HFR: What's the story behind the story?
HE: The story behind the story is that last year, for my birthday, I got myself a fitter. My fitter is a 1950's pinup type who works in a lingerie store on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Once I started singing her praises, I found out that there was a famous fitter on the Lower East Side: a Hasidic Jewish man, who with the help of his wife, runs a tiny one room shop, piled floor to ceiling with boxes of bras. He looks at you and names your size and she steps behind a curtain with you and literally hooks you up. I wondered what it would be like to be married to a man who made our living by staring at other women's breasts all day long. I thought, "I'd be jealous." And then I wondered what it would be like to feel I had to fit him for a new wife.
James Foley was an American journalist, video reporter, Teach for America educator, and creative writer. On August 19, 2014, James was murdered by ISIS in Syria, becoming the first American citizen to be killed by ISIS as a response to the American airstrikes in Iraq.
Here at Hayden's Ferry Review, we were shocked and saddened to hear about this tragedy. In 2001, HFR published James' story, "The Beauties of Cooptown," as part of issue 27. He shared the pages with writers such as Lydia Davis, Eamon Grennan, and George Saunders.
Read MoreOur inscrutable Managing Editor Chelsea Hickok has given us a look into her position at HFR and a few tidbits about herself as well. In this interview we will get a look at what it takes to assemble a body of work into a gleaming literary journal.
Read MoreFor most people, writer’s block can be a huge issue. Whether you’re staring at a blinking cursor while finishing a term paper, poem, or perhaps the next great American novel, I feel your pain. Unlike freaks of writing nature, like Woody Allen, who claims to never get writer’s block, I experience it all the time. Getting started is always the hardest part for me. Often, I’m not sure what I want to say, or if I even have anything to say at all.
Read More“I am very rarely sexy or funny in my writing,” Matt Bell says, but his students seem to disagree. His student Maria Alverez introduced him by saying she had never laughed so hard while trying to interpret Gertrude Stein or discussing the complexities of The Sound and the Fury. Even though this is Matt’s first semester teaching here at Arizona State, it was apparent that he is already well loved by his colleagues and students. As Maria said, “In Matt’s class, we do not only read, we experience literature.”
Read MoreFour Chambers Press is an independent literary magazine based in Phoenix, Arizona that has the goal of bringing literary arts to the public. Four Chambers prints two issues a year, welcoming all genres. They often motivate first-time writers to publish their work.
On September 13th, 2014 this group brought literature to the public by holding a Flash-Mob style reading called “Flash Your Fiction” on the Phoenix light rail system. In doing so, they hoped to honor the daily occurrence of public transportation and strove to represent the unpredictability of life, which can be turned into material for poems or prose. The Flash-Mob participants divided in three groups to board the light rail from Central Ave. and Camelback Station. They staggered their reading times and performed for about twelve minutes per group, to finish at the Public Farmers Market in Roosevelt Station.
Read MoreSomewhere in Norway, trees are being uprooted and cleared out, only to make room for one thousand new trees. In one hundred years, those trees will be the source of paper for one hundred new books.
Katie Paterson has launched this art project, Future Library, with its mission being “to conceive and produce a work in the hopes of finding a receptive reader in an unknown future." Overall, the details of the project remain somewhat vague, although this seems intentional. One author per year, for the next one hundred years, will contribute to the project. And while the authors and their works' titles will be on display at the Oslo Public Library in Norway, all manuscripts will be locked away in a secret room (or something like that), until the year 2114. The Future Library will include works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, with no length minimums or maximums.
Read MoreEnjoy our prose-poem of the month, a lovely piece by Jenna Le.
HFR: "Book Report" clearly takes an interesting form -- in a way, mimicking the form of a book report or journal entries; and in the broader sense, a prose poem form. What was your thought process in creating this unique form? Did the title come before or after the final result?
JL: I was inspired to write “Book Report" after reading Ocean Vuong’s poem “Aubade With Burning City” in the February 2014 issue of Poetry. Because Vuong’s poem is written in long lines, I initially envisioned “Book Report” as a poem with long lines, even though I usually write poems with short lines.
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