A Midwestern Review, Spring 2018

Literary journals are a place for fresh voices in fiction, non-fiction, poetry and visual arts. A Midwestern Review is published by undergraduates at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, and the quality of its content shines bright on this episode of Reader’s Radar.  Samuel Autman is Associate Professor of English at DePauw and the outgoing Faculty Adviser for A Midwestern Review. He asserts that the rich psychological  reality of “Becoming Caroline” (Spring 2018) “is indicative of what we want our students to be out there doing.”

Samuel Autman

Samuel Autman’s first literary impulse as a child was writing personal essays for church newsletters and school newspapers.  Later, as a news reporter for the Tulsa World, The Salt Lake Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and The San Diego Union Tribune, he found great joy in crafting narratives and personal columns. His essay “Invisible Nails” won first place in the 2015 Disquiet International Literary Contest in nonfiction and is now available in THE KEPT SECRET: The Half-Truth in Nonfiction published by the Michigan State University Press. His other essays have appeared in THE CHALK CIRCLE: Prizewinning Intercultural Essays, BLACK GAY GENIUS : Answering Joseph Beam’s Call, Ninth Letter, The Common Reader, Under the Gum Tree, The Little Patuxent Review, Bonfires, PANORAMA: The Journal of Intelligent Travel, Memoir Magazine, Brevity and the forthcoming The St. Louis Anthology. 

Becoming Caroline

In high school, Carol is the funniest person in the room. In college, she reinvents herself as “Caroline” but glimpses what was purged along with her weight.

Katrina Iorio

Katrina Iorio is a senior at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, majoring in English with a Music minor. She is the Music Director of DePauw’s co-ed a cappella group, and is also an Assistant Producer for DePauw’s television station, D3TV. Iorio will work for Teach for America for after graduation, but she also plans to continue writing both fiction and non-fiction. “Becoming Caroline” is the first piece of hers to be published.

The Broken Plate, Spring 2018

How can a college student explore literary publishing as a career path? Well, most literary journals in the USA are produced by colleges and universities. Students apply to be on the editorial staff, and a faculty advisor guides the process. Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana goes a somewhat different route. Their nationally-distributed journal, The Broken Plate, is produced by one undergraduate class over the course of two semesters. Every spring, the journal’s new issue is released at the In Print Festival of First Books at Ball State. We called up Mark Neely, the Instructor of English 489: Practicum in Literary Editing and Publishing. Leading that class, he is also the Editor and Faculty Advisor for The Broken Plate.

Mark Neely

The Check-Up

Mark Neely recommends this story by William Ade as something rare – a truly short story, that develops character rapidly through dialogue. This telephone conversation between a dentist’s receptionist and a longtime patient has far more bite than expected.

William Ade

William Ade lives in Burke, Virginia with his wife and Rudy the Cat. He calls his evolving literary voice “Midwestern Old Man”– because he grew up in Indiana during the fifties and sixties. His stories have appeared in the Crimson Leaf Review, The Rind Literary Magazine, The Broken Plate, Black Fox Literary Magazine and Literally Stories.

Johanna Flies With the Umbrella Man

Our second story in this episode is a fabulist journey into faith — a choice between the unwanted and the impossible.

Olivia Buzzacco

Olivia Buzzacco earned both a BFA and an MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio. At Bowling Green, she served as Assistant Fiction Editor for the literary magazine, Mid-American Review. She has poetry and prose published in Electric Cereal, Zaum, Jenny Magazine, and Prairie Margins. She currently teaches writing and literature courses at the College of the Albemarle in North Carolina.

driftless, Spring 2018

What holds us in place, makes us stop, pause, linger? Something of the senses, perhaps – a sound, a smell, something we want to touch.

In the local cafes, gift galleries and bookstores that help us slow down and remember where we are, we may find a unique magazine called driftless – which has the subtitle, “Midwest Adventuring.”

The publishers and creative directors of driftless are Anna Powell Teeter and Leah Fithian – two professionals in photography, advertising, graphic design and journalism.

I sat down with Anna Powell Teeter, who is a photographer, filmmaker and journalist in Bloomington, Indiana. She acknowledged that the journal’s name refers to the “driftless” region of the Midwest, that 12-state region that was not flattened by glaciers back in the Ice Age. But she also said the name is meant to convey that the magazine celebrates those creative souls who do not “drift away” from their roots in the Midwest, but stay. And create marvelous things, wonderful places, warm communities.

Leah Fithian (L) and Anna Powell Teeter (R)

driftless is eager to publish fiction when they can. The Spring 2018 issue carries this Reader’s Radar episode story: “Test Surfaces,” by Bella Bravo. Set in a college town, a busy intersection is where a blind woman meets a young girl in trouble.

Bella Bravo.

Bella Bravo was born in La Mesa, CA, and now lives and writes in Bloomington, IN. Bravo is the author of the collection of queer short stories, The Unpositioned Parts  and the stage play, As Bad As They. They have been published by Driftless, Peach, Mask, Limestone Post, and Monster House.

A longer version of the interview with driftless Co-creative Director Anna Powell Teeter can be found at WFIU.org.

“Looking for the next Kurt Vonnegut.”

Flying Island is an online literary journal published by the Indiana Writers Center – a nonprofit educational center in Indianapolis. Executive Director Barb Shoup talks with Reader’s Radar about how the Center supports writers around the Central Indiana region – support which includes a broad range of classes, a conference and a newsletter, as well as publishing Flying Island and special anthologies.

Barb Shoup — Writer, teacher and Executive Director of the Indiana Writers’ Center.

Pyramid Scheme

Our recommended short fiction from Flying Island is “Pyramid Scheme,” by Jim Powell – the founding Director of the Indiana Writer’s Center and a driving pioneer of the Indianapolis writers’ community. In “Pyramid Scheme,” a laborer discovers he shares a certain passion with his uber-wealthy client – which puts a sinister edge to paint and concrete.

Jim Powell

Jim Powell holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and is retired from teaching creative writing at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis (IUPUI). He founded the non-profit Writers’ Center of Indianapolis (now the Indiana Writers Center) and served as its director from 1979-99. His fiction has recently been published in Bartleby Snopes, Crack the Spine, Flying Island, Storyscape, and Fiction Southeast.

Willem McArthur

Our second story is “Willem McArthur,” by James Matthew Lee Wilson. In it, a young man’s journey out of a troubled youth takes an uncanny turn.

James Matthew Lee Wilson.

James Matthew Lee Wilson is a writer from Southern Colorado who pursues words and phrases down dusty dirt roads and dark starlit highways. He currently lives in Indiana with his wife and son.

Indiana Voice Journal, July 2018 cover

Online publishing is a natural start for literary journals with minimal budgets.  Indiana Voice Journal is one such publication, intent on bringing new and under-represented writers to its readers on the web, every month. Publisher and Fiction Editor Janine Pickett started the journal as a way to speak out from Anderson, Indiana, and connect with other writers.

Janine Pickett

In our chat, she reveals the diligent work she puts into social media marketing, which has brought hundreds of thousands of page views from a worldwide readership — and an unexpected deluge of submissions from international authors.

Pickett doesn’t shy away from stories that tell the hard human truths of our world’s problems. This episode’s selected story, “New Teeth,” dives into the world of a mother facing down a beloved child whose addiction is out of control.

The author is Jacqueline Masumian, a graduate of DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, who now lives in Westport, Connecticut. She has enjoyed careers in acting, singing, dancing, theater management and landscape design as well as writing. Besides her short fiction and book reviews, she has published a memoir, Nobody Home.

Jacqueline Masumian

We have included a second story by Masumian, also published in Indiana Voice Journal, titled, “Barn Dance.” In it, a contra dance event allows a wife to reflect on her long marriage, and foresee a way to change her steps.

December 2016 issue

Did you know that Indiana is not only home to at least 15 literary journals, but three of them—three!—are world-renowned, prestige publications? Reader’s Radar is proud to begin its podcast series with one of these,  SYCAMORE REVIEW. It comes from West Lafayette, Indiana, published by Purdue University’s College of Liberal Arts and the Department of English. Sycamore Review’s Editorial staff is drawn from Purdue’s Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program.

While Purdue’s English department has long enjoyed a stellar reputation for scholarship, it didn’t have a literary magazine until 1989. I talked with Anthony Sutton, who was the Sycamore Review’s Editor during his final year in the MFA program.

Click on Play to hear the whole interview with Sutton, and his pick for your listening, “To Scream Like Goats,” by Michelle Donahue. Donahue is a PhD candidate in Fiction at the University of Utah. She has an MFA in Creative Writing & Environment from Iowa State University and a BS in Environmental Biology from Beloit College. Her short fiction has appeared in the Beloit Fiction Journal, The Baltimore Review, Whiskey Island, Arts & Letters, Strange Constellations, CutBank, and the collection Prairie Gold: Anthology of the American Heartland. Her web site is Michelle Donahue Writes Stuff.

Michelle Donahue