Category: general

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Runaway Anthology Results!

Runaway Stories

Runaway Stories: An Anthology edited by Luanne Smith, Michael Gills, and Lee ZachariasThe Runaway Anthology results are in at long, long, last. We had hoped to make this announcement three weeks ago. However, the universe conspired to slow us down with dreadful things like illness, injury, surgery and several deaths in our families, but we are gathering our wits at last. We are ready to announce the stories our judges have chosen to include in our 2020 short fiction anthology, Runaway Stories: An Anthology [working title]. *

Here are the judges’ choices:

  • “The Stones” by Richard Shelton
  • “Neighbor Boys and Cousins” by Jodi Angel* honorable mention $100
  • “Kansas” by Emily Chiles
  • “Ritual” by Albert Aden* #1 $200
  • “Running Toward Away” by Richard Jay Goldstein
  • “If That Isn’t a Sign From God, Then I Don’t Know What Is” by Philen Bradford
  • “Sugar” by Misty Skaggs
  • “The Whiskey Monkey” by Maureen O’Brien
  • “Vivian Delmar” by Louise Marberg
  • “Nothing to Light Our Way” by Emily Hoover* honorable mention $100
  • “Daphne: The Aspen Version” by Erica Olsen
  • “Reapers” by Jeffrey Byrem
  • “Reading Herzog” by Michael Simpson
  • “Iris with Mermaids” by Deborah Johnstone
  • “Sioux Falls, South Dakota” by Marisol Cortez
  • “Sever” by Kellie Carle
  • “Lubbock 1974” by Bobby Horecka
  • “Running in Circles” by Merrill Gray
  • “Under the Grapefruit Tree” by Shelbi Carpenter
  • “Willie’s Crucifixion” by Rick Campbell* #2 $200
  • “The Thing” by Lou Morrison
  • “The Anchor Song” by Maurice Ruffin
  • “After We’re Gone” by Brett Riley
  • “Xmas, Jamaica Plain” by Melanie Rae Thon
  • “The House of Unintelligible Omens” by Randall Watson
  • “Lost Her Way” by Jen Knox
  • “The Fishing Dog” by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Congratulations each of these fine authors. All of us at Madville along with our judges, Luanne Smith, Michael Gills, and Lee Zacharias wish you all the best!

* We are doing our best to have it ready in time for AWP 2020 in San Antonio! Come see us at booth number 1658.
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Neon Moon Reading Raised $250 for Casa Juan Diego

By the Light of a Neon Moon: Poetry Out of Dance Halls, Honky Tonks, Music Halls and Clubs
Janet Lowery and Meg Spesia smile for the camera under a blue and white sign reading "Casa Juan Diego 4818 Rose Entrada"
Janet Lowery with Meg Spesia, a Catholic Worker from Chicago now working at Casa Juan Diego in Houston.

With support from the English Department at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, on Wednesday Oct 16th in the Art Gallery on campus, poet Janet Lowery hosted a reading of poetry from By the Light of a Neon Moon, the anthology of poems she edited for Madville Publishing. With the help of the Montgomery Arts Council, fiction writer Cliff Hudder, and 2011 Poet Laureate Dave Parsons, a reading from the anthology was also delivered on Thursday October 17 at Lone Star College, Montgomery campus.

By the Light of a Neon Moon: Poetry Out of Dance Halls, Honky Tonks, Music Halls and ClubsSales from the anthology at both readings amounted to $250.00, all of which was donated to Casa Juan Diego, a House of Hospitality in Houston which provides food, clothing, and shelter—both long-term and short term—to immigrants and the homeless. They accept donations of food, clothing and other items on their premises on Rose Street and online through their website.

Poets from the anthology who read at UST with Janet Lowery included Katie Hoerth,  Lesley Clinton, Winston Derden, and Dave Parsons. Poets reading at Lone Star with Dave Parsons and Janet Lowery included Houston poet Winston Derden and poet Karen Head, editor of the Atlantic Review.

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Congratulations Gianna Russo!

Gianna Russo reads from One House Down

Congratulations, Gianna Russo on a successful book launch!

It was a huge success, and we couldn’t be happier for her. Last night, she officially launched her One House Down. There were about 100 people there and they gave her a standing ovation, an encore call, and then bought every single book!

She read at the beautiful University of Tampa, where we well be attending the Other Words Conference with her in just a few short weeks. It was the perfect venue for this collection of poetry focusing on Tampa, and Gianna is the perfect person to tell the stories of this, her hometown.

So, again we say, congratulations, Gianna Russo! You deserve it.

Here are just a few of the comments from early readers:

“…happiness is a snow globe, our house glued inside…: This is what I feel when reading One House Down, this fantasy in verse, this beauty contained in sprawling lines and stanzas. Each poem, a song. Each song, a swoon. Russo’s newest collection is both a love song and an indictment of a place she knows so well, a Florida without palms and sun, a Florida that is grit, a Florida that represents our world-one which breaks the heart and heals it in the same beat.

—Ira Sukrungruang, author of In Thailand It Is Night

One House Down is filled with story-poems from the unsung American South, where natural beauty butts up against strip malls and human ugliness. Tracing her family’s history in Tampa, a city many readers will be surprised to visit, Russo documents with terrific detail a diverse and fascinating culture in this original exploration of a very particular place.

—Heather Sellers, author of You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know:
a True Story of Family, Face-Blindness and Forgiveness

Get ready. You’ve read the tour-de-force of an opening sentence, a poem hurdling you into the world of One House Down. Now watch Gianna Russo illuminate histories so electric and elegiac, and shadows of shame so persistent, they’re writ in our bones. Yes, this is a book very much about place; but, more importantly, this wonderful collection examines the emotional spaces we occupy as we strive for satisfaction, safety, and meaning. As Russo writes, “Flash at sunset like the luck I never spied.”

—Erica Dawson, author of When Rap Spoke Straight to God

 From front porches to the places where we live, work, and love, to the highways that lead us both out of the city and back home again, One House Down takes us on a precise and lovingly rendered tour of the rhythms, movements, and loves of a city and its people. Gianna Russo’s poems, expansive yet intimate, make a case that perhaps poetry, rather than the evening news, is the true first draft of our collective history.

—Steve Kistulentz, author of Panorama and Little Black Daydream

When it comes to one’s place of origin, the tides are strong—the pull to hold on, and the push to let go. In this luminous, thoughtful collection, Gianna Russo explores the bittersweet legacies of old Florida. One House Down is rooted rooted deeply in place, whether Nebraska Avenue and Central Avenue, cultural seats such as the Fun-Lan Drive-In and the Sanwa market, or the ripe specificity of “Faedo’s Bakery [as] men roll loaves / of Cuban bread, turnovers of guava paste.” I appreciate Russo’s musicality and her formal agility, as she experiments with ekphrasis, ghazal, pantoum, and pecha kucha. Whether the stubborn advice of the Methodist Women’s Society Cookbook, or the dark chuckle of a plaster cat on a funeral home’s roof, these are poems we need.

—Sandra Beasley, author of Count the Waves

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Why Do Writers Need Websites?

Old typewriter keyboard with www keys side-by-side

It’s all about creating a brand

Authors need websites dedicated to their work. This foundational building block of brand creation is essential in today’s world where if you want your work to find an audience, you have to roll up your sleeves and do the bulk of the publicity yourself. This may seem obvious to self-published authors, but it is also true even if your book is published by a big-five publisher. You may think that if a traditional publisher buys the rights to your work, you’re home free, but that is not the case. Publishers’ budgets no longer stretch to a lot of publicity or advertising.

This is true for writers of all sorts. Whether you write fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s books, or magazine articles. The Internet is now the first place your audience or prospective publisher will turn when they want to find out about you and your work.

You’ll want to have a website even before you sell your book. It’s ideal to include a link to your website in your signature for query letters to agents and publishers, for example.

Here are the essentials:

Purchase your domain name

(www.yourname.com). It costs about $15/year, and you should do this immediately, even if you are not yet ready to use it. If the name you want is unavailable, come up with an easy to remember variation. If you wait to do this, you may have a hard time securing your desired name, and it may be very expensive.

.com is still the most popular, but people often elect to purchase the .net variation as well so there will be no confusion or lost website visitors. (It is easy to make both domain names resolve to the same website.)

Avoid using dashes or underscores in your domain name. That gets very clumsy when you are giving radio or t.v. interviews.

A Writer’s Website should display the following information:

 

  • Author’s Bio—See Best Practices for Writing Author Bios. Note that for your website, you can list ALL the awards and publications. Just keep a shorter version for publication with books and articles.
  • Clips—If you seek freelance work, you need clips. This term “clips” derives from the practice of collecting newspaper and magazine clippings to demonstrate a writer’s published work. These clips may be scanned copies of published works, such as copies of pages from anthologies Your clips may also include links to your articles that have been published online.
  • Samples of your writing—use this term if you don’t actually have any published clips. You need to put your best work on display but be aware that first publication rights are gone once it appears on your website, so the sample you use can only be sold as a reprint later.
  • A Blog—excerpt from: Should You Blog? And If So, What Are Best Practices? by Jane Friedman on the Writers Digest website:For fiction writers and poets, a blog should exercise your creative muscles and let you write in an unpressured way. Sometimes it can help you stumble on insights, as well as new friendships. However, for an aspiring writer, you have to be careful it doesn’t detract or replace the “real” work of writing the book or the manuscript. For nonfiction writers, blogs can be an essential part of your marketing and promotion—the author platform that helps you get published in the first place.

     

  • Sales Pages for your published work. It is not necessary to have an entire online shopping cart. Your publisher or POD vendor will have a page you can link to. You may even be able to earn a few extra pennies from each sale if you sign up for affiliate sales programs. Amazon and B & N have affiliate programs, for example.
  • A calendar to show any upcoming publication dates, book-signings or events you plan to attend.
  • Links to Social Media This is a big subject all its own—just know it should connect to your website.

The least expensive way to get started

I recommend authors with limited resources start by signing up for a free blog like the ones at http://www.wordpress.com. You’ll end up with an address like http://yourname.wordpress.com. You don’t even need a domain name, but if you have one, it’s a simple matter to “forward” your yourname.com domain name to the WordPress address. Your domain registrar will be able to talk you through this.

For just a little bit more

I prefer to purchase domain name registration together with the economy hosting from a well-known registrar www.godaddy.com or bluehost.com. ***BEWARE, GoDaddy will try to sell you all sorts of things when you check out. When you get started, don’t buy anything but the domain name. You can add those other services as needed, but you’ll be wasting money if you don’t understand what you’re buying.***

Kimberly Davis holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, and a BA from Columbia College-Chicago in Arts and Entertainment Media Management. She is currently the Director at Madville Publishing, where she solicits literary poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. In addition, Kim has been designing websites for 20 years. See her portfolio at Sublime Design Studio.

Contact her at kpdavis@usa.net to speak to your group.