My pencil is fixed. Let’s avoid the metaphor where the page is the universe, and I am God, and the graphite to the white page is some explosion. Nothing “new” is going to happen here. At best it hasn’t been heard for a long time. At best everyone’s subconscious will render many different things based on the same model. But here is a pencil ready to flesh a mountain. I draw the pleats of it like vulva, I said pleats because you should see a skirt, those things because all mountains are on the female spectrum — if people are still married to that idea. The virtuosity in the depths and heights are just my idea of where the sun is and isn’t. And since I am a bad artist — light is all over the place like spilled olive oil. The mountain because — insurmountable; the olive oil because — the vulva: I should start testing my metaphors by analyzing how well they operate in reverse. The vulva is a mountain, olive oil is light, skirts are mountains: suddenly some things are not very true. I just want to delineate a space I can walk into and be done. There isn’t really a point in all this drawing, just to fashion an escape hatch into a useful solitude.
Jessica Lanay is a poet and short story writer originally from the Florida Keys. She is interested in writing towards the incalculable nature of human emotions, psychology, and metaphysical dilemmas. Currently, she is pursuing her MFA in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh and works at the Center for African American Poetry And Poetics. Her work can be found in Salt Hill Journal, Tahoma Literary Review, Sugar House Review, and others. She is excited to have her work featured in The Dr. T.J. Eckleburg Review, as she has been a fan for quite some time. @jessy_llayne
Support Our Contributors
Support our Adopt a Contributor Program and donate 60% of your donation to this contributor. To adopt your contributor, first subscribe to our monthly or annual subscription. Then, return to your adopted contributor’s work url and sign the comments section at the bottom. Make sure to include “I’ve adopted “contributor name” in your comment. We’ll send 60% of your first month’s subscription to your contributor via PayPal! If you love fiction, poetry, nonfiction, music and art, join us in supporting our talented writers and artists.
About Eckleburg
The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review is a print and digital literary journal. We offer original fiction — short stories, short short stories, hybrid—poetry and nonfiction. We also curate The Eckleburg Gallery — visual artwork and intermedia — as well The Groove including first released, original music by The Size Queens. Our archives include emerging and established writers, poets, artists, musicians and performers such as Rick Moody, Cris Mazza, Eurydice, Steve Almond, Stephen Dixon, Moira Egan, David Wagoner, Zach Galifianakis and many more. We run annual print issues, The Eckleburg Reading Series (DC, Baltimore, Chicago, New York….), as well as, the annual Gertrude Stein Award in Fiction with a first prize of $1000 and print publication.
“Eclectic selection of work from both emerging and established writers….” The Washington Post
“Literary Burroughs D.C…. the journal cleverly takes its name from the The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald….” Ploughshares
Proud member of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.
The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review was founded in 2010 as an online and print literary and arts journal. We take our title from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and include the full archives of our predecessor Moon Milk Review. Our aesthetic is eclectic, literary mainstream to experimental. We appreciate fusion forms including magical realist, surrealist, meta- realist and realist works with an offbeat spin. We value character-focused storytelling and language and welcome both edge and mainstream with punch aesthetics. We like humor that explores the gritty realities of world and human experiences. Our issues include original content from both emerging and established writers, poets, artists and comedians such as authors, Rick Moody, Cris Mazza, Steve Almond, Stephen Dixon, poets, Moira Egan and David Wagoner and actor/comedian, Zach Galifianakis.
Nicole Hylton is a writer-of-all-trades from Southern Maryland. She writes poetry, short stories, and has completed two novellas, Internet Official and Dropping Her Gloves. Her work has appeared in Aethlon and Avatar. She holds a B.A. in English from St. Mary’s College of Maryland, minor in Sociology & Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Support Our Contributors
Support our Adopt a Contributor Program and donate 60% of your donation to this contributor. To adopt your contributor, first subscribe to our monthly or annual subscription. Then, return to your adopted contributor’s work url and sign the comments section at the bottom. Make sure to include “I’ve adopted “contributor name” in your comment. We’ll send 60% of your first month’s subscription to your contributor via PayPal! If you love fiction, poetry, nonfiction, music and art, join us in supporting our talented writers and artists.
About Eckleburg
The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review is a print and digital literary journal. We offer original fiction — short stories, short short stories, hybrid—poetry and nonfiction. We also curate The Eckleburg Gallery — visual artwork and intermedia — as well The Groove including first released, original music by The Size Queens. Our archives include emerging and established writers, poets, artists, musicians and performers such as Rick Moody, Cris Mazza, Eurydice, Steve Almond, Stephen Dixon, Moira Egan, David Wagoner, Zach Galifianakis and many more. We run annual print issues, The Eckleburg Reading Series (DC, Baltimore, Chicago, New York….), as well as, the annual Gertrude Stein Award in Fiction with a first prize of $1000 and print publication.
I forgot to light a candle for them, I tell my husband, ask him to remember. He answers: Dick Clark died. It was all over the radio. Remember him?
Zachor, I whisper, while outside a stranger’s calling strangers over a loudspeaker, names heavy and not ours. No one stops, remembering
they have somewhere to be: in bed perhaps, memorizing a beloved’s face instead of those among the counted, remembered
only by this day, its country made of desert, and her people who have lost so many of each other, the remembered
outlines hold more solid than the bodies left: my husband and I not speaking now after that news he half-remembered.
But my dear, recall instead buying fresh Keemun leaves, and how we brewed them for my grandmother while she remembered
sitting silent with her mother, those last days when memories were theirs to make rather than pass down to other family members.
You know, one cigarette sparked a Golden Gate brush fire, my husband finally says, perhaps coincidence, perhaps remembering—
Vikhlya Khalfin, babushka, age 92, died sleeping in the Hebrew Home: dreaming she’d been shot through the heart or eye or burned alive.
Remembering?
Inheritance
I wish I remembered my great-grandmother’s gaze, the time she spoke turned inward
beyond where we are so alike,
the first time she told the story.
The room too warm, too thick
with honeyed light, and I too young
for her to think that I was listening.
Her features wear me now—the mole
on my left shoulder, soft, uneven
hips—I see her husband
in them. They echo his final vestige.
Taken away from a kitchen in Kiev,
the last place he looked for her
before the neighbor whispered zhid and their house was left
empty until the war ended
and great-grandmother came back
to mourn his unfound body, her
hollowed home, the city
where he may have died.
All her silences and stories, full
I grew with them, full I’ll pass uncertainty
to my children, told or retold, history
or memory, until one, a fading pulsar, bleeds
between stellar glow and blackening sky.
And in that distance, who can tell
igniting times apart? The difference
between the lived and the passed down:
the sundial’s shadow at noon?
I’m wishing
again today still last night—
in flux like sand and water and ancestry.
I’m wishing for her to have told me
his name.
Wounded, pocked, shot through,
he walks beside me now, so close,
sometimes I think I feel his hand.
His body glows with stars. Blood stars.
In a voice without gender or race,
I hear him call. And I am one among
the many, a blood star, and my children.
We will be the passing of light, body to body.
We wear our people’s blood and smear
the sky with it, so when the rest look up,
they too will see nothing but faces in the clouds.
Eternally Sitting Shiva
We know there are these things that burn,
like wood and our own skin, too close
to smoke that rises without praying for return.
If there’s one thing our people learned
about the way that ashes decompose,
they know there are these things that burn
without leaving a body for which to mourn,
and searching for bones we’ve only found
smoke that rises without meaning to return.
I’ve read our history and when I turn
the page, millions of hands char the ground,
and we know there are these things that burn
like my own hands with which I churn
memory and fire doused with the sound
of smoke that rises without believing in return.
Stars calmly die and then again are born,
but the one that’s on our skin we can’t disclose
because we know there are these things that burn
to smoke that rises, always threatening return.
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania where her research focuses on contemporary American poetry related to the Holocaust. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, The Missouri Review Online, and Narrative Magazine, among others. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf and TENT Conferences as well as the Auschwitz Jewish Center. Julia is the author of The Bear Who Ate the Stars, winner of Split Lip Magazine‘s 2014 Uppercut Chapbook Award. She is also Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine.
Support Our Contributors
Support our Adopt a Contributor Program and donate 60% of your donation to your chosen contributor. 60% of the donation will be forwarded directly to the chosen contributor. If you love fiction, poetry, nonfiction, music and art, join us in supporting our talented writers and artists.
About Eckleburg
The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review is a print and digital literary journal. We offer original fiction — short stories, short short stories, hybrid—poetry and nonfiction. We also curate The Eckleburg Gallery — visual artwork and intermedia — as well The Groove including first released, original music by The Size Queens. Our archives include emerging and established writers, poets, artists, musicians and performers such as Rick Moody, Cris Mazza, Eurydice, Steve Almond, Stephen Dixon, Moira Egan, David Wagoner, Zach Galifianakis and many more. We run annual print issues, The Eckleburg Reading Series (DC, Baltimore, Chicago, New York….), as well as, the annual Gertrude Stein Award in Fiction with a first prize of $1000 and print publication.
What others are saying about Eckleburg…
“The most exciting and adventurous and gutsiest new magazine I’ve seen in years.” Stephen Dixon
“Eclectic selection of work from both emerging and established writers….” The Washington Post
“Literary Burroughs D.C…. the journal cleverly takes its name from the The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald….” Ploughshares
SUBMIT YOUR FICTION
We accept previously unpublished and polished prose up to 8,000 words year round, unless announced otherwise. We are always looking for tightly woven short works under 2,000 words and short-shorts around 500 words. No multiple submissions but simultaneous is fine as long as you withdraw the submission asap through the submissions system. Please do not email the editors to withdraw your submission. Submit your fiction.
Note: We consider fiction (and poetry) that has appeared in print, online magazines, public forums, and public access blogs as being published. Rarely do we accept anything already published and then only by solicitation. Once the piece is published in Eckleburg, the author is welcome to re-publish the work anywhere and everywhere. In these cases, we ask that the original publication be credited each time to The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review. One rare exception is our annual Gertrude Stein Award, which allows for submissions of previously published work.
ANNUAL GERTRUDE STEIN AWARD IN FICTION
1st Prize $1000 and publication. Accepting entries year round. Eligibility: 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.
ANNUAL FRANZ KAFKA AWARD IN MAGIC REALISM
1st prize $1000 and publication. Accepting entries year round. Eligibility: All stories in English and magic realism 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 and interns are not eligible for entry.
NOVEL AND STORY COLLECTION MANUSCRIPTS
We publish short works at The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review. At this time, we do not publish novel, long memoir, essay collections, story collections or poetry collections at The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review. We do offer manuscript workshops at The Eckleburg Workshops. If you are looking to place a manuscript, we can suggest several excellent small and large presses whose excellent books are promoted through our Eckleburg Book Club — i.e., Random House, Graywolf Press, Coffeehouse, Tinhouse, St. Martins Press and more.
SUBMIT POETRY
We are now accepting previously unpublished poetry of all forms. Please submit 1 – 5 poems as separate files in separate submissions. Please do not submit them all on one document. Submit your poetry.
Note: We consider poetry (and fiction) that has appeared in print, online magazines, public forums, and public access blogs as being published. Rarely do we accept anything already published and then only by solicitation. Once the piece is published in Eckleburg, the author is welcome to re-publish the work anywhere and everywhere. In these cases, we ask that the original publication be credited each time to The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review. Submit your poetry.
POETRY COLLECTION MANUSCRIPTS
We publish short works at The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review. At this time, we do not publish novel, long memoir, essay collections, story collections or poetry collections at The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review. We do offer manuscript workshops at The Eckleburg Workshops. If you are looking to place a manuscript, we can suggest several excellent small and large presses whose excellent books are promoted through our Eckleburg Book Club — i.e., Random House, Graywolf Press, Coffeehouse, Tinhouse, St. Martins Press and more.
NONFICTION
We accept polished creative nonfiction/essays up to 8,000 words year round, unless announced otherwise. Preferences veer toward shorter works under 1500 words with an arts and culture focus. If you wish to include a bio, keep it short, under 200 words. Submit your nonfiction.
ANNUAL ANAĬS NIN AWARD IN NONFICTION
Coming soon… Accepting entries year round. Eligibility: All stories in English and nonfiction no more than 5,000 words are eligible. No minimum word count. Essays published previously in print or online venues are eligible if published after January 1, 2011. Essays 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. Coming Soon…
ESSAY COLLECTIONS AND MEMOIR MANUSCRIPTS
We publish short works at The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review. At this time, we do not publish novel, long memoir, essay collections, story collections or poetry collections at The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review. We do offer manuscript workshops at The Eckleburg Workshops. If you are looking to place a manuscript, we can suggest several excellent small and large presses whose excellent books are promoted through our Eckleburg Book Club — i.e., Random House, Graywolf Press, Coffeehouse, Tinhouse, St. Martins Press and more.
GALLERY | Visual and Intermedia Artwork
Send us a link for your online portfolio that includes all the works (at least 3, 10 or more even better) that you would like us to consider for the Gallery. You can also send a 100 to 200 word bio. If accepted, we will request attached, high resolution jpegs of the chosen works. The submissions link is below.
Music, Film and Arts Commentary | Send a YouTube link via email along with a short 100 to 200 word bio. The submissions link is below.
REVIEWS
Eckleburg is not accepting ARCs or press releases for books at this time. Some members of our editorial staff and some of our contributors write reviews for other venues such as The New York Times, Washington Post, New York Journal of Books, Washington Independent Review of Books and more and will post notices of these reviews at Eckleburg; however, our editors work directly with the outside venue editors in acquisition and assignment of these reviews. It is a common practice at these venues that reviewers review only work by authors who the reviewer does not know personally or work with personally. Please do not contact our editors about press releases or reviews of your book for Eckleburg. You should contact the review venues directly. We are, however, very happy to consider your book for our Book Club and/or an excerpt of your published book for Eckleburg publication, please see below information at Book Club.
THE ECKLEBURG BOOK CLUB
Send your book cover, publication information and short excerpt to the Eckleburg Book Club.
Please forward a jpeg of just the front cover, not the full jacket;
Do not ask us if you may send us your book cover and information, etc., just submit it through the submissions system;
Please forward publisher, cover artist, blurbs, a short excerpt (a chapter, short storyor poem) we may run with the book, as well as all copyright information typed into the email, not as part of the back cover;
We are not accepting self-published books, etc. If you own the publishing company or work integrally as a regular staff editor (as opposed to guest editor) with the publishing company that published your book, Eckleburg considers your book to be self-published;
What others are saying about Eckleburg…