Philip Elliott is the CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Into the Void, an award-winning international literary magazine founded in 2016. He’s featured in dozens of journals in several countries and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.
Please tell readers about Into the Void, located in Toronto, Canada, and shortlisted for Best Magazine in the 2018 Saboteur Awards.
Into the Void is a literary magazine publishing the very best fiction, flash, poetry, CNF, and visual art it comes across, but it is a lot more than that, too. Our mission at Into the Void is to be a publication where diversity is valued and art is treasured. Our editors read only submissions that have identification information removed to further this mission of fairness and equality.…
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Levis Keltner is an author, editor, educator, and musician from Chicago but currently living in Austin, Texas. He is the editor-in-chief at Newfound and teaches writing at Texas State University. His new book, Into That Good Night, was published last month by Skyhorse Publishing and his short work has appeared in Entropy Magazine and Bull: Men’s Fiction.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Keltner about his road to publication, how misleading marketing and expectations can hurt a creative work’s reception, the joys of somber music, and much more!
– Levis Keltner…
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There was a time when LGBTQ narratives and theoretical lenses had no place in the world of literature and academia. It wasn’t until the late 70’s and early 80’s when queer theorists began to wrestle firsthand with the social forces that silenced them to begin with. From then on, the queer voice extend into contemporary literary fields and provided the world a challenge to the set social norms. Contemporary literature of the 2000’s has greatly dealt with postmodernist themes and actions of deconstructing the modernist systems of their predecessors. Perhaps one of the biggest themes of postmodern contemporary literature is the explication and progression of the domineering force that is patriarchy and toxic hypermasculinity. But how exactly are these writer’s utilizing postmodernist literature to reveal the oppression of this topic?…
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A life-long lover of reading and writing, Mary Jo has been a Story Circle Network member for nearly twenty years, serving as an editor, a book reviewer, and a women’s writing circle facilitator. Most recently, she has been a three-time Program Chair for the National Conference, Stories from the Heart, a board member, and facilitates workshops and a women’s life-writing circle. Her stories have appeared in anthologies, and “I Can’t Breathe” is in Inside and Out: Women’s Truths, Women’s Stories. Mary Jo’s degree is in Secondary English Education/Educational Psychology; her work appears in varied blogs and periodicals, on her blog, Facebook, and Twitter.
When and how did you become interested in women’s writing?
In some visceral sense, I always knew I’d write a book one day.…
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I watched as my friend, now former, pulled the tobacco out of a half-smoked cigarette before stuffing the hollowed out filter with a bit of marijuana. We had found a secret stash and decided that since we were home alone, we ought to try it out. Really, I was the one trying it for the first time. Being only fifteen, I hadn’t fully dived into drugs yet. She was four years older and, therefore, was quite experienced.
She proudly held up the finished splif (which is the technical term for a pot-stuffed cigarette) and ignited the lighter that she grabbed off the table.
“You ready?” she asked with wide eyes.
I quietly nodded, still crippled with nervousness and paranoia. We were at my house doing this, so if anyone was going to get into major trouble if we were caught it would be me.…
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Michele Herman is a longtime teacher in The Writers Studio’s online program, a columnist for The Villager (for which she won the best column prize from the New York Press Association), and a translator of the work of Belgian singer/songwriter/actor/director Jacques Brel. Her first poetry chapbook, Victory Boulevard, was published this past February by Finishing Line Press and she is, as she puts it, a proud survivor of the Tupelo Press 30/30 poetry challenge.
In this episode of Cover to Cover with . . ., Editor-in-Chief Jordan Blum speaks with Herman about the origin and inspirations behind Victory Boulevard, the joys of teaching creative writing workshops online, and much more!
– Michele Herman…
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I wasn’t ready for Regina Spektor. Her first song I heard was “Summer in the City,” a deep-cut my first girlfriend played in her Ford Windstar. One month later she’d pack the same van for first year at Gonzaga and a few weeks after I’d leave for a new life at the University of Oregon. We avoided talking about the eight hours of distance. We wouldn’t own cars. We didn’t know much about college, but told each other the one-and-a-half-year relationship would last—we were each other’s best friend and first sex.
Our worries masqueraded as fights about the subtext of Harry Potter, the taste of olives and the verses of a Russian anti-folk musician who I didn’t know existed until then. I strained to listen to the slow, classical piano behind lyrics about castration and cocaine and orgasms.…
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