Everyday Genius

Everyday Genius has a new design, simple and stripped down. Peruse the archives. As I've read through the work of the last year, I've been continually wowed at the quality of work the various editors have brought to the "journal." It's the task of independent media to promote writing that is either radically new or radically good at supporting new movements, and I believe Everyday Genius does that. If I didn't, I would stop putting it out.

Alec Niedenthal's tenure as editor of Everyday Genius included ground breaking writers like Joshua Cohen, Amber Sparks ("The City longed to travel" -- great!), James Yeh, Mark Doten and more, more, more. Thanks to Alec and thanks to the writers who sent him work.

Now Kate Zambreno has taken the helm, and she's steering good ship EG into Whoa-Wait-A-Minute waters. Game changers already, like this opener from Rebecca Loudon, yesterday:

My tongue’s clapper honeypots shed sticky bodies on the sidewalk an eel pie inside the mute dwarf her gladiolas followed me I prayed to

Come back early and often.

Next Week at Everyday Genius: Matt Bell

Week 1: Christopher Newgent's sort of book, sort of CD: The Lion and The Lamb.
Week 2: Amelia Gray's constraint writing, with sound and video.

Now look out for Week 3, featuring a story by Matt Bell, which will be posted on Monday. On Tuesday, Matt will revise the story online, in real time, so you can watch. On Tuesday night, Michael Kimball will log in and edit the story, also before your eyes.

On Wednesday, tune in to see Lily Hoang take the red pen. And on Thursday, you can join and edit the story yourself.

On Thursday night, Matt will edit the story one final time, and the complete, edited version will appear on Friday. Don't miss week 3!

Everyday Genius, April into May, through June

A huge wallop of thanks to Blake Butler for banging up Everyday Genius through April. Some mesmerizing pieces, and a great conversation starter in Sean Kilpatrick's doozy, "Fistfucking Rules" -- I thought the comments to the poem that happened at HTMLGIANT were great, both for questioning and answering on the topic of value in poetry. It's one of those rare online poetry discussions that sticks to the work and makes productive assertions.

Yes. Thanks Blake, and thanks to all the contributors. So much goodness.

Alec Niedenthal is putting together the issue for June. He'll be pulling almost all or entirely all the work from submissions, so get 'em in soon. And so you know what he likes, check out his stories over at the new Frigg. Dang, they are goooooood 'uns.

Normally I tell the editors that at least a third of the work should come from submissions, in case you're wondering.

For the May issue of Everyday Genius, I invited four authors to put together a week of whatever they wanted. I just asked that they explore what writing on the Internet should do, what it's capable of. This week there are a few poems from Christopher Newgent, which he's contextualized with music, art and an afterword by Joe McHugh.

Everyday Genius, March

Well, we're wrapping up another amazing month at Everyday Genius. A hearty, heartfelt thanks to Laura Ellen Scott for putting together some excellent reads. Every story a winner. After almost a year of great content, it's becoming more and more challenging to incorporate new writers and to maintain a diversity of voice while featuring one story/poem/thing every weekday. I'm extremely grateful to the editors who make this their mission, people like Laura and Fortunato Salazar (from February), who take the job seriously and artistically.

Sometimes I like to point out a few highlights from the month, but I've never felt entirely comfortable doing this. Everything featured should be featured. So I compiled a list of the daily genius, which you can view here. The writing is posted every day, but the archives are meant to be visited often, slowly, with tea and cookies.

Next month brings us selections from Blake Butler. Be afraid. Be calm.

Everyday Genius

First of all, congratulations to the four writers whose Everyday Genius stories were selected for inclusion in the 2010 Best of the Web, from Dzanc. I feel honoreder than words to have published them. Read their stories again:

Aaron Burch
Peter Markus
David McClendon
Stephen Graham Jones

Now Lauren Bender has finished her tenure as the January editor for Everyday Genius. Some of my favorites from her selections include Dina Kelberman's drawings, Jackie Milad's drawings, Jesse Tangen-Mills's poem about 12 ways to die, and of course Mike Topp's funnies (in particular, the first sentence: "What famous actress is Larry King?"). Thanks to Lauren and everyone she published.

The February editor is Fortunato Salazar. He impressed me with his sharp mind and considerate, professional correspondence. When he asked abuot the opportunity, he pointed out a typo in a piece that was recently published (I think it was an apostrophe). His great editorial eye reaches beyond copyediting, though, and there is a lot to look forward to in February.

The March editor is Laura Ellen Scott. Laura hosts VIPs on VSF, a great site that collects thoughts about flash fiction from leading flash writers. Here's an interesting interview with her from March 2009 that is worth a look. Submit 500-word stories, poems, pictures, or whatever, to editor at publishinggenius dot com and she will consider them.

Everyday Genius, December into January

December is over and Sasha Fletcher put together an amazing month. That Daniel Bailey piece we ended with? Just fantastic. A perfect ending to the story and to the year, right? I even think of 2009 as the chewed off leg, wrapped bloody in a tee shirt, carried with love and a big, big song like "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." I'm just like, wow, what a thing to wrap up PG's fourth quarter.
Nice work, Bailey. Nice work, Fletcher.

Speaking of ghost legs, the Kathryn Regina poem -- short, with a striking simile (which is not, in this poem, a dream but an actuality) -- is another favorite. It resonates with me.

Plus, I was thrilled to get to publish people I've admired but not received submissions from before, like Carl Annarummo, whose name isn't too hard to spell once you figure it out. And Rozalia Jovanovic (likewise with the spelling). Those are both double duty submissions.

So much goodness. Sasha Fletcher created a month of uniform quality, and I'm sincerely grateful to him and the authors who lent us their work. I'm already looking forward to the archives.

It strikes me that have been many similarities from month to month, but still each editor has created a fairly distinctive flavor. Sometime I would like to pore over the archives and trace this out a bit. But for now let me diverge just to say that: whoa, January is going to MESSED UP.

Lauren Bender, who lives in Baltimore, is 1/3 of my publisher, and is AWESOME, has put together a collection of some really beautiful work. Take the first thing posted this year, for example: Adam Trowbridge's "The Goat Said" is a complicated and inviting combination of text and image. It's something to look at deeply and shallowly and widely and narrowly. (NOTE: because I was on a ski trip, Adam's piece didn't get posted until this morning. So please do take a look, as it's likely to have been missed. I'm sorry about that.) (But the skiing was fun.)

What the heck is the thing we have today? I don't know. It's a picture by Alex Epstein, and it looks great. I like Bender's image-centric literary eye. I find it very fitting for a literary publisher who's first book was a collection of drawings.

There is a lot more to come, a lot of it images, all of it awesome. Check in every day, genius.

Everyday Genius

Yesterday I returned from an amazing party outside Madison, WI. It was sort of a reunion of all my friends from college. 30 of us ate an amazing Thanksgiving dinner, played football, had a singalong around a campfire, then went for a walk as the sun rose over the chilly farmland.

There was no Internet, and I didn't mind. Friends are the real Internet.

But Everyday Genius is a good second-best. This week kicked off with a face-wowing thinger by Kuzhali Manickavel. From her bio, I learned that Kuzhali lives in a small, coastal town in South India and just released a book called, "Insects Are Just like You and Me except Some of Them Have Wings" (Goodreads). Her story has received a blogtastic amount of comments -- someone even called it "a fist-slammed-into-the-face of a story."

Just posted -- sorry it's late -- Blogger failed me -- is a colorful cartoon by John Dermot Woods. I like John Woods a lot. Recently he let me eat pizza at his really nice house, which is under construction. He happened to be wearing socks and shoes that match the cover of his brilliant book, The Complete Collection of People, Places and Things. Anyway, John's contribution to Everyday Genius is a cartoon about the moon falling. In it, there is a man or a boy with a top hat. There is a lot of action as the moon slowly descends.

Interestingly, Shellie Zacharia (who's book, Now Playing, I love) has a story about the moon falling that will come out in tomorrow's edition of Everyday Genius, so keep reading or whatnot.

Darby Larson at Everyday Genius

Well, we're wrapping up September over at Everyday Genius and I'm about to hand the reins over to Lee Rourke. He's got some great things planned for October. Thanks to Michael Kimball for his great development of the series through August and into the first half of this month.

Today is Darby Larson day, and he brings us an overwhelmingly flowery story.

Kim Chinquee at Everyday Genius

Michael Kimball's been editing Everyday Genius this month. It's been great having guest editors these last couple months (thanks Stephanie Barber for July). Today he brings a story by Kim Chinquee, called "Blast."

It would take more words to summarize her story than she used to write it. Her flash fiction always impresses me with how much can be done with so few words. She strikes me as one of the greatest plot-makers working in the genre.

Everyday Genius

Today I moved Everyday Genius, the PGP online journal, to a Blogger format. I did this for two reasons: first, it was taking me about 25 minutes a day to update the website because of the way PGP's wonky, jury-rigged web infrastructure works. Second, and more importantly, now it can be easily integrated into Google Reader and other RSS aggregators. So take a moment to "reset your preset," and hook up your EDG feed so you don't miss a beat.

Everyday Genius

During the month of July, Stephanie Barber will be editing Everyday Genius. In one email she called it Everygay Genius, and I thought briefly about changing the name. Decided against it.

Barber has put together an amazing lineup. There is some really funny stuff and some really beautiful stuff. For the first time with PGP, there's even some vispo. Here are random lines from work that's coming out this month.

"Eat 'em, coprophilia."

"It is an antelope he is summoning!
But wait!
A sleeping bear is
summoned instead."

"I think I know where this is going -- this is so funny!"

"The effort to avoid omissions gives
emotional support to the
irresponsible
in the face of the sphinx."

Tune into Everyday Genius this month to see what's what, who's who, where's where.

Tune in and find out why's why.

Today's poem is by Cindy Loehr, and it's funny and kind of sweetly beautiful, here's a third of it:

The best way to collect these flowers is to fall into the shrub. You must fall into the shrub and collect the flowers from the street.

Read the rest.

Everyday Genius: Deanna Erickson

There's a very sensitive mash-up (sorta, loosely) of Frost today at Everyday Genius. Deanna Erickson seems smart, seems to exist in spite of her ontological struggles.

Is there a way, can someone tell me, is there a way to put an RSS feeder into the HTML code so that people can subscribe to Everyday Genius feeds?

Everyday Genius: David Daniel

Today in Everyday Genius I posted a chapter of David Daniel's amazing chapbook, Six Off 66. I think that is one of the books I'm most proud to have published. The story is 1,200 words long, which I think is tough to sit for on the Internet, but it's such a good story, with such an easy flow, that it works and works quickly. Give it a read.

There are a few copies of the book still available too, and if you order it by Monday I will include the new Francis Raven This PDF Chapbook and Chris Toll's I'll Be the Invisible Girl Till the Day I Die. I reread some of those poems yesterday and Chris is still one of my top five favorite poets.

Everyday Genius: Laura Ellen Scott

The Wigleaf Top 50 is live.

One of the winners is Laura Ellen Scott, whose new piece "The Temple Dog" was posted in Everyday Genius today. I hope it wins in next year's contest. Cuz it's wack.

Speaking of wack, peep my fam at last year's camping trip:

Everyday Genius: Juliet Cook

Juliet Cook's poem, "Pig Trough as Concept" -- posted today in Everyday Genius -- really delights me. Give it a read. Doesn't it strike you like a Mike Young piece in the way that she juxtaposes unusual (though plainly syntactical) sentences about one thing which culminate in a sentiment that is distinctly different from those one things.

Er, uh.

I honestly didn't do a close reading to sense what happens in this poem; I just let myself associate with it and from that association comes the, what, the grist (if you will), and then I allowed that grizzle (um) to be enough in terms of "understanding," and to be part of the thing that is the poem. I guess I'm arguing for an "Against Interpretation"-type reading here, as always. And why not? Otherwise, I'd be reminded of David Orr's condescending article in the Times --

" . . . the trendiest contemporary style, which relies heavily on disconnected phrases, abrupt syntactical shifts, attention-begging titles (“The Gem Is on Page Sixty-Four”), quirky diction (“orangery,” “aigrettes”), flickering italics, oddball openings (“The scent of pig is faint tonight”) and a tone ranging from daffy to plangent — basically, two scoops of John Ashbery and a sprinkling of Gertrude Stein . . ." (link) --

And I'd think, yeah, but come on Tackleberry: it's good. Orr lists these characteristics like they're a detriment, as if to say they're cataloged, so clearly Juliet Cook didn't think of this first -- so what can the value be? A checklist of tropes employed does not strike me as a productive way to read Cook's poem, or any poem.

I don't want to know what's happening in a poem or how it derives its meaning. The fact that it's possible to recognize a good poem means precisely that it's possible to recognize what's good in a poem. Being able to language those elements, though, is a different, often superfluous matter.

In that regard, I've enjoyed reading these essays on negative reviews.

National Publishing Genius Month

If you're looking for a way to celebrate National Publishing Genius Month, I suggest coming out to the premier of the play I wrote called "It's Okay, Mother." It opens tonight and stars Joseph Young as Roger, Stephanie Barber as Gretchen, and Joe Cashiola as Roger (the server). Showtime is at 7pm, at the Load of Fun Theatre. Tickets are available at the door for $3.

If you aren't in Baltimore but you're within four hours drive/flight, you can still make it before the curtain opens.

If you are more than four hours away by car or plane, I suggest you read Victoria Sroka's three poems that were published Tuesday in Everyday Genius. They are brilliant and deserve your attention.

I love the sonic repetition in David Peak's poem published today in Everyday Genius. The repetition, it is my favorite thing about this poem.