Stephen Elliott Tonight at Lincoln Memorial

Hey, folks. Our friends at Barrelhouse--a literary journal that kind of got started following a writing workshop at The Writer's Center--are hosting a flash-mob type event tonight at the Lincoln Memorial. It features Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder. He's also the editor of The Rumpus. Elliott will be reading on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at 7:30 p.m. More info here on Barrelhouse's Web site.

Tonight! Pass it on.

Saturday Morning Post: Barrelhouse

Here's a special Saturday post. I should call it, and will call it, the Saturday Morning Post. Information from local literary journal Barrelhouse. Everyone should know: Barrelhouse actually kind of got started at The Writer's Center. Meaning: Once upon a time, the guys who founded this journal were all taking a workshop here. They met, fell in love, and decided to do something really crazy. Okay, maybe two out of three of those (to poorly and incompletely paraphrase Meatloaf). Anyway, they've got some news I'd like to share to Writer's Center members and readers of this blog. Next month one of the editors, Dave Housley, will be the subject of a Friday interview. He'll introduce the journal and tell us more about how it got started and where it's going. For those of you who want to check this journal out after visiting their website, we do sell the journal at our bookstore. Check it out.

The following info comes directly from Barrelhouse:

SITE REDESIGN

For everything we've been up to check out the new www.barrelhousemag.com. Barrelhouse has just redesigned and relaunched our website. Check it out. Pretty fancy, right? It doesn’t just look shiny and new, we’ve got a lot of new stuff for you, too.

THE SWAYZE QUESTION

For the past five years, we’ve concluded every interview with the same question: what’s your favorite Patrick Swayze movie? We’ve asked Ian MacKaye and Chuck Klosterman and the Hold Steady and Malcolm Gladwell and literally anybody who would talk to us. Now, in honor of Patrick Swayze, somewhat patron saint of Barrelhouse and star of some of our favorite bad movies (and a few of our favorite good ones), we’ve pulled together all the responses to The Swayze Question.


NEW ONLINE ISSUE

A fresh online issue featuring a lament for the wasted life of a Bond villain’s henchman, Elvis obliterating action figures with a rifle while blown out on cocaine, a Facebook note gone awry, lyrics from a cliché-obsessed-Nashville-songwriter-turned-lunatic, a statement on womanhood, and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, all by Tara Laskowski, Sean Lovelace, Kevin Winchester, Aaron Gilbreath, Molly Gaudry, and Kevin Wilson, respectively.

GROWLER REVIEWS

Originally a side project, we’ve decided to bring Growler in-house. Growler reviews debut collections of poetry and, soon, fiction. You can read reviews from the archives of first books by Jericho Brown, Timothy Green, Aaron Baker, Anne Boyer, Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Fady Joudah, Nate Pritts, Eireann Lorsung, Thomas Heise, and loads more. We’ll be updating regularly so check back to find out the best of the latest.

MIXTAPE

You’re going to have to wait a little longer for this one, but not too long. Mixtape is Barrelhouse’s monthly podcast on the indie lit scene. It’s just like This American Life, but without all the high production values and famous authors with interestingly whiny voices. Our first episode focuses on Baltimore, and features interviews with publishing genius and head of Publishing Genius Adam Robinson, as well as Michael Kimball and Smartish Pace’s Stephen Reichert. Mixtape will launch in mid/late September. We’ll let you know when it’s here.

SUBMISSIONS

We are once again willing to read your writings and make judgments about their value relative to our bottom line. THIS IS A BUSINESS, DAMN IT! For real, though, we’re happy to read your work and appreciate that you’d consider Barrelhouse a home for your stories and poems. We’re open for everything right now—fiction, poetry, non-fiction, online, art, whatever other new genre-bending thing you’re working on.

BARRELHOUSE INVITATIONAL: SEX, DRUGS, AND ROCK AND ROLL

And in More Submissions news, we’re launching a new contest – the Barrelhouse Invitational: Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll Edition. Send us your best fiction, poems, and essays on the aforementioned topic (come on, you know you think about it all the time anyway). We’ll choose the ones we like best and print them in a special sexy, druggy, and rock and rolly section of Barrelhouse number 9.

STORE

We’ve got some special deals right now. Five dollar back issues. Fifteen dollar subscriptions. That’s some good bang for your buck. In this economy, you’re not going to find cheaper, high quality, new independent writing unless you look around the Internet some more. One more note, our first issue has been sold out for a long time now so we’ve put the whole dang thing online for free.

THE USUAL

We would have called this section “the ushge” but we couldn’t figure out how to spell it in a way that you’d know what we’re talking about. The ushge, short for “the usual?” Right. We’ve still got all the Barrelhousey goodness you’ve grown accustomed to -- the blog, news updates, and more. So stay tuned and keep plugged in. We’ll keep doing our thing, bringing you the poetry, fiction, pop flotsam and cultural jetsam you love.

BARRELHOUSE AND SMARTISH PACE READING AT ARTOMATIC JUNE 12 8 pm

Check out this great event at Artomatic:

On Friday, June 12th at 8 pm literary magazines Barrelhouse and Smartish Pace join forces with Artomatic to present a poetry reading by Elizabeth Arnold, Sandra Beasley, David Keplinger, Eric Pankey, Rebekah Sankey, and Terence Winch.


This event celebrates Artomatic’s 10 year anniversary and the publication of new issues by both Barrelhouse and Smartish Pace. The event will be held in Poetry Room on the 9th floor of 55 M Street, SE Washington, DC 20003.


CONTACT: For more information, email danbrady82@gmail.com. Dan Brady, poetry editor of Barrelhouse, will be available for comment and interview. Smartish Pace editor Stephen Reichert can be reached at sreichert@smartishpace.com.

Barrelhouse is a DC-based, independent nonprofit literary magazine that bridges the gap between serious art and pop culture. www.barrelhousemag.com

Based in Baltimore, Smartish Pace is an independent magazine founded by Editor Stephen Reichert in 1999 and is run by a group of dedicated volunteers and interns. www.smartishpace.com

Held regularly since 1999, Artomatic is the Washington, D.C., area's one-of-a-kind multimedia event, involving hundreds of regional artists, performers and volunteers. The free event is an arts extravaganza, featuring paintings, sculpture, photography, music, theater, poetry, dance and workshops. www.artomatic.org

READER BIOS



Elizabeth Arnold has published two books of poems, The Reef (University of Chicago Press, 1999) and Civilization (Flood Editions, 2006). She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Maryland.



Sandra Beasley is the author of I Was the Jukebox, winner of the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize, selected by Joy Harjo and forthcoming from W. W. Norton. Her debut book, Theories of Falling, was selected by Marie Howe as the winner of the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize (New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2008). Recent work can be found in AGNI online, Blackbird, Barrelhouse, and Black Warrior Review, which published Bitch and Brew: Sestinas in their chapbook series. Beasley lives in Washington D.C., where she earned her MFA at American University and is currently an editor for The American Scholar.

David Keplinger's recent books include The Prayers of Others (2006), which won the 2007 Colorado Book Award, The Clearing (2005), and World Cut Out with Crooked Scissors: The Selected Poetry of Carsten Rene Nielsen (translations, 2007). He has won the T.S. Eliot Prize and fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Keplinger teaches at American University.

Eric Pankey is the author of five collections of poetry. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Grand Street, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, and many other publications. Winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, Pankey has received numerous grants supporting his work. He currently teaches at George Mason University.


Rebekah Sankey is an editor for Growler, an online first-books poetry review. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her poems will appear in Barrelhouse 8 this fall.

Terence Winch’s newest book, called Boy Drinkers, is a series of mostly narrative poems that center around religion and Winch's New York brand of Irish-Catholicism. His previous volume, a collection of non-fiction stories called That Special Place: New World Irish Stories, comes out of his experiences playing traditional Irish music with Celtic Thunder, a band he started with his brother Jesse in 1977. His most recent music project is a CD that collects his best-known Irish compositions on one disk: When New York Was Irish: Songs & Tunes by Terence Winch.