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 

Editor-at-Large

  John Hanson Mitchell

Poetry Editor

   Irene Koronas

Fiction Editor

  Prema Bangera

Assistant Fiction Editor

  Teisha Twomey

Nonfiction Editor

   Steve Glines

Book Reviews Editor

   Doug Holder

Arts Editor/Curator

  Pam Rosenblatt

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.

By submitting work to us you grant us a non-exclusive licence to publish your work in any form we see fit. You may withdraw a submission up untill 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 thirty first issue (Volume 8, no 3) 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).

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

Black & White

Have you ever had this conversation:

Bla, bla, bla doesn't look all that white.
You mean it's black?
I didn't say that.
You just said it didn't look white!
It's not black either.
But you just said ….

The only place in the human world where there is no ambiguity is in the digital representation of data. That is until your heard disk dies. The reality is that there are a million shades of gray. Each dimension of our existence has its own million shades of gray. For example, the seasons are a continuum; begin anywhere in the cycle, spring, lets say. A seed blossoms with promise, life is good … until the poison ivy sprouts and the mosquitoes infect the air. Still it's a period of life, activity, shorts and vacation. Life is good, poison ivy is not, black and white.

Come autumn plants and animals shut down and prepare for the winter. November is the bleakest month of the year in the northern hemisphere. Black! But most people I know think fall is a time of excitement, of rebirth, a new school year, a time of quickening your pace, of enjoying the outdoors. White! Life, whether we like it or not, is nuanced.

In literature there are good guys and bad guys but the best literary talent portrays the bad guys with a touch of humanity and the good guys as fallible: paint Hitler as a failed and tortured artist and the Buddha as a homeless but eloquent man with "mental health issues," perhaps like a Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath.

This is our fall issue, written and designed in the fading light of late summer, it bridges the seasons of vivid colors and warmth of summer and fall to the gray, cold depths of winter. Enjoy it all.

Search the house

Art

Reporting by Pam Rosenblatt

• Irene Koronas - Out of Favor
• Pam Rosenblatt
  Robert “Bobby” Gallagher: An abstract artist drawing from the past
• Pam Rosenblatt
  Volodymyr Bilyk: An artist who dwells in the Chaos and the Ukraine

Essays

Fiction

Our fiction editor loves Anton Chekhov and despairs the notion that there are no latter day Chekhovs submitting works for her consideration. This is not to say that the work he receives isn’t excellent … it’s just not Chekhov. To that end WHLReview announces a new prize for fiction to be called “the Chekhov Prize.” A google search reveals several other Chekhov prizes with cash. Alas we’re not offering cash. We will look for a bearded bobble-head doll. In the mean time we have T-shirts with the Chekhov Prize logo available. Just click on Chekhov's head.

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

Poetry

Our poetry editor, not wanting to be outdone by our fiction editor is pleased to announce the Gertrude Stein "rose" prize for creativity in poetry. Anyone published in Volume 3 (and beyond) is eligible. We don't have any idea what the prize will consist of - a T-shirt for sure. Perhaps we can find a Plaster of Paris bust of Julius Caesar, put a rose in its mouth and decorate it to look like Gertrude Stein. In the mean time we have T-shirts with the our rose prize logo available. Just click on Gerturde's head.

For those of you interested in the classics we have:

A special treat from our poet in residence Tomas O'Leary

• Sappho - Poem and Fragments - transduced by J. M. Wilcox

We have a remarkable lineup of poets, enjoy.

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

The Hungry Heart
by Fran Metzman

by Dennis Daly
From Ibbetson Street Press


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


Sophocles' Ajax
translated by Dennis Daly

Ibbetson Street Press