January 2017

Why We Chose It

BY MAGGIE SMITH, CONSULTING EDITOR

Three poems by Erin Adair-Hodges appear in the Jan/Feb 2017 issue of the Kenyon Review.

In the current issue of KR, you’ll find three poems by Erin Adair-Hodges. The poems are from her forthcoming first book, Let’s All Die Happy, which won the 2016 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and will be published in 2017 as part of the Pitt Poetry Series.

Adair-Hodges’s poems explore a kind of dark domesticity. In “Portrait of the Mother: 1985,” the speaker is a woman who is doing her best with what she has:

    First there was the word and the word was OK.
          OK the apartment’s rented floor, new child
               laid over eyelashes and skin’s salt on shag.

Continue reading “Why We Chose It.”

Send Us Your Short, Your Polished, Your Unpublished Gem: Enter KR’s Short Fiction Contest by January 31st!

We’ve moved the Short Fiction Contest up by a month this year. Submissions are being accepted through the end of January 2017. Submit a piece of unpublished short fiction (no more than 1,200 words); the contest is open only to writers who have not published a book of fiction. The winning story and two runners-up will be published in the Kenyon Review, with the winning writer receiving a full scholarship to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Entry fee of $22 includes a one-year subscription to KR or extends your existing subscription by a year. Lee K. Abbott, award-winning author of Love is the Crooked Thing, Living After Midnight, Wet Places at Noon, and, most recently, All Things, All at Once: New & Selected Stories, will be the final judge. Go short and good luck! Click here to read the submission guidelines.
Read Editor David Lynn’s views on the evolution of the Short Fiction Contest.

Join KR at AWP 2017

Visit us February 9-11, at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC. On Saturday, February 11th, the book fair, with over 800 exhibitors, will be open to the public. KR will be at Booth #577. Please stop by to say hello.

And when your book hunting is done, KR is featured in two conference events:

A 5th Anniversary Celebration of the Kenyon Review Fellows. Friday, February 10th, at 9:00 a.m. in the Marquis Salon 3 & 4, in the Marriott Marquis, Meeting Level Two. What do Flannery O’Connor, W.S. Merwin, and Jaquira Díaz have in common? They’ve all been Fellows of the Kenyon Review. The new KR Fellows Program celebrates its 5th anniversary with a presentation by Jaquira Díaz, Margaree Little, Melinda Moustakis, and Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers. They will gather to read from their recent work and discuss the benefits and challenges of the fellowship life, including their individual projects.

Redesigning/Rebranding Your Literary Journal. Saturday, February 11th, at noon in Room 209ABC in the Washington Convention Center, Level Two. Besides consistently publishing excellent writing, what else must your literary journal do to remain relevant? How important is design? Do readers care about your journal’s look? This panel gathers editors of literary journals that have recently undergone major redesigns. KR’s Managing Editor, Abigail Wadsworth Serfass, along with panelists from the Colorado Review, Southern Humanities Review, Willow Springs, and Hobart, will share the challenges of such an undertaking, editorial considerations taken along the way, inspirations they followed, and reasons why they felt a fresh look was necessary for their publication.

Summoning the Falcons: Lit Fest 2016

BY ELANA SPIVACK ’17, KENYON REVIEW ASSOCIATE

The Kenyon Review rolled out the red carpet, reimagined the Renaissance, and summoned the falcons for the annual Literary Festival on November 4th and 5th, all leading up to the Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Lecture by Dame Hilary Mantel, the recipient of the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. Read this first-hand account of a wonder-filled Lit Fest.

Give Your Writing a Creative Vacation This Summer!

FEATURING INNOVATIVE PROGRAMS IN NATURE WRITING AND TRANSLATION

Summer is closer than you think. Make 2017 the year you take your writing to the next level at the Kenyon Review Summer Workshops. Whether you’ve been writing for years, have recently graduated from an MFA program, or have just now decided to take the leap out of your private notebooks and into a classroom, you’ll find a productive, supportive, intense workshop in which to accomplish your literary goals. KR’s 2017 Adult Summer Workshops include:

JUNE 17-24, 2017
Fiction: Lee K. Abbott, E.J. Levy, Nancy Zafris
Nonfiction: Rebecca McClanahan, Dinty W. Moore
Poetry: David Baker, Joanna Klink, Carl Phillips

JULY 8-15, 2017
Fiction: Christopher Tilghman, Nancy Zafris
Nonfiction: Geeta Kothari
Poetry: Natalie Shapero
Nature Writing: David Baker
Workshop for Teachers (partial scholarships available!): Erick Gordon, Brad Richard
NEW! Translation: Katherine Hedeen, Elizabeth Lowe

Online applications are available now.
Read more about the KR Writers Workshops.

Do you know a Young Writer (ages 16-18)?

The Kenyon Review is now accepting applications for its Young Writers Workshop, an intensive two-week workshop for intellectually curious high school students who value writing. KR’s goal is to help students develop their creative and critical abilities with language—to become better writers and more insightful thinkers.

Scholarships are available for those who demonstrate financial need. The application deadline is March 1st. To learn more, please visit our website.

Jan/Feb issue now out!

Curl up with the best of winter reading in the latest issue of the Kenyon Review! Revel in stories by the winners of the 2016 Short Fiction Prize; brilliant fiction from Katherine Zlabek and Mary Terrier; dazzling poetry from Joshua Bennett, Rosalie Moffett, David St. John, and many more; and provocative nonfiction by Dorothy Gallagher and David Winner. Subscribe or order a print copy today or read it on our new app! Don’t have our free app? Download it today!

New in KR Podcasts

We’re playing a double-header this month! Listen as O. Henry Prize winner and Kenyon Review editor David H. Lynn talks with Hilary Mantel, twice winner of the Man Booker Prize, about the way historical novels are published, what it’s like to live in the world of one character for more than ten years, writing for the stage, and the final book in her Thomas Cromwell Trilogy, The Mirror and the Light. Tune in as Josh Bell, author of No Planets Strike and Alamo Theory, chats with editor at large Natalie Shapero about rock star energy, being anxious in New York, and the difficulty of publicizing your book when you’re an introvert. Add KR to your iTunes playlist.

From KROnline: The Rejection

BY MARCIA ALDRICH

I debated whether to go. The invitation for the reading arrived from a friend and colleague, the nicest invitation—old-school manners, simple but charming, sounding just the right note. Weighing the sweetness of the invitation and the opportunity, surely the last, to see and hear this poet in the flesh, I decided to go. The poet had swung through town a few years before to launch a different book and on that occasion I had undergone a complicated line of thinking that arrived at a negative conclusion, a refusal, a demurral. I didn’t want to put a face to the woman who had so memorably rejected me when I was a young, guileless girl just out of college and sending her poems out for the first time as my professors had encouraged me to do. Read the rest here.

The Dream-singing Elegy

BY MURIEL RUKEYSER

From the Kenyon Review, Winter 1944, Vol. VI, No. 1

Growing out of Muriel Rukeyser’s experience during the Spanish Civil War, the elegy evokes both hope and skepticism about dreaming in a time of defeat. The title alludes to nineteenth-century customs practiced by starving Native Americans, who found hope in ecstatic dancing, anticipating reunions with their dead—customs which, as Rukeyser noted, “have connections with expression in the overrun countries of our own time.” “Dream-Singing Elegy” was later republished as the seventh in a cycle of ten poems (Elegies, 1949). A quotation from it appears in Doctor Atomic, John Adams’s 2005 opera about the Manhattan Project, sung by the skeptical Kitty Oppenheimer.

Darkness, giving us dream’s black unity.
Images in procession start to flow
Among the river-currents down the years of judgment
and past the cities to another world.

There are flat places. After the waterfall
arched like the torso of love, after the voice
singing behind the waterfall, after the water
lying like a lover on the heart,
there is defeat.
Read this poem.

From the KR Blog: “We have the house and it is gated”: Latina/o Writers on Resistance

BY ROSEBUD BEN-ONI

November 29, 2016

Since the election, I’ve had quite a few men—all straight, all white, all identifying as liberal—explain to me what’s coming for me as a woman, as a Jew, as a Mexican-American with family on both sides of the border. Most of these men I call friends, and most mean well. Their anger wants to be my anger. But their fear is not my fear. Read the rest of the blog post.

A Micro-Conversation with Nathan Poole

Nathan Poole’s story “Exit Wound” appeared in the Nov/Dec 2016 issue of the Kenyon Review. An excerpt from the story can be found here.

What was your original impetus for writing “Exit Wound”?

Everything I write begins as an image or a scrap of language and nothing more than that. Somewhere in the drafting process, usually before I have a full draft, I begin to discover the thematic drive that will come to reshape the story. With this story, all I had was an image of a young couple walking together at the state fair, and the guy had a bad shiner. . . . I realized, after a few weeks, and after that scene was cut and rewritten, that this story was becoming an important vehicle for me to deal with incidents in my own life that have disturbed my sense of masculinity. Read the rest of the interview.

JANUARY 2017
CONTENTS
Why We Chose It
Short Fiction Contest
Join KR at AWP
KR Lit Fest Recap
2017 Writers Workshops
Young Writers
Jan/Feb Issue
KR Podcast
From KROnline
From the Archive
From the Blog
KR Conversations

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