SF Bay Area.

"Both a beautiful object, and shrewdly edited..." - Josh Corey, on his blog. 

"I find patient editorial intelligence here, composed and improvisatory--rare qualities for a journal just starting out." - anonymous, but clearly brilliant. 

Here is what we said last year, at time of debut:

The word PRACTICE brings to mind notions of craft. Writers and artists and photographers are skilled practitioners of craft, and magazines such as this one celebrate this fact in all of its beauty and diversity. This is all true. But what we also had in mind when we settled on the title was Reading, which is its own form of practice. We want more readers. We like to believe that more people should experience this interesting and worthwhile work -- we'd even venture to say that outside of academia more people want the chance to "understand" it -- and so we are trying to create a publication that immediately addresses the issue, these issues. For one small example, most contributors are provided the chance to introduce themselves or their work in a dedicated page at the start of their "section." These artist statements vary greatly (no constraints except in word count) and first feedback tells us that they are helpful to folks who might be arriving at this type of work for the first time. We also mix "traditional" prose (tending to an international focus, though not exclusively) with "innovative" poetry (awkward labels) because both offer a form of travel that we enjoy. We also believe that the disciplines belong together, and that readers who are drawn into the publication through more familiar essays will likely stick around for the challenging stuff -- especially if there are signposts along the way. You might fairly argue that none of this is particularly original. Even so, we wanted to let you know what we have in mind. When we say PRACTICE, we also mean reading. (And tea, but that's another story.)

Posted by Practice at 09:46 PM | Permalink

to issue one contributor Betsy Andrews: her book-length poem New Jersey was published in March by the University of Wisconsin Press. The book won the 2007 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, and here is what Anne Waldman had to say about it: "The heart of darkness is alive and beating in Betsy Andrews's New Jersey. This well-investigated sweep of a poem builds and passionately sustains itself through many luminous hallucinatory details. With its commitment to naming, to witnessing the machinations and degradations of our 'terror,' this is a brave poem, and a necessary one."

Congratulations Betsy Andrews! New Jersey is available at UW Press.  

Posted by Practice at 09:32 PM | Permalink