The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, a literary and arts journal housed at The Johns Hopkins University, M. A. in Writing Program, is pleased to announce our new Rue de Fleurus Salon and Reading Series. Our debut event will be on Thursday, June 27th, 2013 at the Washington D. C. Campus off Dupont Circle. Our featured reader will be Rick Moody. Free and open to the public.
The Rue de Fleurus Salon and Reading Series with Rick Moody
VENUE CHANGE
The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review, a Literary & Arts Journal Housed at The Johns Hopkins University, M. A. in Writing Program is pleased to announce we will hold our Rue de Fleurus Salon at
Born in New York City, Rick Moody attended Brown and Columbia universities. His first novel, Garden State, was the winner of the 1991 Editor’s Choice Award from the Pushcart Press and was published in 1992. The Ice Storm was published in May 1994 by Little, Brown and Company. A film version, directed by Ang Lee, released by Fox Searchlight in 1997 and won best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival. His collection of short fiction, The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven was also published by Little, Brown, the title story winning the Aga Khan Award from The Paris Review. He has received the Addison Metcalf Award and a Guggenheim fellowship. His memoir The Black Veil: A Memoir with Digressions won the NAMI/Ken Book Award, and the PEN Martha Albrand prize. The Diviners won the Mary Shelley Award from the Media Ecology Association. His new novel, The Four Fingers of Death, was published in 2010. His short fiction and journalism have been anthologized in Best American Stories 2001, Best American Essays 2004, Best American Essays 2008, Year’s Best Science Fiction #9, Year’s Best Fantasy, and, multiply, in the Pushcart Prize anthology. His radio pieces have appeared on The Next Big Thing, Re:Sound, Weekend America, Morning Edition, and at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. He is also a musician. His album Rick Moody and One Ring Zero released in 2004. As part of The Wingdale Community Singers he plays and writes lyrics. They have released two albums, the most recent of which is Spirit Duplicator (2009). He has taught and lectured at NYU, Bennington, Yale, and the New School. He will be guest-lecturing this summer at The Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Richard Peabody is the author of a novella, three short story collections, and seven poetry books. He is a native Washingtonian and teaches fiction writing at Johns Hopkins University, where he received the Faculty Awards for Distinguished Professional Achievement and Teaching Excellence. He is also the Beyond the Margins Above and Beyond 2013 Award winner for his outstanding service to the Washington, D.C. literary community, and he is Eckleburg‘s Patron Saint of Indie. He is the founder and co-editor of Gargoyle Magazine and editor of twenty-one anthologies including Mondo Barbie. His collection of short stories, Blue Suburban Skies, is out from Main Street Rag Press. Read “Maraschino Cherries,” an excerpt from his collection, Speed Enforced by Aircraft (The Broadkill River Press, 2012).
Chas Schroeder’s body of work explores the intersection of pastoral, urban, and ultimately diaristic sentiments. Employing mixed media and text to reveal the aesthetic possibility inherent in subjects ranging from game animals to misogyny to advertising to colonialism to love, no subject is out of the range of his sincere and deeply curious toying. His signature style is marked by the purposeful use of acrylics, wood, found objects, vibrant spray, stencil work, collage, street techniques and perversely rendered figures (both animal and human) in a fashion that seems to address the anxieties and wonders of modern American life in it’s most exuberant forms.
Tim Wendel is the author of Summer of ’68 (Da Capo), Top 10 choice byPublisher’s Weekly. High Heat was a New York Times editor’s choice. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Weekend, Washingtonian, National Geographic Traveler, Huffington Post, GQ and Esquire. He teaches at The Johns Hopkins University, M. A. in Writing Program where he is a writer in residence.
Annie Terrazzo has been creating mixed media and trash portraiture for almost 10 years and has sold over 400 works in that time. “Detritus”, Annie’s recent artistic endeavour and is made completely out of newspapers and vintage magazines from around the world. Originally from Colorado, she studied art with her family of jewelers and plein air artists and then moved on to study graphic design and portraiture in San Francisco. Since then, she has devoted her time to capturing the current depreciation of newspapers and found paper, making fun of it, and preserving them. Annie travels the world collecting newspapers and doing exhibitions, but Los Angeles will always be her home.
Kareem Rizk, born in Australia, is a collage artist, illustrator and designer, currently living and working in Copenhagen, Denmark. Media include collage, acrylic, oil pastel, pencil, solvent transfers and acrylic transfers. The work is highly textured and often multi-layered with a nostalgic and weathered quality. Exhibitions include solo shows and group shows in Australia, US, Canada, UK and Europe. Rizk’s work has been published in numerous art magazines and books and his work is held in private collections worldwide.
Peter Cardamone is a Baltimore-based writer and artist working in intermedia and film. “I always think that poems can fall easily into the cracks of movies where they just show the world around the characters whether beautiful or despondent and that is why Baltimore is the perfect place to film.”
Dana Little currently lives (and, incidentally, writes and creates) in one of Baltimore’s basement apartments that features exposed piping and black mold.
Nicole Idar, author of “The Green Parakeet’s Tale,” is a Malaysian writer now based in Washington DC. She is the recipient of a Cafritz Fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and an Undiscovered Voices Fellowship from the Writer’s Center in Maryland, and is the founder of Asian Arts Live, a new reading and performance series that will debut in DC in the fall.
Amir Shahlan Amiruddin, illustrator of “The Green Parakeet’s Tale,” is a new media artist and founder and Creative Director of One Eye Fish Studio, based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Amir’s first animated short film “Tanggang” won first prize in the Best Animated Short Mixed Media category at the 2011 Lumiere Digitale Animation Festival in Pune, India.
Michael Shattuck is a Baltimore City native and currently resides there. His work has appeared in Short, Fast, and Deadly and Outside In Lit & Travel.
L. Ann Dulin is a Midwestern-bred writer living in Baltimore with aspirations to short film and audio media, and a drive to explore taboo.
Rae Bryant is a writer and intermedia artist working in photography, collage and film. Her work has been exhibited in Washington DC and New York. Her short story collection, The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals, released from Patasola Press in 2011. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Paris Review, StoryQuarterly, McSweeney’s, BLIP Magazine, Gargoyle Magazine, and Redivider, among other publications and have been nominated for the Pen/Hemingway, Pen Emerging Writers, and Pushcart awards. She earned a Masters in Writing from Hopkins and has taught in the writing program as well as the International Writing Program at The University of Iowa. She is represented by Jennifer Carlson with Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency.
D. J. Uncle Matt was born and raised in L.A., where his mother, Dominatrix Sheree Rose, introduced him to the Punk scene and L.A. music and arts scene. Matt studied film at the University of Oregon and in Barcelona, where he taught English and lived the expatriate life. He has written, produced, filmed and/or directed feature films, shorts, music videos, and worked as assistant camera on Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist, a Sundance Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, and L.A. Film Festival awards winning documentary. Matt lives in Washington D.C., where he is a filmmaker/screenwriter and hosts the bi-weekly radio show, Uncle Matt’s Two-Hour Shower.
& MORE….
The Rue de Fleurus Salon and Reading Series takes its name from Gertrude Stein’s famous Paris residence where she conducted her expatriate salon including luminaries such as Fitzgerald, Joyce, Hemingway, Matisse and Picasso.
Gertrude Stein Award:$1000 and publication in Eckleburg to first place winner; publication to second and third place winners; listing of honorable mentions.
All stories in English no more than 8,000 words are eligible. No minimum word count. Stories published previously in print or online venues are eligible if published after January 1, 2011. Stories can be submitted by authors, editors, publishers, and agents. Simultaneous and multiple submissions allowed. Each individual story must be submitted separately, with separate payment regardless of word count. Eckleburg editors, staff, interns and current students of The Johns Hopkins University are not eligible for entry.
Manuscript
Stories must be submitted online and in manuscript form (please don’t upload entire anthologies or collections), double-spaced, Times New Roman, one-inch margins. Must be in English. Experimental to mainstream with punch aesthetics welcome. Multimedia (visual that includes text) welcome. No film or audio.
Publication
Award-winning manuscripts will be published by The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review. Finalists and Honorable Mentions will be listed with titles and author names. By submitting, submitters verify copyright holding and give Eckleburg rights to publish, republish and use the winning works in promotional efforts and anthology printing both print and online.
Submission
No application forms are necessary. Announcement of the winners will be made April 2014. Submit ONLINE.
2014 Contest Judge | Cris Mazza
Cris Mazza’s first novel, How to Leave a country, won the PEN/Nelson Algren Award for book-length fiction. Some of her other notable earlier titles include Your Name Here: ___, Dog People and Is It Sexual Harassment Yet? She was co-editor of Chick-Lit: Postfeminist Fiction (FC2, 1995), and Chick-Lit 2 (No Chick Vics) (FC2, 1996), anthologies of women’s fiction. Mazza’s fiction has been reviewed numerous times in The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, MS Magazine, Chicago Tribune Books, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Voice Literary Supplement, The San Francisco Review of Books, and many other book review publications. Her book Something Wrong with Her: A Hybrid Memoir is coming soon from Jaded Ibis Productions. Read an excerpt in The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review.
2013 Contest Judge | Rick Moody
Rick Moody is the author of the novels Garden State, which won the Pushcart Press Editors’ Book Award, The Ice Storm, Purple America, and The Diviners; two collections of stories, The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven and Demonology; a memoir, The Black Veil, winner of the PEN/ Martha Albrand Award, and The Four Fingers of Death. He has received the Addison Metcalf Award, the Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Winners will be announced at AWP 2013 in Boston, MA.
In March of 1980, Michael Martone did something extraordinary — inviting a motley crew of indie press folks up to Johns Hopkins University. Martone, a student at the Sems, had begun a subversive mag with fellow Hoosier Michael Wilkerson, which they dubbed Indiana Mon Amour. The conceit? You had to write about Indiana to be eligible for inclusion. The concept a chippy response to the workshop lip service to “place” and very much in keeping with those two madcap zealots. Their zine experience plugged them directly into the indie mindset, which may or may not have been prevalent on the Homewood campus at that time.
I thank them both for the invitation to be part of their “People’s Republic of Reading Series.” Because we were a bunch of non-university affiliated long-haired bearded freaks (save for John Elsberg who worked as a book editor for the US Army and who we all mistakenly thought was British) gathered together in that huge auditorium. Sprawling? That’s how I remember it. Eager students as far as the eye could see. We were an alternative to the Canon, a strange and heady brew. And I don’t believe any of us had ever read our work in a university setting before.
Richard Peabody and Michael Martone at AWP 2013
And who was that nefarious motley crew? Jesse Glass, whose Goethe’s Notes Magazine and press were published in Westminster, MD. Imagine avant-garde postcards, broadsides and a zine surrounded by a sea of rednecks. (He’d actually graduated from the Sems in 1979 and was the most experimental of our crew having helped Richard Kostelanetz with Assembling Magazine and he was already into Concrete poetry); Steven Ford Brown from Birmingham, Alabama, where his Thunder City Press and Thunder Mountain Review held reign; the rest of us from suburban Maryland and Virginia — John Elsberg, American Editor for the British mimeo zine Bogg, founded in 1968 by George Cairncross in Filey, North Yorkshire. (They’d just printed their 44th issue and John was soon to upgrade the printing and design by having the work done in the US by an offset printer in Annapolis, MD); Fiction writer Kevin Urick, whose magazine The Mill and White Ewe Press were based in College Park, MD. The press had recently published Oregon writer Al Drake’s In the Time of Surveys and George Myers Jr.’s first fiction collection, Nairobi; and me with Gargoyle Magazine based in Bethesda, MD. I’d just printed issue #14, which featured interviews with Hindenburg author Michael Mooney, local Sci Fi legend Ted White, and renegade pre-Beat writer/editor Chandler Brossard, and part of Raging Joys, Sublime Violations his novel-in-progress. Continuing with the Beat Generation theme the issue also featured Michael Horovitz (the British Ginsberg), Charles Plymell (a collage and an essay on “The Blues”), Herbert Huncke (the “Elsie” chapter of his autobiography), along with an interview with poet Janine Pommy Vega.
We’d also printed our first two Paycock Press books — Michael Brondoli’s Love Letter Hack about which —
“It’s a well written tale, with a nicely exotic flavor. He does indeed have a lot of talent. He also has a good sense of what a story is and how it ought to unfold.” -Guy Davenport
“A first book from this press, and a very fine beginning, indeed. A very touching and wryly humorous account of love and absence from home.” – Library Journal
along with Harrison Fisher’s Blank Like Me.
Harrison was one of the best DC poets of the late 70’s, bar none. He wrote some lyrics for local band Tru Fax and the Insaniacs. BLM was his 6th book in a matter of 3 years. Lots of language play. Harrison, like Brondoli, was connected to the Providence Baroque scene that orbited around Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop’s Burning Deck Press. (Providence poet Tom Ahern designed the cover.) The book is divided into two parts — “Immunization & Society” and “White Zombie.” The latter makes use of B-movie horror titles. I haven’t encountered anybody since who possessed such diabolical wit save maybe Susan Smith Nash.
So what happened? Well, we shared our publishing experiences, traded anecdotes with the students, and then it was time to read our work. This was my 11th ever reading and I’d gone from riding in like a rebel hero to feeling completely out of place. What were we doing reading to MFA students? I was almost 30. I started with a joke poem and they laughed and then everything went fine.
I’m sure Jesse Glass read his long “Mayakovsky Is Dead” poem.
Point your Poetry Gun in the air:
bang! bang! bang! Comrade.
Hopkins Class
He had three chapbooks out at the time, plus Closed Casket, a play that had been performed in The Netherlands. I’m sure John Elsberg read from his chapbooks Walking, as a Controlled Fall and The Price of Reindeer. Kevin Urick might have read part of his experimental western The Death of Colonel Johns, or some of the stories from his Nakedness collection. Steven would have read some of his surreal poems from Apples that are Mirrors, Mirrors that are Apples and Against the Old Propellers of the Twilight. I read from my first book of poems I’m in Love with the Morton Salt Girl.
Why the stroll down memory lane? Well, a couple of reasons. John Elsberg passed away from cancer late in 2011 and I miss him and the rest of the old crew. And nothing like that auspicious March 10th ever happened again. Martone at that time had published one fiction chapbook, At a Loss, and though he was a couple years younger than most of us, he was a peer in every meaning of the word. We were a comfortable crew, hungry to get published, hungry to discover some poets or writers among those gathered in the audience. The big name conferences weren’t interested in small fry like us, so the entire experience was a heady, raucous, educational joyride.
I remember eating at a great Italian place with Martone, writer Gina Maranto, and poet Theresa Pappas (Martone’s wife to be). Was Wilkerson there? Neither of us can remember. Wilkerson won the Elliott Coleman Award in Fiction Writing at Hopkins that year before becoming the director of the Ragdale Foundation, eventually landing at Indiana University where he remains to this day. Martone has of course gone on to be a driving force at Fiction Collective 2, to teach at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and to produce an impressive shelf of fiction, faux travelogue, essays, and anthologies. Steven Ford Brown is in Boston publishing translations of work by Juan Carlos Galeano, Jorge Carrera Andrade, Angel Gonzalez, while also working as a music critic. Kevin Urick taught law school at the University of Maryland in Baltimore for many years and is now a practicing attorney in Elkton, MD. Jesse Glass runs Ahadada Press (among other things) and is a Professor of American Literature at Meikai University in Chiba, Japan.
We were all so young. We were all so passionate. I thought at the time that our combined energy was going to have a real impact. A lot of chapbooks, and books, and magazines were born of those times. Some of us are even still slinging words out into the ether.
Richard Peabody and Michael Martone at AWP 2013, Boston
John Barth and Michael Martone
Steven Ford Brown
Jesse Glass
Richard Peabody is the author of a novella, three short story collections, and seven poetry books. He is a native Washingtonian and teaches fiction writing at Johns Hopkins University, where he received the Faculty Awards for Distinguished Professional Achievement and Teaching Excellence. He is also the Beyond the Margins Above and Beyond 2013 Award winner for his outstanding service to the Washington, D.C. literary community, and he is Eckleburg‘s Patron Saint of Indie. He is the founder and co-editor of Gargoyle Magazine and editor of twenty-one anthologies including Mondo Barbie. His collection of short stories, Blue Suburban Skies, is out from Main Street Rag Press. Read “Maraschino Cherries,” an excerpt from his collection, Speed Enforced by Aircraft (The Broadkill River Press, 2012).
Born in New York City, 
Michael Shattuck
L. Ann Dulin
2014 Contest Judge | Cris Mazza
Richard Peabody