| Featured Book |
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| Just West of Famous |
| Charles Baxter doesn't pull any punches when he answers Lisa Coutant's questions in this month's author interview.
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| In this issue: |
An encore poem from Gol McAdam
Claire Litton's amazing Authenticity Leads
A collection of poetry from Craig Kirchner
New fiction from Maria Pollack and Josh Stewart
Plus great poetry from Corey Feiner, Gary Wilkins, and Sherry Pasquerello |
| Coming Next Month |
Anne Frasier has some fresh ideas about how to boost her book sales,
Ron Hogan is the ultimate literary insider - and next month he's going to take the Picolata Review into his world for an exclusive look around.
Plus:More great poetry, short fiction, and features. Enough great writing to satisfy any literary palate.
Want to submit to The Picolata Review? Send your submissions and queries to submissions@picolatareview.org
Complete guidelines can be found here. |
| The Picolata Review |
Managing Editor Mark Pettus is a full time journalist in St. Augustine, Florida, and author of the novel, Transit Gloria
Features Editor Lisa Coutant is a consultant, former writer for the Philadelphia Theatre Review, and a fiction writer. She is also Vice President of the professional writing group, Pennwriters.
Poetry Editor Andy H-H., is a poet who lives in the beautiful countryside of West Yorkshire
with his partner and a menagerie of pets (a sheep occasionally stares in through the kitchen window), in a home surrounded by literary history. Ted Hughes was born there, Sylvia Plath is buried nearby, and first Emily Bronte, then Kate
Bush, made a certain stretch of desolate land five minutes' walk away very famous indeed.
Fiction Editor Serenity Banks's day job is as an industry magazine editor. She also writes an online sex-advice column, and is trying to find an agent for her latest horror novel.
The Picolata Review is a monthly online publication, and a place to find emerging writers and poets. We welcome you, and hope we'll see you again. If you forget our address, look for us just a little west of famous. |
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| Volume 1, Number 1 July, 2006 |
| The Emerging Writers Network's Dan Wickett, on Reading, Writing, and Remaining Relevant |
By Lisa Coutant, Features Editor
When Dan Wickett discovered that his old creative writing professor, Alyson Hagy, was publishing both a short story collection with Graywolf, and a novel with Simon & Schuster, he wanted to do something to help her, so he wrote a review of Alyson's novel, Keeneland, and posted it at Amazon.com. Dan worried that only those looking for Hagy's novel would find his review, so he emailed it to everyone in his address book. That email list soon morphed into the Emerging Writers Network (EWN), and Dan became a force in the online literary world.
Dan is not only the founder of EWN, a blog dedicated to exposing new readers to emerging and new writers, he is also a member of the Litblog Co-op, a community that every quarter recommends a list of novels by up and coming authors, in the hope of enticing readers to expand their reading lists.
I talked with Dan recently about how he first became involved in the online literary community and the future of blogs, literature, and EWN.
"I just wanted to get people thinking about buying books by writers I thought deserved more attention," he said. In May 2002, when he formally created the EWN and developed www.emergingwriters.net to store past reviews and interviews, Dan formulated the following EWN vision:
To develop a community of emerging writers, more established writers deserving of wider recognition, and readers of literary writers in order to increase the exposure of such writers to as many potential readers as possible.
Dan's site inspires discussions about great books between writers, publicists, and bloggers, keeping alive the dialogue about what is important in the world of writing and books. One thing that is important is increasing the sales of literary titles. Dan doesn't expect to see much change in the near future when it comes to sales of literary fiction. "I certainly don't see it disappearing," he said.
"If the MFA programs forced students to minor in literature, ensuring they read beyond their own work and their classmates', then it would assist in expanding literature sales." Dan thinks that while it's important to have future writers ensconced in classics, they should also be immersed in contemporary work.
Wickett says he has personally benefitted from the EWN. "I've gained a great number of what I'll call friends. People I converse with via phone, email, letters, and/or in person on a regular basis that I had no knowledge of prior to 2000. I've become part of a community of literature lovers – the monstrous majority of which are also just simply fantastic individuals."
He's also gained attention from publicists at both large and small publishers, who've inundated him with catalogues, galleys, and review copies to the point that he jokes he may need to add on to his house within another year or two and formally develop a library.
In the mean time, Dan intends to continue to develop the community/network of individuals interested in reading and writing and to continue to try to find tangible evidence that he is making a difference. As the sites continue to develop, both in content and aesthetics, he hopes they generate more traffic.
In the long-term, Dan envisions steering the Emerging Writers Network into publishing, so he can help authors he enjoys get their work into the hands of readers. He may even publish his own literary journal - like The Picolata Review |
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