Wilderness House Literary Review # 1/3
WHLReview145 Foster Street Littleton MA 01460
The Wilderness House Literary Review is a publication devoted to excellence in literature and the arts.
The WHLReview is published online quarterly with a best of annual print edition.
Deadlines are as follows March 1 – Spring June 1 – Summer September 1 – Autumn December 1 – Winter
The annual edition will be published in May.
Editor & Publisher
Poetry Editor
Fiction Editor
Nonfiction Editor
Book Reviews Editor
Arts Editor
Poet in Residence
The Wilderness House Literary Review is the result of the cooperation of the and the Wilderness House Literary Retreat.
Submissions
Poetry may be submitted in any form.
Short fiction may be submitted in three formats:
1. very short stories less than 500 words in length 2. short stories less than 1000 words in length 3. Short stories that don’t fit the above should be less than 5000 words.
Non-Fiction is just that so lets see some interesting footnotes.
Book Reviews should be positive unless the author is a well-known blowhard. Our mission is to encourage literature not discourage it.
Non-fiction should be short, (a lot) less than 5000 words.
Any form of art may be submitted with the constraint that it must be something that can be published in 2 dimensions. It’s hard to publish sculpture but illustrations together with some intelligent prose count.
Published works are welcome with proper attribution.
Please submit all works electronically. |
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Volume 1
number 1 is available on the web here and will be available
in paperbound book eventually. The same can be said of Number 2. Enough
housekeeping. It’s
been a long hot summer and many of us have been very lazy. So lazy that we
never got around to a vacation. That will be remedied shortly by a trip to
“The Continent.” To Americans that generally means France but can also be
stretched to include anything on the European sub-continent including England
where they insist they are not part of “The Continent” In England “The
Continent” is France. Got that strait? OK so this will be an abbreviated
Grand Tour. In the “old days,” generally taken to be the late Victorian days,
the grand tour of Europe was what rich Americans did with their summers when
they had gotten tired of The Hamptons, and other exotic places. In late
Victorian novels the wealthy made their grand progress across “The Continent”
spending their time in a Grand Hotel in Paris and other great cities of the
world. Wasn’t it “grand”? I’ll be
leaving the best time of the year in New England. In this part of
Massachusetts the height of Autumns fire is October 15th more or
less but before Autumns magnificent peak the colors form a palette only
dreamed of by artists. I claim no credit for the following picture. I merely
pressed the shutter button while sitting at my desk. This is a view of
Bumblebee Park, Littleton Massachusetts, United States of America.
Art & Essays
This issue
finds most of our essayists up in the mountains (writing we hope) so your
editor has to resort to his own keystrokes. In anticipation of his trip to
Paris and other parts of “The Continent” he offers us a glimpse of the pancion
he will be staying in: -
By Steve
Glines Fiction
We hear every
day how much the world hates America. Fanatics willingly blow themselves up
on the off chance that some American somewhere might find discomfort. You’d
think we were monsters. There are times we have to remember that America,
specifically the United States of America is made up of people from all over
the Globe. “Give me your tired, huddled masses yearning to breath free.” It’s
not us or them. We are made up almost entirely of them. Almost every American
is here because they or some ancestor wanted to get away from “there” and
find a new life, which included a large measure of being left alone. The unfortunate
truth is that because most Americans (specially new ones) want to be left
alone. They don’t often learn or want to learn about anything going on in the
rest of the world. Americans are isolationists. Few Americans (second
generation and beyond) speak anything but English (and or some Spanish) and
have little inclination to learn anything else. I speak English, a fact I am
sure will be annoying every Frenchmen I will ever meet. I will confess to
having encountered Americans abroad that make me cringe. Years ago I was
wandering down one of the endless galleries in a Paris museum when I heard
over my shoulder, “Oh Harry, isn’t that one pretty.” The nasally Midwestern
twang echoed “Ugly American” and I vowed then and there to tell everyone I
met that I was a Canadian. I have never met a Canadian anywhere near as
offensive as an uneducated Midwestern American farmer. Being an
American, born and raised, I have little appreciation for why the rest of the
world both loves and hates us. One of the best scenes in Italian cinema comes
from Federico Fellini’s movie “Amacord.” It’s about the goings on in a small
town in Italy. Everything in town comes to a halt so that townsfolk can row
offshore just to see an American Ocean liner. Such is the magnetism of America.
Lest we think that’s a thing of the past my own daughter experienced the same
love for America when she walked through Europe with a group of college
students. Towns opened their hearts to these students in an open display of
Love for America and the idea and ideals of America. She said she was made to
feel like a Rock Star. Emmanuel Ngwainmbi tells us a story of
coming to America.
A Leap in the
Dark Poetry
I’ve always
found it curious that writers are held distinct from poets. Both a novelist
and a poet write word on paper and both craft their words into sentences or
at least stanzas. The difference between a sentence and a stanza alone does
not account for the perceived differences. I have read novels written in
poetry (remember Ulysses) and short stories as brief as a poem. I like to
think that writing in general can be compared with visual art. A novel is a
movie, a masterpiece in oil a novella, a watercolor painting a short story
and a pen and ink drawing or charcoal sketch a poem. Here then are the
collected drawings of our friends: Book Reviews
If our
essayists were busy not writing poetry and essays they were busy reading.
Summer reading is the best part of summer if you have the luxury. Our
reviewers did. by Peg Lauber Marsh River Editions
Chapbook 48 pages, 2006 Review by Lo
Galluccio POETICA:REFLECTIONS OF
JEWISH THOUGHT, Publisher/Editor Michal Mahgerefteh,WWW.Poeticamagazine.com
or Poetica, P.O.Box 11014, Norfolk,
VA 23517.$14.00/year, $5.00/issue. July, 2006. Review by
Hugh Fox By Robert Cooperman Higganum Hill Books PO Box 666, Higganum CT
06441 (860) 345-4103, $12.95,
paper rcdebold@mindspring.com ISBN 0-9776556-1-X Reviewed by
Steve Glines As we said when we started this is a joint
production of Wilderness House Literary Retreat and the “bagel bards”.
The “Bagel Bards” have just published their first (and we hope of many)
anthology. You may purchase it here:
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A new and exciting travelog:
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