This semester, Superstition Review is highlighting the Editors producing Issue 32. Today we got to know Phoebe Nguyen, an Interview Editor for Issue 32.
SR: What are your plans for after graduation? PN: I plan on traveling.
SR: What are you currently reading? PN: “A Brave New World.”
SR: What is your hidden talent? PN: I am scuba dive certified.
SR: What is one place you’d like to travel to? PN: Paris, France.
SR: What are some of your hobbies? PN:Reading, writing, shopping, horseback riding and being with my friends.
SR: Describe your perfect Saturday morning PN: Waking up to a cloudy morning where I can read in bed.
SR: What’s your favorite midnight snack? PN:A rebel from Dutch.
Congratulations to SR Contributor Sarah Beth Childers on her forthcoming book, Prodigals: A Sister’s Memoir of Appalachia and Loss.
Prodigals is a series of lyric essays of loss and resistance told in the voice of an Appalachian storyteller.
The book examines how Childers’ brother’s story was both universal and uniquely Appalachian. While the familiar story of the prodigal son carries all its assumed baggage, the Appalachian setting of Prodigals brings its own influences. Childers foregrounds the Appalachian landscape in her narrative, depicting its hardwood forests, winding roads, mining-stained creeks and rivers, hill-clinging goats and cows, neighborhoods and trailer parks tucked between mountains. The Childers family’s fervent religious faith and resistance to medical intervention seems normal in this environment, as is their conflicting desires to both escape from Appalachia and to stay forever at home.
Prodigals weaves in the stories of other famous prodigals, including the alcoholic brother of the Brontë sisters, Jimmy Swaggart, the fallen televangelist; Robert Crumb, her brother’s beloved author of racist and sexist comic books; and Childers herself. The story examines the role of prodigals within the intimate tapestry of family life and beyond—to its larger sociocultural meanings.
Read some of the book’s reviews:
“An Appalachian childhood steeped in Pentecostalism, the Brontë siblings roaming the English moors, the New Testament parable of the Prodigal Son: Sarah Beth Childers’ memoir triangulates between these and more. From the outset, it raises the question of who the prodigal is—the younger brother Childers loved and lost, too young, to mental illness, or Childers herself, who left West Virginia and her insular family to become a writer and professor. In prose that’s full of swerves and surprises, Childers tells and retells her brother’s story. This telling is an act of loving retrieval—even a kind of return. Riveting, luminous, memorable. I’ve read it three times and can’t wait to begin again.” — Jennifer Brice, author of Unlearning to Fly and Another North.
“Prodigals is about the author’s grief as she explores—via memory, via writing, and via time—her brother Joshua’s mental illness and his loss. She came from a family that did not ascribe names and diagnoses to mental illness, no less Joshua’s, and she must not only find a variety of definitions for loss, love, and relationship but also for herself. This is a journey of self, intellect, and history, toward understanding.” —Karen Salyer McElmurray, author of Wanting Radiance.
“A gorgeous meditation on family, place, and loss. In revisiting the life of her beloved brother, Sarah Beth Childers insists on bearing witness to people and places as they are while contemplating those who stay and those who leave, and the wide pulsing spaces left in their wake. Captivating and clear-sighted. A beautiful book.” —Sonja Livingston, author of Ghostbread.
Sarah Beth Childers is the author of Shake Terribly the Earthas well as numerous publications in literary journals and anthologies. She is an assistant professor of English at Oklahoma State University and lives in Stillwater, Oklahoma.
View the creative nonfiction essay “Beagle in the Road” by Sarah Beth Childers in issue 20 of Superstition Review.
Prodigals: A Sister’s Memoir of Appalachia and Loss, released on September 1 from the University of Georgia Press’s Crux Series in Creative Nonfiction. Purchase the book here.
From October 15-20, ASU will be hosting The College’s Humanities Week with over 20 in-person and virtual events.
Events are open to students, faculty, staff and community members. Enjoy free food, swag, and speakers. The current event schedule is listed below, but updates can be viewed on the Humanities Week website.
Sunday, Oct. 15
‘Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion’ Book Launch by Pulitzer Prize Winner Mitchell S. Jackson in Conversation with Marc J. Spears
7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. | Phoenix Art Museum
Join us for the release of Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion by Mitchell S. Jackson. This sumptuous, colorful book celebrates NBA fashion and the decades of cultural and political phenomena that bring it into being.
The author will be in conversation with renowned veteran NBA reporter Marc J. Spears.
TikTok and Tarot: Imagining Ethical Futures for Social Media
1 p.m. to 2 p.m.
The Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics invites students and faculty to play, experiment, and discover using our Humane Tech Oracle Deck to explore our relationships with “the algorithm;” a mystifying black box we interact with every time we use our smart technology or engage in social media.
We will also be sharing about our newest research project, Understanding Algorithmic Folk Theories: Tracing Community-Based Knowledge on TikTok, which was recently awarded a grant by the NEH Dangers and Opportunities of Technology program.
The School of International Letters and Cultures invites anyone who is searching for a place to come and get to know people from across the world or surround themselves with languages from around the globe.
SILC Café will be every day during Humanities Week with a different language department hosting each one — and a Sun Devil Rewards secret word each day!
Arming Students for Good: Youth Activism to Prevent Violence
3 p.m. to 5 p.m. | Walton Center for Planetary Health (Room 107 and Atrium)
Join the Humanities Lab at Arizona State University for a late afternoon event designed to elevate youth voices in collective efforts to prevent violence.
Hear from public figures, scientists and students about what we know about school shootings. Participate in interactive activities designed to demonstrate the urgent need for innovative solutions.
Open Mic hosted by Hayden’s Ferry Review and Thousand Languages Project
12 p.m. to 1 p.m. | Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing or Online
Come share your creative work at this open mic event hosted by Hayden’s Ferry Review and the Thousand Languages Project.
We welcome poets, short story writers, and song writers/musicians and a microphone will be provided. Participants may share up to 3 minutes. Walk-ins may still sign up to participate.
ASU Worldbuilding Initiative Distinguished Lecture with Connor Alexander
1:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.
The ASU Worldbuilding Initiative invites you to join us during Humanities Week to welcome our Fall 2023 Worldbuilding Distinguished Lecturer, Connor Alexander, lead designer of the award-winning tabletop roleplaying game Coyote & Crow.
In this interactive lecture and workshop, Connor Alexander will first introduce the world of Coyote & Crow, a sci-fi and fantasy tabletop role playing game set in a First Nations alternate future where colonization never happened, detailing the inventive and collaborative work that went into the game’s design and launch.
Afterward, he will lead participants in a character creation workshop where students and other audience members can make their own Coyote & Crow characters to take home with them, working in collaboration with Connor Alexander, the Akinana Circle live play team, and other members of the audience.
The School of International Letters and Cultures invites anyone who is searching for a place to come and get to know people from across the world or surround themselves with languages from around the globe.
SILC Café will be every day during Humanities Week with a different language department hosting each one — and a Sun Devil Rewards secret word each day!
Eddie Glaude is a passionate educator, author and political commentator. He has authored a number of books on Black communities, the difficulties of race in the United States and the challenges we face as a democracy. He has also written award-winning books on religion and philosophy.
He is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor and Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University and a contributor on programs like Morning Joe and Deadline Whitehouse with Nicolle Wallace. He also regularly appears on Meet the Press on Sundays and is a columnist for TIME Magazine.
Film and Media Studies in the Department of English at ASU invites all to our Fall 2023 Humanities Week Open House.
We’ll showcase work from FMS students and faculty, talk about upcoming courses, and provide opportunities for students and potential students to speak with FMS faculty and staff.
Hear Our Voices: Why We Need Historians to Write Children’s Books in the Wake of a Banned Books Movement
2 p.m. to 5 p.m. | Hayden Library (Room 236)
Join the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies and the ASU Libraries for visiting historian Radhika Natarajan’s discussion of her first children’s book, Hear Our Voices: A Powerful Retelling of the British Empire in 20 Stories.
Students will have the opportunity to create book ban and censorship awareness buttons via the library MakerSpace, as well as explore the Censorship Collection, a new curated collection of books and media that focuses on debates over censorship and free-speech.
Shakespeare at 400: Scenes From and Discussion of ‘The Book of Will’ by Lauren Gunderson
5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. | Old Main, Carson Ballroom or Online
In the case of “The Book of Will” by Lauren Gunderson, historical fiction illuminates historical fact. Discover how history was made with the publishing of Shakespeare’s Complete Works. Arizona State University presents scenes from “The Book of Will” by Lauren Gunderson, a modern, comedic look at how the Bard’s plays became the First Folio.
Historian Helen Cam has said: “Historical fiction is not only a respectable literary form; it is a standing reminder of the fact that history is about human beings.”
The School for Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies invites you to engage one-on-one with our current students and recent graduates who have been making an impact in public history research!
Students will showcase their projects by creating and presenting poster-sized visual representation of their findings, including the social and cultural significance of their work. The posters will be evaluated by a committee of faculty who will award fellowships to the winning students.
ASU Book Group: ‘The Circle That Fits’ by Kevin Lichty
12 p.m. to 1 p.m. | Piper Writers House or Zoom
The book group is open to all in the ASU community and meets monthly from noon–1 p.m. with two different options for attendance: either in-person at the Piper Writers House or virtually on Zoom. Registration is required for online attendance. In-person attendees are invited to join the author for lunch after at the University Club, no-host.
The School of International Letters and Cultures invites anyone who is searching for a place to come and get to know people from across the world or surround themselves with languages from around the globe.
SILC Café will be every day during Humanities Week with a different language department hosting each one — and a Sun Devil Rewards secret word each day!
Please join us for the 2023 Environmental Humanities Initiative Distinguished Lecture by Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles: “Mining the Deep: Speculative Fictions and Futures.”
The lecture examines the oceanic turn in the humanities, particularly what Gaston Bachelard once termed the “depth imagination.”
6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. | Marston Exploration Theater or Online
Jonathan Daniel Wells, author of “The Kidnapping Club: Wall Street, Slavery and Resistance on the Eve of the Civil War” and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, author of “Children of the Land” will be in conversation with communities in and beyond ASU.
Join us as we reflect on vulnerability, borders, resistance, history, love, advocacy and justice.
11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. | Armstrong Hall (Room L1-30) or Online
“So, what are you going to do with that?” English majors, history majors, language majors and more have heard the question a million times. The truth is that you can do a lot with a humanities degree.
Join a panel of alumni from the humanities division at The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences to hear their stories of where their humanities degrees took them and how their studies have positively influenced their careers.
The School of International Letters and Cultures invites anyone who is searching for a place to come and get to know people from across the world or surround themselves with languages from around the globe.
SILC Café will be every day during Humanities Week with a different language department hosting each one — and a Sun Devil Rewards secret word each day!
The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing holds a series of free events open to the public to ensure all individuals have the ability to participate in the literary arts. Visiting authors host small workshops in partnership with the Piper Writers Studio, engage in intimate craft talks with students, visit ASU classes, and participate in other meaningful activities.
This month, the Piper Center, in partnership with the Hispanic Research Center at ASU, welcomes Norma Cantú and Denice Frohman. The event will offer a rare opportunity to hear from two acclaimed Latinx writers talking about mentorship, ancestry, and how we leverage the past to create something new.
About the authors:
Norma Cantu
Norma Elia Cantú, the Norine R. and T. Frank Murchison Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, is a folklorist, scholar, poet, and novelist. She served as the President of the American Folklore Society between 2019 and 2021. She is Professor emerita in English at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is a co-founder of CantoMundo, a national organization that celebrates Latino/a poets and poetics. Her most recent publications include the novel, Cabañuelas, and Meditación Fronteriza: Poems of Love, Life, and Labor and the co-edited anthologies, Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Pedagogies and Practices for our Classrooms and our Communities and meXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction.
Denice Frohman
Denice Frohman is a poet and performer from New York City. A Pew Fellow and Baldwin-Emerson Fellow, she’s received support from CantoMundo, Headlands Center for the Arts, the National Association of Latino Arts & Cultures and Millay Colony. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The BreakBeat Poets: LatiNext, Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color, ESPNW and elsewhere. A former Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, she’s featured on hundreds of national and international stages from The Apollo to The White House. She lives in Philadelphia.
Hear from these talented writers on Thursday, September 21, 2023 from 6:30-8 p.m. MST.
The event will be held on the Tempe Campus in the Alumni Lounge in the Memorial Union. RSVP to save your spot for this exciting literary event.
The Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference is returning to ASU’s Tempe campus on October 12-14 after several seasons away.
The “literary event of the year,” hosted by Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, will feature 70 craft talks, workshops, panels, and readings from some of the industry’s most influential voices, including Superstition Review’s founding editor Patricia Murphy.
The conference spans a variety of genres and forms: fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, memoir, screenwriting, young adult, and picture books.
Sessions will discuss editing, publishing, the business of writing and the writing life. Discussion topics include travel writing, climate change, graphic novels, translation, disability studies, hybrid forms, social justice, and more
“I’ve been to lots of writing conferences in my time, and I’ve always learned something really vital about the art of writing, the practice of writing by being at conferences. It isn’t only the presentations and workshops and readings but also the chance meetings and conversations you have along the way,” says Sheila Black.
This year’s lineup includes more than 60 presenters, such as keynote speaker Joy Harjo who served three times as the U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natalie Diaz. Attendees will have an opportunity to intimately engage with these voices in group readings.
“We went big this year and sent out invitations to all of the major writers we wanted, and not one person turned us down,” says Sheila Black, assistant director of the Piper Center. “The depth of talent at this year’s conference is amazing and will cover multiple genres.”
Black continues, “I think what makes a writing conference particularly valuable is the opportunity to get up close and personal with a number of different writers (including fellow attendees) and learning through hearing about their lives: how they made the books they made, what tricks and tips (often hard-won) they picked up along the way.”
View the schedule and the list of conference faculty. Find more information here.
Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference for 2023 is sold out, but please check out the faculty and schedule and think about joining next October for the 2024 conference.
Congratulations to SR Contributor Kelle Groom on her forthcoming book, How to Live: A Memoir-in-Essays.
The book has already earned strong praise from established voices. Read some of the reviews:
“Kelle Groom is a navigator of the soul’s voyage, from mooring to mooring, no matter the tumultuous seas. She is a writer of deepest heart and purest eye, who seizes you and takes you where she wanders. How to Live is one of the most beautiful books I know, a profound reckoning.” — Susanna Sonnenberg, author of Her Last Death and She Matters: A Life in Friendships
“At its simplest, this is the story of a restless search for a place to be– a way to live– after a series of devastating events. But there’s nothing simple about it. Kelle Groom has created a marvel: a haunted, haunting, beautifully sustained dream of a book.” — Joan Wickersham, author of The Suicide Index and The News from Spain
“Is home the place you left, or the place you are now? This is a central question in this fiercely won, wildly original, and ultimately beautiful meditation. Kelle Groom is one of our most gifted writers, and this book is her Odyssey, which means we will end up back where we started, only changed. Along the way we will visit strange lands, we will come face-to-face with our fears, we will find ourselves among kind strangers, and we will understand why we are alive. This is a book which wrestles with our hardest, darkest questions, and comes out on the side of gratitude. ” — Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and This is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire
“It’s really a book where the tissue between life and death feels very thin at times and Kelle Groom negotiates these mortal stations like a wandering medieval saint on residencies and short term teaching jobs who finds consolation, wisdom and suicidal despair in violet rain, flashes of feeling in the grasp of a hand, while the euphoria of love and eloquent scraps of knowledge keenly ornament this trail where being a bare faced reader is precisely enough. Kelle Groom writes with a relentless and avid consciousness and in this story there is a child and I think it her own becoming.” — Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls and Afterglow
Kelle Groom is the author of the award-winning memoir I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl and four poetry collections. Groom’s honors include numerous fellowships and grants, and her works have received Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, Library Journal Best Memoir, Oprah O Magazine selection, and Oxford American Editor’s Pick. Her work has appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry,among others.
Groom is a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in Prose and Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Nonfiction. She was previously Distinguished Writer-in-Residence and Assistant Professor of Humanities at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe and formerly poetry editor of The Florida Review. She is now a nonfiction editor for AGNI Magazine and works as director of communications and foundation relations for Atlantic Center for the Arts.
View four poems by Kelle Groom in issue 5 and “Dear Baby” in issue 13 of Superstition Review.
The book is available for preorder here. The book will be for sale from Tupelo Press starting October 1, 2023.
To learn more about Kelle Groom’s work, visit her website.
Superstition Reviewhas published art and literature since 2008 and with each new issue, the team grows more familiar with the expectations of the magazine and the type of content our magazine publishes.
To understand Superstition Review‘s editorial preferences, view Issue 31’s editor statements. These statements comes from last issue’s editors in the poetry, nonfiction, fiction, art, and interview sections and offer insight into the process editors use to select the pieces that are ultimately published in our magazine. Read through these statements to get an idea of the type of content and messages previously published in our magazine before submitting your own work. And, make sure you view Issue 31 to see the pieces editors ultimately chose to be published.
Superstition Review is open to submissions for Issue 32! Our submission window closes August 31st, 2023 at 11:59 p.m. Our magazine is looking for art, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry submissions.
Director, producer, and writer David Shields has a forthcoming film, How We Got Here. The film is now streaming on Tubi, Mometu, Cineverse, and Free Movies Plus and a companion volume of the same name will be published by Sublation Books in January 2024.
In both the book and the film How We Got Here, Shields traces the history of postmodernism and ultimately argues that Melville plus Nietzsche divided by the square root of (Allan) Bloom times Žižek (squared) equals Bannon.
Shields found inspiration for the film when attending the NonfictioNOW writers’ conference in Phoenix, Nov 1-3, 2018, just before the midterm elections. He asked fellow writers and professors in attendance questions such as: How do you know what you believe? Do you have any absolute beliefs? Is there such thing as “truth”? What is ‘nonfiction” and is it “true”? What do you think is the difference between “truth” and belief? If you have siblings, have they shown your view of the world to be flawed? Are you superstitious? Do you believe in ghosts? Why are you here and not canvassing for Stacey Abrams?
Shields found that the consensus answers: I have no absolute beliefs, though I do believe in the power of art; there are no absolute truths other than that there is no truth; my sister and I are estranged; there are no ghosts except psychic luggage; I probably should be canvassing for Abrams, but I’ve lost faith in the process.
It is from these interviews that Shields has crafted How We Got Here. The film consists of interviews with more than thirty NonfictioNOW attendees, eighteen brief 2-Truths-and-a-Lie videos, and a slideshow / TED talk (on speed) / montage / soundscape / voiceover / monologue / intellectual history of the last 170 years. The film shares diverse perspectives across the history of postmodernism from its roots in art and philosophy all the way to modern day election denial and media politicization.
The film has received great praise:
“This film should be required viewing for every Intro to Humanities course in the country. It does the seemingly impossible: reinserts some context to our mostly decontextualized lives. And, perhaps even more surprisingly, the film’s pace and structure prevent it from ever feeling even slightly boring, despite the heavy lifting it does to excavate the ideological roots beneath our country’s growing social and political turmoil.” —Michael Wheaton, Autofocus.
“A brilliant, encyclopedic film. The meanings are conveyed by how the film is edited: cutting between the history of ideas of the truth, the arrangement of quotations, the personal versions articulated by different speakers, the black-and-white live action, the colorful animation, and the intersplicing of Two Truths and a Lie.”—Susan Daitch, author of Siege of Comedians: A Novel.
“A fast-paced, exhilarating collage of voices converging on the question of how we got to birtherism and election denial.”—Jennifer Jacquet, author of The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World.
David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of twenty-five books, including Reality Hunger (which Lit Hub named one of the most important books of the past decade), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and PEN USA Award), Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (PEN/Revson Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors’ Choice). Shields has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. Shields, a senior contributing editor of Conjunctions, has published essays and stories in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Esquire, Yale Review, Salon, Slate, Tin House, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Believer, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Best American Essays. His work has been translated into two dozen languages.
Shields has also written, stared, produced, and directed several films including the film adaptation of I Think You’re Totally Wrong: A Quarrel; Lynch: A History; I’llShow You Mine; and How We Got Here.
View David Shields’ interview regarding “Keeping Up with the Speed of Light,” in issue 11 of Superstition Review.
To learn more about the film, visit the website here. View the film on Tubi here.
Superstition Review is open to submissions for Issue 32! Our submission window closes August 31st, 2023 at 11:59 p.m. Our magazine is looking for art, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry submissions. Submit here.
Ensure you read all guidelines before submitting. Do not submit previously published work. Simultaneous submissions are permitted, but please alert Superstition Review to a piece’s potential publication elsewhere. Submissions are able to be withdrawn and part of a submission can be withdrawn if a note is added in Submittable.
View Issue 31 of Superstition Review to understand the type of work our literary magazine publishes.
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