Author: John Winkelman

Last Day of May, 2015

John Winkelman

Sitting in the Lyon Street Cafe with a journal book, a notebook, a Chromebook, Esperanza Street, and Rudy Rucker‘s recently released Journals 1990-2014. The work book, apparently, covers a lot of ground.

June approaches, and with it a titanic pile of work. In the day job the current project will hit the “WE HAVE ONE MONTH LEFT” milestone tomorrow. In Master Lee’s class we have one week until the Festival of the Arts performance. Rick and I are fitting in private practice sessions whenever we can, to offset the time we spend teaching in class.

But the biggest news involves Caffeinated Press, and it comes in two parts. First, today is the last day for submission to Brewed Awakenings II, the house anthology of short stories. Tomorrow we start looking at all of the submissions and figuring out which ones will make it into the anthology. I don’t know the exact submission count, but I do know it is probably closer to 100 than it is to 50.

The second is The 3288 Review. Submissions are rolling in. At the same time we are working on the website (going live very soon!) and meeting frequently to hash out the final details of design, distribution, etc.

Oh yeah: June is when we set up our new office space on Kalamazoo Ave, just south of 28th Street.

In the spare moments left after all of this, I still have a house to maintain and numerous repairs and upgrades.

And at some point I will need sleep and/or food.

There Are Many Like It

John Winkelman

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…but this one is mine.

This is my garden. This is the seventh iteration of my garden. I have tried six other times, and have become exceedingly efficient at it.

In the past I have grown, or tried to grow, all manner of different vegetables and herbs, with varying degrees of success. For most plants, I had my best luck with the green leafy bits of species which otherwise are known for flowers or the underground parts. My radishes would have spectacular foliage but the radish qua radish would be about the size of a jelly bean. Similar luck with broccoli; leaves the size of tablecloths, and the green vegetable bit would be the size of a mouse and suddenly turn into a beautiful bunch of tiny yellow flowers. Giant chard would be nearly indistinguishable from crab grass. Tomato plants would grow to the size of horses and yield a single tomato.

Though I followed advice from Knowledgeable People, things never improved.

There were a few plants, however, which did well. Basil. Hot peppers. Some herbs.

So this year I have scaled back, both in quantity and variety, to just those plants with which I have had success in the past – hot peppers, herbs, and basil. 68 total plants. 34 hot peppers, 14 various herbs, and 20 basil plants. Nothing in pots or hanging on hooks this year, other than the raggedy avocado tree and two Jack Fruit saplings, which were beautiful in their pots inside over the winter, but appear to be not able to handle being outside, even in this surprisingly (compared to the past four years) mild spring.

For all of the other things I have grown in the past, I will rely on the hard work and expertise of the vendors at the Fulton Street Farmer’s Market.

Pre-Ides Doldrums: Or, May I Continue, May?

John Winkelman

Because of a migraine-ish headache I requested the day off from work. The pain is at a low ebb at the moment so I can bear to look at a screen.

The 3288 Review is open for submissions! Tonight is our third official meeting, where we will finalize the few details which still need to be finalized, and lay out a course for the next fifty days. Fifty, being roughly the number of days until the deadline for submissions to issue #1 (to be published in mid-August), seems like a large number at the front end of it, but the whittling down has already begun. June 30 is just over the horizon.

Spring weather is here, finally, and I have laid in most of my garden for the year. My plans are simple – about three dozen hot peppers, a handful of herbs, and some of the easier-to-grow greens, like collards and kale, and maybe some chard. No tomatoes this year; I have seen progressively diminishing returns over the past three years so, for the first time since about 2010, no tomatoes in my garden. That simply means I have more room for cayenne, cherry bomb, habanero, serrano, jalapeno, Thai dragons, Thai birds-eyes, and Hungarian wax peppers. And likely some other varieties, too.

Another change is that I am only growing from seedlings. No sprouting seeds this year. So many other people are so much better at that kind of thing than I am, and I am happy to pay them for their efforts at the Farmer’s Market.

As I get more of a handle on my finances I have started planning for fixes and upgrades to my house and property. Right now I have it narrowed down to “rip out and replace everything that isn’t actually my house or my garage”, which sounds about as expensive as it probably will be.

My Pile of Literary Journals

John Winkelman

As part of my role as dogsbody Chief Operations Officer for Caffeinated Press I spent a lot of my time in research. The current Big Project is The 3288 Review literary journal, which is now accepting submissions. The research portion started out as a trip to local bookstores, but now that Socrates Cafe is closed, Grand Rapids is woefully under-supplied with lit magazines and journals. So I hit the exhaustive list at Poets & Writers, and began ordering. To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, once you get locked into a serious literature collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

This list will be updated as the collection grows.

American Short Fiction 58
Asimov’s Science Fiction 471/472
Black Warrior Review 41.2
Border Crossing Vol. 4
Brick 94
Crazyhorse 86
Creative Nonfiction 52, 53
Dissent Magazine Spring 2015
Fantasy & Science Fiction March/April 2015
Gigantic Sequins 6.1
Green Mountains Review 27.2
Interzone 246
Lapham’s Quarterly 7.4, 8.1, 8.2
Massachusetts Review 55.3
McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern 45, 46, 47, 48
Michigan Quarterly Review 54.1
Midwestern Gothic 16
n+1 22
New Delta Review 27
NOON Annual 5
Oxford American Spring 2015
Pank 10
Paris Review 205, 209, 210, 212
PMS poemmoirstory 14
Prairie Schooner 88.4
Red City Review January 2015
Redivider 12.1
Rosebud 58
Saint Ann’s Review Winter 2015
Saltfront 1, 2, 3
Salt Hill 33
Siblini Art and Literature Journal, Vol. 1
Tin House 62
Wherever 2014 issue 1
Zoetrope All-Story 18.3
Zyzzyva 102

Mid-April Already

John Winkelman

The days are indeed, as Bukowski would have it, running away like wild horses over the hills. Thanks to rain and some warm weather West Michigan is slowly turning green, and it is beautiful to see.

My free time remains captive to Caffeinated Press and The 3288 Review; enough that I probably should stop considering it “free time”. Or even “mine”. But it is all for a good cause, and fun besides. This past week saw a two hour “get it in gear” meeting for The 3288 Review, which segued into a sort of unofficial planning-for-the-future meeting for Caffeinated Press. To wit: we have a couple of ideas for fun projects which will help tie us in to the Grand Rapids creative communities, and allow us to give something back. We needn’t only look for literary talent to publish. West Michigan hosts a large pool of talent in all forms of creative expression.

Following closely on this is the realization that we need to have physical office space. Meetings in living rooms and on porches are all well and good, but they quickly begin to feel less like career builders and more like hobbies. I am reminded of a friend, many years ago, who in a fit of pique referred to the UICA as the “Suburban Institute for Contemporary Arts”. I don’t see that happening to us, though I admit I might be naively optimistic. We have a diverse-enough cast of characters, both in people and people-who-know-people, that we can avoid the subtle trap of provincialism.

Then again, provincialism sells.

Office space will allow us to host community-level gatherings, be they round-table meetings of our (over a dozen) editors, or open space for people to camp out and write, or to provide workshops for the local literary community. And at the most practical level, sometimes you just need to get out of the house.

This may be the last beautiful day of the month. Time to work on the yard.

ConFusion 2015, Panel 6: Current State of Short Fiction

John Winkelman

[This post is part of a series which collects and expands upon notes taken during panel discussions at the January 2015 ConFusion science fiction convention in Dearborn, Michigan. The index page, which links to the other posts in the series, is here.]

Panelists included Scott H. Andrews, Ron Collins, Elizabeth Shack and moderator Catherine Shaffer.

As I complete this post, on Easter Sunday 2015, more than two months after the fact, I find myself thinking back on the panel itself. So much laughter and goodwill, and people – editors, writers, and publishers – who have worked their fingers to the bone, but still have such extraordinary optimism and generosity for people in the community of genre fiction. Scott Andrews, in particular was a treasure trove of information. It helps that he is the publisher (and editor-in-chief) of Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Here are my notes. Less narrative form, more of a raw info-dump.

* Who is publishing, reading, and writing?
** Galaxy’s Edge
** Uncanny Magazine
** Bastion Science Fiction Magazine
** Fireside Fiction
** Lackington’s
** The Dark

* Early issues are where you find your audience and pool of writers. This means that for publishers, the first few issues of a journal are where you determine what will be submitted going forward.

** Terraform
** Urban Fantasy
** SubmissionGrinder

* Professional rate for genre fiction authors is $0.06/word

* Clarkesworld. Neal Clarke is a GENIUS at marketing. He has made his enterprise so successful that it can no longer be considered a semiprozine.

* Flash Fiction (1000 words or less) is becoming more viable,thanks to on-line/digital publishing

* Podcasts/audiobooks of short stories are very popular. This in itself makes the shorter forms more commercially viable, particularly for venues which are comfortable releasing works online.

* Who’s writing short fiction?
** Seth Dickinson
** Gregory Norman Bossert
** Cat Rambo
** Helen Marshall
** K J Parker
** Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
** Alex Dally MacFarlane
** Tamara Vardomskaya
** Laura Pearlman

* Trends for 2014 – 2015
** fewer zombie stories
** More humor in Flash Fiction

* For any question “Is anyone publishing X?”, the answer is YES. BUT: Can you find the publisher willing to publish X?

* Novellas are becoming a viable length again, thanks to digital publishing.

* “Making a living” in short fiction? Difficult. Very difficult.

* Readers of old media sometimes resist converting to new media. People want their analog. This is why many of the classic magazines are still viable.

* Rejectomancy – divining the underlying message in a rejection letter (explanation here).

And that’s about it for this panel. More to come in the weeks ahead.

Hello, April!

John Winkelman

Well, it’s been a quiet week here in Lake Wobegon Grand Rapids, near the shores of Lake Michigan. Spring has sprung with the crocuses running rampant in neighborhood lawns and our first, albeit brief, thunderstorm Thursday morning. Work has been quiet thanks to the one hand being out of synch with the other, though that will likely change very soon. Bench time is a precious commodity and not to be wasted on frivolous pursuits. We will shortly move into our new office space on the fourth floor of 99 Monroe Ave, overlooking, um, Z’s Bar and Restaurant.

Energy level in Master Lee’s classes is still high. The students are practicing hard, and we are giving them a lot to practice. We have two upcoming events – our annual demonstration at the Grand Rapids Festival of the Arts on Saturday, June 6; and our Sifu Day celebration on August 8. We seem to have passed a tipping point of some kind and have a lot of students suddenly learning more advanced forms.

Caffeinated Press is going strong! We have at least three novels in the editing pipeline and many stories submitted for Brewed Awakenings II. The 3288 Review is approaching the edge of the precipice where it goes from being an idea to being A Thing. I have a stack of lit journals on my coffee table which is approaching two feet tall. We are homing in on the format we want, and from there on to the amount of content we can have for each issue. Then we need to figure out advertising, distribution, compensation, all that fun stuff.

All this is lead-up to our community introduction event at Schuler Books and Music this upcoming Monday, April 6, at 7:00pm. We hope to see a room-full of writers to whom we can offer our services as editors and publishers. Word on the street is that we will have something close to a full house. I am allowing myself to be cautiously optimistic. Regardless, We can expect a significant surge in submissions.

All of which is to say, Spring will be busy, and summer likely moreso. But all in a good way.

Knowing the Words

John Winkelman

As a coda to my recent pilgrimage to Vietnam I now have a pen-pal of sorts, a friend-of-a-friend named Yen who lives in Saigon. We send emails back and forth a couple of times a week, discussing the differences between west Michigan and south Vietnam. Often there are photos, too.

Finding the right words for the conversation can be challenging. She knows some English, but is not fluent. I don’t know any Chinese or Vietnamese at all. We began corresponding back in early November, just before the first major snowstorm of the year. When she saw the photos Yen had a lot of questions. She had never seen snow before, or even been outside of the tropics. Of course she knew what snow was, and winter, and all of those concepts, but there are a hundred small details which go along with winter which I found myself explaining. Like, for instance, why all of the photos were so dark. And where all the people were.

The quick answer was “Because it’s winter.” But that doesn’t explain things to someone who has never seen winter. So then I explained how little daylight we have in the winter, and that the photo with the sun low on the horizon was actually taken in the middle of the day, not 8:00 in the morning. And the trees aren’t all dead; they’re dormant. And that everyone is inside because today the air temperature is -20C. And that the wind chill made things feel even colder. And then I need to explain wind chill.

Yen isn’t unschooled about these things. She has family here in the US, out west and down south. Sometimes it seemed that every other person we encountered in District 5 had been to the United States or Canada at one point. And of course there is the internet. The concepts were not unfamiliar, but the explanations – finding the right words in the right context – are not easy.

Another example. There are more people in Ho Chi Minh City than in all of Michigan. Even the most crowded downtown event will not have as many people as a similarly-sized neighborhood in HCMC on any random day. So no matter where or when I take photos an appropriate response would be “where are all the people”?

Yen thinks the photos of snow are beautiful and hopes to travel here one day to experience winter.  I would like to tell her that some days Michigan is colder than anything in southern Vietnam outside of a cryogenics facility.

And right now the challenge is to find the right words to explain the emotional impact, after five months of gray and brown and white, of seeing the green spears of newly-sprouted crocuses peeking up through the grass.