An extension of Sundress Publications, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit publication group founded in 2000, the Sundress Academy for the Arts (SAFTA) is an artists’ retreat on a 45-acre farm in Knoxville, Tennessee, that offers residencies to writers, visual artists, filmmakers, composers, and other creators from across the country. With two residency rooms and a dry cabin on site, we offer a rotating space for nationally recognized and emerging artists in multiple disciplines. SAFTA also hosts weekend workshops, yearly retreats, and more.

Both positions will run from December to June with a chance to be renewed. The development research intern’s responsibilities include researching and proposing grant opportunities, coordinating with the development writing intern and other SAFTA departments, collating data, and proofreading documents. The development writing intern’s responsibilities include writing grants, coordinating with the development research intern and other SAFTA departments, collating data, and proofreading documents.

Both may also be responsible for writing copy, composing blogs, and assisting in the establishment of new programs, projects, and partnerships.

Qualifications include:

• A keen eye for grammar, punctuation, and syntax
• Strong online research skills
• Strong organizational, creative, problem-solving, and written communication skills
• A passion for contemporary literature and community arts programs

Knowledge of arts administration and/or grant writing a plus but not required. Applicants are welcome to telecommunicate and therefore are not restricted to living in the Knoxville area.

While this is an unpaid internship, all interns gain real-world experience with a nationally recognized press and arts organization while creating a portfolio of work for future employment opportunities. Interns will also be able to attend all workshops at the Sundress Academy for the Arts at cost.

To apply, please send a resume and a brief cover letter detailing your interest in the position to the Development Director, Tori Lane at lane@sundresspublications.com. Applications are due by November 15, 2019.

For more information, visit us at www.sundresspublications.com and www.sundressacademyforthearts.com. You may also check us out on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Sundress Publications invites contributions to support the production of beestung, a new quarterly online micro-magazine for non-binary and two-spirit writers and readers, with an emphasis on intracommunity sensibilities.

Resisting the canon and all forms of bigotry, this entirely volunteer-run magazine under the imprint of Sundress Press, a 501(c)3 non-profit will publish poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, hybrids, and art by creators who fall under the non-binary umbrella, with specific attention to historically underrepresented writers. beestung will never charge a submission fee.

DONATE HERE!

What these contributions create:

• 100% of these tax-deductible donations will go to funding the quarterly. 
• This will ensure that each and every one of our writers and artists get paid.
• This will help to sustain our hosting for two years as a paying outlet, with a modest budget for spreading the word about beestung.
• This gift will help ensure we never have to charge a submission fee.
• Help us fund a new home for writing that buzzes, stings, and drips with sweetness.

beestung met their first donation goal and now have a stretch goal that will allow them to publish for three full years. This stretch goal asks for an additional $499. Editor Sarah Clark said, “For an additional $499, we can publish for a third year, fee-free, paying contributors $20 each. I think sustainability is a big project for literary publications…” Thanks to generous supporters who helped them off to a promising launch, securing sustainability can now be their goal. Further donations will be used toward that end.

Who’s behind beestung?

Sarah Clark is Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at Anomaly, Co-Editor of The Queer Movement Anthology (Seagull Books, 2021), a reader at The Atlas Review and Doubleback Books, and an Editorial Board member at Sundress Press. Clark has edited folios for publications, including Anomaly‘s GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms, Drunken Boat’s folios on Sound Art, “Desire & Interaction,” and a collection of global indigenous art and literature, First Peoples, Plural. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations.

Sundress Publications announces the eighth episode of the podcast, Shitty First Drafts. A podcast made for and by writers this show playfully investigates the creative processes of different artists to determine how a finished draft gets its polish.

In Episode 8, Andrew Dillon visits Brynn and Stephanie to talk all things poetry and writing, and on top of everything: being nice to people. In between college and graduate school, Andrew taught for a year in Korea, as well as a substitute teacher in Nashville. He describes how his love of music led to a love of poetry and how a Terrence Hayes reading inspired him to apply for MFA programs. Andrew reads his poem “Apologia for Never Saying What I Mean” and teaches Brynn and Stephanie about his unique writing and editing process that he says allows him to “keep going with the drafting instead of sticking on one line…so I don’t lose the [momentum]” he says. After discussing Andrew’s published poem and how his editing process has changed over time, they question whether any poem can ever truly be perfect. Andrew currently works and lives in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is a technical writer and sometimes-open-mic poet.

Listen to Episode 8 here!

Andrew P. Dillon graduated in the University of Tennessee’s inaugural MFA class. His work is forthcoming or has appeared most recently in Analog, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Connotation Press, and Public Pool. He lives in Nashville and is completing his first collection, currently titled Captain for Dark Mornings (after a track on his favorite Laura Nyro album). He is tragically committed to the Buffalo Bills, Buffalo Sabres, and Tennessee Vols. He strongly supports the use of semi-colons, em-dashes, and the serial comma.

I became a writer for the same reason anyone does: a book was my first real friend. I hear this happens sometimes when you’re home-schooled. I spent my childhood nuzzled up in my book nook, reading stories about Anne with the carrot hair, or Elizabeth Bennett’s mouth. I entered public school in the fifth grade, round glasses, half-formed boobs and all. I wrote a short story about a chair falling like a ballerina and I won a writing award. My life’s been chasing that high ever since.

In middle school, I’d write garbled, flowery prose on my old Windows computer,

attempting to emulate the Naruto fanfiction I’d read on FanFiction.com. I showed my best friend Jennifer my writing when I was 13. She took out her retainer to squint at the neon green ink on my laptop screen. Her only critique? “No plot.”

When my parents got divorced I got actual material. I wrote Tumblr poetry in high school in anonymous bliss, until my classmates found my blog. Their readings of my poetry to my ex boyfriends kept my habits under wraps for years.

Until my senior year of high school, when Mrs. Tharpe shook back her blonde hair and asked us to write three essays about our life, like Joan Didion did. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

 I had stopped journaling when I was 13, after I lost them all in the move. But writing my story again, as it had happened in order to understand it, gave me a clarity and sharpness like I had just tasted mountain air. So I declared myself a Journalism major, and decided to go to the grand University of Tennessee.

Undergrad was a fever dream. I wrote arts & culture pieces for The Daily Beacon for six months, and then for a year and a half I got to write a Wednesday weekly column about women’s adversity called “My Humps”. I got to intern with The Knoxville Mercury (RIP in peace) and witness a deteriorating media company first hand. So, I declared a second major in English–because the loss only showed me how important it was. My Creative Nonfiction and Poetry classes supported this belief. For my last year and a half, I wrote sketches for UnwarranTed, a Volunteer Channel comedy show, and started doing stand up.

Now, I have a B.S. in Journalism and a fervent desire to make sense of the world around me. I have been lucky to have met so many inspiring and encouraging English teachers and professors in my academic career who have challenged me, and helped me focus my needle in a haystack ambitions. I am honored to be given the opportunity to work for Sundress Publications, and excited to learn how to contribute to and connect to this beautiful literary world.

Author Katie Burgess gives Sundress intern Maria Esquinca a glimpse into her persistence as a writer of flash fiction — the moon landings, postpartum depression, humor, and heartbreak in her stories, and growing up conservative Southern Baptist — all themes that influence her Sundress chapbook, Wind on the Moon!

Maria Esquinca: I’m curious as to why you’re drawn to flash? What sorts of freedoms does it allow you? What restrictions?

Katie Burgess: For a long time I felt like I would never be able to write flash. I loved reading it because of how weird and playful it can be. I think flash can get away with being really strange, because the story is over before the reader knows what hit them. But I couldn’t figure out how to be that concise and still tell a complete story. I had three flash pieces in my MFA thesis, and my committee pretty much hated them. One of the pieces was about an astronaut admitting that he’d faked the moon landing, and I couldn’t bring myself to let it go. It eventually became the title story in “Wind on the Moon,” after I spent ten years revising it and sending it out and having it get rejected. (I don’t recommend doing that, but it’s what I did.) Now that I’ve gotten the hang of it more—or now that I’m at least averaging less than one decade per story—I really don’t feel restricted in any way writing flash. It’s so flexible.

ME: Can you talk about parents, parenting, and the precarious situations of your collection?

KB: A lot of these stories were written either while I was pregnant with my son or during the first year after he was born. I had pretty bad postpartum depression, and right as I was starting to get better, fucking Trump was elected. So at that point I was basically reading Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” and sobbing all the time? All. The. Time. And when I was able to write anything, it tended to come from that place. “If You Lived Here” was originally about a mother and a baby. They’re going around the mall, and the mother wonders if the stroller will be too cumbersome if they have to escape a mass shooting. That version of the story got rejected a dozen or so times before I finally realized I needed to take the baby out. The pathos was way over the top with the baby in there. Sometimes the anxiety of parenting is too much to handle, even in fiction.

ME: Can you talk about why you choose to narrate some of these stories through the voice of young females?

KB: I mostly write narrators who are close to my own demographic. There’s a great essay by Daniel José Older about writing the Other, and at one point he says, “Forget the other—can you write you?” I do often make them younger than I am because I have the benefit of hindsight. I can think about what it meant to be eighteen a lot more clearly now than I could when I was eighteen.

ME: Can you talk about the queer characters in your collection? What are your hopes for them?

KB: I hope they have amazing lives full of love and happiness. And revenge. A whole lot of revenge, against everyone who ever wronged them. I mean, the best revenge is to live well, and I hope they do that, but I also want them to get the petty kind of revenge, and I want them to savor it. “Variables” came from thinking about the LGBTQIA people I know who are so kind to their non-affirming parents, giving them chance after undeserved chance, and how exhausting that must be. “The Chronicles of Steve” is more silly. It’s me responding to the whole “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” thing with “oH, gOD madE AdaM anD eVE.”

ME: There’s a line in “The Emptiness Walks With You,” which reads “You’re walking down a dark road, thinking about emptiness, how singular it is that there should be a word to describe a quantity of nothing, and soon you feel the emptiness around you, and the emptiness walks with you.” Can you talk about this line—this feeling?

KB: It’s a line from a story in the main character’s English textbook, and it’s meant to be literary-sounding gibberish. It’s there to make the character angry. No one in his life understands him, and then this pretentious story is trying to say it knows what he’s thinking. (If any readers do get something out of that line, I guess this is where the death of the author comes in.) That story was inspired by a writer I went to grad school with. We were in a meeting to decide what to accept for the literary journal’s next issue, and he started yelling about how much he hated second-person narration. He said, “It’s all ‘You’re walking down the street, and you do this,’ and I’m like ‘No I’m not! I’m reading a story!’” I like the second person, but I also enjoyed his rant.

ME: Can you talk about “Egg Baby” and the role of nurturing and caretaking in this collection?

KB: I think Jennifer in “Egg Baby” might be the only competent caretaker in the collection? Sure, she makes the one joke about putting her child in the refrigerator. But when things get messed up, she’s the one who can fix it. In most of the other stories, the caretakers are absent, negligent, or mentally unwell. Or lying to their kid about having been to space. Again, that comes from the time in my life when I wrote them, when all I could think about was how my child was like this delicate little egg that I was sure to break because of everything I was doing wrong.

ME: There are definitely some funny moments in this collection. Can you talk about writing humor? How did you learn to write humor?

KB: I’ve always been drawn to it—probably as a way of avoiding Big Feelings. Once in a workshop, I got a comment that said, “This story is hilarious—I think with a few revisions, it could be heartbreaking.” All I could think was WHY would I want to do that? I am the opposite of Wilco—I am not trying to break your heart! But then I heard Jennine Capó Crucet say this really great thing at a Q&A, basically that if you want to make something funnier in a piece of writing, put something sad right next to it. And that’s something I try to do now. As for how I learned, I started out by imitating anything I found funny. I read this Garfield cartoon in seventh grade where Jon wrote a super gross poem about a dead toad. I thought it was the funniest thing ever because I have always had extremely highbrow taste. I read it to a friend of mine, and then she and I wrote several dozen more stanzas to it, making each one more and more disgusting. I showed them to my English teacher, and I may have made her want to quit her job. Now I do improv, which I recommend to any writer, even if you don’t want to write comedy; you learn so much about narrative and character development. I’m not saying that just because improv is a cult. I swear.

ME: And finally, can you speak to your engagement with God/the Bible in this collection?

KB: I was brought up in a fairly conservative Southern Baptist church, and from there I self-radicalized a lot. I read a book in high school called He Came to Set the Captives Free. It was about spiritual warfare, the idea that Satan is constantly lurking around, trying to trap you. I got to a point where I would lie awake every night and pray I wouldn’t get possessed. If a friend turned the radio to a secular music station, I would whisper, “In Jesus’ name, I command you to leave this place,” to any demons who might happen by. I was terrified that my grandparents were getting mixed up in witchcraft because they were taking yoga for seniors. This went on for years. So yeah, I have some baggage there. I criticize the abuses that can happen when you take everything literally. And “Workshop Note on The Universe” is all about the difficulty of believing in an omnipotent, omnibenevolent deity. (God might be the worst caretaker in the collection.) I don’t think religion is inherently harmful, though. I think it can be weaponized easily because it’s a space where people let themselves be vulnerable. But everyone also needs to have that space in some form. May I recommend improv?

Read Wind on the Moon for free today!

Katie Burgess is the editor of Emrys Journal. She lives in South Carolina, where she performs with Alchemy Comedy Theater. More of her writing can be found at katieburgess.fun.

María Esquinca is an MFA candidate at the University of Miami. She is the winner of the 2018 Alfred Boas Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has appeared in The Florida Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Scalawag, Acentos Review, No Tender Fences: An An Anthology of Immigrant & First-Generation American Poetry, and is forthcoming from Waxwing. A fronteriza, she was born in Ciudad Juárez, México and grew up in El Paso, Texas. You can find her on Twitter @m_esquinca.

Doubleback Review Seeks Associate Poetry Editor

Does rifling through poetic lost and found bins sound like your idea of a good time? Do you hate to see good poems disappear into the void? Do you have a weird thing for poems, zombies, and zombie poems? 

Join the Doubleback Review team!

It can be disheartening when a journal where you’ve published goes defunct, taking your work with it. Enter Doubleback Review! We only accept work that was previously published but is no longer available online or in active print circulation. We resuscitate dead art and release it back into the wild. And you can help!

Doubleback Review is looking for an Associate Poetry Editor. This is a remote, volunteer position. Responsibilities include reviewing poetry submissions for bi-annual issues, logging comments in an online database, and participating in virtual editorial meetings a few times a year. We’re looking for someone who is passionate about poetry, communicates openly and skillfully, and is able to self-motivate to work toward long-term deadlines. Previous editing experience is preferred but not required.

If you’re interested, please send your resume and a short cover letter telling us why you’re a good fit for Doubleback Review to Managing Editor Krista Cox at krista@doublebackreview.com.