Frog eating bats and forgiveness

Smithsonian Tropical Research video article on Frog eating Bats  by Rachel Page shows nature with its conflicts and terrors.  The frogs must produce a mating call to get a mate and propagate.  The mating call is also what leads the frog eating bats to them.  And the bats can tell from the call if the frog is good eating or is poisonous.
And then reading Olin Morales in his blog C2C talking about all of the emotions that need to be felt before there can be "forgiveness"  Given the complexity of our world and our nature I wonder what the emotion of forgiveness feels like.

William Stafford annual celebration

Reading "The Darkness Around Us Is Deep" by William Stafford getting ready for a Stafford celebration at the Library on Wednesday.  We will be filming the poetry reading and putting into a show for the local TV McMinnville Community Media.  I'll put it on our YouTube channel.

Writing and the Delete Key

Rachel Kadish in a Ploughshare's blog says we live in an age of instantaneous deletion.  The delete key is our friend.  That is for sure.  But I'm of an age when paper got crumpled into a waste basket overflowing on the floor, then used to start the fire in the fireplace.  She is sweetly nostalgic, but I truly love spell check.

Because we write to be heard or read, Rachel says all writing is essentially an unrequited love letter.  Were it so simple.

Internet Writing as Promotion

Reading Leslie Jaminson's article My Internet Relations in Rain Taxi.  She talks about the tension of creating and marketing her book "The Gin Closet" (free press).  She talks with a self depreciating voice as she describes how she has to promote herself but does not want to seem self promotional.
She presents a very good case for using the internet to do promotion.  She is forced to write articles and essay she would not think to write about subjects she would not have considered. And she discovers the self promotion is about the book and not her.  Although the internet seems to make the distinction somewhat hard to make.

Reading Lisa Caldarone's Journey of a Literary Journal  about starting a Literary Journal.  Just what I needed to hear.  Wow.  A lot of work.  Hmmmm.

Caldarone mentions that Glimmer Train gets 40,000 submission a year, 750 per week.  That is a huge amount of reading.  They are successful, but it is daunting.  

She provides a fantastic list to consider for marketing a new Journal

• Develop a clean, sophisticated design for your site – this will announce the value of your enterprise more than anything else
• The best marketing technique is simply to publish excellence from a variety of writers, new and emerging; for journals, less can be more – publish only the stories, essays, and poetry that blow you away
• Create an opt-in e-mail listserv and/or e-newsletter for your journal
• Exchange links with other magazines
• Network; as your community of writers and readers grow, correspond with friends around the world on a daily basis
• Send out press releases when something new & exciting is going on (first issue, first big-name author, new web redesign, new columns/features, etc.)
• Attend the Annual AWP Conference Book Fair
• Participate in various writing conferences across the county, including the Sewanee Writers Conference & the Bread Loaf Writers Conference
• Sponsor or co-sponsor readings and presentations at the AWP conference
• Hold readings of selected work from the latest issue of your journal in your local community
• Post new features on your website every 1-2 weeks
• Archive the online journal permanently in libraries worldwide through the LOCKSS program initiated by Stanford University
• Register and keep your profile up-to-date in Duotrope’s Digest – best registry of online journals available
• For online journals, it’s important to have some print marketing materials to hand out, such as postcards w/ photos from the latest issue
• Seek out “Best of the Net” – every literary journal can nominate poetry there
• Nominate your best work for the Pushcart Prize  
• Use your blog to weigh in on the discussion surrounding today’s literature; be brief & don’t be afraid to say something confrontational if you believe in it
• Post 1-2 new posts per week on your blog; content can include quick interviews with writers in magazine, promotion of events, special events of interest to writers in regional area
• Send especially exciting issue links to popular blogs
• Announce your “birth” at newpages.com
• When first starting out, solicit many of the MFA departments in the country; it’s a quick way to get submissions
• Purchase an ad in a magazine that most suits your journal’s style to announce your presence
• Use Twitter – a most important marketing tool because a lot of book lovers, authors, and literary journal folks are on it. Use Twitter to announce links to new blog posts, interviews with a best-selling author, most recent issues, etc. Retweet anything from any of your authors
• Take adequate time to help your publication find its audience; be careful not to cross the line into blind, belligerent promotion…!

And if that weren't enough she has more in Part Two


Community Building

• Build community around the journal by creating personal, ongoing relationships with contributors 
• Send one e-mail a month to your e-list – no more or it gets too much, no less or they forget about you. Weekly is too much; monthly is appropriate.
• Build your audience organically by having some patience and letting people come to you; don’t overdue it with email blasts and online publicity
• Encourage editors to respond to emails in personal ways, including signing their own name when rejecting submissions
• Build a sense of trust among other literary journals, and focus on cross-promotion not just of your journals, but of the artists and writers for whom you share a mutual appreciation

Blogs & Social Networking

• Blogs are flickering fireflies of promotion; make connections with both new & established ones
• Tap into the blogosphere with a niche genre
• Use your blog for in-depth content – book reviews, interviews, spotlights on contributors
• Create a Facebook page for the journal & encourage your editorial board & contributors to use their personal FB pages to announce new issues
• For online journals, use social networking & interactivity tools to find a way for readers to be able to discuss what they’ve just read 

Word of Mouth

• Mail your call for submissions to all department heads you can get email addresses for
• Make sure your faculty who have connections talk up the latest issue among their writer friends, colleagues, and in their classrooms
• Some of your better known contributors will bring a lot of people to each issue, with their mailing lists, students, and colleagues, plus in Google searches of their name
• Pitch to Poets & Writers & try to get special issues reviewed in other popular literary outlets

 The Real World

• Give the journal some sense of presence in the world by holding readings and events in the community
• Attend conferences and book fairs, most especially AWP’s book fair, where you have a captive audience actively looking for new journals to read and submit to.
• Put up posters around campus
• Hold poetry slams and other student readings at the local bookstore, library, or other literary outlet
• When your literary journal is established and has built a solid reputation, pitch it as a learning tool for English courses in high schools and undergraduate programs
• Sponsor live events open to the public, inviting artists in multiple genres together; these will help you connect to your readership and create a lot of energy around each issue. 

Novelty Ideas 

• Provide your contributors with announcement cards that they can spread around
• Make a hand-made version of your first online issue, which you can pass out at local readings and at the local book fair. Make about 500 of these mini-mags (2 in x 2 in). People enjoy the novelty of these hand-made items, which will drive traffic to your site & they can keep as a momento

I know I do not need to copy and paste from her blog, but I've seen sites and blogs get pulled, so just the referral link worried me.  She did such great work I want to make sure I have it with me.

Technology, creativity

reading "What defines a Meme?"  by James Gleick writing in the May issue of the Smithsonian Magazine.   He refers to Richard Dawkin contention the center of life, the center of the cell, is information, instructional code.  Evolution is the exchange between a self (organism) and the environment.  Gleick says we are surrounded by technology.  It does seem to be absorbing us.  Technology increases our interactions and exchanges.  The hard part is being creative and not becoming passive, thus consumed. Writing sure is easier than in the day of clay tablets and sharp sticks.

Wild Rice (Manoonan) to Hiawatha

Reading an article in the paper about growing wild rice in the Willamette Valley.  The article said "wild grain (whose name in Ojibwe means "good berry") never gave the Ojibwe word.  I had to know.  The word for the good berry wild rice is Manoonin and there is a website with great information about the major roll wild rice played in the lives of the Ojibwe peoples.  More than I wanted to know.

The serendipity  that is the internet I found the Native American Words in Longfellow's Hiawatha The original word was "Hayowent'ha which meant "He Who Combs".  Henry was singing his own Song with his story of Hiawatha who accepts the Christan message and then pushes off for the sunset and disappears forever.  I'm thinking, if he were writing today Henry's Song might have a different ending, or maybe not.