News and Events

Willow Springs Magazine editor and renowned Eastern Washington University Creative Writing professor Polly Buckingham has announced that she will be reading from her new book of poems titled The River People at a live virtual reading this Wednesday, October 28th. The reading will be hosted by Lost Horse Press in celebration of their autumn 2020 book launches, also including Roy Bentley’s My Mother’s Red Ford: New & Selected Poems 1986 – 2020, Svetlana Lavochkina’s Carbon: Song of Crafts, and Mykola Vorobiov’s Mountain & Flower: Selected Poems. The reading will begin at 12pm PDT and will take place via Zoom. The event is open to the public, and can be registered to attend by clicking here or following the link on the attached poster. You can also find out more about the event from the Lost Horse Press Facebook page.

Polly Buckingham’s The River People was released via Lost Horse Press on October 1st of this year. As noted on the HFS Books website through which the book can be purchased from the publisher: “The poems in Polly Buckingham’s debut collection, The River People, move through both dream and natural landscapes exploring connection and loss, abundance and degradation, the personal and the political. The speaker in these poems is often in a state of not knowing that can be both terrifying and revelatory. It is a state in which windows and doors connect the living and the dead and the inner and outer worlds. Organized in four sections that move from Florida to the Pacific Northwest, the poems are heavily imagistic and reminiscent of deep image poetry and Spanish surrealism.”

The River People can be purchased now via the HFS Books website, the University of Washington Press site, in stores and online via Barnes & Noble, through IndieBound, via Amazon, and more.

This is Buckingham’s third book. Her first book, The Expense of a View, won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize and her second book, A Year of Silence, won the Jeanne Leiby Memorial Chapbook Award. She is also the recipient of a Washington Artists Trust fellowship. You can learn more about her, read her online work, and find out where to purchase her previous books from her website.

Today, Willow Springs magazine is proud to announce their new virtual live reading series in collaboration with Eastern Washington University, a continuation of the first live stream reading event that occurred in June via Facebook Live with Robert Long Foreman, who read from his book I Am Here to Make Friends (2020). That stream was recorded and can be watched back here. The live reading was the first of its kind for our magazine given the virtual nature of the event, and has inspired many more to come.

The next reading in the series will feature Issue 85 contributor and award-winning poet Andrea Jurjević, who will be reading from her collection of poetry. The reading will take place next Friday, October 23rd at 7pm PDT. A Q&A with the audience will follow. The event is free to attend and can be viewed via Facebook Live on the Willow Springs Facebook page. In collaboration with Eastern Washington University, all EWU students and faculty can access the reading via Zoom as well.

According to Andrea Jurjević’s personal website: “Andrea Jurjević grew up in Rijeka, Croatia, in the former Yugoslavia, before immigrating to the United States. Her debut poetry collection, Small Crimes, won the 2015 Philip Levine Poetry Prize, and her book-length translations from Croatian include Mamasafari (Diálogos Press, 2018) and Dead Letter Office (The Word Works, 2020). Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Believer, TriQuarterly, The Missouri Review, Gulf Coast and The Southeast Review, among many others. She was the recipient of a Robinson Jeffers Tor Prize, a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a Hambidge Fellowship, and the 2018 Georgia Author of the Year award. Andrea lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and teaches at Georgia State University.”

Andrea contributed three poems, “Nastic Movements”, “Department of Dream Justice”, and “Nevada Augury” to Issue 85 of Willow Springs magazine. Those poems, along with a featured interview in which she explains the inspiration behind them, can be read on our website here.

We will continue to announce upcoming events via our News and Events page, our Facebook page, and our Instagram. Be on the look out!

On next Tuesday, October 20th, multiple-time Willow Springs Magazine contributor and Montana Poet Laureate Melissa Kwasny will be giving a live reading online with previous Willow Springs Magazine Editor-in-Chief Christopher Howell. The reading will begin at 6pm PDT, and can be accessed live via YouTube through the link here. Both authors will be reading from their extensive poetry collections.

The reading is being given as a part of the Windfall Reading Series, a collaboration between the Lane Literary Guild and the Eugene Public Library. Traditionally done in person, the Windfall Reading Series has been moved online for the 2020 lineup. Each reading can be viewed live via YouTube, and also played back after they are done.

As written on the Lane Writers Network website: Melissa Kwasny has been named Montana Poet Laureate for 2019-2020, a position she is sharing with M.L. Smoker. Her most recent poetry collection is “Where Outside the Body is the Soul Today.” She says, “Most of my poems address in some way our human relationship to the nonhuman world and my own attempt to forge a communication and conversation with it ….Recently I read that one translation of the Chinese character for poetry might be ‘words laid upon the earth altar.’ I like to think of my work like that.”

Also according to their website: Christopher Howell is author of twelve collections of poems, including the recent “The Grief of a Happy Life.”  Describing it, Yusef Komunyakaa said the book “feels and reads like a gift. Each healing song takes lyrical twists and turns and arrives at an abiding truth – a blessed ransom paid to soil and sky, body and soul, to the Earth….Every vowel is weighed, every leap earned, and the sway of hope drives the natural music of a worthwhile journey.”

Christopher Howell was the previous Editor-in-Chief of Willow Springs Magazine, and remains a beloved professor of poetry in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University, out of which Willow Springs is run.

Issue 81 Contributor and 2013 Willow Springs Fiction Prize winner Robert Long Foreman has announced Weird Pig, a new fiction book coming out on October 1st. According to the Southeast Missouri State University Press site, “Weird Pig is about Weird Pig, a pig who wants to do right. But doing right isn’t always easy. He drinks. He eats pork chops. He rides a skateboard. He gets his fellow farm animals murdered, and fathers an illegitimate son who has a messiah complex. When Weird Pig leaves the farm he calls home, he inspires a series of children’s books that help bring on the end of his little world-a farm where human and beast alike toil in the shadow of an ever-growing factory livestock complex. From farm to table and beyond, follow the misadventures of Weird Pig in this kaleidoscopic portrait of America, seen through the eyes of a crazed animal who insists on making himself at home there.”

Erin Somers, author of Stay Up with Hugo Best, writes that “Weird Pig is one of the funniest books I have ever read. Robert Long Foreman has a special talent for capturing the chaos, brutality, and absurdity of life in America. Like Huck Finn meets Animal Farm on acid.” The book has also been awarded the Nilsen Prize.

Weird Pig can be pre-ordered now from the Southeast Missouri State University Press website, and goes on regular sale October 1st. It can also be pre-ordered and purchased via Amazon, as well as from Target’s website and from Book Depository. The original short story that inspired Weird Pig can be found in Copper Nickel magazine.

This is Robert Long Foreman’s third book. You can listen to a reading he did from his second book, I Am Here to Make Friends, here. You can also read his featured story, “The Vinyl Canal”, from Willow Springs Issue 81 here on our site. In addition, his short story “The Man with the Nightmare Gun”, which won the Willow Springs Fiction Prize, is in Issue 82 of Willow Springs Magazine.

New from Bruce Bond and Etruscan Press, Scar comes out in October of this year. As Bruce Bond described it in a recent announcement, “This trilogy of sonnet sequences explores trauma, self-alienation, and the power of imaginative life to heal-to reawaken with the past a better understanding of its influence, both conscious and unconscious, to gain some measure of clarity, empathy, and freedom as we read the world.”

As esteemed poet and author of Another City David Keplinger reviewed the book on Amazon, “These unrhymed sonnets, as if one whole note struck repeatedly from beginning to finish, are technically superb, but the genius of Scar is its faithful translation of an ache. I know no other poet writing today whose capacity of perception is so sensitive to the harmonies of language and truth, sphere music composed by the difficult, nearly impossible, work of listening closely and hearing what is real.”

Scar can currently be pre-ordered on Amazon, and will be available for general sale by November 10th. Additionally, it can be pre-ordered through the Etruscan Press website, where it will also be officially released on the 10th of November. Etruscan Press has also released a Scar study guide for interested readers and instructors.

This is Bond’s twenty-fourth book. He has been published in multiple issues of Willow Springs, including in our most recent Issue 86, which you can find more about here on our website.

Recently, Issue 85 contributor and award-winning Floridian poet Michael Hettich gave a reading on Facebook Live with the Carolina Poets to promote his most recent book of poems: To Start an Orchard (Press 53, 2019).

Quoted from the Press 53 website, author Lola Haskins (How Small, Confronting Mourning), writes, “Michael Hettich has written, with extraordinary empathy, a book about vanishment: of dreams and fathers, of love and animals and birds. Look carefully at the glinting lights he paints. Like everything beautiful, they will be gone before you know it.”

This is Hettich’s twelfth published book of poems. His other recent book publications include Bluer and More Vast (Hysterical Books, 2018) and David Martison Meadowhawk Prize winner The Frozen Harbor (Red Dragonfly Press, 2017).

You can learn more about Hettich at his website here, and you can purchase his latest book through the Press 53 site and on Amazon here. It is also available on the Barnes and Noble website.

Next Friday, January 29th at 5pm PST, Willow Springs Magazine and the Gettysburg Review will host a joint online reading featuring contributors from their upcoming issues. The reading will be a Zoom webinar and is free and open to the public. Anyone with the link can attend. It will also be livestreamed through the EWU MFA Visiting Writers Series YouTube page. There will be an opportunity for guests to ask questions and interact with the readers through Zoom at the end of the event.

To attend, guests can use this Zoom link.  The reading can also be viewed back after the event ends through this YouTube link.

The readers from Willow Springs Magazine are Tom McCauley, A.D. Nauman, and Heikki Huotari. The readers from the Gettysburg Review are Julialicia Case, Allison Hutchcraft, and Christine Schott. You can find out more about each of the readers through their bios below:

Tom McCauley is a writer, comedian and musician whose work has appeared in Superstition Review, Leveler and What Rough Beast. His poem “People Are Not Lights” won the 2018 Joseph Langland Prize from the Academy of American Poets. In 2012 he scored Constance Congdon’s play “Tales of the Lost Formicans” for the Great Plains Theatre Conference, and in 2018, he was a writer-in-residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center of Nebraska City. Currently, he works for the nonprofit AIM Institute and teaches contemporary literature at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

A.D. Nauman has published short fiction in TriQuarterly, Necessary Fiction, The Literary Review, Roanoke Review, The Chicago Reader, and many other journals. Her dystopian novel, Scorch, was published in 2001 by Soft Skull/Counterpoint. Nauman is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, and her work has been produced by Stories on Stage, broadcast on NPR, and nominated for a Pushcart prize. She lives in Chicago with a very pampered tuxedo cat.

Heikki Huotari, in a past century, attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. He’s a retired math professor and has published poems in numerous literary journals, including Crazyhorse, Pleiades, and the American Journal of Poetry, and in three collections. A fourth collection is in press.

Julialicia Case has had work appear in the Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, the Pinch, Willow Springs, the Writer’s Chronicle, and other journals. She earned her MA from the University of California, Davis, and her PhD in fiction from the University of Cincinnati. Currently, she teaches creative writing and digital literature at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. You can learn more about her writing and scholarship at www.julialiciacase.com.

Allison Hutchcraft is the author of Swale, published by New Issues Poetry & Prose in October 2020. Her poems have appeared in the Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, Five Points, the Kenyon Review, and the Southern Review, among other journals. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Christine Schott teaches literature and creative writing at Erskine College. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Converse College and a PhD in medieval literature from the University of Virginia. Her memoir “Bone-House” appears in issue 33.1 of the Gettysburg Review and is her first published essay.