qarrtsiluni

So what have we found here? Sifting through dozens of pages and hundreds of lines of code, we’ve chosen this handful of hidden messages: shadows full of portent, the dreams of the blind, words left unsaid, scents on the wind, real and imagined witchcraft.

In the end, it seems that every person, every page, every leaf is stamped with hidden meaning, broadcasting a message which is both instantly obvious and irrevocably lost. The world is always speaking to us; we are always speaking to each other. In a world so crammed with meaning, the real scarcity is readers: people willing to listen, to decode, to understand.

Thank you for taking the time to tune your radios to these particular hisses and beeps. We hope they might provide you with the clues to unlock the next hidden messages you see.

— Carey Wallace and Dana Guthrie Martin

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Please click on the contributors’ names to see all their publications in qarrtsiluni to date.

Anne-Mieke was born in a small village in the Netherlands, but in writing she feels more comfortable with using English. She has found that it is easier for her to write on beauty and intimacy when there is a distance between her and the words. Currently working in the field of arts education, she aims to become a professional photographer, and recently began a photoblog, Eye in a Bell.

D.S. Apfelbaum is a senior at Long Island University’s C.W. Post Campus, where she’ll be receiving a B.A. in English in May 2008. Every once in a while she updates her blog, The Art of Poetry.

Tricia Anne Baar is a poet, painter, and observer of the absurd, who lives on the edge of a forest in Arkansas. Or sometimes just on the edge.

Cecelia Chapman (website) is a graphic artist and writer currently living and working in Pacifica. Born in San Francisco, lived in New York, Los Angeles, Italy, Barbados, Mexico and Hawaii, she studied graphic design at Parsons School of Design, New York. She works as a designer and waitress while producing videos and stories and exhibiting her artwork.

Robert Elzy Cogswell retired from librarianship a year ago and has worked every day since as a poet. He has some fifty poems in print or forthcoming, but his greatest pleasure devolves upon him in the writing process itself. Before librarianship, he was a panhandler in Manhattan.

Teju Cole is the author of Every Day is for the Thief, published by Cassava Republic Press. He lives in Brooklyn.

Beth Coyote (My Little Golden Book of Phobias) is published in Snow Monkey, Gumball Press, synapse, When It Rains From the Ground Up, Chrysanthemum, two Washington Poets Association anthologies, a new anthology of women’s political poetry, From the Web and Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. In 2007, she was nominated for Seattle Poet Populist.

Nathan Curnow’s first collection of poetry is No Other Life But This (Five Islands Press). In 2007 he was funded by the Australia Council to stay at ten haunted sites around the country writing poetry based upon his experiences. He blogs at Blog Eat Poet.

Brent Goodman’s work has most recently appeared in Anti-, Diagram, Rattle, Court Green, Hobble Creek Review, Pebble Lake Review, and Barn Owl Review. He lives in northern Wisconsin with his partner and the cats, and blogs at The Brother Swimming Beneath Me. His first full-length poetry collection, also entitled The Brother Swimming Beneath Me, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press.

Diana Hunt is a first-time contributor to qarrtsiluni, and says she found us via the cassandra pages. She spends a lot of time in the woods.

Dick Jones (Patteran Pages), a drama teacher and musician, has been writing seriously for the past 20 years. His poems and short stories have been published in a wide range of magazines, both on- and offline, and he is currently preparing a selection of poetry for submission to publishers.

A Cave Canem fellow and Vona Alum, Alan King’s fiction and poems have appeared in the Arabesques Review, Warpland, The Amistad, and Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS, among others. He has a blog at MySpace, which includes links to two chapbooks.

Rob Mackenzie (Surroundings) is a Scottish poet. His poetry chapbook, The Clown of Natural Sorrow, was published by HappenStance Press in 2005. He served as a guest editor for qarrtsiluni’s Making Sense issue.

Dana Guthrie Martin (My Gorgeous Somewhere) lives and writes in the Seattle area. Her poetry has appeared in Fence and Canopic Jar, and is forthcoming in Blossombones. Her poem in qarrtsiluni’s Insecta Issue, “And the Crickets Outside My Window,” has had the most page views of any poem we’ve ever published.

Robbi Nester teaches composition classes to mostly unwilling freshmen at Irvine Valley College in Irvine, California.

Edith Oberley blogs at Bitterroot and Bergamot, named for “wildflowers native to my two homes, Montana and Wisconsin.” Since she began blogging in April 2005, her focus has been on communicating the value of “heart-places,” as she calls them: natural areas in need of protection.

Katherine Durham Oldmixon is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at Huston-Tillotson, an historically Black university on Austin’s East Side. A poet active in the community, she also serves on the board of Texas Folklife, is the current president of Austin Poetry Society and is a Research Associate of the Humanities Institute of the University of Texas at Austin. She and Arturo Lomas Garza blog about their artistic projects, many of which are collaborations, at Katudi Artists Collaboration.

Allan Peterson is the author of two books: All the Lavish in Common (2005 Juniper Prize) and Anonymous Or (Defined Providence Press Prize), as well as four chapbooks. Recent print and online appearances include: Perihelion, Press 1, Bat City, Marlboro Review, Northwest Review, Notre Dame Review, Seattle Review, Runes. Work forthcoming in: Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Swink, American Life in Poetry.

Andy Pokel is a student at St. Olaf College and is an active performer, poet, and doodler.

Monica Raymond is a prize-winning poet and playwright based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. She has taught writing at Harvard, the City University of New York, and the Boston Museum School. You can read an excerpt from her play The Owl Girl at the Massachusetts Cultural Council website.

Stephen W. Searfoss’s piece in this issue marks his first appearance in qarrtsiluni.

Deb Scott (stoney moss) is a middle-aged tomboy living in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and pets. Her poetry is published in MReview 2006 and 2007, and she manages ReadWritePoem, an online community poetry site.

Tom Sheehan has published 9 books since 1999, received 9 Pushcart and 2 Million Writer nominations, an IPPY Award, an Aldren Memoir nomination, received a Silver Rose Award from ART and The Georges Simenon Award from New Works Review for short stories. Pushing 80, he’s surprised how fast he still is, getting there. Soon he meets with pals (92, 79, 78, & 77) for a 3-hour lunch and gab session on literature and politics. They’ll each have a martini and he’ll have 3 beers and the waitress will shine on them.

Prize-winning photographer Anne Morrison Smyth (website) grew up in Ripton, Vermont and in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She moved to Belchertown in 1999 after living in Amherst for 30 years, where she raised her four children. Anne’s love for wildernesses of all kinds informs her work with an intimate, unflinching celebration of the diverse small realities that create a larger truth.

Carey Wallace (alice) is a writer from Michigan, living in New York, and working on a new novel about the invention of the typewriter.

Martin Willitts, Jr. is a librarian, visual artist, and “science magician” who hypnotizes watermelons and bounces eggs. He has recent a print chapbook, Lowering Nets of Light (Pudding House Publications, 2007), an online chapbook News from the Front, edited an anthology of poems abut cancer, Alternatives to Surrender (Plain View Press, 2007), and has an online chapbook of haiku and his art forthcoming entitled, Fragile as Paper Cranes.

A seventh book from Marly Youmans (website, blog), Val/Orson, is forthcoming from P. S. Publishing (U. K.) in 2008. Set among the tree sitters of California’s redwoods, the story takes its inspiration from the legendary tale of Valentine and Orson and the forest romances of Shakespeare. Her prior books are: Ingledove; Claire; The Curse of the Raven Mocker; The Wolf Pit; Catherwood; and Little Jordan.

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