Portrait of a Modern Family - Molly Gaudry (featherproof)

Portrait of a Modern Family by Molly Gaudry tells the story of a family and a neighbourhood that is disrupted by the disappearance of a young girl.

Two interesting notes on the format: the story is published as free, downloadable, do-it-yourself featherproof mini-book. And the story itself was inspired by phrases borrowed from a Philadelphia City Paper. "I took a phrase from every single page and the task was to combine two such phrases and create a single paragraph from them," Molly Gaudry explains. " So, for instance, the final two phrases, which appear in the final paragraph, are: "Fox & Roach" and "Isabelle Meyer." Sometimes I think I'd like to write a novel inspired by a year of City Papers."

You can download the minibook here: Portrait of a Modern Family

Molly Gaudry is the author of the verse novel We Take Me Apart, which has been nominated for the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. She is also the editor of the soon-to-be released Tell: An Anthology of Expository Narrative, founding editor of the environmental literature journal Willows Wept Review, co-founding editor of Twelve Stories, and she runs Cow Heavy Books.

featherproof books
featherproof books is an indie publisher dedicated to doing whatever they want: "This might take the form of publishing an idiosyncratic novel, design book, or something in between. We love paper, but we're not afraid of computers. Our free downloadable mini-books are an invitation to all ten fingers to take part in the book-making process. We also have an experiment in attention span: the TripleQuick Fiction iPhone app. No matter the medium, we see our authors as creative partners involved in every step of publication. We make our own fun."

Portrait of a Modern Family
a minibook

related links: experimental format, stories

Matryoshka - Jamie Townsend (LRL textile series)

Jamie Townsend's long poem Matryoshka is a delicate layering of language and sound. It just got published in the Little Red Leaves textile chapbook series: pocketbook size books that are sewn, printed, and bound with fabric covers scavenged from old curtains, bedsheets and other textile remnants. The textile format provides an intriguing physical wrap for the almost microscopic sensations in the poem, with its sutures that weave throughout the negative space. You can take a peek at the book online: Matryoshka

"In sections that move between anaphora & restraint, Townsend's material poetics charge the I and O divisions that begin each poem -- comprising a book in which the single and multiple slip in and out of each other in the "flocks of/ pelican/ un/ solvable/ sight." The title Matryoshka denotes famous Russian nesting dolls, and yet the subtle physics and physicality of such poems which attend to "sub-dermal termites scattering" reveal that such momentary nesting is in fact a station in orbit." - Ash Smith

Jamie Townsend lives in East Kensington, Philadelphia where he is organizer of the c/c reading series, and a co-founder and editor of con/crescent, a chapbook publisher & magazine focused on discursive essay / creative non-fiction. He is the author of the chapbook STRAP/HALO (Portable Press @ YoYo Labs, 2011) and recent work has appeared in various print and online publications, including Wheelhouse, Volt, Elective Affinities, Jacket2, The Poetry Project Newsletter and TRY.

About Little Red Leaves
Little Red Leaves is a collectively edited annual online journal of poetry as well as an ebook/paperback series of original books and reprints. The textile series is a special project of LRL, offering limited-edition poetry chapbooks with fabric covers and machine-sewn bindings. The LRL journal is currently taking submissions through the end of May 2011 for issue #6: The Ephemera Issue. Each poem selected for this issue will be "ephemeralized" into paper and printed objects, then mailed out to subscribers. To get a sneek peak of the upcoming issue or subscribe, visit our blog.

Little Red Leaves e-editions
Please look for forthcoming books in our e-editions series from Sarah Mangold, Hugo Garcia Manríquez, and Pattie McCarthy as well as a book length collaborative review of Michael Cross's Haecceities. An exquisite back catalog of the e-editions is available at littleredleaves.com/ebooks.

Jamie Townsend: Matryoshka
textile chapbook
$8

related links: experimental format, poetry

Flash Bites - Abha Iyengar

Flash Bites by Abha Iyengar is a collection of flash and micro fiction, telling stories in a few words, letting the reader in into a world and allowing her to fill in the gaps to arrive at her own interpretations. The stories are sometimes down-to-earth and sometimes surreal. They open a different door to let the light in on what may seem to be the mundane and ordinary. They give an insight into what lies beneath the surface of things, people and places.

You can read more about Flash Bites, sample a few excerpts, or buy the e-book online at Smashwords: Flash Bites.

Abha Iyengar is an internationally published writer and poet. Her work has appeared in Bewildering Stories, Dead Drunk Dublin, Danse Macabre, Conversation Poetry Quarterly and others. She is a member of the ‘Riyaz' Writer's Group at The British Council, New Delhi. Her poem film “Parwaaz” has won a special jury prize at the film festival at Patras, Greece and has been screened to acclaim at various international film festivals. She received the Lavanya Sankaran Writing Fellowship for 2009-10. She blogs at Encounters of an Everyday Kind.

Abha Iyengar: Flash Bites
story collection
88 pages
e-book: $2.99

Family Album - Sheree Mack (Flambard)

Family Album is preoccupied with migration, journeys and places. In poems full of energy and life, Sheree Mack catches the complexity of family history – ‘it was already there waiting for me’ – the pull of the past and the threads that have formed her identity.

Sheree Mack’s collection captures a sense of the migrations and changes of the last century, and shares with us, through the control and patterning of her poetry, an experience and insight that is her own. Her poems evoke images of sea journeys made from Barbados and Trinidad to England – ‘a place speckled / with a few brown faces’ – and onward travel to Bradford and Newburn on Tyneside.

"Poems that do not flinch from the conflicts and inconsistencies of family bonds." - Cynthia Fuller

Sheree Mack was born in Bradford to a Trinidadian father and a Geordie mother of Bajan and Ghanaian heritage. She has lived in Newcastle from the age of ten. She was Poet in Residence at the Durham Literature Festival in 2005. Married with two children, she works as a freelance writer and lecturer for the Open University and has recently completed her PhD in Creative Writing at Newcastle University. She participated in a river of stones and blogs at every day creativity.

About Flambard Press
Flambard is an independent press now based in Newcastle upon Tyne. Established in 1990, Flambard publishes about ten books of poetry and fiction a year. Flambard’s list includes writers from all across the UK and abroad, yet the press remains especially supportive of writers from northern England.

Sheree Mack: Family Album
poetry collection
90 pages
ISBN: 978-1-906601-23-2

related links: poetry, about a place

Short Story Month 2011 - Links

It's Short Story Month! To join the celebration, here a collection of story links, lists, reviews, quotes, notes etc. There also are several short story initiatives that invite to participate, they are marked in red.

National Short Story Month - the history of short story month by Poets+Writers: "The concept has some history behind it. The Emerging Writers Network kicked off its first Short Story Month in 2007, and Larry Dark, director of The Story Prize, floated the idea even earlier." - Official links: Emerging Writers Network + The Story Prize Blog.

Short Stories in Daily s-Press: story collections (by Walter Bjorkman, Tania Hershman, Eric Beeny, Meg Pokrass and many others); anthologies (Writers Abroad, International Short Fiction, optimistic SF, ....); short story writing guides (Short Circuit); author talks

100 Story Links in Honor of Short Story Month 2011 - a list-in-progress by Flash Fiction Chronicles, writers are invited to share their flash story recommendations by posting on the flash fiction chronicle wall

The storySouth Million Writers Award - long list with 158 notable short stories of 2010, shortlist upcoming Friday, 20th May

#storysunday - a twitter initiative: on sundays, link to someone else's short story published somewhere online which will delight and astound readers this week. if you aren't on twitter, there's an online stream

52/250 A Year of Flash - a year-long writing initiative, now completed: 52 themes in 52 weeks, dozens of authors, hundreds of stories. (Daily s-Press feature)

The Short Story Reader - a blog about good stories on the web and other reading (Daily s-Press feature with interview)

Short Story Collection Giveaway Project - readers are invited to promote one of their favourite story collections by blogging about it and offering a copy as giveaway

The Short Review - online reviews of new, not-quite-so-new and classic collections and anthologies (Daily s-Press feature)

Short Story Month blog by Mat Bell - daily reviews of short stories published in print literary magazines

Paper House - Jessie Carty (Folded Word)

Through the 64 narrative poems in this collection, Jessie Carty illustrates one woman's coming of age in the face of neglect and unmet social expectations. However, these are not poems of woe. Instead, Carty flings open closet doors and jumps in, describing the dark recesses with an innocent acceptance of what is rather than what should be. The births of babies and love. The deaths of elders and allusions. The reconstruction of homes and lives. An unflinching honesty folds them all into "boxes in boxes like Russian dolls," waiting for us to lift the lids.

Update May 2011: Paper House won the Northern California Publishers & Authors’ 2011 Best Poetry Book Award! To celebrate this achievement, Folded Word offers a special 3 for 1 sale.

For some more notes and reflections on "Paper House", read Jessie Carty's author talk with Mel Bosworth: on breathing, writing, the internet, scares, yielding, boxes, greed + red, black and white.

Jessie Carty's poems and non-fiction have appeared in publications such as The Main Street Rag, Iodine Poetry Journal and The Northville Review. Her first chapbook At the A & P Meridiem was released by Pudding House Publications in 2009. Her print & e-chapbook The Wait of Atom was released by Folded Word Press in 2009.

About Folded Word (+PicFic + unFold + Heron)
Folded Word is an independent press that continually seeks new ways of connecting readers to new literary voices. Though we do sell our books and chapbooks, we offer free poetry and fiction to the public in our Twitter-zines PicFic and unFold, as well as our print broadside, Heron. We also value craftsmanship, both of literary works and the medium in which they are rendered--as demonstrated by our handcrafted Signature Series chapbooks. Folded Word is managed by J.S. Graustein with the support of Rose Auslander, Ben White, and the entire Folded family of contributors.

Jessie Carty: Paper House
poetry collection
84 pages, trade paperback (e-book in Kindle & Mobipocket format available late-April)
$12 U.S. / £8 U.K. / €9 Europe
ISBN 978-0-9778167-4-3