Contributor's Notes, Eclectica Magazine, v28n4, Oct/Nov 2024

Oct/Nov 2024

Tom Dooley co-founded Eclectica in 1996 and serves as its Managing and Fiction Editor. In the 12 years between earning a BA in English literature from the University of Chicago and a MPA in municipal management from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he taught middle and high school English in Alaska, Arizona, and Wisconsin, amassing fond memories, dubious experiences, and debt. Two careers post-teaching later, he now creates spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides for the man by day, edits Eclectica by night, and feels very grateful for the blessings he has received—chief among them being married to the sweetest gal and the best poet he knows. He and said gal reside in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with enough rescued lapdogs to field a diminutive Iditarod racing team and the empty-nest echoes of two amazing Haitian-American children who have flown the coop.

Marko Fong is Eclectica's Nonfiction Coeditor. A former Spotlight Author, he lives in North Carolina with his wife, dog, and two cats. He's written fiction and non-fiction for many years, and publications include Solstice, Prick of the Spindle, RKVRY, and Volleyball Magazine.

Christine Potter is Eclectica's Poetry Editor. A former Spotlight Author, she appeared in Eclectica a dozen times before joining the staff. She lives with her husband and chonky cat Bella in a very old house in the Hudson River Valley. Her poetry has also appeared in Grain, The McNeese Review, Rattle, Roi Fanéant, Does It Have Pockets, ONE ART, SWIMM, and Autumn Sky Poetry Daily as well as having been featured on ABC Radio News. Her latest collection of poems, Unforgetting, is on Kelsay Books, and her young adult time travel novels are published by Evernight Teen.

Nadia Arioli is this issue's Spotlight Author and the cofounder and editor in chief of Thimble Literary Magazine. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net three times and for the Pushcart Prize and can be found in Cider Press Review, Rust + Moth, McNeese Review, Penn Review, Mom Egg, and elsewhere. Essays have been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize and can be found in Hunger Mountain, Heavy Feather Review, SOFTBLOW, and elsewhere. Artwork has appeared in Permafrost, Kissing Dynamite, Meat for Tea, Pithead Chapel, Rogue Agent, and Poetry Northwest. Her forthcoming collections are with Dancing Girl Press and Fernwood Press.

René Bennett writes at the meeting point of desire and catastrophe. His chapbook, Hymnal for Catastrophe (2024), is available from Mouthfeel Press.

Bob Bradshaw is retired and looking for the perfect hammock to spend retirement in. He is a fan of the Rolling Stones. Mick may not be gathering moss, but Bob is. Bob has had many poems published on the net over the years, including Apple Valley Review, Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY, Dodging the Rain, Eclectica, Ekphrastic Review, and many other publications.

John Brandon is a former Spotlight Author and the author of the novels Arkansas, Citrus County, A Million Heavens, Ivory Shoals, and the forthcoming Penalties of June, as well as a short story collection, Further Joy, all with McSweeney's Press. Brandon's debut novel, Arkansas, was adapted into a motion picture in 2020, starring Vince Vaughn, Liam Hemsworth, and John Malkovich. His shorter work has appeared in Oxford American, The Believer, ESPN the Magazine, GQ, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, The New York Times Magazine, and numerous university journals. For two seasons, he wrote about college football for Grantland.com. He has served as the Grisham Fellow in Creative Writing at University of Mississippi, and as the Tickner Writing Fellow at Gilman School, in Baltimore, and now teaches at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Daniel Brugioni is 47, an English teacher, and an avid traveler. He's published in several diverse small-market magazines, including Coffin Bell Journal, The Evening Street Press, 34th Parallel, The Timber Creek Review, Spitball, Zahir Tales, The Sulfur River Literary Review, Words of Wisdom, Struggle, The Deadline, and The Skylark. He also maintains a writing and travel blog.

Stephen Bunch lives and writes in Lawrence, Kansas. His poems have appeared in Rootdrinker, Mudlark, Ithaca Lit, The Literary Bohemian, and many other print and online publications. His chapbook, Preparing to Leave, was published in 2011 by The Lives You Touch Publications. His e-chapbook, DisquiEtudes, was published by Mudlark in 2015. A book-length collection, Transmissions from Bone House, appeared in 2016. From 1978 to 1988 he edited and published the little magazine Tellus, which included work by Edward Dorn, Denise Low, Donald Levering, Jack Anderson, Paul Metcalf, Edward Sanders, Jane Hirshfield, Harley Elliot, and many others.

Ryan Clark is a documentary poet. He is the author of Arizona SB 1070: An Act (Downstate Legacies) and How I Pitched the First Curve (Lit Fest Press), as well as the forthcoming chapbook Suppose / a Presence (Action, Spectacle). His poetry has appeared in such journals as DIAGRAM, Interim, SRPR, and The Offing. A Texas native and former military brat, he now lives in North Carolina with his partner and cats. He says, "In writing my poems, I use a unique method of homophonic translation which relies on the re-sounding of a source text, letter by letter, according to the various possible sounds each letter is able to produce (example: 'cat' may become 'ash' by silencing the 'c' as in 'indict,' and by sounding the 't' as an 'sh-' sound, as in 'ratio'). For the poem in this issue, in particular, I sought to translate a brief section titled 'Lajes and the 1990s' from 'A Short History of Lajes Field, Terceira Island, Azores, Portugal,' published by the 65th Air Base Wing History Office. As a former military brat who spent four years of my childhood on and around Lajes Air Base, it was my intent to transform this general history into a more specific, personal history of the years I spent there."

Maryann Corbett is the author of six books of poems, most recently The O in the Air from Colosseum Books / Franciscan University Press. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Image, Raritan, and other journals, and in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and Best American Poetry 2018. She is a past winner of the Richard Wilbur Award and the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize. About the poem in this issue, she says, "The poem really is the recitation of a dream, written down the next morning and retold as closely to the way it unfolded as blank verse will allow."

Barbara De Franceschi refers to herself as an arid zone poet living as she does in the Australian outback town of Broken Hill. Besides four collections of poetry, her work has been published widely in Australia, in other countries, on-line and featured on national and regional radio.

Paromita Goswami is a grassroots activist working on land and gender issues. Her stories have been published in Jaggery Lit, Muse India, Mean Peppervine, Himal Southasian, Samyukta Fiction, Out of Print, and other magazines. She won the Rama Mehta Writing Grant (2023). A collection of her short stories is forthcoming from Red River Stories.

Donna Hilbert has appeared in numerous journals and broadcasts including Cultural Daily, Gyroscope, Rattle Sheila Na Gig, ONE ART , Vox Populi The Writer's Almanac, Lyric Life; and in anthologies, including The Poetry of Presence Volumes I & II, The Path to Kindness, The Wonder of Small Things, and I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing. Her latest book is titled Threnody from Moon Tide Press, 2022. Enormous Blue Umbrella is forthcoming from Moon Tide in early 2025.

Matt Hohner won the 2023 Jacar Press Full-Length Book Competition for his book At the Edge of a Thousand Years. He has been a finalist for the Moth International Poetry Prize and won the Maryland Writers' Association Poetry Prize. He won the 2016 Oberon Poetry Prize, the 2018 Sport Literate Anything but Baseball Poetry Prize, and the 2019 Doolin Writers' Weekend Poetry Prize in Ireland. Hohner has held two residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. An editor for Loch Raven Review, Hohner's first full-length book Thresholds and Other Poems was published by Apprentice House Press in Fall 2018. Hohner has published in Poetry Ireland Review, Breakwater Review, Smartish Pace, Rattle: Poets Respond, New Contrast, Prairie Schooner, Narrative Magazine, takahē, the Cardiff Review, Stony Thursday, and elsewhere. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Madronna Holden has appeared in over three dozen literary journals and anthologies, including Verse Daily, the Bitter Oleander, Cold Mountain Review, Puerto del Sol, and The Christian Science Monitor. She won the 2022 Kay Snow Poetry Award.

Thomas J. Hubschman is a regular contributor to Eclectica's Salon and is the author of Look at Me Now, My Bess, Billy Boy, Father Walther's Temptation, Song of the Mockingbird, and The Jew's Wife & Other Stories, as well as three science fiction novels. His work has appeared in New York Press, The Antigonish Review, The Blue Moon Review and many other publications. Two of his short stories were broadcast on the BBC World Service. He has also edited two anthologies of new writing from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, and he was the founding editor of the pioneering online publication Gowanus. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, which remains his chief inspiration.

Laurence Klavan wrote the story collection, "The Family Unit" and Other Fantasies, published by Chizine in Canada. His novella,Albertine, was published by Leamington Books in Scotland. An Edgar Award-winner, he received two Drama Desk nominations for the book and lyrics of Bed and Sofa, the musical produced by the Vineyard Theater in New York and the Finborough Theatre in London. He says, "I can't find the quote, but I believe former poet laureate Robert Pinsky once said all historical fiction and films were really about the times in which they were produced. Gone with the Wind was about the Depression—'I'll never go hungry again... Tomorrow is another day'—and Titanic about fears of late 20th century technology. My story, 'The Commodore,' takes characters from the '30s and puts them strangely in the '70s with, I hope, some relevance for today."

Jerry Krajnak is a Vietnam veteran who later survived 40 years in public school classrooms and collected degrees from UW Eau Claire, Wichita State, and Kansas University. He shares an old North Carolina mountain cabin with rescue animals and, when lucky, a grandchild or two. He started sending out his writing during Covid isolation, and it can be found in numerous journals and anthologies and at his website. He says, "I wrote 'Discovering Empathy' earlier this year while I was considering a trip to Wisconsin for a 60th year gathering of whomever might be left of my 1964 high school class. Though health issues prevented me from taking the trip, I spent some worthwhile time recalling events and people that were important parts of my early life. Some of those people could not make it to Wisconsin either but appear in a series of what I hope are halfway decent poems."

Carol Krauss relocated to Virginia after 24 years in Fort Lauderdale. Some venues where she has publications are Louisiana Lit, One Art, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Story South, and Highland Park Poetry. She was selected for Ghost City Press' 2023 Micro-Chap Summer Series. The Poetry Box released her chapbook, The Old Folks Call It God's Country ( April 2024). Her next book, Mountain. Memory. Marsh., will be released by Fernwood Press in the summer of 2025. She says, "I wrote 'Dead or Alive' on one of those sweltering days when even the slightest movement felt like a chore. I reflected on my life and questioned whether I was genuinely progressing toward my goals or standing still, trapped in a cycle of uncertainty. I grappled with the feeling of being stuck and unsure how to move forward."

Sydney Lea served as founding editor of New England Review and was Vermont's Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015. A Pulitzer finalist in poetry, he was presented in 2021 with his home state's highest distinction of its kind, The Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts. He has published 25 books: two novels, six volumes of personal and three of critical essays, and 16 poetry collections, most recently What Shines (Four Way Books, NYC, 2023). His latest book of personal essays, Such Dancing as We Can, is now available from The Humble Essayist Press, and his second novel, Now Look, has just been published by Downeast Books.

Penelope Moffet is the author of the chapbooks Cauldron of Hisses (Arroyo Seco Press, 2022), It Isn't That They Mean to Kill You (Arroyo Seco Press, 2018) and Keeping Still (Dorland Mountain Arts, 1995). Her poems have been published in Afield, The Ekphrastic Review, Halfway Down the Stairs, Natural Bridge, One by Jacar Press, ONE ART, The Rise Up Review, Sheila-Na-Gig, The Sow's Ear Poetry Review, and other literary journals, as well as in several anthologies. She lives in Southern California. She says, "The first draft of 'Iridescence' was written on the back of a postcard in this summer's poetry postcard festival, run by Cascadia Labs in Seattle. This is my seventh year of participating in that festival. It's very freeing, writing first drafts onto the backs of postcards and sending them off to strangers. 'What Looks Through the Window' was written in response to a Rattlecast prompt."

Robert Osborne has appeared or is forthcoming in Witness, Epiphany, Southeast Review, Obsidian, The Baltimore Review, and other publications. His short story "A Year of Riots" was a finalist in Bomb Magazine's 2023 Fiction Contest and his short story "Children" was a fiction finalist in Witness Magazine's 2022 Literary Awards. He lives in New York City with his wife, son, and three cats.

Alan Perry is a poet and editor whose debut chapbook, Clerk of the Dead, was a finalist in the Cathy Smith Bowers Poetry Competition and was released by Main Street Rag Press in 2020. His poems have appeared in Tahoma Literary Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Third Wednesday, Ocotillo Review, Sleet, San Pedro River Review, and elsewhere. He is a founder and Co-Managing Editor of RockPaperPoem, a Senior Poetry Editor for Typehouse Magazine, and a Best of the Net nominee. Alan lives in suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Tucson, Arizona.

Connie Post served as Poet Laureate of Livermore, California (2005-2009). Her work has appeared in Calyx, Cutthroat, River Styx, Slipstream, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. Her awards include the Crab Creek Poetry Prize, Liakoura Award, and the Caesura Poetry Award. Her second full length book, Prime Meridian was released in January 2020 (Glass Lyre Press) and was a finalist for the 2020 Best Book Awards. Her most recent books are Between Twilight from New York Quarterly Books and Broken Metronome from Glass Lyre Press. Broken Metronome was the winner of the American Fiction Award for poetry chapbook. About the poem "Re-boot," she says, "I spend time (probably too much) time on Facebook. But one night it had me thinking about all the sci-fi like possibilities of our social media worlds." On "Pet Tarantula," she says, "There are so many memories attached to other memories, and seem to have many legs. Thus, the poem was birthed from one of these times."

Jessy Randall is this issue's Spotlight Runner-Up for fiction. A longtime contributor to Eclectica, she has also appeared in Asimov's, Nature, and Scientific American. Her most recent book is Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science (MIT, 2022). A sequel, The Path of Most Resistance, will come out in 2025. She is a librarian at Colorado College.

John Riley is a writer and editor. In 2023, EXOT Books published 10,000 Words, a collection of 100-word prose poems. His poetry has been published in The Hudson Review, Literary Matters, Smokelong Quarterly, Banyan Review, and many other journals and anthologies. About the poem in this issue, he says, "Gehenna was a place outside of the walls of Jerusalem where it was said child sacrifices had taken place."

Jo-Anne Rosen has appeared in over 40 literary journals and been nominated for a Pushcart. Since 2010 she has published Wordrunner eChapbooks, an online hybrid chapbook/journal, and co-edited the Sonoma County Literary Update. What They Don't Know (2015) is her debut fiction collection. "Good Old Gals" is a story in her yet-to-be published novel in stories, Libidoland. She is a semi-retired book and web designer living in Petaluma, California, working now on historical fiction.

Marybeth Rua-Larsen has appeared in Flash Frontier, Lily Poetry Review, Magma, 3Elements Review, and Crannóg, among others. She won the Luso-American Fellowship for the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon and was a Hawthornden Fellow in Scotland. Her chapbook Nothing In-Between is available from Barefoot Muse Press. She says, "Many of my poems are about small truths and the myriad of ways people reveal themselves, if only we are paying enough attention to see it and try and understand it."

David Sahner is a poet and physician-scientist whose verse has appeared in The Bitter Oleander, Steam Ticket, Connecticut Review, Catamaran, The Sandy River Review, Blue Unicorn, Blackbox Manifold, Mudlark, The Raven's Perch, Tears in the Fence, Agenda, and elsewhere. A book-length collection, Hum, was published in 2022, and his work has been anthologized in several multi-author collections, most recently in a release from Anhinga Press.

Dr. Ravi Shankar is a Pushcart prize-winning poet, translator, and professor who has published 17 books, including the Muse India award-winning translations Andal: The Autobiography of a Goddess, and The Many Uses of Mint: New and Selected Poems 1997-2017. Along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he co-edited W.W. Norton's Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, called "a beautiful achievement for world literature" by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. He has taught and performed around the world and appeared in print, radio, and TV in such venues as The New York Times, NPR, BBC, and the PBS Newshour. He has won awards to the Corporation of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, fellowships from the Rhode Island and Connecticut Counsel on the Arts, founded one of the oldest electronic journals of the arts (Drunken Boat), is outgoing Chairman of the Asia Pacific Writers & Translators (APWT), and recently finished his PhD from the University of Sydney. His memoir Correctional was published in 2022 with University of Wisconsin Press. His new and selected essays Tallying the Hemispheres was published in 2024 by Nirala Books, and he teaches creative writing at Tufts University.

Ann Skea lives in Australia. She is the author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE Press, Australia) and has been contributing reviews to Eclectica Magazine since our very first issue back in October of 1996.

Gregory Stephenson grew up in Colorado and Arizona but has lived in Denmark for many years. His most recent book is And the Rivers Thereof: Reflections on Riverine Imagery in the Writing of Jack Kerouac (Felix Culpa Press).

Jim Stewart has been published or has poems forthcoming in In Company, New Mexico Poets after 1970, Liminality, Rattapallax, Passengers Journal, The City Key, Does it Have Pockets, Neologism Poetry Journal, and the Moonstone Arts Center's Ekphrastic Poetry Anthology. He co-edited and designed Saint Elizabeth Street Magazine and hinenimagazine.com. He teaches programming and logic in New York.

Gillian Thomas graduated from New York City's Hunter College with a degree in English and Theater. Thomas' work has been featured in such journals as Blue Unicorn, The Mid-Atlantic Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Gargoyle, Ligeia Magazine, Pembroke Magazine, and more. She lives with her husband, a young son, and two barking miniature schnauzers near Washington, DC. She says, with regards to her poem in this issue, "My hope was to take Monroe's obvious femininity, sensuality, and especially her vulnerability, and show through strong imagery, that what Monroe wanted most was to simply be seen as a person. Her lifelong desire to belong—to somewhere or someone—was paramount, and I suspect being seen as just 'Norma,' as the end of the poem shows, would have meant more to her than the stereotyped persona she had been forced to portray."

Dr. Larina Warnock has appeared in Rattle, The McNeese Review, The Sunlight Press, and others. Her TEDx Talk, "The Other Statistic," can be found on the TEDx YouTube channel or her website. A one-time teen mother and high school dropout, she serves the education system in Southern Oregon where she lives with her husband, three dogs, and a turtle older than she is.

Virginia Watts is this issue's Spotlight Runner-up for Poetry. Her poetry and stories can be found in The MacGuffin, Epiphany, CRAFT, The Florida Review, Reed Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Sky Island Journal, and others. She has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize. Her debut short story collection Echoes from the Hocker House was a category finalist in the 2024 Eric Hoffer Book Awards, selected as one of the Best Indie Books of 2023 by Kirkus Book Reviews, and won third place in the 2024 Feathered Quill Book Awards. She says, "I find that much of my poetry reflects my true life experiences, and 'Vienna Sausages' and 'Ya! Ya! Giddy Up!' are no exception. I often write in the viewpoint of a child, me as a child, because that is what is what arrives so often as inspiration. I think it's a dangerous thing to question what comes to mind when you sit down to write. The thing to do is to write what you know in your heart you want to write."