Katie P. Sherman

On the corner of King and W. Main Street, in a renovated Masonic Temple, you’ll find the home of The Hub City Writers’ Project (HWCP). The building — which houses a coffee shop, bakery, independent bookstore, and the Hub City Press offices — is impressive in and of itself with striking white columns and an intricate stone awning. However, its façade is nothing in comparison to the formidable ideas being exchanged within. The Hub City Writers’ Project has spent nearly 25-years fostering a literary community dedicated to Southern stories. For those who believe Southern stories became extinct following the deaths of Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty, think again. Each year, Hub City Press publishes six to eight novels and collections from Southern writers shouting to be heard and, while each voice is unique, the message is clear. ‘This place has more to say!’

I recently sat down with Anne Waters (Executive Director of the Hub City bookstore) and Meg Reid (Director of Hub City Press and Programs) to discuss the future of their press, the importance of literary voice, and upcoming events which shouldn’t be missed.

S85: Tell me a little about the HWCP? How did you get started?

AW: The bookstore is the youngest component, started eight years ago. In 1995, a group of writers started chatting about what their community really needed. They all agreed Spartanburg needed literary identity. They wanted a place to knock around ideas. They wanted comradery.

MR: [Our founders] needed somewhere where after you’ve spent time alone in your room writing, you can engage with other people. That’s what humans were designed to do!

S85: And so HWCP was born. How have the original goals shifted?

AW: They’ve exploded! We are still coming from this same idea of place. But I think our organization has gone well beyond anyone’s dreams. The majority of major presses have shifted from the south. We saw a vacuum that Hub City could fill.

MR: The bookstore really supports and puts money back into the press. I don’t know if that was the original intention but it works. The press provides influence and voice to the bookstore. We try to curate our collection by purchasing books with integrity. The majority of books are well-written and crafted. They speak to the audience intended. I wouldn’t take every book as there are some with different philosophies but, they speak to their audience with authenticity.

S85: How have you fostered a connection to the Spartanburg community?

AW: We do a lot of collaborations. Last spring, we partnered with Spartanburg Youth Theater to stage a play here. The kids won prizes and got tickets. We also do programming with the library. We sponsor book clubs, including a feminist book club called “her story.” We have a cookbook club, which gives us a chance to break bread in the community. We aren’t just about lofty ideas. We have programming that is cross genre, age group, and ethnic groups.

S85: What have you learned through this process?

AW: No job is too small. No idea is too big.

S85: Your goal was to create a literary community and if people come to your events, they’ll see many of the same faces again and again. Some are literary tastemakers including C. Michael Curtis, longtime editor of The Atlantic. You recently ran a contest in honor of Curtis. What is his relationship to HCWP?

MR: He reads manuscripts for us. He’s still an editor. He’s very active and, alongside his wife Betsy Cox, he’s a dear friend.

S85: Tell me a little about the winner of the contest. Were you all pleased?

MR: It is a favorite of ours. The author, Emily Pease, published individual stories throughout the years in high quality journals including The Georgia Review, The Missouri Review, and Shenandoah. We couldn’t have chosen better. In three rounds of judging, this book stood out each time. Emily has been working and writing for over 30 years. She has an incredible resume but no one had bought the book. The industry is obsessed with young people and we’re so glad we could give an opportunity and a life-changing amount of money to someone who has dedicated her life to craft. The book, Let Me Out Here, will be released next month.

S85: What are some things HCWP is doing that no one else is?

AW: We’re good at taking a book from inception to packaging and editing. We are small and deliberate in what we publish. Sometimes this is painstaking. We are all passionate about what we do. Ultimately, our goal is to nurture writers and cultivate readers. This means we try to reach the community as a whole. Everyone from tiny tots and annual book drives to speaking at book clubs. We want everyone to feel this place is the center.

MR: We are a very tight knit community and we have fostered relationships over lifetimes. I don’t think everyone can say that. Outside that, we use lots of social media and branding tools, top to bottom. We try to really engage with people. If you have a question, we try to answer it. That pays back when we put content about our books up.

S85: What is the best thing about this job?

AW: The people.

S85: What is the worst thing?

AW: The people [laughs]. No! Honestly, there aren’t a lot of drawbacks. The people I work with are very ambitious and hard-working. This also means we’re all tired though!

S85: What are some of the challenges of running a small press?

MR: There are many. Publishing generally is hard. Getting people to pay attention to books is hard. The six to eight books you’re publishing are important and you want people to take notice. Still, there’s limited time in a day. We have a small staff!

S85: So let’s get the word out! What’s coming out from HCWP this spring?

MR: We have the best spring lineup. As we mentioned, the winner of the initial C. Michael Curtis short story prize by Emily Pease will be out soon. The Magnetic Girl by Jessica Handler is a great feminist read. Booksellers love her and we do too! In May, an anthology about fishing called Gather at the River [edited by David Joy and Eric Rickstad] is coming out. David Joy brought it to us and was adamant that all proceeds go to the charity Cast for Kids. Right now, we are publishing a lot of women. For a long time, we’ve been an all-female staff and that feels like part of our brand at this point. We try to, to some extent, combat the rampant sexism and ageism within the industry!

About the Publishers

A native Arkansan, Anne Waters  worked for twenty years in regional book publishing before taking a break to raise her son, Eli. During that time she ran an art gallery and yoga studio. She is thrilled to be back working in the world of bookselling and publishing. What she is reading: The Handmaid’s Tale (I just saw Margaret Atwood at Winter Institute); What she just finished: Jessica Handler’s The Magnetic Girl published by Hub City Press; What is next in her stack: Etaf Rum’s debut novel  A Woman is No Man.

Meg Reid is a book designer, editor and writer living in South Carolina. Her literary essays have appeared online in DIAGRAM, Oxford American, the Rumpus, and elsewhere, and she also writes extensively about design. Her MFA in Nonfiction is from University of North Carolina Wilmington, where she served as Assistant Editor of the literary magazine, Ecotone, and worked for the literary imprint Lookout Books. She currently lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where she is Director of Hub City Press. The most recent book she’s read and adored is Impossible Owls by Brian Phillips.

About the Interviewer

Katie Sherman is a journalist and an award-winning author who covers fine food and parenting—two things rarely related—in Charlotte, NC. This year, she was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Katie has an MFA in fiction and an affinity for Southern Gothic literature, cider beer, Chicago, and morning snuggles with her two daughters. She has published extensively in literary magazines across the country. She just finished reading The Great Believers and loved it so much! Next on her nightstand is Everything Here is Beautiful.

Featured Image: Left to right; Executive Director of the Hub City Bookstore, Anne Waters, with one of HCWP’s founders Betsy Teter.

It’s that time again! South 85 Journal is currently reading for our Spring / Summer 2019 issue, which will come out June 15, 2019.   We are seeking fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and visual art. We are especially interested in work that conveys a sense of place, presents a strong voice, or provides a unique point of view.  For examples of what we love, check out our Fall / Winter 2018 issue. We are also accepting blog posts about writing and literary topics on an on-going basis.

For more information and to submit, visit our Submittable site at https://south85.submittable.com/submit. We look forward to hearing from you!

Andrea Marcusa

You’ve just done a deep dive into difficult material: the death of someone dear, a trauma from childhood, a failure that cuts deep. Your editor, professor, and writing colleagues — those carefully honed beta readers — were moved by your work. You were surprised by how moved because you weren’t sure about what you’d ultimately created. You knew it came from a deep place, there was discomfort in the writing and perhaps a tiny bit of pleasure, too. But when you finally were ready for others to see it, uncertainty remained. The material was raw and you felt exposed. When the piece finally had an audience and it was well received, you are thrilled. Maybe a tiny bit surprised. And relieved because there is nothing worse than thinking you’ve hit the mark and having a writing audience sit silently, unsure.
Now, it’s a few days or perhaps a week later and you are ready to go back in. The next draft. The next chapter. The next poem of the collection, or story for a volume of linked stories. You try to get back to that place. You do all the things you usually do — heat your coffee to a certain temperature, stretch your neck and torso, take the dog out, feed the cat. You stare at the blank page. You type a sentence, erase it, start again.

The author who appears on the page is someone you don’t recognize. It’s not the writer who dove in and mined his or her depths but someone who is delighted to skim across the surface, spend enormous amounts of time getting the wording of a sentence right, scouring the internet for a certain fact. You find yourself writing about something entirely unrelated to “your story.” Instead of writing about trauma, you are relaying a disagreement you had with the dry cleaner. Or, you are writing about birds. You don’t even like birds. Why are you writing about them? Despite all these questions, you marshal through until you end up with something that feels complete.

But what is it that you have written? And why have you written it?

I call this palate cleansing writing. The kind of writing that we do after a deep dive into something extremely emotional. It’s a break. A respite from the heavy lifting and, a necessary part of the writing process. The mind is still working on the big story but it can’t be forced. It needs to go at its own pace. And so, we have these breaks from the depths where we find ourselves bobbing on the surface, writing about our backyards, our altercations, our preoccupations, anything. But the good news is this. We are writing.

I used to try to resist this process and make myself go back to the other story. I would sit there, numb, like a child refusing to eat her vegetables at dinner. Now, I understand this as a rest stop in the journey. I tell myself writing about birds or plumbers or my coffee cup keeps my mind moving forward, while the big story is set on a windowsill to rise before it can go into the oven and bake.

Andrea Marcusa is a writer of literary fiction and essays that have appeared in The Baltimore Review, River Styx, Epiphany, New South, and others. She’s received recognition from the writing competitions Glimmer Train, Third Coast, Ontario Review, Ruminate Magazine, and New Letters and been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes.

We know you’ve been waiting for it. The Fall / Winter 2018 issue of South 85 Journal is now available online!

Flash Fiction Contest Winners

In October, we announced the winners of the 2018 Julia Peterkin Award for Flash Fiction. Now, you can read the stories!

• Winner – “What You Said” by Natalie Troy
• Runners Up (listed in alphabetical order by story title) – “Dump Columbus” by Charlie Watts, “Eric Clapton’s Girlfriend” by John Mattson, “Fiesta” by Kathleen Wheaton, and “Mark 12:31” by D. Nolan Jefferson

Other Creative Work

We are also excited to present work by the following contributors:

• Artwork – Michelle Brooks, Bette Ridgeway, Roni Rae Robbins, Ashleigh Rosanna, Shelley Sarna, Seigar, Maria Angela Feliz Cabrera Sumadsad, and Bill Wolak
• Fiction – Lisa Bubert, Kim Farleigh, Joshua Isard, Sean Murray, and Emily Townsend
• Non-Fiction – Gabriela Denise Frank, Lori Horvitz, Anna Kaye-Rogers, and A.J. Romriell
• Poetry – Charles Cantrell, Thomas Griffin, Anna Harris-Parker, Michael Jack O’Brien, Barry Peters, Abhijit Sarmah, and Kerry Trautman

Reviews

Need something to read over the Christmas break? Read our reviews for some ideas!

• The Largesse of the Sea Maiden by Denis Johnson – fiction review by David Hartshorne
• Too Much and Not in the Mood: Essays by Durga Chew-Bose – non-fiction review by Maya Wood
• Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God by Tony Hoagland – poetry review by Chris Menezes

Next Reading Period

With this issue complete, our staff is going to take a well-deserved break. We will open our reading period again on February 1, and we hope you will consider submitting then.

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!

During the summer, South 85 Journal relaunched Converse College’s Julia Peterkin Awards with a flash fiction contest, and we are excited to announce the results.

Julia Peterkin Award for Flash Fiction

“What You Said” by Natalie Troy

Natalie Troy lives near a beautiful lake in the wilds of northern New Jersey where she recently completed her first novel. Her short fiction appears or is forthcoming in Firewords Magazine and Montana Mouthful. Connect with her on Twitter @_natalietroy.

Runners Up
(Listed by Title in Alphabetical Order)

“Dump Columbus” by Charlie Watts

Charlie Watts earned an MFA from Brown University in 1992. After a long detour through communications consulting, Charlie returned to writing in 2013 and has published in journals including Carve, Narrative, Storm Cellar, and Sequestrum. His story, “Arrangements,” won the 2015 Raymond Carver Short Story Contest. He and his wife, a chaplain, have three grown children and live in Freedom, New Hampshire.

“Eric Clapton’s Girlfriend” by John Mattson

John Mattson is a writer, screenwriter, songwriter, and teacher. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son. His bio is incomplete.

“Fiesta” by Kathleen Wheaton

Kathleen Wheaton lived and worked as a journalist in Spain, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. Her fiction has appeared in many journals; her collection, Aliens and Other Stories, won the Washington Writers Publishing House Fiction Prize. She is at work on a novel about the dictatorship in Argentina.

“Mark 12:31” by D. Nolan Jefferson

D. Nolan Jefferson is a librarian and  writer based in Washington, DC. A California native, he has earned an MFA in Film from Art Center College of Design and a MLIS from Louisiana State University. Pursuing an MFA in fiction at American University, he won the 2017 AWP Intro Journals Project Award, has been published in Tahoma Literary Review and Red Savina Review and enjoys tacos, records, and fellow introverts.

Get excited about reading these amazing stories in our Fall / Winter issue, which we will release December 15, 2018. Also, because we received so many awesome stories in our contest, we will publish a few other entries in our blog before the release of our issue. We look forward to sharing this work with you!

In the meantime, you can continue to submit longer fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry, and art for our upcoming issue through November 1 at https://south85.submittable.com/submit.

Thank you for your continued readership and support!

Russell Carr

I have a confession. I majored in Russian Literature without finishing War and Peace.I read small sections of it in Russian, but was expected to read all of it in English. In the past 25-years since college, I hesitate to mention my major, because most people ask about War and Peace. Is it any good? Is it worth it? I had to look away at these questions and try to change the subject, or lie about it.

Why did I never read it? Partly because I was a Dostoevsky man at the time (Yes, there are camps among Russian lit nerds). Also because, every time I tried, it just seemed boring to me. In college, I was reading the classic translation of it by Constance Garnett, a British translator from the early twentieth century. Then a few years ago, I heard about Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation from 2007. It was supposed to be more accessible to today’s American readers, if Americans still reads tomes like War and Peace. I felt the difference immediately.

Here’s a brief comparison:

Constance Garnett: “Anna Pavlona, with the adroitness and quick tact of a courtier and a woman, felt an inclination to chastise the prince for his temerity in referring in such terms to a person recommended to the empress, and at the same time to console him.”

Pevear and Volokhonsky: “Anna Pavlova, with her courtly and feminine adroitness and ready tact, wanted both to swat the prince for daring to make such a pronouncement about a person recommended to the empress, and at the same time to comfort him.”

To me, the second is less stodgy, less like an old Victorian house you might visit in Vienna. The second version has plainer language, language we are more likely to use or hear every day as Americans, including vernacular such as “swat.” We can connect more with Anna Pavlova’s feelings, both her anger and compassion, about the prince.

Don’t get me wrong! I’m not saying that Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translation is better. I’m saying it fits better in our time. It sounds better to our ears. This often happens with translations. They peak based on their adherence to cultural norms of a given era. For instance, in the early twentieth century, Garnett’s translations were considered the gold standard. They were loved, particularly in Britain.

As readers, we often underestimate a translation’s importance. However, it shouldn’t be undervalued. After all, it’s how we are able to access the work. Our understanding of a novel, memoir, short story, or, especially, a poem is filtered through the translator’s understanding of it and his or her ability to convey the work in our language and idiom.

Here are several factors that will allow you to compare translations when multiple versions exist:

•  The form of English the translator knows: It’s important to find out where the translator lives. The translation might be into British English, American English, or Canadian English. A translator naturally will use idioms from his or her country. If you are an American and your translator of a French novel is from Wales, then you will be trying to understand French humor translated into Welsh humor. You would also need to understand Welsh expressions, particularly for dialogue. You want the translation to be as close to your form of English as possible to reduce the unfamiliar filters it must pass through on its way to you.

•  The translator’s intended audience: Good translators think about their audience just like authors do. Is the translator a professor and envisions a translation that will awe his or her colleagues with esoteric details in footnotes? Or, is the translator intending the translation for a more general consumption?

• Time period: Even if nationality isn’t a concern, the language can still be confusing if it was translated several generations ago. Expressions will be different, but also the translation might have been reviewed by censors and required to meet certain cultural requirements to be published. For instance, expletives in the original might have been omitted or altered. Prejudices might be smoothed over or exaggerated from the original to fit the translator’s time.

• Cultures and Languages: Translation involves both the culture and language of the work. You should look at the translator’s credentials. Does he or she have advanced degrees in the original language? If so, they have studied it fairly extensively. Other signs of expertise can be lengthy periods of time living in both countries.

• Translator’s own writing: Is the translator a writer also? If so, the translator will likely have an understanding of writing craft. This understanding of craft will help the translator properly interpret the original author’s ideas. Vladimir Nabokov, for instance, was an outstanding translator for Americans because he lived in both Russia and America and wrote in both languages. It is also helpful if the translator has written in the same genre as the author’s work. Poets often translate poetry better than fiction writers, for instance.

• Dedication to the author:Has this translator published translations of other works by this same author? It conveys a deeper understanding of that particular writer and also experience with the writer’s style.

In short, translations matter. With the right one, War and Peace has become much more engaging for me. With a contemporary translation, I made it all the way through this great work of literature, despite Tolstoy’s soap box soliloquies about Napoleon and history. In fact, maybe finishing it is why I’m in Chekhov’s camp now.

Russell Carr is a physician living in Maryland.  He will complete an MFA at Converse College in fiction with a minor in nonfiction by the end of 2018.

Penny Zang Wilcox

5 a.m. Morning shocks itself into focus, the sky coffee-dark and thick with silence. The hopeful kind. 

I am a 5 a.m. writer. Judging from others’ faces when I tell them how early I wake up each morning, on purpose, I must be a masochist. The question of “why” floats over their head like a cartoon dialogue bubble. Why sacrifice sleep? But also, perhaps: why bother writing at all? 

My reasons are easy to explain. To write, I need the luxuries of both time and quiet, spread out before me, clean and unbroken. With a full-time job and a family, stretches of uninterrupted quiet time only exist in my house before sunrise. The other answer to “why” is one I rarely say out loud, but one I am always thinking. For me, writing is worth the sleep deprivation, worth the early bedtime on a Friday night. I’ve written whole novels (at least the messy first drafts of novels) in that sliver of morning before anyone else on my block is awake. I brew the coffee, feed the cat, and get to work. 

I started waking early to write when my son was a baby. For the first year of his life, D woke every two hours (and didn’t sleep through the night until he was four years old). I would cradle him to back to sleep and then lie awake, lamenting my sleep deprivation and my inability to write.  During these bleary-eyed mornings I started to revise old work, piecing sentences together and deleting scenes without mercy.  Since I was already awake, why not use the quiet time for something besides laundry and Facebook scrolling? Many of my memories of my son’s first year are blurry, but I do remember returning to writing after a long hiatus, and how miraculous it felt. 

On Twitter, the 5amwritersclub hashtag brims with donut and dance party gifs, unbridled encouragement, and sometimes more enthusiasm than even I can handle so early in the morning. I check in and cheer on the other writers, motivated by all of the early morning writers who are also sacrificing sleep in pursuit of getting a few words on the page. 5 a.m. is our time. We work past the exhaustion. We drink all the coffee.

Here’s the thing: 5 a.m. writing isn’t for everyone just like daily writing isn’t always necessary (or feasible), no matter how many craft books tell you otherwise.

As a creative writing teacher, I am the first to tell my students that they need to find their own process. Some writers prefer silence and some need a carefully curated playlist. I know many writers who work through the night. Good for them. Not so much for me. What is most important has been developing healthy writing habits, creating a realistic type of discipline in the midst of work and family and the thousands of ways a day can fold in on itself without warning. On the hardest days, the days filled with self-doubt and rejection, I remind my students there isn’t one path to being a writer. Give yourself time to figure it out. For the most part, I think they believe me.

I have woken up at 5 a.m. to write through illness, family deaths, holidays, vacations, and weekend mornings when all I want to do is sleep in. There have also been plenty of days (and years) when I have not written at all. The difference is that now I no longer feel guilt over non-writing days because I know I will make up the time. If it isn’t my body’s internal clock waking me up the next morning, it will surely be my son, his eyes wide and eager to start the day. He’s been an early riser since he was born. What can I say? I’m pretty sure he gets it from me.  

Penny Zang Wilcox is from Baltimore and now lives in Greenville, SC, where she teaches English at Greenville Technical College. She graduated from West Virginia University with her MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) and her work has appeared in publications such as the Potomac Review, Pank, Iron Horse Literary Review, Baltimore City Paper, and New Ohio Review. She is currently working on her first novel.

Featured Image Credit: Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash