We’ll be in Salem, Massachusetts on Saturday, April 21st, at the Salem Museum Place Mall for the Small Press & Magazine Fair. The event is part of the Fourth Massachusetts Poetry Festival.

Check out all the great magazines and small presses and stop by our table where we’ll be giving away buttons and broadsides.

Congratulations to Kendra DeColo, whose poem “The Dream in Which You Are,” was selected as a finalist for the 2011 Best of the Net Anthology. The poem appears in the first issue of Printer’s Devil Review.

You can download a broadside of the poem here.

Our friends at the Inman Review are throwing a party Saturday night at Lorem Ipsum Books to celebrate the release of their fourth issue. The review is dedicated to the writing of the many creative people who make their home in the Boston neighborhood of Inman. Chris Hall, one of the contributors to the issue and readers at the event, was also featured in the first issue of PDR.

The evening’s festivities will include readings from contributors of the new volume of the review, live music, refreshments and coffee courtesy of 1369 Coffehouse.

Here are the rest of the details:

Doors at 8, Readings planned to begin at 8:30. Sliding scale donations at the door, donations of $5 or more receive copy of the Inman Review, vol. 4.

Contributors from Vol. 4 include:

• Antonio Ochoa, reading the poems of Uruguayan poet Eduardo Milán
• Annabel Gill
• Jahn Sood
• Craig Hildebrand
• Derek J.G. Williams
• Randy Black
• Christopher Hall

If you live in or around Boston, come down to the Cantab Lounge in Central Square on Wednesday, December 12, at 8 p.m. Our friends at Amethyst Arsenic will be throwing a party to celebrate their Winter 2012 issue.

Amethyst Arsenic is an online poetry and art journal based out of Somerville, Mass; It was founded by Samantha Milowsky in 2011 to publish the best poetry and art to the widest possible audience. 

The release party will feature will feature Tony Brown, Sam Cha, Karen Locascio, Michael Lynch, Gordon Marshall, Jacqueline Morrill, Alexander Nemser, Tara Skurtu, and Jade Sylvan. Doors for the show open at 7:15. The open mic begins at 8:00 and the feature performs at approximately 10:00. A season final poetry slam in the 8×8 series will follow. The show is 18+ (ID required) and the cover charge is $3. You can find more information about the featured poets here.

We’re thrilled that artist Benjamin Duke has agreed to let us use an image of one of his paintings for our Spring 2012 cover.

Ben’s work has appeared in numerous solo and group shows, both in the United States and abroad. He has been awarded international residencies at Bamboo Curtain Studios, Taiwan and at The Kuandu Museum of Fine Art in Taipei. A catalogue entitled Benjamin Duke 2001-2010: Nine Years of Work was published by Garden City Publishing in June 2010. Ben teaches painting and drawing at Michigan State University.

He describes his work this way: 

In my paintings I ask myself “Is this the way the world is?’ I reshape and retool my painting experience to answer that question. But while the question begins with the world, it ends with the work itself: “Is this the way the world is in this work?”

The search is for the world in painting and painting in the world (painting worlds / paintings world). Am I in the world or is the world in me? I allude to my life, to writers works, to imagery and it is my hope that this record of allusion conjures and creates the same. I am referring to text, theory, idea but I am also finding myself already there, looking out to see in.

You can see more of Ben’s work at his website. He is represented by Ann Nathan Gallery.

The painting pictured above is TMI, 2010, 96 X 144.

Prefer print? You can now purchase print copies of Printer’s Devil Review from Lulu.com. Sorry that they’re a bit pricey (between $21 and $26). We’re selling them at cost, but full-color printing (essential for the arts section) turns out to be pretty expensive.

Of course, you can also get ebook versions for $1 from Amazon, the Barnes & Noble store, and the iBookstore (Spring 2011. Fall 2011 coming soon). And you can always download the magazine for free as a PDF here at our website.

The latest issue of Printer’s Devil Review is now available for download for the Kindle reader from Amazon.com. You can also download it for the Nook at the Barnes & Noble site. We’re waiting for the folks at Apple to review it and we’ll let you know as soon as it’s available from the iBookstore.

As my section editors have been working on selecting and editing new work for our second issue, I’ve been re-working the look and feel of the magazine. 

Probably the biggest change is document size: we’re moving from 8 1/2 X 11 inches to 6 X 9 inches, a standard format for literary journals.

Readers will still be able to print pieces from the magazine on letter paper (at a slightly adjusted scale), but will get two facing pages on each sheet. The 6 X 9 format also has a couple of advantages. I can now lay out two-page spreads instead of cramming everything onto a single page, for example; this will be a big help for the arts section, allowing me to accommodate larger images by allowing them to take up more than one page. The format is also the same dimensions as a trade paperback, so if we ever decide to make the magazine available in hardcopy or to print an anthology, everything is already laid out and ready for press.

We’ve also changed our body text font from ITC Galliard (a handsome font used by, among other publications, The New England Review) to Adobe Caslon Pro. The Caslon typeface is the same one used for body text in the New Yorker, and Adobe’s version of Caslon has more flexibility than our old font (true small caps, for example).  

We’ve also added a sans serif face to to the mix for captions and occasionally for headers. The magazine is both idealistic (non-commercial, open-access, and focused on emerging writers rather than established names) and forward-looking (embracing mobile technology by offering the content as an ebook). So what better typeface than Futura, a sans serif face based on geometrical shapes, representative of the aesthetics of the Bauhaus school of the 1920s-30s.

In his Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst states as his first principle that “typography exists to honor content.” Through our attention to things like picas, points, and proportions, we hope to honor the work of our contributors and enrich the experience of our readers. 

The editors would like to thank everyone who donated to or helped to spread the word about our fundraising campaign this summer. Although we didn’t reach our goal, we did raise enough to pay for six months worth of hosting on a fast, reliable server. Thanks again!

We would also like to thank everyone who submitted work for our upcoming issue. We’re a new magazine, and we know that for many it was a leap of faith to consider entrusting us with the results of days, weeks, or months of hard thinking, writing, and making. We’re happy to report that we’ve reviewed all the submissions and have made our final selections. We’ve attempted to reach everyone who submitted, but a few emails bounced back. Our apologies if you were one of those and didn’t hear from us.

Finally, we’d like to express our gratitude to our readers. Creative work needs a community to flourish: bright, inquisitive people who offer encouragement and appreciation as well as questions, comments, critiques, and challenges. Thanks for reading, and we hope you’ll keep following PDR as we strive to bring you the voices and visions of emerging artists.

A few months back, the Axiom Center for New & Experimental Media invited me to participate in a reading series about the intersection of art and science. 

I read my story “Evidence of Harm,” which follows an attorney as he pursues his obsession with a troubled young woman and investigates an invasive plant species that is suffocating a New England lake. The story, concerned with trauma the limits of empirical explanation, seemed like a good fit for the series.

Axiom is planning to podcast a series of interviews with readers, and they just finished editing mine. You can follow the links below to hear what I have to say about art and science and to hear a scene from the story. By the way, I’d love to post the whole thing here or elsewhere, but I’m still holding out hope that it might be accepted for publication in a journal someday.

 Interview with Axiom

 Reading from “Evidence of Harm”

If you’re in the Boston area this Monday, August 22nd, come out and celebrate the latest addition to Beantown’s literary scene.  

The Amethyst Arsenic Poetry Journal will be hosting a release party on Monday, August 22nd, at 7 p.m., in the backroom of The Burren, in Davis Square.

There’s a $5-$10 cover (sliding scale), and the event will feature music from Kristen Ford (worth the price of admission on her own, if you ask me), Jade Sylvan, and The Whiskey Boys. Readers from the inaugural issue will include: Brandon Amico, Rusty Barnes, Gale Batchelder, Cassandra Clarke, Jim Cronin, Judson Evans, Laura Kiesel, Robin Linn, Valerie Loveland, Chad Parenteau, Charlie E. Rose, Christopher R. Vaughan.

There’ll be an open bar and the event kicks off with a meet & greet dinner (meat and vegetarian), followed by music and readings. Some of the editors from PDR will be there, so we hope you’ll say hello. You can also stay late for a screening of the cult classic Harold and Maude.

We’re thrilled that artist Teresa Dunn has agreed to let us use an image of one of her paintings for our Fall 2011 cover.

Teresa is an Assistant Professor of Painting at Michigan State University and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. She describes her work this way: 

My narratives explore relationships through the absurd. Animals, food, and objects are important as humans by becoming symbolic, metaphorical or characters themselves. Their peculiar reality becomes normal, as in dreams or memory…My paintings investigate ways we navigate ourselves through life, environment, and our psychological eccentricities. Seasons, relationships, jobs, and cities attempt to define us. Peculiar occurrences, symbolism, and metaphor tie together some loose ends and fray others.

You can see more of Teresa’s work at her website. She is represented by First Street Gallery and Hook-Epstein Galleries.

Oh, and we should probably mention that we won’t be using the painting pictured above (Introducing my other half, 2010, oil on linen, 40”x66”) for the cover. We really like it, but it’s not the right shape.

“Nothing is sexier than an intelligent hard-on.” So says KD Diamond, editor of Salacious, an independent magazine devoted to queer feminist sex art and literature.  

With its offering of erotica, poems, photographs, and comics (Diamond is a comic artist and illustrator), the magazine “aims to meld pornography with high art.”  

Diamond and friends have put out two issues so far and the editors at PDR are big fans. That’s why we’re re-posting her call for support to print their third issue:

“Salacious #1 sold out within about 6 weeks of being printed. It was amazing! We did a print run of 550, and it went like hotcakes. It’s already become an amazing commodity.

We decided to take a risk, and we doubled the print run of #2. We have a much better printer, and so the cost was basically the same for doubling our print run. We’ve already sold approximately 500 issues of #2, so we’re at the same place we were with #1, which is wonderful!

The unfortunate difference is that, with #1, we had start-up funds, all of which went into printing promotional materials and helping with printer costs. Issue #2 has had nothing but capital from magazines, which, to be transparent, isn’t enough. We currently owe our new printer another $2700, and we don’t know where that money is going to come from. 

For everyone that donates $10.00 in the next week, you will get a COMPLETELY ORIGINAL illustration from me. It’ll be a little bit like Illustration Roullette in that you will not know what you’ll be getting, but it will be hand-drawn and signed by yours truly. 

You can donate here: http://salaciousmagazine.com/support.php

Or if you have a PayPal, you can wire money to kd@katiediamond.com

I know this is asking a lot. Many of us, myself included, don’t have a lot of spare change right now. I’m aware that start-ups are rough for the first 3-5 years, and I’m willing to stare bold-facedly into that roughness and totally rock the hell out of this magazine. We are filling a void and supplying a new voice to the queer sex media, and I feel strongly about continuing this work. But I don’t feel right asking my printer to go ahead with printing #3–nor do I think he’d let me!–without finishing our payments for #2.

You are all amazing.

Thank you.

- kd diamond”

Miranda July is one of my favorite people, so I was excited to see her on the cover of this weekend’s New York Times Magazine.

I remember being knocked out by No One Belongs Here More Than You, her collection of stories in which lonely and shockingly odd characters make real or imagined–but usually unexpected–connections with other people. I especially love “This Person.”

July is probably best known, though, as a performance artist and filmmaker. Honest, intimate, and daring, July’s 1999 film ”You, Me, & Everyone We Know” was hailed by Roger Ebert as one of the best films of that year.

In April of this year, we had a chance to talk to July about her new film, “The Future”. You can listen to the discussion here.

Like the stories, poems, and images in PDR? Help us keep this free, open access magazine going. 

We’re trying to raise $500 in sixty days. This will pay for approximately 20 months on a fast and reliable server to host the magazine and our website. We put out an issue every six months, so that pays for three issues plus the extra content we add to the site–we featured an interview with Miranda July in May, for example.

We don’t have any outside sources of funding; it’s all out-of-pocket. We started by hosting the magazine on a budget server, but our readers told us they couldn’t always get to the site–it took forever to load, or the server kept crashing.  The service provider we were using was even the subject of a denial of service attack by a malicious hacker that disrupted our site for several days. 

To promote the work we admire–from Pulitzer Prize winners to the never-before-published–and to reach our readers, we needed a more reliable web hosting service. We’ve made the switch but it’s costing us more money than we have. All the work we put into the magazine doesn’t mean much if readers don’t have reliable access to issues.

We hope you’ll consider helping us reach our goal by clicking here or on the “donate” button on the top left of the main menu. Thanks for your support and for reading the magazine!

On the eve of our launch party, Gabrielle Varela of the Cambridge Day posted an article about PDR. Varella describes the magazine as “lushly produced” and “brilliantly crafted … a gateway for artists to debut the way they deserve, as well as presenting a compilation of striking work to those with a love for art and a discerning eye.” We’re blushing a little bit, as that’s just about the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about us. 

The party was a big hit, by the way.  Thanks to everyone who came! And stay tuned; we’ll be posting photos soon.

We’re having a launch party for the magazine at Middlesex Lounge on Monday, June 20.

Join us for readings, music–and free stuff!

Check out these T-shirts screenprinted by editors Chris Willard and Joshi Radin. Shirts are available in multiple designs, sizes, and colors–and they’re all free for the taking.

Congratulations to Cat Ennis Sears on the publication of her story “Action & Reaction” in Corium Magazine. If you missed it, you can read Cat’s story “Split Spine” in our Spring 2011 issue.

In 2009, I interviewed Cat about a trio of stories set during the 1918 flu pandemic for our sister site, Champs Not Chumps (CNC). At the CNC page, you can also listen to–*sniffle*–Cat reading her story “You Stopped Galloping” and view images from the–*sniffle*–1918 influenza pandemic. Man, I hope that’s just my spring allergies; does it seem hot in here to you?

Two weeks ago we released our first issue as a free PDF on this site, but did you know you can download PDR as an ebook and take it with you to read on your mobile device or ereader?

You can purchase our Kindle Edition for $1 from Amazon (they won’t let us give it away; we asked). If you have a Nook or the Nook application for your mobile device, you can drop a dollar at the Barnes & Nobles Store.

We’re also on deck at Apple’s iBooks store; we’ll let you know when it’s available there. Thanks for reading!