Tag: sundress

Meet our New Editorial Intern: Katie Culligan

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My name is Katie Culligan, and every week, I go to a Space Jam-themed cycling class for seniors that I started going to accidentally, but now go to purposefully.

I learned to read in the city of Buffalo, New York, and learned to drive in the mountains of East Tennessee. I’m a junior creative writing student at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where I am also an affectionate succulent parent. My writing is currently forthcoming on my mother’s refrigerator.

It was a love story between an intense person and an intense pastime when I became a varsity women’s rower for the University of Tennessee. My teammates reinforce everyday that French braids are where girls keep their secret power reserves and they should make you feel very intimidated.

In my free time, I am a purposeful chaos maker in UT’s youngest improv troupe, Cumberland Striptease (that I did not name). When I grow up, I want to be a stately lady that wears bright orange lipstick very poorly and very confidently. Until then, I’m so excited to be here at the Sundress Academy for the Arts looking for my words.

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Katie Culligan is currently young and terrified at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she is a junior studying creative writing. Her favorite responsibilities are NCAA rowing, big sisterhood, and believing unwaveringly in ghosts. Her writing is informed by this age of indestructible men, though she likes to think her life isn’t. She also thinks if you haven’t tried fig newtons with peanut butter yet, you really should.

Meet Our New Social Media Intern, Tierney Bailey

The Myers-Briggs test tells me I am an ENFJ, like Abraham Lincoln (mostly interesting because I am distantly related to Mary Todd Lincoln) and Peyton Manning (mostly interesting because I was born and raised in Indianapolis—though I only have any fealty to the Pacers because I loved Reggie Miller’s big ears a kid). ENFJs like to put things into external contexts, according to all the profiles I’ve ever read. That might be true, since I was born October 2, 1993, but I like to contextualize it with “I share a birthday with King Richard III, Sting, and Ghandi.” I, however, am mostly convinced that this is just because I wholly embody the phrase my mother uses most often about me: “They can hear you a county over, Tierney.” As a toddler, I constantly received invitations to birthday parties for little, old ladies I had conversations with inside grocery stores and book stores. I remain unconvinced about by the NFJ bits, but “extravert” fits.

Sundress is not my first dealing in publishing. (Here’s to hoping it won’t be my last!) When I first entered college, I enrolled as an English/education major. Luckily, while I loved my students, I found my way into the publishing program early on. I spent my remaining three years as a professional writing major with terrific professors at the University of Indianapolis honing my skills to various degrees—writing, editing, designing, Tweeting, any gerund I could possibly fit into my schedule would eventually be done. Now, I am enrolled at Emerson College as a Writing, Literature, and Publishing graduate student with more amazing people. Most of the time, I use communication to put my world in order because I see interaction as a piece of the greater conversation.

Maybe this is why I’ve ended up as Sundress’s new intern for social media.

I guess the basic profile of myself is this: my name is Tierney Bailey. I like to talk and listen and learn. I mostly just try my best.

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Tierney Bailey is a Libra, a lover of science fiction and poetry, and studies Korean in her spare time. She currently copyedits for Strange Horizons. Tierney is also a Writing, Literature, and Publishing graduate student at Emerson College. As an East Coast transplant from Indianapolis, Tierney still smiles upon the slightest bit of eye contact. If you can’t find her on a train between Providence and Boston, she can easily be found on Twitter as @ergotierney.

Project Bookshelf: Cheyenne L. Black

If I’m trying to look cool I’ll say this is my bookshelf:

And it’s true. When I bought the house in 2010, one of the first things we did was install these shelves. Note how I can never change the size of my television. Which is probably okay since we never turn it on. It’ll last forever I think. Note too that these are in perfect order, there is a fiction section, a poetry section, and a reference section. Most of these books haven’t been touched in at least six years—since I started school. Most of these books don’t even belong to me. They were inherited from my mother or belong to my now-adult-once-teen daughters.

But if I’m being honest about the current state of MY books I’ll show you these instead: 

And I’ll add that there are at least twenty more stacks of books that look exactly like this, on my desk, on my nightstand, on the floor near both of these, and anywhere I regularly try to stake out space in a house full of people. Because right now I’m always bouncing back and forth between home and school, my actual books, the ones I use, read, reference, and sleep with, aren’t on that wall at all. (See also: lesesucht.)

I’m currently in a constant state of flux between Washington state and Arizona, so I’m always carrying whole boxes of books back and forth. I carry more books back and forth than I do items of clothing. And because I’m only in each place for a few months at a time before I have to return to the other, I don’t really bother to unpack them exactly. I more distribute, stack, and scatter strategically. Moreover, when I’m in one place I will inevitably, never mind how many books I brought, need one that is in the other location and will pay shipping to have one of my kids send me the book or will buy another copy. Thus I now have two copies of many books, too, but I can never remember in which state. . . So the truth of my bookshelf presently is that it’s more box than shelf, more floorstack than display, more misplaced panic—than leisure. But I’ll probably pretend I have no idea what you’re talking about if you mention this to me in public.

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Cheyenne L. Black serves as the editor-in-chief for Hayden’s Ferry Review at Arizona State University where she is a third-year MFA candidate and Virginia G. Piper global fellow. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the anthologies We Will be Shelter and In Sight: An Ekphrastic Collaboration, as well as the journals 45th Parallel, American Journal of Poetry, and New Mobility among others. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and children where she brutally and with much zeal strikes the ‘s’ from directionals like toward, afterward, and backward.

Now Accepting Fall Writer’s Coop Residency Applications


The Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is now accepting applications for short-term writers residencies during the fall residency period for our new Writers Coop during the weeks of August 14th to December 31st, 2017. These residencies are designed to give artists time and space to complete their creative projects in a quiet and productive environment.

SAFTA is located on a working farm that rests on a 45-acre wooded plot in a Tennessee “holler” perfect for hiking, camping, and nature walks. Located less than a half-hour from downtown Knoxville, an exciting and creative city of 200,000 in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, SAFTA is an ideal location for those looking for a rural get-away with access to urban amenities.

The SAFTA Writers Coop is a 10×10′ dry cabin approximately a fourth of a mile from the SAFTA farmhouse. This tiny house is furnished with a twin bed, a desk, a wood-burning stove, a deck that looks over the pasture and pond, as well as a personal detached outhouse. While the cabin has neither electricity nor running water, residents will have full access to the amenities at farmhouse as well as solitude from other residents to write in the rolling hills of East Tennessee.

Each residency costs $150/week and includes your own private dry cabin as well as 24-hour access to the farmhouse amenities.

 

The application deadline for the fall residency period is rolling. All application fees have been waived for applications for the Writers Coop.

Find out more at www.sundressacademyforthearts.com.

Meet Our New Editorial Intern: Danielle Alexander

Hello, hello! I’m Danielle Alexander. I’m quite a few years post undergrad, so I’m not your typical intern. Since graduating with a BFA in Creative Writing from a small, liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I have been working in nonprofit communications and grant writing. Two years ago, I opened a brick and mortar used bookstore. The store, then Bombadil Books, (let’s be best friends if you get the obscure Tolkien reference) was amazing. It brought the world of self-published zines and handmade journals to me. It was also a TON of work (hello taxes, accounting, inventory, legal paperwork, etc.), on top of continuing to work a full-time job in the nonprofit sector.

In the past few months, I’ve transitioned Bombadil Books into Grey Grey Books, an online and pop-up shop that I run out of my home, still focused on used books, zines, and handmade journals. Retiring from the world of running a storefront has allowed me to focus more on some things I have been putting off for a few years: working on my own writing, applying for an MFA program, and getting some experience in the publishing and editing world. I am thrilled to be joining the Sundress Publications team as an Editorial Intern this summer, fulfilling a long-time dream of working with a small and passionate team of talented, literary-minded individuals.

When I’m not pricing out vintage books or sewing up journals, you’re likely to find me travelling, doing yoga, talking about anxiety and self-care, bullet journaling, and spending time with my dog, Mugs, and cats, Jane and Austen.  

Danielle Alexander is a writer and the owner of Grey Grey Books, an online and pop up shop that sells used books, zines, and handmade journals in Michigan. Her writing has appeared in The Bandit Zine’s Love & Heartbreak Issue and The Aquinas College Sampler, where her poem Mother received an American Academy of Poet’s Honorable Mention. She has self-published two poetry chapbooks: Sunlight Get Through (2016) and Chasing Rabbits (2016); two collaborative artist’s books, We Sit Together, At the Table (2015) and White Walls: Entelechia (2015); and recently self-published Ten Lists: A Workbook for Anxiety (2017). Danielle holds a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts Degree in English and Creative Writing from Aquinas College and will be pursuing an MFA in Nonfiction or Poetry in 2018. Her work can be found at http://www.greygreybooks.com.

 

 

 

Meet Our New Editorial Intern, Emily Corwin

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Hello! My name is Emily Corwin and here are some things to know about me!

  1. I love lists. Also bread, coffee, dresses, and lipstick.
  2. I live in Bloomington, Indiana with my partner, Joe and my cat, Soup.
  3. I am currently completing an MFA in poetry at IU Bloomington!
  4. As someone with chronic conditions (hip impingement, anxiety disorder, various joint issues), I write a lot about physical and psychic pain, and about fairy tales, the girly and the grotesque, longing, and magic.
  5. Next spring, my first full-length collection, tenderling is forthcoming from Stalking Horse Press. I have two chapbooks, darkling (Platypus Press) and My Tall Handsome (Brain Mill Press) which came out in 2016.
  6. I am a Midwestern girl through and through—I grew up in Michigan, went to school in Ohio, and now, I am in Indiana!
  7. My favorite color is pink, my favorite musician is Grouper, and my favorite flowers are dahlias.
  8. My current poetry inspirations: Diane Seuss, Liz Bowen, Laura Theobald, Jennifer Givhan, Vievee Francis, Kiki Petrosino, and Stacy Gnall.
  9. My ancestor, Jonathan Corwin, was a judge in the Salem Witch Trials.
  10. I just finished my year as Poetry Editor of Indiana Review, and I am looking forward to continuing my editorial work at Sundress!

Emily Corwin is an MFA candidate in poetry at Indiana University-Bloomington and the former Poetry Editor for Indiana Review. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins, Day One, Hobart, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, THRUSH, and elsewhere. She has two chapbooks, My Tall Handsome (Brain Mill Press) and darkling (Platypus Press) which were published in 2016. Her first full-length collection, tenderling is forthcoming in 2018 from Stalking Horse Press. You can follow her online at @exitlessblue.

Poets in Pajamas with Karen Craigo

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Announcing the Newest Episode of Poets in Pajamas,
An Online Reading Series from Sundress Publications

Sundress Publications is pleased to announce the next episode of our online reading series, Poets in Pajamas. Poets in Pajamas is a free online reading series that connects readers and writers around the world. Utilizing Facebook Live allows for people to participate in a bi-monthly reading series regardless of location through the internet. Author Sam Slaughter will host. This coming episode, airing on Sunday, June 18th, 2017 at 7 PM ET, will feature poet Karen Craigo.

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Karen Craigo is the author of the poetry collections No More Milk (Sundress, 2016) and Passing Through Humansville (forthcoming, Sundress, 2018). She also has a new chapbook, Escaped Housewife Tries Hard to Blend In (Hermeneutic Chaos, 2016). She maintains “Better View of the Moon” a daily blog on writing, editing, and creativity, and she teaches writing in Springfield, Missouri. She is the nonfiction editor and former editor-in-chief of Mid-American Review, as well as the interviews editor of SmokeLong Quarterly.

Sam Slaughter is a spirits writer for The Manual living in the New York City area. His work has or will appear in Bloomberg, InsideHook, Thirsty, and Tales of the Cocktail. He is also the author of the chapbook When You Cross That Line and the story collection God in Neon. He can be found online @slaughterwrites and www.samslaughterthewriter.com.

Our featured poets will read for 15 minutes, with an addition 10-15 minutes of audience questions. The readings will take place on Sundays at 7PM ET, twice per month. Visit our website for information about upcoming readings.

 

2017 Summer Fiction Writing Retreat Sign-Ups Open

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The Sundress Academy for the Arts is thrilled to announce its Summer Fiction Writing Retreat, which runs from Friday, June 2nd to June 4th, 2017.  The three-day, two-night camping retreat will be held at SAFTA’s own Firefly Farms in Knoxville, Tennessee.  This year’s retreat will focus on generative fiction writing and include two break-out sessions “Transmogrification: Magic and the Body” and “The Most Weird and Practical Dream: Advice on How to Communicate With Strangers, or, Everything I’ve Learned in the Last 20 Years Cut Down to 2 Hours,” plus discussions on kicking writer’s block, publishing, and more.

A weekend pass includes one-on-one and group instruction, writing supplies, food, drinks, transportation to and from the airport, and all on-site amenities for $250.  Tents, sleeping bags, and other camping equipment are available to rent for $25.  Payment plans are available if you reserve by March 31, 2017; inquire via email for details.

The event will be open to writers of all backgrounds and provide an opportunity to work with many talented, published fiction writers from around the country, including Chen Chen and Emilia Phillips.

M.O. Walsh

 

M.O. Walsh is from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  He is the author of the short story collection The Prospect of Magic and the novel My Sunshine Away, which was a New York Times Bestseller, an Amazon Featured Debut, and won the Pat Conroy Book Award for Southern Fiction.  His stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, Oxford American, The Southern Review, and others. He currently lives in New Orleans, LA, where he is the director of the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans.

 

tessa-mellas-for-gristTessa Mellas received the 2013 Iowa Short Fiction Award for her collection, Lungs Full of Noise. She holds an MFA from Bowling Green State University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. She teaches writing at the University of Maine at Machias, a college so far east it is the first in the nation each morning to see the sun. Figure skater, vermicomposter, vegan, and tender of a fierce feline twosome, she relates to soil and snow.

We have one full scholarship available for the retreat as well as limited 20% scholarships for those with financial need. To apply for a scholarship, send a packet of no more than (8) pages of poetry along with a brief statement on why you would like to attend this workshop to Erin Elizabeth Smith at erin@sundresspublications.com no later than March 31, 2017. Winners will be announced in April.

 

Space at this workshop is limited to 15 writers, so reserve your place today!

Sundress Reading Series presents Andrea England, Minadora Macheret, and Clay Matthews

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Join us on February 26 at 2PM at Bar Marley for the February installation of the Sundress Reading Series!

Featured readings will include:

andrea-englandAndrea England is the author of two chapbooks, INVENTORY OF A FIELD (Finishing Line Press) and OTHER GEOGRAPHIES (Creative Justice Press). She has been a finalist for Four Way Books Levis Prize and Intro Prize, and has been awarded residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and SAFTA. Currently she lives and works between Kalamazoo and Manistee Michigan, where she works as an adjunct and serves as a board member to the non-profit organization, Friends of Poetry. More information about Andrea England and her poetry can be found at andreajengland.com.

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Minadora Macheret is a graduate student at Kansas State University, where she received the Graduate Poetry Award and Seaton Fellowship. Her poems received the Isabel Sparks’ Poetry Prize. Her work is forthcoming from The Deaf Poets Society and has appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Rogue Agent, Connotation Press, and others. She lives in Manhattan, KS, with her dog, Aki.

clay-matthewsClay Matthews has published poetry in journals such as The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Black Warrior Review, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His most recent book, Shore, was recently released from Cooper Dillon Books. His other books are Superfecta (Ghost Road Press), RUNOFF (BlazeVox), and Pretty, Rooster (Cooper Dillon). He teaches at Tusculum College in Greeneville, TN, and edits poetry for the Tusculum Review.

An Interview with Sundress Author, Colleen Abel

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As a poet, Colleen Abel is a shape-shifter. In her chapbook, Deviants, you’ll find couplets, flash CNF, lists, lyric essays, sectioned verse, and poems that morph across the page. What takes this formal variability to another level is that Colleen’s work is also about form—about the human body, about boundaries and celestial bodies and the Venus of Willendorf. These thirty pages are about a lot. We talked with Abel about Deviants, the way these forms find themselves, and how she found her way to poetry.

Colleen Abel’s Deviants won the 2016 Sundress Publications 5th Annual Chapbook Contest. Her first full-length collection, Remake, won Unicorn Press’ 2015 Editors Prize and is forthcoming in fall 2016. She is also the author of Housewifery, a chapbook (dancing girl press, 2013). A former Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at UW-Madison, Abel has published work in Pleiades, Colorado Review, The Collagist, Southern Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She lives in Wisconsin with her student loans.

Sundress: What did you want to be when you were a kid?

Colleen Abel: I have always wanted to be a writer, from the time I was four. I wrote my first short story around that time, about a vampire and his wife. (I illustrated, as well, but happily I abandoned notions that I was a competent illustrator pretty much immediately.) But even though I always wrote poetry, when I was a kid, I saw myself becoming a novelist. It wasn’t until college when I was encouraged to do an MFA in poetry that I thought, hmm, maybe this is going to be my path. Not that you have to pick a genre and stick with it! The older I get, the less interested I am in staying within genre boundaries.

Sundress: How do your pieces find their form? Do you draft in the form a piece eventually takes, or do you think about form later?

Colleen Abel: I almost always draft a piece in the form it ends up with—the form dictates the intellectual and sonic moves the poem makes, usually, so I like to find the form first. It’s sort of like picking a vessel to hold the thought. But sometimes in revision, I do figure out that the vessel is wrong! “The Photographer’s Model” is an example of a poem that was restless in the original form I had chosen for it.

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Sundress:Formally, Deviants is a very eclectic bunch of poems, but the book’s foundation seems to be the 18-page piece titled “Fat Studies.” Speaking of genre, how do you classify “Fat Studies”?

Colleen Abel: I would say “Fat Studies” is a lyric essay. I have been trying to write about obesity for over a decade in my poetry and it never worked–not once. I couldn’t really figure out why. It wasn’t until I shifted my thinking about form that I was able to write about obesity in a way that I was happy with–and “Fat Studies” was the result.

Sundress: In “Fat Studies,” the speaker’s body is described as “deviant.” The piece goes on to investigate the speaker’s life and mind within this “deviant” body. How did this piece come about? Is this stigmatized subject you’ve dealt with before, or is it something that required the building of experience and courage to write about so directly, frankly, and beautifully?

Colleen Abel: As I mentioned, I’ve been wanting to write about obesity for a long time, but could never make headway. A couple of things happened right around the same time that broke open the essay for me. I was sitting in on a fiction class at the school where I was teaching at the time, in 2014. So I was thinking a lot about prose. Then I stumbled across the theories of stigmatized identities by the sociologist Erving Goffman. He had this list of ways that people could respond to having a stigmatized identity, and I immediately thought: that list would make a great backbone for an essay. The third thing was that I had read an essay about physical fitness by John F. Kennedy and was trying to write a poem about it (and failing; see above.) Somehow those three factors collided and “Fat Studies” was born.

Sundress: In “Poem Beginning With A Zen Proverb,” (which, is such a great title), you create a list poem of places to “hide your body.” What are other list poems you have loved or that have influenced you?

Colleen Abel: Great question. The list poem that I think I go back to the most is Kenneth Koch’s “One Train May Hide Another.” I’m fascinated by how list poems make their way toward endings. They are so hard to write!

Sundress: What’s something you used to believe about writing that you no longer think is true?

Colleen Abel: Wow. I can think of probably a hundred things, from small to hugely philosophical. I was very young when I went into my MFA program and for a while I think I absorbed a lot of the aesthetic preferences of my teachers and saw those as rules of a sort. Eventually, I shook those off–as writers need to do with their mentors, often. I had a teacher who thought poems shouldn’t have questions in them, for example, and for a long time I was scared to ask questions in poems. That’s a small example, but I think the more I read and write and live in the world, the more expansive my idea of poetry becomes.

Sundress: What are three things that every poem needs?

Colleen Abel: 1. Attention to language 2. Attention to arrangement 3. A desire to communicate something to an audience.

Sundress: Can you tell me a little about writing community? Where is yours? What is it like? What were the best writing communities you’ve ever encountered, and why?

Colleen Abel: I am about a month into a two-year writing fellowship. There are about a dozen of us who comprise the inaugural class of Tulsa Artist Fellows, so I am excited to see this fledgling community grow and evolve, especially since it’s multi-genre. I was very, very lucky to be a part of a small group that met frequently for several years in Chicago. I probably won’t ever find anything quite like that again, but I still carry their generosity with me even a decade later.

Sundress: What projects are in the works for you now?

Colleen Abel: [My full-length collection] Remake is coming out this spring! I’m super excited. I have a full-length collection called Caryatid that’s seeking a home, and right now I am just trying to generate work without thinking too much about how it will shape into a book. Wish me luck!

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Colleen Abel is the winner of Unicorn Press’ 2015 Editors Prize for her collection Remake, which is forthcoming in fall 2016. She is also the author of a chapbook, Housewifery (dancing girl press, 2013) and a former fellow at University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Pleiades, The Southern Review, Phoebe, West Branch, and many other outlets. She was recently named a 2017-2018 Tulsa Artist Fellow.

Tyler Barton is one half of FEAR NO LIT, a literary organization focused on community-building, surprise, and discomfort. An MFA candidate at Minnesota State University, he edits fiction for the Blue Earth Review, co-hosts the radio show Weekly Reader, and leads writing workshops for senior citizens. He’s currently creating a flash-fiction podcast called SHOW YR WORK that will be available online this summer. This winter, you can find his short stories in Midwestern Gothic, Little Fiction, matchbook, NANO Fiction, and No Tokens (and you can always find his jokes at @goftyler). Tyler is originally from York County, Pennsylvania, where, once, as a teenager, he saw a sweatshirt that read “York’s Not Boring…You Are,” and his life changed.