Today through Sunday (May 17th), the first five to subscribe or resubscribe will get a free set of HFR coasters, custom designed by our Editor-in-Chief, Dana Diehl. The coasters are printed on a Vandercook in the Arizona State University printshop. Design features a Milky way print inside animal silhouettes. They’re perfect for setting an ice cold drink on this summer.
Read More“HTML”: THE ORIGIN STORY
It’s strange to mourn someone you’ve never met. The story isn’t about him, but the story exists because of him, because he died, because the circumstances of his death were so preposterous, and so in that sense you could say that “html” is an elegy for Aaron Swartz. I’d been planning to write an English/HTML hybrid for years, but the project kept getting postponed in favor of other stories, it was always next up, it was never the priority. And then Aaron died.
Read MoreIn the first part of this mini-series, I examined the narrative landscape of Immortal Technique’s “Dance With the Devil,” a Faustian tale of greed and violence. Continuing this theme, I want to examine a piece that is contemporaneous with “Dance With the Devil,” but occupies the opposite end of the hip-hop success spectrum. Where most outside the underground hip-hop scene haven’t been acquainted with Immortal Technique’s work, it’s hard to find someone alive in the U.S. (and indeed, much of the world) who hasn’t at least heard of Eminem. He’s the best-selling artist of the 2000’s, has won fifteen Grammy Awards, and is a mainstay in current popular culture. So, as is often is the question with print books, can material with mass appeal also be literary?
Read MoreBorderlands are venues for encounter, exchange, and conflict. They encompass not only physical or legislative borders, but also abstract spaces—psychological, cultural, social, and natural. What happens in the limbic, the transitional, and the in between? What is gained and what is lost in the act of defining boundaries? What questions does the space raise of race, class, gender, citizenship, and identity? Hayden’s Ferry Review invites writers and artists to interpret the theme as they like. We’d prefer interpretations of a personal nature, rather than general, but mostly we just want strong, passionate pieces that excite and challenge.
Read MoreIn the never-ending logomachia that completely consumes the poetry world every second of every day, I champion The Forces of Good and Right by making sure all my verse is in meter and/or rhyme. You should, too.
Read MoreIf you’re an English major, fiction writer, poetry buff, or literature lover, chances are you often encounter a dash of crippling anxiety from time to time (or perhaps that’s just me). Why? Well, I feel that over time those of the literary persuasion have gotten a bad rap. It’s become a bit of a running joke in the academic world that those who choose a life of metaphors, papers, and workshops are also choosing a life of unemployment, low-pay, and uncertainty. I have yet to meet an English major who hasn’t heard in so many words that they will not make any money and are in for a rough go once graduation hits. And in my personal experience, after listening to this lecture so many times, it becomes harder and harder not to believe the prophecy. It was this inkling fear and curiosity that lead me to this.
Read MoreEvery month, we receive hundreds of prose and poetry submissions from emerging and established writers. The stories, essays, and poems we receive are ambitious, relevant, and emotionally moving. Unfortunately, we only have room to publish a small fraction of these in our print journal, and it saddens us to have to turn away so many amazing pieces.
Read MoreHFR: This piece has a wonderful tendency to juxtapose humor, the mundane, and tragedy. In one moment, we're with the quirky Fox-Neck, or on the phone with a family member, and in the next we're looking at the great-grandmother's skin like crumpled paper. What do you think the importance is of shifting tones in this story?
EB: The most significant scenes from my own life—and most people’s lives, I think—are riotous with feeling. Not just one. Chaos invites a certain kind of manic alertness and the antenna goes up, jerking us in and out of emotional stations. Where there is predicted pain, I think we become receptive, eager, for a different feeling. The shift is a survival instinct. I think the narrator’s erratic experience of death in this story is just one version of everyone’s. What we all notice, say, project, ignore, what we tune in and out of, shift between, is the way we protect ourselves from the permanence of loss. From a craft standpoint, the tonal shift can wake readers up and keep us ready for the next jolt, but it only does that because we want that turn in life.
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