Every semester the Converse College Low-Residency MFA program brings staff changes to our journal.  We’d like to announce the staff who will be working on the Spring / Summer 2017 issue, which will be released June 15, 2017.

Returning to Staff

We would like to thank the following staff members for continuing their involvement with South 85 Journal:

● Melissa Sherrer (Managing Poetry Editor)
● Anthony Reese (Managing Prose Editor)
● Russell Jackson, Reed McFarlin, Chris Menezes, and Monica Torres (Poetry Editors)
● Gwen Holt, Joshua Springs, and Shianna Whitner (Fiction Editors)
● Aaron Dargis (continuing as a Poetry Editor and joining the Fiction Editors)
● Courtney McQueen (Artistic Director and Fiction Editor)
● Jonathan Burgess (Non-Fiction Editor)
● John Newlin (moving from the Fiction Editor position to serve as the Review Editor)
● Rick Mulkey (Contributing Editor)
● Stephen Gray (Webmaster)

Joining Our Staff

We are always excited to welcome new staff to the journal because this means new ideas and fresh perspectives.  We would like to welcome:

● Susanne Parker (Fiction Editor)
● Samantha Moe (Non-Fiction Editor)
● Katie Sherman (Blog Editor)

Leaving Staff

We’d like to wish those staff members who aren’t returning the best in their future endeavors. I am sure they will be successful in whatever they do.

● Angela Raper (Review Editor since January 2016)
● Annette Sanders and Kay Stewart (Non-Fiction Editors since January 2016)
● Kristi Hébert (Blog Editor since January 2014)

I would like to specially thank Kristi Hebert for her time as our Blog Editor. We started this journey together, and while South 85 Journal has changed quite a bit over the past three years, she’s been a loyal and consistent part of our advancement.

To the readers, I’d like to thank you for continuing to support our journal – by reading, submitting, and telling others about it.  We look forward to bringing you the next issue.  In the meantime, write like mad, and if it’s good, we want to see it!

Sincerely,
Debby DeRosa
Managing Editor
South 85 Journal

The Fall / Winter 2016 issue of South 85 Journal is now available online.

Creative Work

We are pleased to present work by the following contributors:

• Artwork – Adorable Monique, Daniel de Culla, Monika Malewska,  Fabrice Poussin, Katerina Pravdivaia, Jean Marc Richel, and Gilmore Tammy
• Fiction – Jody Gerbig and J.T. Townley
• Non-Fiction – Micah McCrary, Matt Paczkowski, and Heather Gemmen Wilson
• Poetry – Clifford Browder, Ingrid Bruck, Merrill Oliver Douglas, Kym Cunningham, Allison Goldston, Brit Graham, Lynn Marie Houston, Jessica (Tyner) Mehta, and Carl Wade Thompson

Reviews

For some great reads, check out our Reviews section, featuring reviews of:

• My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout (Fiction)
• M Train by Patti Smith (Non-Fiction)
• The Spoons in the Grass are There to Dig a Moat by Amelia Martens (Poetry)

Interested in Submitting?

Our reading period is still open!  We are currently accepting submissions for the Spring / Summer 2017 issue, which we will release June 15, 2017.  We hope to hear from you!  Submit now.

About Us

South 85 Journal is published by the Converse College Low-Residency MFA program.  Thank you to our staff of volunteers who put countless hours into making this issue happen.

We hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as we enjoyed putting it together!

South 85 Journal is pleased to announce recognition for two of its stories published in 2015.  “Symbiosis” by Janet Schneider and “Fish Hook” by Justin Eisenstadt, both published in our Fall / Winter 2015 issue, have been selected to receive the 2016 Write Well Award sponsored by the Silver Pen Writers Association.

According to the Write Well Award website, “This award seeks to recognize outstanding short stories and flash fiction from both print and online journals and to give readers a way to experience stories that they might not otherwise be exposed to.”  Twenty-five different fiction pieces were chosen for the award this year.

“I’m excited my story will appear along with twenty-four other winning stories in the 2016 Write Well Anthology. Thanks to South 85 Journal, my story will enjoy a second life and receive even wider circulation,” says Janet Schneider, author of the winning story, “Symbiosis.”

Janet writes during the winter in Berkeley, CA and in Charlevoix, Michigan in the summer. Her work has appeared in Harpur Palate, Pooled Ink, Bear River Review, Traverse Magazine, Yourlifeisatrip.com, and Fishfoodmagazine.com.  She received her MFA in fiction writing from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. When she’s not writing, she’s riding her bike. You can see more of her work at www.janetschneider.com.

Justin Einsenstadt, who wrote “Fish Hook,” says, “I’m incredibly grateful to South 85 Journal for originally publishing my story and to the Silver Pen Writers Association for choosing to share it with a wider audience. ‘Fish Hook’ is a story that went through many changes before it found itself, often drastically so, and this recognition is a validation for me of the importance of revision. The process between the first draft of a story and the final draft can be a long and tedious one, but I’m glad I stuck with it. I can’t wait to read all the other wonderful stories in the 2016 Write Well Anthology.”

Originally from Baltimore, Justin currently lives in Spokane, Washington where he is attending the MFA program at Eastern Washington University. His fiction has appeared in Gulf Stream, Jet Fuel Review, The Ilanot Review, Swarm, and Connotation Press, among others. He has one wife, two guitars, and three cats.

Check out all 25 winning stories in the 2016 Write Well Anthology, which is now available on the Kindle and in paperback format through Amazon.com.

Emilee Struss

My eyelids are heavy. Natural daylight diminishes from my room with the sunset, so I turn on the one lamp in my apartment. It was a long day.  However, I need to write. I must write.

Sometimes I feel like I have a sixth sense.

I am sure other people have this, too. And, no, I do not see dead people. If you see dead people, you should seek help immediately. My sixth sense is the feeling of time. Even more so, the sense that time is slipping away. It’s moving too fast, and I can’t stop it. I can’t accomplish all the desires that lay undiscovered before me. One of those things I desire is to inspire others through writing. Passion ignites passion. Just by following my passion to write, I can inspire others to pursue their passions.

Some evenings I sit in my cheap apartment, with thin walls, aware of it all. Aware of the students around me. All of them searching for their passion and purpose in life. Various styles of music entertain them through headphones while working on essays and projects. Outside, I hear screechy breaks from a Budweiser truck pulling up beside the liquor store. A tow truck drives by and removes a vehicle from its all too convenient parking spot. Someone knocks on my front door. Time passes in this way for each of us, unnoticed. It slips by while we deal with the oddities of life. For so many, passion gets lost in the business and busyness of life. In my apartment, a young man comes through to check the vents, and smiles at me sweetly. He is probably a student himself. Back in my room, a microwave hum tells me that one of my roommates is home. I think about unfinished homework, the fact that I have work early tomorrow morning and my heavy eyelids. I wrestle with the idea of staying up later to write.

I realize that if I fall asleep, that will be another day wasted. Sure, I attended class, went to work, and accomplished small tasks around the house. But what did I do in regards to pursuing my passion for writing? I think about all the statistics. Those living out their last breaths on earth commonly regret one thing: not pursuing their passion. I look out the window of my apartment and watch the snow drift at an angle. I am aware of it all, raw to the reality that this fire inside me to write could waste away. It could get drown out by time. By life.

Back in my apartment room, a single lamp lights a circle on my desk. The Budweiser truck has left. The tow truck took his victim and vanished. The guy checking the vents has gone. I hear my roommate’s door shut. The sun has gone down and the snow continues to sway through the air. My eyes are still heavy. The cursor on my computer blinks at me. I realize the importance of seeking out this fire within me to tell of something. To reach out and ignite the flame within others. Even with the sixth sense of time slipping away, and words unwritten, I have to write. It is my passion. It is to be pursued.

Emilee Struss recently graduated with a degree in Creative Writing from Minnesota State University, Mankato. Currently, she lives in Bellevue, Idaho, and follows several passions including rock climbing, trail running and of course… writing.

Francis DiClemente

When I read poetry I eschew formalists who pack their poems with words I need to look up in an online dictionary. I avoid books filled with single poems that run multiple pages and prefer compact works imbued with concrete details and spoken with an honest voice. I like to feel the writer behind the words, and an example of my taste is Samuel Menashe.

I recently read The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, and while I admire Stevens’ intellect, his use of imagery and technical construction, I struggled to slice through the book and skipped over the last fifty or so pages. I couldn’t wait to reach the end.

I am not smart enough to interpret much of his symbolism, and I didn’t want to work that hard anyway. I believe reading should be a pleasure, like it was when I was a kid and would snag the evening sports page from my father while he sat at the kitchen table after dinner. At the same time poetry, like classical music, can produce a sublime experience for its audience. It has the power to examine life, making observations that resonate with readers and inspire further thought.

And three “poets of the street”—my go-to trifecta for verse—deliver in this regard. I admire Langston Hughes, Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski for the rich details they offer and a palpable authenticity that leaps across the page; you get the sense they not only wrote these poems but lived them as well.

For brevity, we turn to “Suicide’s Note,” where Hughes uses just twelve words to tell a dramatic story:

The calm,

Cool face of the river

Asked me for a kiss.

The story has a satisfying conclusion while also giving readers numerous options for interpretation.

I prefer short, narrative poems with clean resolutions. That’s because I often find these poems online and read them during my lunch hour. I will peruse the site PoemHunter.com and read through a few poems in between bites of my daily turkey or tuna sandwich.

One of my favorite poems is “Hell is a Lonely Place” by Charles Bukowski, which I came across on PoemHunter and also read in Bukowski’s book Septuagenarian Stew: Stories & Poems.

In the poem, Bukowski describes an aging, disease-plagued couple. The man has cancer of the mouth and the woman suffers from Alzheimer’s disease. The man faces the humiliation of putting “his wife in rubber diapers like a baby.” The poem concludes with the man shooting and killing his wife in an act of mercy and then turning the gun on himself.

Bukowski writes:

the shots didn’t arouse

the neighbors.

later

the burning tv dinners

did.

The police investigate the scene, go through the couple’s belongings and discover a closed savings account and a checkbook with a balance of $1.14.

Just like Hughes with “Suicide’s Note,” Bukowski gives us a full story arc. And the poem stands out because of its honesty, clear language and emotional gravity.

Bukowski drew me in with the details about the man’s decaying jaw, the rubber diapers, the empty bank account and the burning TV dinners. I felt a deep empathy for the man and woman; I sensed the story could have been true and I mourned the couple’s loss.

And that’s the strength of story-based poems. They have the ability to make us sympathize with others and reflect on our existence. It’s just my opinion, but formalist poetry with reserved language and obscure references cannot measure up. The words do not endure because they fail to reach the heart. These works dance in the realm of intellect and never risk the courage to throw a punch to the gut. And I believe poetry should aim to elevate our consciousness and create an emotional response in the reader.

Francis DiClemente is a video producer and freelance writer who lives in Syracuse, New York. He is the author of three poetry chapbooks and his blog can be found at francisdiclemente.wordpress.com.

Author’s Photo Credit: Susan Kahn

References:

Bukowski, Charles. Septuagenarian Stew: Stories & Poems. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1990.

Hughes Langston. Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage Classics, 1990.

Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, 1982.

Noelle Sterne

After too many years, I was painfully getting back to writing. For four years, I’d faithfully scribbled my “morning pages” (per Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way), the only writing I could manage. As I struggled through countless tear-soaked journaling sessions, my fragile new hope told me it was time.

For weeks, in the local newspaper I’d studied the Sunday magazine feature called “Great Neighborhood Secrets” on terrific but little-known places and events in the area. Only 100 words—I could creep into that. But what to write?

One day, crossing Broadway from the market, I walked in front of the firehouse to get to the library. And between the two buildings, there it was! A small pond, almost completely hidden by tall rushes and overhanging trees, pristine, intact. I’d never noticed it before.  If I hadn’t, probably others hadn’t either.

Lily pads floated on the water’s surface, insects hummed and buzzed, and small birds flitted overhead. The pond was an anomaly, an oasis, and a comfort that all of nature hadn’t succumbed to concrete and strip malls. Like the bubbles from a small fish in the pond, my title emerged: “Hidden Jewel.”

I tapped out a too-long first draft. After weeks of editing, cutting, and polishing, on a crisp November morning I sent the piece out to the newspaper.

Winter dragged on. No reply. Spring emerged and grew warmer. Nothing. As I gained writing strength, I became preoccupied with other pieces. But my annoyance grew the more I checked my log. The paper could have at least replied with a form email.

Then, in late May, the phone rang. Seeing the newspaper’s name on the caller ID, I assumed it was another computer-generated, randomly dialed, automatic message subscription solicitation. I answered half-heartedly, with No already in my voice.

To my shock, the editor identified himself. “I apologize for the late response. We’d like to publish your piece—two months from now.”

I tried to form words but could only groan with paralyzed ecstasy.

“Oh,” he continued, taking my strange sound for assent, “where shall we send the $50 check?”

When I hung up and regained my power of speech, I ran screaming into my husband’s study. He was on a European conference call closing a big deal, but this was more important. He graciously put the CEO and CFO on hold and rejoiced with me.

The piece came out on a bright Sunday in July. We bought all 12 copies at the local newsstand and sent several to friends. One even sent it to the mayor.

Since then, I’ve published and sold many pieces and have written many more. The morning pages have delivered what Cameron promised. I write almost daily now, and the ideas and projects keep flowing. But “Hidden Jewel” was especially meaningful.

Maybe, you could say, I should have found the impetus to continue writing without creating this piece. Maybe, you also could say, I shouldn’t have needed the validation of the sale. But after the long dark days and nights of wrestling with the self-depreciation demons, I freely admit that first sale thrilled me, and more. It gave me the hope, inspiration, and impetus to keep writing.

© 2016 Noelle Sterne

Noelle Sterne (Ph.D.) publishes in many venues, including Author Magazine, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Children’s Book Insider, Graduate Schools Magazine, Inspire Me Today, and Writer’s Digest. Her Trust Your Life: Forgive Yourself and Go After Your Dreams (Unity Books) helps readers reach lifelong yearnings. Her handbook based on her academic coaching practice assists doctoral students: Challenges in Writing Your Dissertation: Coping With the Emotional, Interpersonal, and Spiritual Struggles (Rowman & Littlefield Education).  www.trustyourlifenow

Richard LeBlond

Tragic events often change the lives of survivors. Some become part of the team raising money to find a cancer cure. Others rally against drunk drivers or lobby on behalf of safer air travel. At least a small amount of survivor guilt is probably involved in these life changes. But I’m sure most are inspired by the higher motive of not letting the victim or victims die in vain. The survivor feels a responsibility, even an obligation, to set things right.

For nearly 40 years, I was burdened by that obligation because I was unable to fulfill it from a failure to write. One day in Athens, Greece, in the mid-1970s, I witnessed hundreds of men and women holding hands and marching unarmed towards the sound of automatic weapon fire – that is, the sound of carnage – during an uprising under the military dictatorship of Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos.

It was one of several traumatic events I witnessed or endured during two and a half years in southern Europe and north Africa. The trip started as an open-ended vacation, but by the time it was over, I had spent a day surrounded by Moroccan police armed with submachine guns; sat in a Guardia Civil interrogation room convinced I would be sentenced to six years and a day in a Spanish prison; befriended an American who, against his will, had become a pig inspector in Yugoslavia; then had my own personal encounter with Athens’ secret police. And for a while I worked for a newspaper that was likely financed by the CIA. (I think this paragraph would make a good movie.)

I returned to the States in 1974 full of these incredible stories, but it took me nearly 40 years to write them. I lacked confidence. More than once I told myself I was a second-rate writer with a third-rate mind. During that long interim, I kept hearing the voices of the Athens marchers and knew their story might die with me if I couldn’t set it down. In all those years, I never found another account of what I had witnessed.

I had written a brief op-ed piece about the marchers back in 2002, but I still needed to write the whole story. By the winter of 2010, I realized I would have to write it whether I was ready or not. Nearly 70 years old and 13 years into my COPD, I had to assume I was running out of time. And I wanted to relate all of my adventures in the Mediterranean, or at least as many as I could squeeze past my censor. Some things happened others don’t need to know about, and there is embarrassment enough in what the censor allowed. Autobiography teeters on the edge between which lies to tell and what truths to leave out.

February 2010 was a good time to be indoors. Thanks to the closing window of opportunity, I had reached a truce with my demons, and out poured the stories. I wrote nonstop, six to seven days a week, 8-10 hours a day for two months. I began each day listening to the same piece of music, during my morning walk, a 10-minute-long Salve Regina written in the 1500s by a Spanish priest during the Inquisition. It set the perfect mood, as my journey had begun among the gitanos on the south coast of Spain, where I had my own taste of the Inquisition with General Franco’s army of police.

During the decades of not writing, I had told my stories several times to friends, which helped to keep details alive. Even so, I had forgotten a few names, and I’m fairly certain one character was actually two. But the stories remained clear, and I can still experience their actuality in my mind. That is especially true of the Athens marchers.

Hemingway said “The first draft of anything is shit.” But for me the first draft became another level of inspiration, and I wrote with a greater sense of responsibility, propelled by the marchers. Every time I came to their passage, I bawled from reliving the experience. Even now, I bawl when I read that passage. It is my own little post-traumatic stress disorder.

I found the task of editing and rewriting to be enjoyable and fulfilling, like working on a four-dimensional tapestry. The first draft was the warp, and it became a process of adding on and pulling out, of changing forms and colors. The rewriting process brought new insights and taught me how to let things go. For the first time in my life, writing felt like art.

Richard LeBlond is a retired biologist living in North Carolina. Since 2014, his essays and photographs have appeared in numerous U.S. and international journals, including Montreal Review, Hippocampus, Compose, Smoky Blue, Appalachia, and Still Point Arts Quarterly.

After taking a break for the summer, the South 85 Journal staff is ready to read again!  Our reading period is open, and we will be accepting submissions through April 30, 2017.

We’d love to see what you’ve been working on.  If you have something ready, you can submit now.

Our next issue is the Fall / Winter 2016 issue, and we will release it on December 15, 2016.

Our entire staff from last issue is returning, and we would like to welcome a few new staff members:

● Poetry Editors – Russell Jackson and Chris Menezes
● Fiction Editors – Jessie Marshall and Joshua Springs

All of our editors are students or graduates of the Converse College Low-Residency MFA Program.

Thank you for continuing to support our journal!

Kelly DeLong

After decades of writing, I have discovered a single truth—there is only one reason to write and that is for the sense of satisfaction I get from sitting at my desk a couple hours a day, putting to paper the life inside my head.  For me, there is no other reason to write.  There can’t be.  It’s pretty clear by now that I’ll never make a living at it, never win a major award and never become famous.  Moreover, if I stopped writing today, other than me, there is no one who would care.

That might sound sad or pathetic, but it’s not.  I began writing in the first place because I’d always known that there was something inside of me that needed a release.  The more I wrote, the more I felt I accomplished something that was important to me.  For years I wrote without a thought about publishing or making money.  I just wanted to write.  I needed to write.  It was as simple as that.

When I was a teenager I wrote stuff I called “poetry.”  I was quite proud of it, so much so that I showed it to my speech professor at the community college I attended.  Rumor had it he was a poet.  A week after handing him a stack of my work, I entered his office and asked him what he thought.  He shook his head and handed my pages back to me.  On the top poem, he’d written “What is this?” and “This doesn’t make sense.”  I discovered that day that I wasn’t a poet.  But that didn’t stop me from taking a poetry workshop at the state university I transferred to.  In that class I learned that in order to write in a particular genre, you actually had to read that particular genre.  I didn’t read poetry, which was one of the reasons I struggled to write it.

Still, I had to write.   I’d grown up a non-reader, who just got by in school.  Not until I was twenty did I finally start reading books on my own.  By the time I found my way to a fiction workshop, I’d been voraciously reading novels and short stories for a little over a year.  That might not sound like a long time, but it was enough for me to conclude that the release I needed would come from writing fiction.  I had found my form.

I wrote when in school, when out of school, when I was working full-time jobs.  Nothing killed my love of writing fiction.  I made my way to an MFA program, and after seven years of writing, I published my first short story in a magazine that wasn’t affiliated with the school I attended.  It would take several years before I published something else.  Of course, when I say publish, I’m talking about placing a story in a magazine with a circulation of fifty.  I knew my work was only being read by about three or four people (I’m including my mother). I was gratified though that somebody out there thought my work was worth the time it took to put it in print.

Eventually, I published a couple of pieces in magazines that actually paid money, and, then, one of the great surprises of my life happened—a publisher wanted to publish not one but two of my manuscripts.  I would have two books published!  The publisher was new, very small (a one-man operation) and couldn’t pay an advance.  I didn’t mind.  I was elated.  Bigger things were certainly headed my way.  I just knew that my books would sell and that my next book would be picked up by a major publisher who would pay me a big advance, and, as a result of my book’s success, prestigious magazines would solicit stories from me, providing me with an audience who was emotionally connected to my writing and who would pay to keep that connection.

I soon learned though that my books, like most of the thousands and thousands of books published every year, are read by next to no one.  Also, getting my stories published by literary magazines—big or small—was as difficult as ever.  It felt to me that after nearly thirty years of writing, I had gotten nowhere.  I reached the realization that my work would have an emotional connection to no one since no one was reading it.  My writing hadn’t had an effect on anyone.  That knowledge, I have to admit, pained and depressed me for a while.

It did not stop me from writing, however.  I reached the conclusion that my writing had a tremendous effect on one person’s life.  Mine.  It had shaped my life, had pushed me to practice, to improve, to reach a certain level of competency and skill that nearly everyone would like to achieve no matter what they do.  Writing has become a part of who I am.  It doesn’t matter if no one else knows it.  I know it.  That’s enough.  I’ll always be the only person who’s read all my work. I’ll always be the only person who cares about every word, every punctuation mark I put on the page.  So be it.  I have spent countless hours as my desk contemplating my creations, and I have valued every minute of it.

Kelly DeLong is published in many literary journals including The Sun, Evansville Review, The Jabberwock Review, Roanoke Review, Palo Alto Review, among others. He is also the author of the novel The Poor Sucker. Further, his non-fiction book, The Freshman Year at an HBCU was published last year.