Superstition Review

Eileen Cunniffe’s Mischief and Metaphors: Essaying a Life

May 3, 2023April 27, 2023Superstition Review

*Mischief and Metaphor: Essaying a Life* by Eileen Cunniffe (Published by Shanti Arts March 28th, 2023) | Eileen Cunniffe

Congratulations to Eileen Cunniffe for her collection of essays titled Mischief & Metaphors: Essaying a Life, published by Shanti Arts. Its cover art and illustrations accompanying the essays were created by Cunniffe’s mother, Rosie Cunniffe. The collected essays are introspective, exploring the underlying patterns of memories through characters spanning “family members, friends, and co-workers; but also butter, baseball, birds, and assorted articles of clothing.” Cunniffe has created a Spotify playlist to pair with Mischief and Metaphor and can be previewed here.

Eileen celebrated the book’s launch on April 23rd in-person with her mother and community. See photos from the launch on her site here.

Eileen Cunniffe with her mother Rosie Cunniffe

Eileen Cunniffe writes nonfiction that explores identity and experiences through the lens of travel, family, and work. She is known to write prose poetry on occasion. She was a regular contributor to Nonprofit Quarterly from 2013 to 2021, covering arts and culture. Her writing has appeared in literary journals and anthologies. Four of her essays have been recognized with Travelers’ Tales Solas Awards and another received the Emrys Journal 2013 Linda Julian Creative Nonfiction Award. Her nonfiction piece Consignments was published in issue 9.

Mischief and Metaphor: Essaying Life can be purchased here or from Bookshop. To learn more about Cunniffe, visit her website.

Kat Meads’ These Particular Women

April 24, 2023April 20, 2023Superstition Review

This is the cover of "These Particular Women" by Kat Meads. Two white women in old-fashioned clothing are drinking tea and staring out at the viewer. They are heavily stylized and have green-blue lips. — *These Particular Women* (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2023) | Kat Meads

Congratulations to Kat Meads for her new book These Particular Women, published by Sagging Meniscus Press. In this collection, Meads “investigates ten famous/infamous women and the exceedingly contradictory biographical and autobiographical portraits that survive them,” including Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, Sylvia Plath, and Flannery O’Conner.

Kat Meads’s new collection of essays examines several famous (or perhaps infamous) women—the kind of women often labeled shrill, pushy, angry, bitchy. The reader who is not intimidated by a strong woman demanding her right to make her own plans for her own life will enjoy the author’s quiet but often sardonic tone as she retells these women’s stories by strategically quoting and skillfully questioning those who wrote about but clearly did not understand (and sometimes didn’t even like) them. Kat Meads likes these women, and so will other women, who recognize how they have so often been misunderstood.
—Margaret D. Bauer, author of A Study of Scarletts: Scarlett O’Hara and Her Literary Daughters

Kat Meads has written six novels, three essay collections, two short fiction collections, an epistolary memoir, and a hybrid fiction. She’s won a variety of awards, including five Best American Essays Notable citations. To learn more, go to her website.

Built from bits and grains and jots of detail, built impeccably from exhaustive research and in effortless prose, Kat Meads’s portraits of singular, extraordinary women are particulate in the service of telling the story of whole (and wholly unknowable) women. If you love literary pilgrimages, if you yourself are a literary pilgrim, if you love stories (and stories about stories, and stories balanced like excellent hats on the heads of other stories) you will find this exploration of literary women’s lives thrilling and addictive.
—Elizabeth Cooperman, author of Women Pissing

To purchase These Particular Women, go here.

Kat Meads’ essay “Relativism: The Size of Tsar in Vegas” appeared in Issue 2 of Superstition Review.

Superstition Review’s Issue 31 Launch Party

April 21, 2023April 13, 2023Superstition Review

In just one week, on Friday, April 28, at 11:00 am AZ time, Superstition Review will be holding its Issue 31 Launch Party! To register, go here.

A photo of Matt Bell. Description: He is white, with short salt-and-pepper hair. He's wearing a plaid button-up.

Coffee & Craft: Free Revision Lecture by Matt Bell

April 18, 2023April 13, 2023Superstition Review

Coffee & Craft workshop flier | Matt Bell (Photo credit: Jessica Bell)

On Saturday, April 22nd at 10:30 AM AZ time, Matt Bell will lead a revision workshop “Refuse to Be Done,” named after his own book on revising novels. The workshop will take place in room LC369 inside the Language & Communication building located on Scottsdale Community College’s campus. Participants will learn Bell’s own process for breaking down revision into manageable steps and meet other aspiring writers of all skill levels.

Bell’s award-winning writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, American Short Fiction, and other publications. His novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award and an Indies Choice Adult Book of the Year Honor Recipient, and was selected as the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award. Both In the House and Scrapper were selected by the Library of Michigan as Michigan Notable Books.

Coffee & Craft is a new, recurring series of Saturday morning creative writing workshops at Scottsdale Community College. The first was on poetry and led by Scottsdale poet laureate Lois Roma-Deeley. The workshop is free and open to the public. Seating is first come, first serve, and subject to limited capacity. Learn more about Matt Bell at his website. A map of Scottsdale Community College’s campus can be found here. A map of the Language & Communication building itself can be found here.

Michelle Brafman’s Swimming With Ghosts

April 10, 2023April 7, 2023Superstition Review

*Swimming With Ghosts* (Keylight Books, forthcoming June 13th, 2023) | Michelle Brafman

In Michelle Brafman’s forthcoming novel Swimming With Ghosts, published by Keylight Books, she explores the darkness and humor of children’s competitive swimming. Themes of family secrets, obsession and friendships shine through the lenses of childhood and the feuding families of the characters.

I really enjoyed Swimming with Ghosts, for the excellent characters, unusual plot inside the world of local competitive swimming, the fine writing, and the frequent insights and humor. I raced right through it.
ANNE LAMOTT, author of Bird by Bird

Michelle Brafman’s writing has been featured in Lilith Magazine, LitHub, and San Francisco Book Review. She has received numerous awards for her fiction, including a Special Mention in the 2010 Pushcart Prize Anthology, the F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story prize, and first place in the Lilith Magazine Fiction contest. In 2019 she received the Excellence in Teaching Award for creative writing. Swimming With Ghosts will be her third published novel after Bertrand Court (2016) and Washing the Dead (2015).

Swimmers and readers rejoice! Michelle Brafman’s Swimming with Ghosts is proof that the most important events in life happen at the pool. Fast-paced and frequently hilarious, we unsuspectingly float on the novel’s wry, quirky humor until we’re suddenly over deep water, gazing into the depths of our need for purpose, friendship, and love. Anyone heading to a pool or beach this summer should have a copy of Swimming with Ghosts in their swim bag.
DAVID MCGLYNN, author of A Door in the Ocean

Swimming With Ghosts releases June 13th, 2023 and can be pre-ordered here. Learn more about Michelle Brafman’s writing and teaching by visiting her website. Her short story “Brain Freeze” was featured in Superstition Review issue 13.

Michelle Matthees’ Complicated Warding

April 5, 2023April 2, 2023Superstition Review

The cover of "Complicated Warding." Description: There is a somewhat abstract owl on the cover. Behind it are words that have been blotted out (as in blackout poetry). — Michelle Matthees | *Complicated Warding* (2023)

Michelle Matthees’ latest book of poetry—Complicated Warding—is ambitious in its form and message, a captivating examination of history through a contemporary lens. As described by Matthees, it’s an “inmate case file stuffed with assorted poems, images, and historical texts about institutionalization at the turn of the last century.” Old photographs and state records are interspersed between Matthees’ poignant poems, which shine as imaginings of what the people in the pictures might have been thinking, altered records, and current musings. These pictures are on semi-transparent vellum, the words visible through the faces.

Matthees’ poetry in this collection is elusive, bizarre, and almost uncertain. It leaves out unnecessary words and lets the reader do the work of connecting, which makes it all the more rewarding when meaning begins to form. During the “State Hospital” section, her lines flow into one another with a unique, stream-of-consciousness style: “…my antlers, / my fin, my jaundiced claw / (I need this for killing) / but not in a way that should scare you / though it might if you’re smart.”

In contrast, her “State Reformatory for Men” section removes itself from the minds of the documented. Instead, Matthees examines the records from a modern place, grounding her readers: “I work through the archived noise / of one hundred years in a box. / I drop my pencil and reach / into your corner. You retreat / with your odd geometry of eyes. / How must I touch you?”

With an excellent eye for detail, Matthees’ poems and use of photography, records, and paintings create a unique texture. Even in its abstractions, however, her words spark delightfully in both the past, the present, and the ties between the two. She contemplates life, violence, and death with the precision of a surgeon: “…you’ve just begun to pick at the scab of / your very own demise.”

To purchase Complicated Warding, go here.

Michelle Matthees is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s MFA program in Creative Writing. She has received grants and awards from The Jerome Foundation, The Minnesota State Arts Board, The Arrowhead Regional Arts Council, AWP, and other arts organizations. Her work has appeared in Memorious, PANK, The Prose Poem Project, The Bellingham Review, J Journal, 22 Magazine, and elsewhere. Her first collection of poems, Flucht, was published in 2016. To learn more, visit her website.

Two of Matthees’ poems—”Distinguishing Marks” and “Skeleton #1018. 1903. Lake Como.”—were published in Issue 20 of Superstition Review.

ASU Worldbuilding Initiative Workshop with Matt Bell: Imagining New Ways of Making Community

March 24, 2023March 23, 2023Superstition Review

On Monday, March 27, at 4:00 PM AZ time, Matt Bell will be leading a worldbuilding workshop that examines “democracy, consensus, and communal problem solving” in imagined worlds. These workshops invite audience members to “engage in worldbuilding… inventing new ways of imagining and interacting with the world around us.”

The ASU Worldbuilding Initiative is hosted by the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics.

Matt Bell is the author of numerous books, the two most recent being Appleseed (a New York Times notable book) and Refuse to Be Done, a craft guide on writing, rewriting, and revision. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and elsewhere. Originally from Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University. Read more about him on his website.

This event will take place online. It’s free and open to the public, although it does require registration. Go here to learn more.

Stellar Alumni Series: Bojan Louis and Sara Sams

March 22, 2023March 17, 2023Superstition Review

On Thursday, March 23, at 7:00 PM, the Creative Writing Program at ASU presents a reading by Bojan Louis and Sara Sams.

Bojan Louis is Diné of the Naakai dine’é, born for the Áshííhí. He’s written a variety of poetry and fiction, published in Alaska Quarterly, Ecotone, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. He’s published two books: Sinking Bell: Stories and Currents, which received an American Book Award. To learn more, visit his website.

Sara Sams is a writer and translator from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She’s written a variety of poetry and nonfiction in Blackbird, Now and Then, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She’s published Atom City, her fist book of poems. To learn more, visit her website.

Read Bojan Louis’s interview in Issue 20 of Superstition Review.

Sara Sams advised on and helped to create Issue 22 of Superstition Review.

This event is free and open to the public! To learn more and register, go here.

Share Where You Write: Enter Our Giveaway!

March 21, 2023March 20, 2023Superstition Review

Do you have a great writing workspace? Share a picture of the space that allows your creativity to flow to win an exclusive Superstition Review mug! Messy, orderly, or out of the ordinary workspaces are all invited to apply. To do so:

-Post a photo of your workspace on Twitter
-Mention @SuperstitionRev in your post

The contest will run from March 25th to April 3rd. We look forward to seeing all of the creative workspaces where masterpieces are born! You can view entries from our previous Workspace contests here.

Jane Satterfield’s The Badass Brontës

March 20, 2023March 17, 2023Superstition Review

Jane Satterfield’s poetry collection The Badass Brontës, published by Diode Editions, explores the lives and legacy of the Brontë sisters, some of the most iconic literary figures of the 19th century Jane’s poetry illuminates the traumas, decisions, and aspirations of Emily, Charlotte, and Anne Brontë.

Jane Satterfield’s beautiful new collection The Badass Brontës reimagines the world of the Brontë sisters. With a range of forms including ekphrasis, letters, a cento, a sestina and even a quiz—“Which Brontë sister are you?”—Satterfield’s poems are both daring and inventive. The poems investigate the Brontës’ vivid world of imagination and envision the sisters’ lives in our present moment, during the pandemic lockdown and the climate crisis. I love The Badass Brontës for its lyric grace but also for its boldness and wit. As Satterfield writes in the poem “Volumes,” “A book’s an invitation, / excoriation, sustenance, pilgrimage…” and this exhilarating book is all of this and more.
—Nicole Cooley, author of Girl after Girl after Girl

In 2022, Jane wrote about her interest in the history of the sisters as their images filtered through pop culture in a PopPoetry article. It’s a wonderful look into her enthusiasm for writing about literary influences throughout history.

“Would you / say the here & now is a horizon / to eternity?” asks the poet of Emily Brontë in the proem that introduces Jane Satterfield’s remarkable new collection. With consummate empathy, the poems of The Badass Brontës seek nothing less than to interfuse historical, personal, and artistic horizons, and do so with such formal and tonal vibrancy they accomplish something close to a co-presence of the Brontës’ haunting and haunted world and our own fraught and frangible one. In Satterfield’s work, the voices of these figures emerge as from a proverbial mind-meld with the poet’s, such that every detail feels conjured alive, awake, so each becomes, like all of us, “one bright strand / in the story of time & / vanishing.”
Daniel Tobin, author of Blood Labors

You can pre-order The Badass Brontës here. Visit Jane’s website here. Her nonfiction piece “Mother Tongue” appeared in issue 17.