Iron Horse Literary Review

Check out our write-up on Alissa Quart's master class at Texas Tech University. Ten gems of knowledge for nonfiction writers.

Our Labor Day issue has been released! See poet and carpenter Steve Scafidi straighten his world! Watch Elise Hempel transform toy farmers into the Grecian Urn! Suffer the annual performance review with Christine DeSimone!

We would like to congratulate Michael Hemmingson, whose novella The Journalist and the Moon was selected as the winner of our 2013 Single-Author Competition. Judge Bill Roorbach wrote of the winning manuscript: “Hemmingson’s novella flies through a life and career to find the heart of an appealing protagonist, and reunite him with his one true love. The Journalist and the Moon is a life told in fragments and blocks and tesserae, a mosaic beautifully rendered. Stand back from the blues and reds and golds and greens and take delight in the bigger picture: the life of Gordon Bass.”

Congratulations also to the semi-finalists, listed below:

“Among the Wrecks” by Gregory Brown

“Death and Other Holidays” by Marci Vogel

“Lucha Libre” by Dan Mancilla

“Picaflores” by Gail Waldstein

“South of Hannah” by David Norman

“This Is Why We Live Here” by Linda Michel

“Three on the Bank” by Kelly Jacobson

“We Will Never Speak of This” by Paula Peterson

“Word for Mattock” by James Carpenter

"The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike."

The Ecstasy and the Agony of the Editor’s Handwritten Note

 I learned about the existence of literary magazines late, the same year I started an MFA program. Soon after, I began submitting work, logging my efforts in a spreadsheet, and delighting over every scribbled “Thanks” or “Try us again” on their form rejections. What writer doesn’t love a handwritten note from an editor? I was scrupulous about following each magazine’s formatting guidelines. Paper-clipped or stapled. 1-inch margins. Times New Roman. My word counts never overshot the max. The only policy I ignored concerned simultaneous submissions. How unreasonable, I thought (and still think), for a journal to hold a story hostage six months or more only to receive what will most likely be a rejection (often without so much as stray pen mark on the slip). One happy day, I received a hand-written rejection on a story I’d sent to a fairly prominent journal. While the editor wasn’t taking the story, he said he admired it, had obviously read it closely, and encouraged me to send something else. Which I did, immediately. Never mind that the new story was also being considered at six other places, and never mind the prominent journal’s policy barring simultaneous submissions. When the story was taken by a small review, I wrote to withdraw it everywhere else and received another handwritten note from the prominent journal’s editor. “You are in violation of our submissions policy,” it read. “Please don’t submit here again.”

I discovered it so you don’t have to: guidelines matter. Even the unreasonable ones. 

This year, we received many fantastic submissions for our Discovered Voices Awards; the competition was quite fierce. Rest assured, every manuscript we received was worthy of its nomination.

Leo Costigan won for his story, "An Account of the Cold," nominated by Valerie Sayer and University of Notre Dame. This story has got some gutsy moves inside it; we just couldn't believe how Leo pulled off one man with two women at an abortion clinic at the same time, but he did! And Christian Anton Gerard won for three of his poems, nominated by Marilyn Kallet and the University of Tennessee. We loved these poems not only because they were linked, but because we loved the characters in them and the way that Christian created a different voice in each one despite the linked narrative. Look for Leo's story in Iron Horse 15.6 (forthcoming in December 2013) and for Christian's poems in Iron Horse 16.2 (forthcoming in April 2014).

THIS is Lubbock, Texas, where legends are born.

Your grandmother’s jewelry box. That drawer in the kitchen. A rusted Folgers can in your father’s workshop. We all have those places where the haphazard artifacts of our lives collect like so much flotsam and jetsam. Rarely do we even see, much less pay attention to these objects, these souvenirs of experience. Yet, this is precisely where Joseph Johnston focuses his lens in Fragments, the winner of the IHLR Jury Prize. The suspense of the wooden box Johnston carries in the video’s opening shots propels us toward the work’s revealing conclusion. Only then do we discover that the actual objects in the box matter less than the larger statement Johnston is making about the disjointed nature of our existence within a world that is itself fragmented. In the sharpest kind of literary irony, Johnston creates coherence even as he points to incoherence. He suggests significance in the seemingly insignificant—pocketknives and baby teeth, that coin machine ring bent from wear. These objects are as particular and personal as the blues Johnston plays, as the art he creates, but, as Joyce and others have said, in those details, there is the universal. In those fragments, there is us.

It was our pleasure to open the first annual IHLR Film Fest with Jacob Cutler’s video essay entitled A Story About Snow and People. “Don’t just shake the snow globe,” we wanted to suggest. “Step into it. Feel the flakes fall on your shoulders. Stay for a while.” And stay our audience did, for by the end of the night (and nine videos later), we were still thinking about Cutler’s piece as we voted A Story About Snow and People as the viewers’ choice for favorite video. Cutler’s essay juxtaposes a casual voice alongside larger-than-life ideas of what it means to be an individual as well as what it means to see an individual. Though Cutler acknowledges that the comparison of human individuality and snowflakes isn’t, by any means, new, it’s still a concept we seem to take for granted. As he dazzles us with snowy scenes and dreamy glimpses into an endearing relationship that makes us recall our own young loves, Cutler encourages us to examine the subtleties of an old adage, to know that we can only see what makes one person different from the next if we’re willing to look really, really close.