The following is a correspondence that took place between the editor of this magazine and an ex-proof reader of this magazine. To read the piece in question, click here to purchase Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice.

On Apr 5, 2010, at 7:09 PM, Afton Carraway wrote:

Dear Chris – I thought you hated poetry?  If that is the case, what is Illusions [N2] doing in the new edition of Annalemma?  That alleged “story” wreaks of poetry.  Literary devices, rythms, cadence – all it is missing is lines and stanzas and, in fact, all you have to do is reformat the page slightly and you’ve got lines and stanzas…LINES AND STANZAS, I tell you!  This is a poem, no prose…where is the plot?  This is not how people speak, no matter how eccentric one chooses to be – POEM.  This is a poem – ADMIT IT!

Sorry.  I don’t mean to get worked over this.  And I do hope that I am not offending any one with my accusations, but I’m calling poem on that entry.  POEM!

I’m REALLY enjyoing reading this issue.  Poems included.

Thanks for another great one

I hope you’re well and happy and doing lots of good stuff.  Your party is the weekend of my birthday and I’m LETTING you have Jenifer for it.  You owe me one.

*wink* – Afton

———-

On Apr 6, 2010, at 2:08 PM, Chris Heavener wrote:

Hey Afton!

Glad you’ve been enjoying the magazine and it has had a visceral effect on you. Here’s my counter-argument:

It’s a gross misconception that I hate poetry. On the contrary. I’ve read poems that have really pumped my nads in the past,  and, in some cases, pumped them up more than most stories. What I have a problem with is bad poetry. My level of tolerance for bad fiction is pretty low. My tolerance for bad poetry is even lower. Close to nil. I can’t even be in the same room with it without wanting end my life if it means I no longer have to listen to or read it. And, like bad fiction, there’s a whole lot more bad poetry out there than there is good poetry. And I’ve pretty much dedicated my life to stories, finding them, publishing them and writing them. So it’s hard for me to pull focus from that and put it into sifting through the dearth of truly awful writing. It makes me feel like I’m wasting my time.

However…

The more I get involved with writing and the writing community, with other writers and other publications, both print and online, the more I become exposed to writers who are doing some exciting experimentation with language and form, straddling that line between poetry and fiction. J.A. Tyler is one of those writers. I feel “Illusions [n2]” is an dark piece that flat out rejects the traditional format of narrative voice and conventional storytelling. And that’s one of the styles that I’m into as a writer and an editor these days.

So I hope that’s a satisfactory answer to your argument. And I hope you enjoyed the STORY.

thanks,

Chris Heavener

——–

On Apr 7, 2010, at 1:54 PM, Afton Carraway wrote:

Dearest Mr. Heavener –

My yoga guru has a saying:  “If you have a foot in two different boats, you’ll end up splitting your ass.”

With that in mind, indeed, I enjoyed Illusions [n2] in your most recent edition of Annalemma, however confused and/or worked it up it did make me.  Perhaps that is precisely why I enjoyed it. Perhaps that is the only reason I enjoyed it.  Nonetheless, the “story” certainly stuck out to me.

Now, call me traditional or mundane or whatever you will, but – despite your eloquent explanation as to why you decided to include such a piece of work in your literary publication – I cannot wrap my head around Illusions [n2] as anything other than a poem.  Poetry, being mostly void of complete sentences, is chock-full of individual words put together in a collage to create the sense of a larger image.  In poetry, one uses as little words as possible in order to get across a greater picture.  Whether a poem tells a story or not, they need no plot, they need no format – its just image after image after image with no explanation, no justification – only ideas and pictures.  It’s like a piece of artwork hung on a wall (and, yes, most of it sucks).  You can interpret and reinterpret that artwork however you want with whatever background information, time line, relationship there may be.  The final and big picture, however, is always there.

To me, that is precisely what Illusions [n2] did.

Perhaps I will go back in read it again to see if I can find some sort of “story” in there.  But don’t worry – I won’t bother you with anymore of my banal literary criticism   I know that I am nobody to accuse a writer of faulty or mislabeled genres.  Of course you know that if you ever would like a pedestrian’s point of view on this stuff I’m happy to oblige my humble opinions.  I really do love reading your magazine, it inspires me to get my hands on more things to read.

Take care,

Afton

To read the piece that’s sparking such hot debate, click here to purchase Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice.

Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice officially ships today. Apologies for the delay, shipping software was being a fickle pickle. Click here to order. But first, please observe this primer:

A couple of homo sapiens are walking around in the forest, hunting for some wily beasts to fill the bellies of their women and children. They stumble upon a boar foraging for mushrooms, oblivious. They take aim with their bows and arrows shaped from twigs and tendons and kill it. They hoot and holler around the dead body of the boar. The hooting and hollering subsides and they stand above the boar, silent. They experience the emotion of guilt. Once back at the village, they proclaim to the women and children that they’ve murdered a living creature in order to live another day and that they must offer the creature up to the gods as a token of thanks, lest the gods think the villagers ungrateful and find reason smite them upside the head. And thus, the notion of taking a loss for the greater good, the notion of sacrifice itself, was born.

It’s hard to say that the human race has changed all that much since the concept was created. The last decade began with an act of martyrdom so primitive and barbarous that it couldn’t be mistaken for anything less than an offering of sentient life to an angry god. But the term has also taken on a new definition. Nowadays survival hinges not on the appeasement of deities, but on working an extra 20 hours a week without health insurance. Sacrifice pervades our lives, whether we’re the ones reaping the benefit or remitting the payment. Acts of selflessness and altruism evoke powerful feelings within us. We tend to raise up individuals with purpose beyond achieving personal gain. It’s with these thoughts that we put out the call for stories of sacrifice for our sixth issue.

Artists are a conflicted group when it comes to the theme of sacrifice. On the one hand they’re used to giving up comfort and happiness in the pursuit of a larger ideal. On the flipside, sitting alone in a room working on a story or a painting is one of the most self-indulgent activities one can engage in outside of downright masturbation. Contradictory as artists may seem, they’re experts on the subject.

Two questions kept surfacing in these stories: What are you willing to give up for your loved ones? What are you not willing to give up? We all like to think that we’d give up everything for our spouses, our siblings, our parents. But unless you’re forced to make that decision, you can’t ever really know. The answers to those questions offer quick insight to what a person’s really made of. It’s our hope that through these fictions you might find what your own answers to these questions could be and discover something about what makes you human.

Click here to order your copy.

Did you know this is the only thing happening in the borough of Brooklyn tonight? Come be entertained, listen to and watch beautiful people performing music, drink alcohol that is surprisingly good for being free and pick up your copy of Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice.

Thanks to Jeff Hamada for big upping Issue Six at Booooooom!

And don’t forget: If you’re in Denver, come visit us at table P5 in the AWP book fair

If you’re a Denverite and you follow this blog (according to Google analytics there’s approximately 9 of you) then come visit us today and tomorrow at the Colorado Convention Center where we’ll be slingin’ books, talkin’ shop, crackin’ jokes and tellin’ lies a.k.a. AWP 2010 in Denver.

Introducing the Annalemma postcard collection, featuring words and images from Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice.

Click on over to our print store where you can purchase all five of these handsome art pieces printed on recycled matte stock for $5.00 plus s&h.

Got a college student you haven’t heard from in a couple semesters?

Or perhaps a long distance significant other who swoons with every mention of your name?

Or maybe you’ve got an estranged sibling that lives in remote part of the country.

Or maybe you want to impress guests with all of the international contacts you have by displaying fake correspondences with people you just made up.

Many reasons to buy, no excuse not to.

p.s. the entire set comes free with purchase of Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice, while supplies last!

We are going to JAM.

The following is an excerpt from the story Bred in Captivity by Ravi Mangla, appearing in Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice. Image by Xenia Fink.

There were few things Dev loved more than shooting himself in the side of the head. With his index and middle fingers aligned, his nails pressed to his greasy black hair, he would click down with his thumb on some imaginary top-access trigger. He blew his brains out countless times each day: when he was bored in school, while waiting in a long line, during any film without a high-speed car chase or kung-fu fight. He mimed the deed with such ingrained devotion that when he built his volcano for the school science fair, the activation device – affixed to twin propane tanks – fit seamlessly in the crook of his cocked hand, and as the judges made their rounds at tectonic speeds, he leaned idly over his project and scorched himself to a molten pulp.

For months my mother grieved. She wore through shrinks like the boxes of tissues we bought in bulk; their contents crushed and scattered like windblown blossoms from a dying dogwood, littering the carpet and hardwood floors. One psychologist was so forthright as to call her grief “inconsolable” and “beyond repair,” and he said it would be a waste of his time and our money to attempt to treat her. My father keyed the hood of his car.

To be honest, there were times I believed him. She cried all day and all night. In our sleep, we dreamed of mewling cats and beached whales. And then one morning I woke early to the slow gurgling of the coffee maker and found my mother in the kitchen, a cartridge belt wrung around her shoulder like John Rambo, equipped with silver canisters of cleaning products, linen dish rags, and small rolls of bubble wrap.

She waged war on danger. Mannerisms were the first to go, like the nasty habit my sister had of biting her fingernails, on the off chance poison or disease was festering underneath the nail. Little by little, her fear evolved. At her urging we began relieving ourselves in the backyard (numero dos), behind the azaleas, for fear that sewer gators might shimmy their way up the plumbing. She’d just seen a special on the sci-fi channel in which a pack of famished, sun-deprived reptiles wreaked havoc on the diarrhetic and unsuspecting denizens of New York City. That spring, our garden was the envy of all the neighbors.

Years earlier, grouped with the other parents at parties and play dates, she used to tell the story of her tipped uterus, and how she was only given a one in four shot at conception. Dev was a two-fold miracle, for surviving the nine months and for straightening out her uterus, clearing the way for me and, later, Penny. She’d always wanted a big family.

To read the rest of this story, click here to pre-order Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrfice, which ships April 12th 2010.

Ravi Mangla lives in Fairport, NY. His short fiction has appeared or will soon appear in Gargoyle, Storyglossia, Gigantic, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Best of the Web 2010 (Dzanc Books). He is the Associate Series Editor for the annual Wigleaf Top 50 (Very) Short Fictions.

Xenia Fink was born 1979 in Sao Paulo. She grew up in Brazil, Mexico and Germany. After studying Illustration in Halle and Hamburg she finished her Fine Art studies with a Masters Degree at the University of Arts Berlin(UdK) in 2009. She lives and works in Berlin.

The following is an excerpt from the story Fight Songs by Jim Ruland, appearing in Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice. Image by Todd Jordan.

Last week deputies from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department escorted Staci Carson from the agency for violating a restraining order by stalking a lifeguard at the beach, but I’m the only one in the building who knows this. Staci had a secret blog. It isn’t up anymore–her hosting service deleted the file at the request of the authorities–but she archived the content and parked it on her hard drive, which became my hard drive after Staci left and I moved into her office. She documented her infatuation with the lifeguard in a file called “StatusReports2010” and I’ve been reading it nonstop. I’m pretty much in love with Staci Carson now.

I didn’t know Staci Carson very well. She traveled all the time and worked from home a lot. She was reasonably fit, reasonably personable, reasonably attractive. In short, the least likely person to get all fatal attraction over a nineteen-year-old lifeguard barely out of high school. Not that I’m judging her. I believe love is a weed that can spring up anywhere. You can rip it out of the ground, but its root structure, its essence, remains. You can’t make love go away just because you want it to.

The telephone rings and I nearly jump out of my chair. It’s my first call in my new office and the ring tone is super loud.

“Hey, sugar.”

It’s the receptionist, a woman named Gilda who wears wild wigs and headscarves, and may very well be the only person in the agency with a sense of humor, which is a problem since our biggest client is a comedy network.

“You got a call from Jessica.”

“Jessica?” Jessie is the daughter of my on-and-off girlfriend, Rocio. I have no idea why Jessie would be calling me at work.

“I’ll put her through.”

“Wait,” I say, but it’s too late. Gilda’s gone. I use my best I’m-super-busy-this-better-be-good voice: “Tom Lanier.”

“Hi, Tom.”

“Jessie. Is everything all right?”

“Yeah. Well. Sorta.”

“What does ‘sorta’ mean?”

“I got suspended.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing!”

“You got suspended for doing nothing?” I wince as the words tumble out of my mouth. To a fourteen-year-old, sarcasm is pretty much the same thing as being a dick.

“Hold on,” she says and another voice comes over the line. Someone from the school.

“Mr. Vargas?”

“Um, no. This is Jessie’s mother’s significant other.” It’s the first time I’ve ever used this phrase to describe myself and it feels completely asinine, but Jessie’s mother’s boyfriend sounds sleazy. It could be that I’m slightly intimidated: this woman’s got the I’m-super-busy-this-better-be-good voice down cold.

“I see. And your name is?”

“Lanier. Tom Lanier.”

“Mr. Lanier, this is Ms. Ortega, the school disciplinarian at Our Lady of Guadalupe. Your significant other’s daughter has been suspended for a dress code violation. Will you be coming to pick her up or shall I phone her mother?”

“I’ll be right there,” I say. “What’s your address?”

“You can obtain the school’s address and driving directions on our website.”

“You can’t just give it me?”

“No, I can’t just give it to you. Good day, Mr. Lanier.”

I put down the phone and grab my car keys. Love without sacrifice is but a declaration of intentions. That’s from Staci’s blog, posted a week before she was arrested. I don’t what this means, but I can feel the truth of it down to my bones.

To read the rest of this story click here to pre-order Annalemma Issue Six: Sacrifice, which ships April 12th.

Jim Ruland is the author of the short story collection Big Lonesome and the organizer of the L.A.-based reading series Vermin on the Mount. He lives in San Diego with his wife the visual artist Nuvia Crisol Guerra.

Todd Jordan is a photographer based in New York City. He has had various solo exhibitions of his work and been included in several group shows.  He has self published two books of his work and most recently released “Sleep Talking” with Decathlon Books. Todd is represented in New York by Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art.

So we decided to throw a party last minute at AWP, buuuuut we kinda waited too long to secure a venue or a drink sponsor. However, we were able to secure some top-notch talent with the help of some very powerful New York literary agents whom we may or may not have career-shattering hidden camera photos of. The bathrobes were Michael and George’s idea. Can’t wait to see you there!