Event: Desert Nights, Rising Stars Literary Fair 2020

Come and celebrate Desert Nights, Rising Stars Literary Fair with us! The event is free, but seats are first-come, first-served so be sure to get there early!

When: Saturday, February 22, 2020, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Where: ASU Tempe Campus, Front Lawn, Old Main, 400 E Tyler Mall, Tempe, AZ 85281

More event details here.

Superstition Review is holding a panel from 2:15 to 2:45 on Getting Published in Literary Journals, come meet some of the interns behind our magazine and hear from them and author Scott Daughtridge DeMer!

RSVP for our event here. Note: You do not need to RSVP to attend this event and RSVP’s do not guarantee a seat.

Hope to see everyone there!

Meet the Interns: Heidi Nielson, Fiction Editor

heidinielson_0Heidi Nielson is pursuing concurrent degrees in English (Creative Writing) and Journalism (Digital Journalism), as well as a minor in Music.

Superstition Review: What do you do for SR?

Heidi Nielson: As a fiction editor, I send solicitations to authors for work, as well as for interviews, read, discuss, and decide on submissions along with Riki, and conduct at least one interview with an author.

SR: How did you hear about SR?

HN: I first heard about the internship while I was interning at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, working with Hayden’s Ferry Review. Shortly thereafter, I volunteered at the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers’ Conference at ASU and was able to attend a class on literary journals that Patricia Murphy was teaching, and met with her after the class ended. During the last issue, I helped with the blog, though I wasn’t officially an intern. I’m very excited to be an intern this semester.

SR: What is your favorite section of SR and why?

HN: As a fiction writer, I tend to gravitate toward the fiction section of any journal first. I am an avid reader, as well as a writer. I feel like I learn the most about writing fiction from reading the work of more experienced and talented writers, like those in Superstition Review.

SR: Who is your dream contributor to the journal?

HN: My dream contributor would probably be Jhumpa Lahiri. Her prose is beautiful, and I admire the way that she is able to immerse her readers in Bengali culture.

SR: What job would you like to try out?

HN: Probably blogger. I really enjoy social media and had a lot of fun when I helped with the blog during the last issue.

SR: What are you most excited for?

HN: I would say that I am most excited to just read submissions. We are writing to so many amazing writers this semester to request work.

SR: What is the first book you remember falling in love with?

HN: I think the first book I fell in love with was Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. What made that book so compelling to me as a child, I think, was that their family felt so similar to my own. I come from a family of six girls, and one boy, and the personalities of myself and the three sisters closest to me in age, always seemed so similar to the four sisters in Little Women.

SR: What are you currently reading?

HN: I’m currently reading a compilation of T.C. Boyle’s short stories, entitled simply, Stories.

SR: What are your favorite websites to distract you from homework?

HN: I noticed that most people were saying Facebook, and I can’t deny that I do check it more than once a day, but I think the website that usually distracts me from homework the most is etsy.com. It’s a website of handmade or vintage items, and I can just spend hours browsing through the thousands of items. I also get distracted by my Google Reader. I subscribe to about 50 blogs, and so I’m almost constantly reading posts.

SR: Do you write? Tell us about a project you are working on.

HN: I write fiction, mainly short stories. I have been working on revisions of two stories I wrote for my fiction class last year since the last ended, and I’m on my sixth drafts of both.

Meet the Interns: Kat Corliss, Blogger

With the semester picking up speed and things really starting to get done on the journal, we’ve come to realize that it’s also about that time that we ought to start introducing the interns working on Superstition Review this semester. We strive to be in touch with our reading audience and that includes letting you get to know our entire student staff. We feel it gives you perspective as the reader, especially when getting to know the personalities of our editors as they change each term with new faces every semester.

I suppose I should go first, though, since I’ll be the one writing the updates here for the next three-and-change months, and then introduce our team members as I interview them.

My name is Kat Corliss, and I’m serving on the Web Design team. I’m the Blogger. I’m a student of the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences, majoring in English: Creative Writing: Fiction, with a focus on Young Adult Literature. I am a Senior this semester and will be graduating December 2009.

Superstition Review: What do you do for SR?

Kat Corliss: I’m the Blogger for SR, which means I write tri-weekly posts about what’s going on with the production magazine in our blog. I’ve also kind of become the Social Networker, in a sense. I maintain our Facebook fan page and update our Twitter account. I make sure the public knows what’s going on internally with the journal, I announce calls for submission and deadlines, and I communicate local events pertaining to the literary and art world.

SR: How did you hear about or get involved with Superstition Review?

KC: I was introduced to our Editor-in-Chief, Trish, by a classmate of mine at the 2009 Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference at ASU Main. Trish had just talked on a panel about SR and it sounded really exciting and something fun to pursue so I submitted my application later that week.

SR: What is your favorite section of SR?

KC: Probably the art section because I’m a really visual person. I like being exposed to new artists all the time. Plus, the online delivery of our journal really allows for higher quality images to be published than a print magazine would.

SR: Who is your dream contributor to the journal?

KC: In writing, it’d be Manuel Munoz, a (now) local writer. He is absolutely amazing. I just read his Faith Healer of Olive Avenue this summer and it was breathtakingly well written, smart, and painful. For artists, I’d have to say Chris McVeigh. He’s just plain fun. His photography often involves LEGOs or Star Wars action figures and it’s just that little connection between passion for creating art and embracing childhood whimsy that I adore.

SR: What job, other than your own, would you like to try out in the journal?

KC: Definitely fiction editor. It’s what I’ve been doing in school for the last few years, it’s what I want to do with my life–edit young adult fiction–so that’d be fun to work on. I’m glad to have been given the opportunity to see the publicity side of journal editing, though, and I’m excited to work on the social networking aspect because it’s new and flexible, a lot of it experimental. I’m never bored with what I get to do for the journal.

SR: What are you most excited for in the upcoming issue?

KC: The changes we’re looking at in formatting. We’re updating our look a bit. We’re hoping it will be ready in time for launch so the Web Design Team has already been in a couple meetings discussing what we’d like to change and what’s working great for us.

SR: What are you currently reading?

KC: Loads of YA lit for a class and an independent study project I’m working on. I just finished a Goosebumps graphic novel–did you know they’ve started republishing the classic scary stories into visual format? How cool is that? I’m also in the middle of The Time Traveler’s Wife, something I picked up over a year ago and haven’t managed to sit down and finish. A stack of graphic novels and comic books. I’m about to start Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys.

SR: Do you write? Tell us about a project you’re working on.

KC: Yes, I do. One of my current projects is writing a full young adult novel under the supervision of Dr. Blasingame at ASU Main in an independent study. It’s a story that follows a 17-year-old girl on a trip halfway across the US in her search to find out more about her mother who committed suicide when the girl was a toddler. She ends up reconnecting with a family she didn’t really ever get to know since her father moved her away when her parents had gotten divorced and, in the process, learns a lot about what her mother was like and why she killed herself, and how she’s actually more like her mother than she thinks.

SR: What are some of your favorite websites to waste time on or distract you from homework?

KC: Oh, definitely Facebook. I love Twitter, too, especially since my favorite part of Facebook are the status updates my friends make, and that’s all it really is in my opinion. I also spend a lot of time on LiveJournal, especially in the Literary Tattoos, Trashy Eats, and Thrift Horror communities.

SR: What are some of your favorite literary links?

KC: I definitely follow Neil Gaiman on Twitter, read his blog, and sometimes even listen to his library on LastFM because it’s just plain interesting; he’s one of the authors who has jumped into every aspect of online life and is always just keystrokes away from connecting with fans, and that’s just cool in general, beside the fact that he’s a brilliant writer. I also read Fiction Circus blog posts, one of my favorite literary bloggers/literary magazines. I also enjoy the Australian site, Inside A Dog, created to promote reading to youth by the Centre for Youth Literature.

 

More intern interviews coming soon!

Author Interviews

Arizona State University’s renowned Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing is hosting the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Writers Conference this weekend; lucky for us here at the magazine, some of the wonderful authors involved in the conference have agreed to give us some insightful interviews for our Inaugural Issue.

The authors we will be interviewing this weekend include the very talented Denise Duhamel, Lee Gutkind, and Jim Daniels. The interviews will be premiering on our site sometime soon, so be sure to check them out.