July 2015

Why We Chose It

BY NATALIE SHAPERO, ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Derek Mong, “Ten New Ways to Read Ronald Johnson’s Radi os”

The literary essay is having, as they say, a moment. Here at KR, the number of nonfiction submissions we receive each year has been steadily on the rise, and I suspect that other journals would report the same. Within that increasingly large pool of submissions, we’re also seeing a trend toward formal adventurousness, with many essayists shrugging off linear structures to play around with associative leaping, lyricism, and lists.
Continue reading “Why We Chose It.”

July/Aug issue now out!

In the July/Aug 2015 issue you’ll discover exciting new poems by Albert Goldbarth, William Stobb, Elizabeth Spires, and more; dazzling fiction from Laura van den Berg, Jamie Lyn Smith, and Lily Tuck; and provocative nonfiction by Derek Mong and Floyd Collins. Grab a print copy today! Or check out our Kindle Edition! Subscribe and get a full KR issue for only $0.99 a month. Or purchase single issues for only $3.99. Subscribe or order the new issue today!

Literary Nonfiction Writers Workshop: Letting Something Small Expand

BY JULIA GRAWEMEYER, PETER TAYLOR FELLOW AT THE KR WRITERS WORKSHOP

“Oh boy.” I’d forgotten to prepare for the first day of Literary Nonfiction class at the Kenyon Review’s intensive Writers Workshop. Roger Rosenblatt had assigned 250 words on any item in his list: an object, an event, an animal, a piece of furniture. I had only an hour, so I typed out a few thoughtful ideas, but nothing I was thrilled about sharing with everyone the next day. In the workshop, I discovered that this simple exercise on the topic of a beat-up table I bought at an antique store revealed a great deal about my family’s dynamics. “I can just see your sister smoking outside the car!” They laughed and asked about my mother. They saw openings everywhere to make it larger. Continue reading this report from Writers Workshop.

How Does Two Years to Write, Read, and Teach Sound? Apply For a KR Fellowship!

On August 15, the Kenyon Review will begin accepting applications for its KR Fellowships. These two-year post-graduate positions are intended for creative writers who have already completed the MFA or PhD degree and are seeking time to develop as writers, teachers, and editors. Two fellows, a poet and a prose writer, will arrive in Gambier, Ohio in August 2016. Applications will be accepted through September 15, 2015. Learn more about applying for a fellowship.

The Poetics of Science: Call for Submissions

How does science inspire the literary imagination? Can science writing be literary? The Kenyon Review is seeking poetry, fiction, essays, and drama that respond to issues in science, ecology, or the environment for a special issue to be published in September 2016. Feeling inspired? KR is now accepting submissions for this special issue. Read more about the call for submissions here.

New in KR Podcasts

The good, the bad, and the publishable. OK, let’s start with the bad. In July’s podcast, KR Poetry Editor David Baker and KR Fiction Editor Caitlin Horrocks discuss what makes a bad poem, what makes a bad book review, and what makes a bad strategy for integrating research into your writing. And of course, they also talk about what editors are really looking for when they read through submissions to the magazine. Download the podcast.

An Alphabet of Escapes

BY JEFF OAKS

If not for those abandonments, those plots behind lawns, at edges of railroad tracks, forgotten by farms, unassessed, wild-appled, where strange water ran or welled up or undermined. Hilled, too thick, too rambled, too ivied, too riddled or rocky or aslant, askew, junked with quit appliances, beyond the bounds, buzzing with, burrowed into, existing in spite of, out of sight of taxes, rock-walled, high-grassed, full of spider-lightning, frog-throb, bee-lines, mint growing wild over water-trickle, snake-snap, antwork, cricket-fiddle, shell after shell lived in, burned out, where I invented myself year after year.
Continue reading or listen to this essay on KROnline.

Summer

BY JULIO CORTÁZAR

Translated from Spanish by Clementine Rabassa

In the late afternoon Florencio went down to the cabin with his little girl, taking the back road full of holes and loose stones that only Mariano and Zulma were up to following in their jeep. Zulma opened the door for them, and Florencio thought that her eyes looked as if she had been peeling onions. Mariano appeared from the other room, he told them to come in, but Florencio only wanted to ask them to take care of the little girl until the next morning because he had to go to the coast on an urgent matter and there was nobody in the village he could ask to do him this favor. Of course, said Zulma, leave her, don’t worry, we’ll set up a bed for her here downstairs.

Continue reading this story.

From the Same Nothing

BY MEG SHEVENOCK

June 28, 2015

Earlier this month, I read an intensely wonderful article in the current issue of Harper’s by the writer John Crowley called “Easy Chair,” whose premise is essentially the very thing I have been lately trying to get at: there is one deep way humans and all other animals differ, and that is in our conscious knowledge of mortality. Read the rest of this blog post.

A Micro-Conversation with Garret Keizer

Garret Keizer’s essay “Hokusai’s Octopus” appears in the May/June 2015 issue of the Kenyon Review

What was your original impetus for writing “Hokusai’s Octopus: A Romp at the Edge of the Deep”?

I have always felt a powerful attraction to the sea even though I live in a state with no coastline and am a landlubber to the marrow of my bones. I’d as soon have my teeth drilled as go on a cruise. I’m of one mind with Dr. Johnson when he says that being on a ship is like being in a jail with the possibility of being drowned. But sitting by the shore and watching the waves break on the rocks—I can do that happily for hours at a time.
Read the rest of the interview.

JULY 2015
CONTENTS
Why We Chose It
July/Aug 2015
A Dispatch from the
    Writers Workshop
KR Fellowships
The Poetics of Science
KR Podcast
From KROnline
From the Archive
From the Blog
KR Conversations

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