For those in the know, Patty Seyburn is celebrating her first Pushcart thanks to her prizewinning poem, “The Case for Free Will”. But for those who don’t know (and you should), it appeared in the very first issue of Arroyo Literary Review! It’s a rare privilege to have a Pushcart winner arise from a debut issue, so we’re more than thrilled, to say the least. Thanks to the talented eye of our first editor, Eric Neuenfeldt, we’ve set the standard for all issues to come!
The poem will appear in The Pushcart Prize XXXV: Best of the Small Presses (2011). We are so proud – of both Patty and our publication – for this fantastic success. Congratulations everyone!
Finally! We’re both excited and relieved to have the new issue back from the printer and out of the boxes! We’re sure issue two is just as beautiful as issue one, and we’re as proud as ever to call it ours. We have a few new things, as well as ingredients we hope our readers will come to expect from Arroyo. We have a fantastic translation from Kirk Nesset of Eugenio Montejo, poetry from authors such as Christopher Buckley and Jesse Nissim, an amazing interview of Dorothy Allison by CSUEB’s own Jacqueline Doyle, and fiction from names like Kate Braverman and Jeff Fearnside. We couldn’t be happier with the way the issue turned out, and can’t wait to recreate the same enthusiasm building issue three. Thanks to all of our contributors for making this another awesome issue!
Our first trip to AWP in Denver was more than we hoped for. The cold weather couldn’t keep us from all the panels, the full book fair, and all of other events and goings-on. Sharing a table with Richard Peabody from Gargoyle/Paycock Press might sound crowded, but it was the most fun I’ve had in a long time, meeting all of the amazing writers and students that came to check out Gargoyle and met Arroyo for the first time. Richard, you’re awesome. We shared insights with Kitty Lewis from Brick Books in Canada, and became utterly enthralled with the guerilla promotion tactics from the many editors at Ugly Duckling Presse at Table X, who made quite a stir by standing on their chairs silently for minutes at a time and read foldable issues aloud in the middle of the aisles. Whatever you guys did, it worked. We couldn’t stop staring. Thanks for the issues of 6X6 you guys swapped for an issue of Arroyo.
We met writers, publishers, editors, swapped issues for issues, traded fun stories with Chatham, and enjoyed drinks with the editors from Cimarron Review. We had an amazing experience, and we hope everyone else did, too. Can’t wait to go back.
We at Arroyo like to think we’re looking out for amazing art no matter what we’re doing, and when we saw the images from Naomi Grossman, we were blown away. Her art is gorgeous; both sophisticated and edgy, art that is more than visually pleasing, but challenges the mind. Works like Touch Me ask the viewer to contemplate more than just the unique, romantic shape of the human body, but what the body expresses with its simple, silent pose.
With Holding My Breath, Grossman asks us to contemplate more than words, but the functioning of the human mind’s repetitive thought processes as its own art form. The words become fluid, artistic motions and cascading shapes. On paper, almost abstract, we can conjure a whole new way of thinking about the things we say and how they’re perceived.
