What writer can read the Artifice call for submissions and not respond?
Artifice is very specific in what it wants: stories, prose works, and poems that are aware of their own artifice. (For more specific content guidelines, check out the Artifice Wishlist Archive.)
Their first issue, which has a beautiful blind-debossed cover, is filled with prose and poetry that plays with form and that also takes form very seriously. Some highlights:
- Roxane Gay’s “Contrapasso” uses a menu form to tell a story about Mara, a man-eating bulimic who dominates sexually from a subservient position. Roxane has an amazing ability to write both raw and tender (sometimes she shows that range within the same sentence).
- David Silverstein has four erasure poems composed from pages of dictionary entries. The poems are presented in type as well as in photocopies of their original (primitive Humument-like) markups.
- Andrew Farkas’s “Police Procedural” has a number of funny set ups and a ton of funny lines. It’s a highly subversive take on police cop shows. Is it a crime if there is no victim and no perpetrator?
- Cynthia Reeser uses hypertext markup language in “<alt img 3</i>” and presents a cut and paste narrative in outline with “Story (Prepackaged): Designed for Easy Disassembly and Transport”.
Artifice 1 also includes great work from Lance Olsen, Gregory Lawless, Carol Berg, Blake Butler, Kyle Hemmings, and others.
To celebrate the release of Artifice 1, two reading events are scheduled on Feb 27–one in Artifice’s hometown of Chicago, and one in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- Reading in Cambridge at Outpost 186 (3PM): Jessica Bozek, Ori Feinberg, Elisa Gabbert, and William Walsh.
- Reading in Chicago at Loft 3A (7PM): Andrew Farkas, Kelly Haramis, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Jeffeson Navicky, Christopher Phelps, Derek Phillips, Kathleen Rooney, Davis Schneiderman, Susan Slaviero.
Hats off to artificers James Tad Adcox and Rebekah Silverman.