Tag Archives: Ruth Foley

“Ghost Stories,” by Michael Collins and Annie Kim, is lovely and—appropriately enough—haunting, with the two voices echoing and playing off each other yet appearing seamless. Simultaneously dark and lyric, musical and surprising, it is everything I would look for in a collaborative sequence.
—Judge Ruth Foley

 

Ghost Stories by Michael Collins and Annie Kim

Ghost Stories

~

Annie Kim

Annie Kim’s first poetry collection, Cyclorama, won the 2015 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Southern Indiana. Her poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in The Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, Mudlark, Asian American Literary Review, DMQ Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers and the recipient of a Virginia Center for Creative Arts fellowship, Kim works at the University of Virginia School of Law as the Assistant Dean for Public Service.

Michael.CollinsMichael Collins’ poems have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 50 journals and magazines, including Grist, Kenning Journal, Pank, and Smartish Pace. His first chapbook, How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water, won the Exact Change Press Chapbook Contest in 2014. A full-length collection, Psalmandala, was published later that year, and a second chapbook, Harbor Mandala, appeared in 2015. Visit www.notthatmichaelcollins.com for more.


First Runner-up: “The Dose” by Lissa Kiernan & Kim Peter Kovac

Second Runner-up: “Old Man Blue Fairy” by Dustin Michael & Neesha Navare

Honorable Mention: “Every Day a New Death” by Lisette Alonso & Janelle Garcia

Read letter from our guest judge, Ruth Foley


 About our Guest Judges

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERARuth Foley lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two greyhounds, one of whom sometimes gets mistaken for a cow. Her work is easy to find online and in her chapbooks, Dear Turquoise (dancing girl press, 2013) and Creature Feature (ELJ Publications, 2015). She is easy to find at fivethingsthatdontsuck.blogspot.com or by looking at her sofa. She serves as Managing Editor for Cider Press Review.

Patrick BagleyPatrick Shawn Bagley‘s debut crime novel Bitter Water Blues was published in January 2015 by Snubnose Press. His stories of hardscrabble life and rural mayhem have appeared in Crimespree Magazine, Thrilling Detective, Spinetingler, The Iconoclast, and the anthology Uncage Me. He was one of the founding editors of The Lineup: Poems on Crime, an annual anthology. Bagley lives and writes on a dead-end dirt road in a one-stoplight town. During the day, he works at a nonprofit community support program for adults with intellectual disabilities.

 

Need more? Read cahoodaloodaling‘s best of the best: 2015 Nominations
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Interview with our 2015 In Cahoots Guest Judge Ruth Foley

2015 In Cahoots Collaboration Contest submissions remain open until 10/1/15.In Cahoots Flier 2015

Ruth Foley, the poet in our Poet-Novelist judging duo for cahoodaloodaling‘s 2015 In Cahoots Contest, shares with us a little about her recent chapbook, collaborating, and her co-judge, Patrick Shawn Bagley.

Yonder Sm

Raquel Thorne: I’m a big fan of your chapbook Dear Turquoise from dancing girl press (2013) and can’t wait to get my hands on your newest, Creature Feature (ELJ Publications, 2015). Of your writing, you recently said, “I ask a lot of questions. I use the word ‘if’ a lot. I am much more comfortable with lack of knowing in a poem than in other parts of my life. I almost wrote ‘than in real life’ there, but if poems aren’t real life, I don’t know what is.” What questions do you explore in your new collection?

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERARuth Foley: My first instinct is to say that I’m not exploring anything to do with real life, because Creature Feature is not only drawn from monster movies, it’s drawn from monster movies that, in some cases at least, are closing in on being a hundred years old. Isn’t that wild? Hundred year-old movies? But the fact is that the poems aren’t really about the movies at all—they’re about the monsters, sure, and some of the other characters, and the actors who played them. At their heart, though, they’re about us.

I’m interested in questions of masks and humanity, of the way we treat each other, about how frightened we are of differences. I wasn’t thinking about these poems as political when I was writing them, but I was thinking about the othering that we do, the ways in which we comfort ourselves with the thought that we are normal while so-and-so is not. As if “normal” is a thing that exists. The monsters in Creature Feature are across the board more human than the humans, more “normal” than the characters who are supposed to be just regular people. I was also thinking about the sexual politics of the time, the ways in which these films portray men and women, the assumptions we as audience were expected to make, and how little some of these ideas have changed. Of course all of that is political.

I also might explore the question of whether Boris Karloff would have been my boyfriend if he hadn’t died six months before I was born. (Yes. Yes, he would.)

Raquel Thorne: What does collaboration mean to you as a poet?

Ruth Foley: Oh, all kinds of things. I’ve written collaboratively—with a fiction writer, although I stuck to poems; and as an essayist. I encourage my students to write collaboratively. And I have a tight-knit pack of poets who inspire and support me in multiple ways. I don’t think of myself as a collaborative poet, but that might be because, apart from the exceptions listed above, I don’t tend to draft collaboratively. But the influence of my writer friends—from across genres, but especially my poet friends—is all over my work. I have a rotating cast of characters in my head that serve as audience when I’m drafting, and whose concerns I keep in mind (although I’m just as likely to ignore those as not). I love nothing better than a great stretch of time—a long afternoon or a late night—talking to poets. They’re super-smart people, for one thing, and engaged with the world in all sorts of different ways, and they’ve all read stuff I haven’t read and seen movies I haven’t seen and thought about things I haven’t thought about in quite the same way if at all, and all of it goes churning into my brain and, if I’m lucky, comes out as something that’s totally mine but which wouldn’t have existed without them. They also keep me laughing, which I think does a great service to a poet. Or to anyone else, probably.

Raquel Thorne: Now this part’s like a game show: Can you tell us something cool about Patrick Shawn Bagley that he’d be too shy to share himself?

Ruth Foley: I am trying to imagine Patrick being shy about anything at any time, and I have to say I’m coming up pretty short. He’s funny and smart and knows how and where to bury a body, so we get along just fine. Which is good, because he’s smart and knows how and where to bury a body. And he’s a tough guy, but he’s got a giant heart, which he shows in little bits and pieces when he talks about his work or the beauty of Maine. If you’re reading this and you’re anywhere near Patrick, buy him a beer for me, please. I’ll pay you back later.

Stay tuned for our interview with Patrick Shawn Bagley!


OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERARuth Foley lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two greyhounds, one of whom sometimes gets mistaken for a cow. Her work is easy to find online and in her chapbooks, Dear Turquoise (dancing girl press 2013) and Creature Feature (ELJ Publications 2015). She is easy to find at fivethingsthatdontsuck.blogspot.com or by looking at her sofa. She serves as Managing Editor for Cider Press Review

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Guest Staff Announcement: Ruth Foley & Patrick Shawn Bagley

2015 In Cahoots Collaboration Contest – SUBMISSIONS OPEN

In Cahoots Flier 2015

About guest judges Ruth Foley & Patrick Bagley:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

 

Ruth Foley lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two greyhounds, one of whom sometimes gets mistaken for a cow. Her work is easy to find online and in her chapbooks, Dear Turquoise (dancing girl press 2013) and Creature Feature (ELJ Publications 2015). She is easy to find at fivethingsthatdontsuck.blogspot.com or by looking at her sofa. She serves as Managing Editor for Cider Press Review

 

Patrick Bagley

Patrick Shawn Bagley‘s debut crime novel Bitter Water Blues was published in January 2015 by Snubnose Press. His stories of hardscrabble life and rural mayhem have appeared in Crimespree Magazine, Thrilling Detective, Spinetingler, The Iconoclast, and the anthology Uncage Me. He was one of the founding editors of The Lineup: Poems on Crime, an annual anthology. Bagley lives and writes on a dead-end dirt road in a one-stoplight town. During the day, he works at a nonprofit community support program for adults with intellectual disabilities.

 

More on how to submit here.

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Issue #15 – Travelogue

Travelogue Cover Final
Travel Genre, an Essay

by Jim Ross

Guest Editor Spotlight
Pale Blue Dot
by Ruth Foley

Art, Poetry, & Literature

Bike Nation
by Dragos Ioneanu

Ankara
by David Russomano

Lunar
by Winston Plowes

The Prairie Demons
by Stephenson Muret

Twenty-seven, Twenty-four
by Maureen Alsop

From Visiting Day on the Psychiatric Ward
by Alan Catlin

This is Traverse City
by Becca Hawk

Cedar Key
by Peter Hurtgen Jr.

Safari through Southern California
by Vakseen

Salkantay
by Claire Ibarra

Waltz of the Romanovs
by Sophie Jupillat

Beggars
by Kenneth Robbins

Olive Wood
by Linda Caldwell Lee

A Place to Call Home
by Derold Sligh

Bonus Free Download:

Cover Artist: Travelogue
by Marenne Hoeksema

Interview
Kevin Rodriguez of Bop Dead City

Book Reviews

 


About Our Guest Editor

April Michelle Bratten HeadshotOriginally from Marrero, Louisiana, April Michelle Bratten has a BA in English from Minot State University in North Dakota, where she currently resides.

The daughter of an USAF active duty father, April grew up traveling and living across the United States and abroad. Her travels have greatly influenced her writing over the years, particularly her three year stay in Incirlik, Turkey. April adores the quiet beauty of the upper-midwest prairies, but she feels the most at home in the American deep south.

Her publications include decomP, Thrush Poetry Journal, Southeast Review, Stirring, Sheepshead Review, and Punchnel’s, among others. She is the Supreme Empress of Up the Staircase Quarterly and a contributing editor at Words Dance Publishing.

April’s next chapbook, Anne with an E, is forthcoming from dancing girl press in 2015. Her other chapbooks include Raw Dogs and Other Metaphors (Maverick Duck Press, 2012) and Drink This (Citizens for Decent Literature Press, 2012.) Her first full length poetry collection, It Broke Anyway, is available now from NeoPoiesis Press.

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