Elena Passarello, A Contributor Update

Since her essay, “Playing Sick,” was featured in Issue 3 of Superstition Review, Elena Passarello has been leaving her unmistakable mark on the literary community.

In 2013, Elena won the gold medal for nonfiction at the Independent Publisher Awards, later receiving the Whiting Award for nonfiction in 2015.

She also published her essay collection, Let Me Clear My Throat in 2012, as well as her book, Animals Strike Curious Poses in 2017 from Sarbande.

Elena continues to write and is currently a professor at Oregon State University.


Want to find out more about Elena? Check out her Twitter.

Jerry Eckert: “Mahlapane’s Story” in Pooled Ink

Jerry Eckert’s “Mahlapane’s Story” (Issue 5) is available in the Northern Colorado Writers’ anthology, Pooled Ink. Pooled Ink publishes and celebrates the winners of the Northern Colorado’s Writers 2011 Contests and includes works of esteemed fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and cover design work. Eckert’s “Mahlapane’s Story” originally appeared in Issue 5 of Superstition Review and you can read a full version of the story in our archives.

Jerry Eckert is a former professor who has returned to his love of writing nonfiction after years of work in his academic field. He has published nearly 200 papers, some of which were award winning. His research and policy analyses for the Office of the South African Prime Minister helped speed the downfall of the apartheid, his monograph restructured Lesotho’s agriculture, he wrote the first economic policy package for the incoming Mandela government, and his op-eds in the Christian Science Monitor influenced American’s South Africa policies. “My career was in agricultural development and policy advising overseas.  I lived these events,” Jerry notes, “I was able to earn the trust of my host nations and their governments and they sucked me in very close to the center of the action. Every country I ever lived in long-term, I entered as a technocrat and ended up working for the President or Prime Minister directly, at their request.”

In our interview, Eckert mentions that his work and his love for literary nonfiction seem to come from two different cultures: “As an academic, I wrote a lot in ‘Academic Speak’ which is not a very creative (nor easily readable) medium. I [won] a couple of ‘Best Published Article’ awards from my professional association, and those were two papers I chose to write in the language of the average person rather than for the academic with his/her Ph.D.”

Jerry started writing when his studies took him beyond Arizona borders, and he felt the loss of leaving the desert that he loved: “I wrote for Arizona outdoor magazines as a way to re-live the Arizona desert and our sky islands vicariously. I could get back home in my mind every now and then. I wrote of my favorite mountains, the Santa Ritas, I wrote of my favorite species, the Coues deer (Sonoran whitetail). I think I got hooked when I discovered that I could get paid for what were essentially my love letters to an ecosystem. I fell in love with literary nonfiction when I discovered the richness of the feelings when writing memoir, recapturing my life’s high points, and finding that readers loved the stories.”

Eckert’s nonfiction pieces have previously appeared in Matter, Pilgrimage, Memoir (and), Weber – The Contemporary, in addition to Superstition Review. His piece “The Dustbin Telegraph” will be featured in our upcoming Issue 9 of Superstition Review, which will go live April 1st. “Requiem for the Night Sky,” a lament of losing the stars and the skies to pollution, will appear in the upcoming issue of Weber – The Contemporary West. Eckert’s “Ismail,” a nonfiction piece that examines life lessons learned from following the poorest people in Pakistan, is scheduled to appear in Memoir (and). Jerry Eckert is in the final stages of finishing his memoir, Weeping Kings and Wild Boars: Adventures of a Neocolonialist.

For those seeking to enter the literary nonfiction field, Jerry advises that budding writers “keep a journal, religiously.  I didn’t and now decades later it is really hard to pull up exact sequences of who said what to whom.” Jerry also encourages young writers to “Go through life with your eyes wide open. Like a photographer goes through life always seeing light more intensely than the rest of us, the writer needs to see life more intensely that most. Jump into the thick of things and, even if being swept along by the thrill of it all, remember to watch with what I call the Writer’s Eye, knowing that you are at the same time taking field notes for an essay some day.”

Pooled Ink is currently available on Lulu.com for $11.99 (plus shipping/tax) or at NCW for $11.00. Pooled Ink will be available on Amazon and additional markets in roughly 6-8 weeks.

Northern Colorado Writers is currently hosting their Short Fiction 2012 contest, which is open until March 15th, 2012. You can find more information and guidelines for the contest at the NCW website.

Congratulations Jerry Eckert. We’re proud of all that you have accomplished and look forward to your new work.


Forthcoming: Patrick Madden

Superstition Review is thrilled to announce our publication of Patrick Madden in our upcoming issue, set to launch this December. Madden is a wonderful essayist who curates his own website which features classical and renowned essays from the most esteemed authors in history and currently teaches at Brigham Young University. Check out his website at www.quotidiana.org.

Patrick Madden joined the BYU English Department in 2004 after completing his Ph.D. at Ohio University. He specializes in theory and practice of the personal essay and its sister genres (travel, aphorism, etc.) in literary nonfiction. He is also interested in Latin American Literature.

His first book, Quotidiana, a collection of personal essays, was published in early 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. It was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction; it won a gold medal in the Independent Publisher Book of the Year Awards for Creative Nonfiction, a bronze medal in the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Awards for Essay, and the Association for Mormon Letters Award for the Personal Essay. He has published individual essays in The Iowa Review, Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, Portland Magazine, and many other journals, plus some of these essays have been anthologized in The Best American Spiritual Writing 2007 and The Best Creative Nonfiction vol. 2 or noted in the back of The Best American Essays.

He enjoys volleyball, basketball, web design, strategy games, singing, Rush, and Notre Dame football. He and his wife, Karina, have three sons and three daughters.

We are honored to have the opportunity to publish Madden’s work ourselves, and look forward to our readership enjoying his work as much as we have.

Below is a link to one of Madden’s essays, entitled, “On Laughter”
http://magazine.byu.edu/?act=view&a=2390

Or you can listen to him read the same essay by downloading the .mp3 from this link:

http://magazine.byu.edu/issues/121/2390/files/patrickmaddenonlaughter.mp3

 

Superstition Review Reading 3

What: Superstition Review Reading 3: Featuring Carol Ann Bassett
When: Monday, November 30, 2009 from 6:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Where: ASU Memorial Union Building, Pima Auditorium (Room 230)

In conjunction with the ASU School of Life Sciences and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, Superstition Review proudly announces its final reading of the Issue 4 Reading Series featuring renowned nonfiction writer and journalist Carol Ann Bassett. Author of three books of literary nonfiction, including her most recent release Galapagos at the Crossroads, Bassett’s work has received high acclaim, being anthologized in the American Nature Writing series. She was a regular contributor to The New York Times and Time Life Inc. and her work has appeared in such national publications as The Nation and The Los Angeles Times. Her work focuses on natural history, the environment, and traditional cultures in transition.