WHLReview

145 Foster Street
Littleton MA 01460

The Wilderness House Literary Review is a publication devoted to excellence in literature and the arts.

To contact an editor simply click on a name below. To submit work to us please see "Submissions" below:

Editor & Publisher

Steve Glines 

Poetry Editor

Ravi Yelamanchilli

Poetry Readers

Carol Smallwood
Rose Bagby

Fiction Editor

Tim Gager

Nonfiction Editor

Steve Glines

Book Reviews Editor

Doug Holder

Arts Editor/Curator

 Steve Glines

Poet in Residence

  Tomas O’Leary

 Submissions

Deadlines are as follows
March 1 – Spring
June 1 – Summer
September 1 – Autumn
December 1 – Winter

Please read this section before submitting work.

Please include some form of identification in the work itself.

All submissions must be in electronic form. Our preference is an MS Word file uploaded through the system below. Please do not send us pdf files. We can't use them.

By submitting work to us you grant us a non-exclusive license to publish your work in any form we see fit. You may withdraw a submission up until the issue deadline (see above).

We don't pay so you retain all copyrights. If we publish your work online we may include it in a printed edition.

Poetry may be submitted in any length. Please don't submit 100 poems and ask us to pick 3.

Fiction may be submitted in three formats:

We also accept longer forms of fiction occasionally.

Non-Fiction is just that so lets see some interesting footnotes. Non-fiction should be short, (a lot) less than 5000 words

Book Reviews should be positive unless the author is a well-known blowhard. Our mission is to encourage literature not discourage it..

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. Click here to submit to Wilderness House Literary Review

Welcome to the 57th issue (Volume 15, no 1) of the Wilderness House Literary Review. WHLR is a result of the collaboration between a group of poets and writers who call themselves the Bagel Bards (who keep publishing their anthologies).

Lets get this out of the way. We use cookies, everyone uses cookies. Our cookies just tell us how many people take a look at Wilderness House Literary Review. Over the life of an issue we get about 1500 unique visitors. The cookies tell us who’s unique. If that's a problem We're sorry. Enough of that.

The stories, articles, poems and examples of art have been presented as PDF files. This is a format that allows for a much cleaner presentation than would otherwise be available on the web. If you don’t have an Adobe Reader (used to read a PDF file) on your computer you can download one from the Adobe website. These files are large and we hope you will be patient when downloading then, however we think the beauty of the words deserves a beautiful presentation.

Wilderness House Press has a Twitter feed and you can find us on Facebook or read about us on Wikipedia.

It costs quite a bit of money to keep publishing WHLR - Please help us out if you can as every little bit helps.

Our ISSN number is 2156-0153.

Let us know what you think in our Letters to the Editor.

Table of Contents

Opine

Unintended Consequences

“May you live through interesting times,” is an ancient Chinese curse. Some of the greatest lines in literature have come from trying times. “It was the best of times and the worst of times.” Clearly just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse … it did.

COVID-19 was a name none of ever heard spoken (or written for that matter) when we put our last issue to bed on New Years Eve 2019. Today it is the Great Plague of 2020. When it burns itself out or a vaccine is developed it will have killed many hundreds of thousand, perhaps millions of people worldwide. It’s something to be frightened of.

The question is: Will this global pandemic be as insignificant (though just as deadly) as the 1918 “Spanish” Flu or will this be a cultural killer like the epidemic that ravished Athens in 330 BCE? It’s true that between twenty and fifty million people were killed by the 1918 pandemic but it was merely the ultimate insult fitting an end to the WAR TO END ALL WARS. The plague of 330 BCE in Athens was different. It killed far fewer but one of the dead was Pericles and with his death came the end of the Golden Age of Greece. The fifty years that followed were, perhaps, the highest flowering of Athenian culture and influence artistically but Athens as a political power was over.

Plagues have a habit of killing the innocent and great alike and we’ll never know what might have been but they also generate extraordinary creativity. Shakespeare wrote King Lear while hiding from the London Plague of 1603-1613.

Get thee glass eyes, and like a scurvy politician seem to see the things thou dost not.

and

When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.

(Lear, Act 4 Scene 5)

Thus we expect a brilliant flowering of artistic works in the following issues.

Don't forget to take a look at Poplar Hill by Stephen Ramey Glines in e-book or on Amazon for hardback. It's super cheep on Amazon.

Search the house

Art

•  Phil Rowan

Fiction

For your reading pleasure we offer an outstanding collection of short stories by:

Poetry

Enjoy the collection of poetry we have assembled.

Reviews

WHLReview is brought to you by:

An exciting travelog:

Seven Days in Fiji
by Steve Glines

Dosha, flight of the Russian Gypsies
by Sonia Meyer

What Drives Men
By Susan Tepper


The Last of the Bird People
a novel by John Hanson Mitchell


Sophocles' Ajax
translated by Dennis Daly

Ibbetson Street Press

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 nineth anthology. You may purchase them here: