January’s session was absolutely the best turn-out yet, and we’re hoping to beat it in February. Due to AWP, we’re moving up February’s reading to the 22nd. Per usual, if you’re in the area, we’d love to see you! Details of where/when on the official Wednesday Night Session website. Bios of the readers involved below. Check it out!

Amanda Goldblatt is a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction. She has led workshops in both genres at Washington University in St. Louis and currently teaches at the University of Michigan. Her work has been published in American Short Fiction, The Collagist, Thermos, NANO Fiction, and elsewhere. Catalpa: This is Not True, a prose chapbook, was published by Cupboard in 2010. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of the online journal Super Arrow, and lives in Michigan.

Benjamin Paloff grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and was educated at Harvard and at the University of Michigan, where he now teaches. He is the author of The Politics, a collection of poems, and has translated several books from Polish, including Lodgings: Selected Poems of Andrzej Sosnowski. The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Program, he is a poetry editor at the Boston Review.

Matthew Olzmann is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Inch, Gulf Coast, Rattle and elsewhere. He’s received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kresge Arts Foundation. Currently, he is a writer-in-residence for the InsideOut Litereary Arts Project and the poetry editor of The Collagist.

Benjamin Cartwright’s pieces “January 31st, 1955″ and “[Unlabeled 1]” appear in Midwestern Gothic Issue 4, out now.

How long have you been writing?
I wrote my first short story after watching the silent, Lon Chaney version of The Phantom of the Opera at St. John’s cathedral in Spokane, Washington, when I was five years old. They showed it at midnight, on Halloween, complete with organ music and creepy sound effects. I had a really intense dream, after the movie, and when I woke up, I wrote it down in this red Hello Kitty diary I stole from my sister. What was with my parents, taking us to something that terrifying, that young? God bless you, mom and dad.

What’s your connection to the Midwest?
I moved to the Midwest from the Pacific Northwest for the first time when I was eighteen, after meeting a girl on the internet at a time when people did not meet people on the internet. That relationship went south, of course. Years later, living in Moscow, Idaho, working at an amazing bookstore called Bookpeople, I was trying to decide between going to graduate school in New York, or going to graduate school in Kansas. The owner of the bookstore, Bob Greene, a transplanted Brooklynite who’d moved to Idaho in the late seventies/early eighties, gave me some sound advice. He said: “Do you want to live with twelve other people in a studio apartment and work three jobs in order to pay rent, and write one poem a year, or do you want to move to Kansas and really work on your writing?” Bob was right. I moved to Kansas, and my future wife, a Topekan, was, by chance, the first human being I spoke to when I rolled into town. I’ve been here ever since, for over a decade, except for a stint in China. I have no family ties, or family history in the Midwest, but live here by choice, which is something many of my coastal friends and family are still confused by. It was the right choice, though. Kansas is a great place to write.

How has the Midwest influenced your writing?
I attended a lecture given by Larry Martin, a vertebrate paleontologist, who explained how the move of primate species from an arboreal habitat to the wide, open spaces of the African veldt, was one of the evolutionary causes of development in the human brain. The wide open spaces required primates to evolve and develop the capacity for abstract thought, because of the difficulty navigating terrain without visible landmarks. We like to think ourselves very advanced, we Homo sapiens, but I feel the open landscapes of Kansas, particularly the Flint Hills, affect my thinking, and my writing. The landscape here nudges you into grappling with ambiguity. In Kansas, there is the physical dimension of the wide, open spaces, but we also, almost reflexively, fill up those open spaces with thought. The physical, rural landscape of Kansas requires abstract thought to navigate, or make sense of it. Open space is the space of terror, as well as the frontier; the space of the sublime. If you don’t believe me, take a writer from New York and drop them into the middle of a wheat field in Western Kansas, say, around Garden City.

Why do you believe there has never really been a regionalist push for Midwestern writing in the past like there has with the South or even the West Coast?
I don’t have a good answer for this one. I’ve wondered this same thing, since my very first move to the Midwest. One thing I’ve noticed, being a transplant, is that many native Midwesterners, Kansans at least, have bought into the coastal rhetoric of the Midwest as “less than,” as secondary to other regions, artistically. Quite frankly, that’s bunk. Great art can come from anywhere, and everywhere. It’s easy to settle comfortably into your identity as an artist in Billyburg, or Seattle, where you can throw a rock and hit one of your peers, at one of the fifty nightly fiction readings or art openings. I’m an artist in the only state in the Union where the governor has abolished the state arts commission. That’s nothing to brag about, sure, but still, nobody’s coddled here, and if you do meet an artist who has been an artist for any length of time, that artist is serious about his/her work. They have to be!

Aw, hell, that’s a miserable answer. Let’s just start a Regionalist push right now. Everyone from a Midwestern state affiliated with any kind of writing program should meet up at AWP in Chicago, and we’ll all get tattoos. It’s Chicago! This is our year.

How do you feel about social media to promote your writing, and do you use it?
I blogged a lot more frequently while living in China, but I’m trying to get back into it. I’m lucky enough to be part of two really amazing arts communities, in Lawrence and Topeka, and most of the writers I know help to promote each other’s work using social media, and let each other know about readings, and events.

Favorite book?
What an insidious question! I am going to cop out, and answer with the best book I’ve read so far this month, which is See Jack, by Russell Edson.

Favorite food?
Mutton and cilantro steamed jiaozi at Bai Jiao Yuan Restaurant in Tianjin, China.

If you could have coffee (or tea or a beer) with any literary figure, alive or dead, who would it be?
Max Ernst, when he was in Paris. He would pick good wine, and he had crazy friends. It would be a hoot. We would paint Monmartre chartreuse.

Where can we find more information about you?
http://kansasblotter.blogspot.com/ (poetry archive project)
http://benjamindcartwright.wordpress.com/ (web page)
http://www.hypergraphicneedling.blogspot.com/ (blog)

Christi Clancy’s story “The Last Tannery in America” appears in Midwestern Gothic Issue 4, out now.

How long have you been writing?
I wrote for the school newspaper in college – that’s where I got my first real taste for writing. After college I had a corporate job working in marketing and communications, but about a decade ago I decided to get back into fiction and creative non-fiction. I joined a writing group, took some classes, got a few publications… hard to believe I’ve now got a PhD in English and a job teaching writing at Beloit College. Pays a lot less, but I’m really happy with my decision to follow my passion.

What’s your connection to the Midwest?
I’m originally from Denver. Some people in Colorado call themselves Midwestern, but I don’t understand why they make that claim. We moved to Milwaukee when I was a kid, and I’ve spent most of my life in Wisconsin and Minnesota. I think of the “real” Midwest as having a stronger connection to lakes, lawn ornaments, exaggerated vowels, binge drinking and rabid sports fanaticism. It’s taken me a long time to accept the Midwest as home. I think a lot of people grow up here thinking they are destined for something else, some sort of greatness they think can only be found near a coast. But I’ve finally let myself fall in love with where I am, cold winters and all.

How has the Midwest influenced your writing?
I’m a passionate observer of details, and the Midwest never, ever lets me down in the details department. From a dead deer strapped to the top of a Lexus to the world’s largest can of soup to the “Recall Walker” light brigade, there’s always something to observe, note, and anchor in writing.

Why do you believe there has never really been a regionalist push for Midwestern writing in the past like there has with the South or even the West Coast?
Probably because Midwesterners are, by nature, self-deprecating. I have a friend who moved to Milwaukee from the East Coast. He really loves Milwaukee, and as a venture capitalist, his job is to get people to bring their businesses here. He said one of the biggest problems he faces is getting native Milwaukeeans to sell our city to the people he’s trying to entice to the Midwest, and to even feel OK about being proud of where we live. Instead, we have an undermining “aw, shucks” attitude about the Midwest.

That said, I appreciate what Midwestern Gothic is doing in terms of promoting our unique regionalism because the writing coming out of the Midwest is really great, funny, insightful and real. I’m tired of the way writers who aren’t from here make random characters from Wisconsin or Ohio. There’s a Franzenesque condescension about shag carpeting, summer sausage and Velveeta that rubs me the wrong way – as though the Midwest is a place where time stands still and you’re better off escaping or you’ll get stuck in a cow pie. I like writing from the Midwest that doesn’t patronize or conform to caricature.

How do you feel about social media to promote your writing, and do you use it?
My grandfather used to clip articles from the newspaper and magazines and send them to us on a weekly basis. I think I inherited that gene, because I love sharing news and articles via Facebook. I need to start using my blog, living social, twitter, etc. a lot more. Since I have a background in marketing I feel pretty comfortable using social media to market myself.

Favorite book?
The first book that I really loved was The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. It was so hard, and then so gratifying, and I admired Faulkner’s crazy energy. More recently, my favorite book is The Book of Common Prayer by Joan Didion. I’ve recommended it to friends but nobody has loved it as much as I do. I just finished writing a novel that started out as my attempt to move her character Charlotte from a fictional Latin American country to exurbia, although it changed a lot as I wrote and hardly has anything at all to do with Didion’s book anymore – the only similarity is the character’s name. A friend of mine calls me a “Joan Didion migraine brain.” I take it as total compliment.

Favorite food?
Indian. The long, cold winters have made me a slave to comfort food. What’s more comforting than curry?

If you could have coffee (or tea or a beer) with any literary figure, alive or dead, who would it be?
Maybe Lorrie Moore, because Birds of America showed me that I didn’t need to be so afraid of plot in short stories. But she’s so smart and witty I don’t think I could keep up. I once had a high school boyfriend who bought me a book called 101 Fast Comebacks because I was so slow on the up-take. Maybe writers are all like that in person, because on paper we can write down all the things we think we ought to have said.

I actually met Lorrie Moore a few years ago when she read at the Wisconsin Book Festival. I loved, loved, loved her story “The Nun of That” from Anagrams – I found it emotionally devastating. I asked her about the story and she said she didn’t really remember it. I couldn’t believe it.

Where can we find more information about you?
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/fashion/27ModernLove.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.beloit.edu/english/faculty/
http://www.literarymama.com/fiction/archives/2005/11/home-i-hope.html
http://www.fictionaut.com/stories/christi-clancy/old-flame–6
http://www.wuwm.com/programs/lake_effect/le_sgmt.php?segmentid=8584
http://www.amazon.com/Glimmer-Train-Stories-Jake-Hawkes/dp/159553010X

Just wanted to share some good news on this Friday: Midwestern Gothic contributor Marc Watkins’ story “Handsome Pair of Sunday Walkers” was recently picked up for publication by Third Coast. And if that wasn’t good enough, his story “Two Midnights in a Jug” was listed as one of “Thirty Distinguished Stories” in New Stories from the Midwest 2011.

Congrats, Marc!

It might come as a pleasant surprise, but we have found that there is a wondrous pool of talent in Kansas—many of our contributors call the Sunflower State home, and even more of them (it seems) live in the same general vicinity. And with that, we are oh, so excited to announce the first ever Midwestern Gothic reading to be held at the uber-fantastic Raven Book Store in Lawrence, Kansas.

When: Saturday, February 25, 7PM
Where: Raven Book Store, 6 East 7th Street, Lawrence, KS
Details: http://www.ravenbookstore.com/events.php

Seven of our contributors will be reading their work(s), and if you live anywhere near this fantastic bookstore, we absolutely recommend you check this out and support these talented artists:

Andrew Bales lives in Wichita, Kansas, where he is the Barr Fellow in Wichita State University’s MFA program and the Assistant Editor of mojo. His stories have won second-place in Glimmer Train’s 2011 Short Story Award for New Writers and have appeared or are forthcoming in New Delta Review, Bateau, NANO Fiction, Johnny America, and other journals. His story “Pancake People” appeared in Issue 3 of Midwestern Gothic.

Kara M. Bollinger is a graduate student at the University of Kansas, where she is pursuing her Master’s in Rhetoric and Composition and serves as the assistant nonfiction editor of Beecher’s Magazine.  Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Sleet Magazine, Midwestern Gothic, Prick of the Spindle, and The Connecticut Review.

Benjamin Cartwright is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Kansas.  His work has appeared in Sentence, DMQ Review, Stone Telling, and other fine places.  Ben hopes that coastal people keep flying over Kansas, so that it stays a secret, like a fort you build in the backyard, or the afterlife.  We don’t need any more riffraff.  Actually, we do.  Bring the riffraff.  Bring it.

Mary Stone Dockery is the author of Mythology of Touch (Woodley Press), a poetry collection, and two chapbooks, Aching Buttons (Dancing Girl Press) and Blink Finch (Kattywompus Press), all forthcoming in 2012. Her poetry and prose is forthcoming in Gargoyle, South Dakota Review, Weave Magazine, and has appeared in many fine journals. She is the 2011 recipient of the Langston Hughes Award in Poetry and co-edits Blue Island Review. She lives and writes in Lawrence, Kansas.

Katie Longofono is very close to finishing her undergraduate degree in creative writing at the University of Kansas. She plans to pursue an MFA in poetry at whichever institution threatens her with the least amount of debt. Her work has been published in Midwestern Gothic, The Medulla Review, and other journals; her first chapbook, The Angel of Sex, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. She is the founding editor of Blue Island Review, and poetry editor of the KU literary/art & design magazine Kiosk. In 2011 she received the William Herbert Carruth Memorial Poetry Prize.

Jason Ryberg is the author of seven books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, several angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors, and a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel. He is currently an artist-in-residence at The Prospero Institute of Disquieted Poetics and an aspiring b-movie actor. His latest collection of poems is Down, Down and Away
(co-authored with Josh Rizer and released by Spartan Press). He lives in Kansas City, Missouri with a rooster named Little Red and a billygoat named Giuseppe. Feel free to look up his skirt at jasonryberg.blogspot.com.

Leah Swewell is a Chicago native living in Topeka, Kansas. She is the founding editor of XYZ Magazine, a freelance graphic designer and the founder and mediator of the Topeka Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared in journals including Flint Hills Review, Blue Island Review, Coal City Review and Begin Again: 150 Kansas Poems

We are excited to announce that Midwestern Gothic Issue 4 (Winter 2012) is now available at Apple’s iBooks, downloadable on on your computer, or via your iPhone/iPad/iWhatever.

Get a copy for only $2.99

Ah, the life of a quarterly-print journal…no rest for us! But, truthfully, that’s how we like it.

We’re excited to announce that submissions for Issue 5 (Spring 2012) are now open and we are feverishly looking for new stories and poems to fill the pages.

Haven’t submitted to us before? Please take a few minutes and read through our Submissions Guidelines—they’ll fill you in on what Midwestern Gothic is all about and exactly what we’re looking for. Or, I suppose, you could check out one of our previous issues to get a sense of the sorts of things we enjoy publishing (the best way, really).

Please make sure you submit all work through our Submishmash link…here. (All the relevant details are there too.) Any work sent to us via email won’t necessarily get ignored, but it won’t take precedence (we have to award those that follow the directions, right?).

Happy submitting!

Jeff + Rob

Happy New Year: Midwestern Gothic Issue 4 (Winter 2012) is here!

You can order a hardcopy, PDF, Kindle or Nook Book: Buy now

It’s that time again, when we offer up past issues of Midwestern Gothic for less than you can get them at any other time during the year. Need a last second gift for that book worm you know? Struggling to fill the stockings with more than just socks? An eBook makes a great gift, after all. Even if you’re busy prepping for the holidays, don’t worry, the sale lasts until January 1st!

PDF – $1.50 (Issue 1, Issue 2, Issue 3)
Kindle - $1.50 (Issue 1, Issue 2, Issue 3)
Hardcopy - $9 (Issue 1, Issue 2, Issue 3)

Note: If buying a digital copy (either PDF or Kindle), prices are reduced automatically. If buying a hardcopy, use dicount code T84N5KGX to get the sale price.

Times are tight, but that doesn’t mean you can’t give someone that perfect gift for not a lot of dough. Or find an excuse to treat yourself to a copy of fantastic fiction and poetry from some of the most talented folks the Midwest has to offer.

Remember, this is for a limited time only, so jump on it while you can!

Cyn Kitchen’s story “A Man on One Knee is Considered Down” appears in Midwestern Gothic Issue 3, out now.

How long have you been writing?
The long answer is that I came to writing later than many. I think it was always there as I spot evidence looking back at my childhood, but my mother was fearful of literature and the words and images that lurked there, so she disallowed all but a few books in the house. Her actions seriously limited my exposure to the world of literature and effectively delayed any awareness that I was a writer, collateral carnage of sorts. My senior year of high school I had a novel on my nightstand that I’d borrowed from a friend. It was Margaret Walker’s JUBILEE. My mother discovered it while inspecting my room during the school day and went through several pages with a black marker, crossing through any word she found offensive. I never finished the book.

By the time I finally discovered I was a writer, I was in my 30s and raising a family. One might think that such a realization should be obvious, even with the issues I faced, but for me it wasn’t that simple. Multiple barriers fell into place that kept me from writing for a good long while. The flipside of that is that by the time I did start writing I had plenty to say and lots of material to say it with.

The short answer? About fifteen years.

What’s your connection to the Midwest?
Bred, born and raised in the same Illinois town as the poet Carl Sandburg. I’ve never managed to escape, and it’s not for lack of trying. I was born in the same hospital as my mother and all four of my children.

How has the Midwest influenced your writing?
The fingerprints of Midwestern characters smear everything I write. They surround me, the people I grew up with, the ones I have loved, grown to resent, and learned to love again for different reasons. Their sensibilities, syntax, willing acceptance of limitations, and periodic efforts to move beyond what life throws at them are qualities and characteristics and situations that echo my own. I didn’t know that the Midwest was a place different from others until I could get outside of it and look back in. Then I was delighted to recognize that this land-locked band of rolling landscape, chock full of grain fields, and brimming with character, was like nothing else I would ever know, and I know it like I will never know another place. I cannot separate the Midwest from me. It is my skin and my heart, and I love that I’m a part of all its flawed beauty.

Why do you believe there has never really been a regionalist push for Midwestern writing in the past like there has with the South or even the West Coast?
I wish I knew the answer to that because it’s something I lament. I have often wished to be from some other place that reveres writers and writing differently than the Midwest seems to. But the truth is that it’s the only place I know. Whatever stories come out of me are so undeniably Midwestern that I can’t fake being from some other place. I have a mini-obsession with Flannery O’Connor. Her regional influence, and her connection to the South are qualities I envy. But I know it cut both ways with O’Connor as she often railed against being categorized as a Southern writer when she just wanted to be respected as a writer. That’s why I love it that the editors of MW Gothic chose to start a magazine that honors the Midwest and carves out a new place for us. It makes me think of Toni Morrison’s quote, “I wrote my first book because I wanted to read it.” The only way to change the Midwest’s reputation as a regional member of the literary community is to change it.

How do you feel about social media to promote your writing, and do you use it?
I’m almost ambivalent. I use it, but I’m not sure how effective it is. I like it that I have a list of friends who are aware of my work and who obstensibly support it, but it seems to me that the people who could really affect my writing in terms of getting eyes to read it are the people who put my stories into books and magazines. I understand it’s all connected in various ways, but I’m not convinced that my involvement in Facebook, for instance, has any real bearing on the visibility of my work.

Favorite book?
This might be the most difficult question I’ve ever had to answer. It’s akin to asking me which of my children is my favorite. So I put the question into the context of which book I would take along if I was locked up and only allowed one. I think I would have to say the Bible. It’s the one book I was allowed to have as a child so there’s a lot of history and memory attached to it. Plus, I come from a long oral history of Bible stories which no doubt informs who I am and how I think. Besides that, the Bible has it all: sex, violence, revenge, magic, absurdity, cruelty, parable, metaphor, miracles and redemption. It’s dark, which I like, but it’s also shot through with hope.

Favorite food?
Grandma May’s roast beef with mashed potatoes & gravy.

If you could have coffee (or tea or a beer) with any literary figure, alive or dead, who would it be?
Hands down, Flannery O’Connor.

Where can we find more information about you?
www.cynkitchen.com
http://www.knox.edu/academics/faculty/kitchen-cyn.html
http://departments.knox.edu/engdept/FacultyPages/Cyn_Kitchen.html