Contributor's Notes - Eclectica Magazine, v5n4, Oct/Nov 2001

Oct/Nov 2001

Tom Dooley co-founded Eclectica in 1996 and serves as its Managing Editor. He is, at the time of this issue's publication, attending Air Force Officer Training School in Montgomery, Alabama. He misses his wife terribly, but otherwise enjoys getting up at five in the morning and being yelled at all day.

Julie King shares a birthday with Eminem. She has a Master's in creative writing, which she teaches along with film studies at the University of Wisconsin, Parkside. Her work appears in the Iowa Press anthologies Boomer Girls and are you experienced? and she has published in Fiction International, Sundog, Puerto del Sol, Quarterly West, Gulf Coast, and others. She wrote, directed, and produced the short film Worlds, sometimes stars in B-horror movies, and is a mother to four personality-rich cats. She first appeared in the magazine back in 1996 and has been a member of the staff since 1999.

Tara M. Gilbert-Brever has appeared in Primavera and previous issues of Eclectica, where she now serves as an assistant editor. She loves her husband and her cats (Ponyboy and Willow) so much she could eat them like chocolate covered cherries. She would like someday to be the person who names lipstick colors and spends her free time making bad on her promises not to write about the personal lives of her friends.

Laird Barron was born in Palmer, Alaska and now resides in Olympia, Washington. He is a professional Iditarod competitor turned writer, with poetry appearing in the Melic Review, The Animist, 3rd Muse, pith, and others. His fiction appears online and in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Interests include research of ancient warfare, medieval diplomacy, and combat martial arts.

Kristy Bowen has appeared most recently in Moon Journal, Poetry Midwest, and Prairie Poetry. After studying English and Theatre Arts at Rockford College, where she won the College Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets, she received an M.A. in English Literature from DePaul University in 1999. Her latest project is launching the on-line literary zine Wicked Alice, and she also serves as contributing editor for "20th Century Women Authors" at Suite101.com. She lives in Chicago.

Joseph Carcel has won a number of poetry awards, including first place in the momthly IBPC poetry contest. His poems have recently appeared in Melic Review, Neidergasse, and Writer's Block. When not writing poetry, Mr. Carcel, an attorney, enjoys rock climbing and reading remaindered college texts.

Robert Castle has recently published fiction in 5_trope, 3 A.M. magazine, Monocacy Valley Review, and Timber Creek Review.

Scott Clevenger along with Sheri Zolllinger, is an expert at decoding the secret agendas of crappy motion pictures. The article featured in this issue of Eclectica is adapted from their epic book-in-progress, Subliminal Cinema: Life Lessons from Lousy Movies.

David Clum graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a BA in English Literature. He works as a software engineer and lives in Denver with his wife and three children.

Ron Currie is this issue's Spotlight Author. He lives and, consequently, writes, in Waterville, Maine. His story "Killing Scottish Elvis" will appear in the September 2001 issue of Carve Magazine. This is his second appearance in Eclectica.

Alison Daniel has been widely published in her native Australia and has appeared in Eclectica before.

Bob Dornberg supplied the art for this issue. Check out a complete catalog of his work online!

Jürgen Fauth is a writer, translator, editor, and film critic from Wiesbaden, Germany. His fiction has appeared in Berkely Fiction Journal, Chiron Review, Mississippi Review, Potatoeaters Quarterly, Enterzone, Vestal Review, Product, Georgetown Review, and The Blue Moon Review. He is an associate editor for fiction at the Mississippi Review Web, where he recently guest-edited an issue of short shorts. He received his doctorate from the Center for Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi and now lives in New York City.

Jennifer Finstrom lives in Chicago, IL. She is a former Eclectica Spotlight Author.

Sarah Freeborn is twenty-two years old, attends the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, and works two jobs. She reports, "I basically just enjoy life!"

C. Garza currently gravitates between his home state of Texas and his adopted state of Connecticut, where he attends Yale. He is on the staff of AOL's Amazing Instant Novelist and a poetry editor of the award-winning The Rose & Thorn. His interests include The Real World and Road Rules on MTV, the poetry of Louise Glück and Nick Flynn, the history of England's royal Tudor dynasty, and the music of Our Lady Peace, Incubus, Fuel, and Oasis, to name a few. His work has previously appeared in Stirring and Prose Ax.

Sarah Goff is a young writer living in New Jersey. The story in this issue of Eclectica was written while attending the New Jersey Governor's School of the Arts this summer. She also has a poem in an upcoming issue of Poetry Motel. She is a big fan of Paul Newman.

Laura Goldblatt is a resident of Princeton, New Jersey. She would like to thank Lisa Speransky for being a constant source of inspiration.

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada. She also helps her husband, a retired wildlife biologist, with his bird projects, and she's trying to become proficient at solar cooking. Her poems appear in Cider Press Review, Descant, The Distillery, Red Wheelbarrow, The Chattahoochee Review, The Iowa Review, Poetry International and elsewhere; online, she was featured in the May issue of Poetry Magazine and is a former contributor to Eclectica. Her latest collection, "An Hour in the Cougar's Grace," received a Pipistrelle Best of the Small Press Award.

Michael Graves is a twenty-four year-old writer of screenplays and fiction, who also works as a special needs educator in Massachusetts. When not working, he enjoys astronomy, travel, and beer. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including The Armchair Aesthete, S. L. U. G. Fest Limited, and Naked Poetry. Michael has just completed his first full-length feature film, "Memorial Day." He is currently writing two new motion pictures.

Allen Itz lives in San Antonio, Texas. He has published in a number of on-line and print journals, including Alchemy, Neiderngasse, The Melic Review, The Horsethief's Journal, The Green Tricycle, AvantGarde Times, Maelstrom, Dynamic Patterns, The ShallowEnd, and, most recently, The Poet's Canvas and Nectarzine. This is his second appearance in Eclectica.

Stanley Jenkin's stories and essays have or will appear in Amelia, 32 Pages, The Blue Moon Review, CrossConnectand the Oyster Boy Review. A former Spotlight Author, Stanley now writes a regular column for the Salon. He lives and works in Queens, New York.

Amy Crane Johnson is a former Eclectica Spotlight Author who lives and works in Green Bay, Wisconsin, her native birthplace. She received her BA in English Literature with an emphasis in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. While working in advertising, she wrote award-winning video and radio scripts. In addition to children's books, she enjoys writing poetry and short stories. She can often be found reading in bed or watching movies with her husband, children, and Walker, her darling dog.

John Kidd lives in Hobart, Tasmania. He used to be an English teacher, and he has recently written screenplays and a novel just sent off to a publisher. His poetry currently appears in ezines and print in the US, the UK, the Phillipines, Canada, and Australia.

Rebecca Lu Kiernan is the editor of GECKO. She has appeared in Ms. Magazine, among others in the US and Australia, and has poetry upcoming in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. 2 River Press recently released her chapbook, "Sex With Trees And Other Things Equally Responsive." She says about the poems appearing in this issue, "I ended an important relationship recently, but I would not trade one ounce of my misery for the poetry that came with it."

Sharon Kourous lives in Ohio near Lake Erie and teaches high school English. A former contributor to Eclectica, her poetry appears most recently in Melic and Stirring. About the poem in this issue, she says it "reflects my growing belief that poets must re-assume an important political/social role in society—find ways to move out of the personal and confessional. I wanted to address the way media increasingly define our lives. More and more, we seem to embody cliches and believe they are real."

Robert Lamontagne was raised in southeastern Massachusetts and hails from a French Canadian family. An amateur actor, writer and poet, Rob attended local schools and is currently studying English literature and philosophy at Trinity College Dublin.

Barbara Lefcowitz is in China doing a brief teaching stint in Shanghai. Her seventh poetry collection, "The Politics of Snow," was just published this summer. She has published poems, stories, and essays in about four hundred journals, including previous appearances in Eclectica, and won writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation. About the poem in this issue, she writes: "The poem, of course, was written in response to the catastrophic events of 9/11/2001; it is one of four I have written on the subject so far—at the moment I can't seem to write about anything else. The poem was particularly inspired by a photo of a man spread-eagled as he fell to his death from the World Trade Towers, along with something I saw on TV: one shoe, perfectly intact and, indeed, upright in the midst of the rubble. I hope by the time you publish this poem the overall situation will have improved, but I hesitate to think it will do so for many decades."

Ines Lopes lives in Livingston, New Jersey and is a senior in highschool.

Don Mager has published some two hundred and fifty original poems and translations from Czech and German over the last thirty years, including two books: To Track The Wounded On (1986) and Glosses (1995).

Walt McDonald was an Air Force pilot, taught at the Air Force Academy, and is the Texas Poet Laureate for 2001. He has published eighteen collections of poems and a book of fiction, including All Occasions (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000); Whatever the Wind Delivers: Celebrating West Texas and the Near Southwest (Texas Tech University Press, 1999); Blessings the Body Gave, and The Flying Dutchman (Ohio State, 1998, 1987); Counting Survivors (Pittsburgh, 1995); Night Landings (Harper & Row, 1989); and After the Noise of Saigon (Massachusetts, 1988). Four books received Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame.

Mark Melton is a poet/writer currently residing in Melbourne, Australia, although various fragments of himself have been known to surface, mysteriously, in certain parts of Europe and the United States. Apart from writing, he dabbles in web design and edits 3rd Muse Poetry Journal. His hobbies include playing computer games, procrastinating, and writing about himself in third person.

Rebecca Ohlsen claims she "was born backwards and grew up crooked." She's now pretending to be a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon, where she's lived for about five years. She's almost thirty. She spent this past summer daydreaming about novels and making around $4 an hour to write movie reviews for the local alt-weekly. Her favorite color is clear. Her favorite band is the Astrobastards, but they may have just broken up again. Her favorite writers are Hemingway, Rushdie, HST, and whatever she's in the mood for at a given moment.

Daniel A. Olivas makes his home with his wife and son in the San Fernando Valley. Having earned a degree in English Literature from Stanford University and law degree from UCLA, he specializes in land use and environmental enforcement with the California Department of Justice. He is the author of The Courtship of María Rivera Peña: A Novella (Silver Lake Publishing, 2000). His fiction and poetry have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, THEMA, The Pacific Review, Outsider Ink, linnaean street, The Vestal Review, Red River Review, and Web del Sol, among many other print and online journals. His work is also featured in several anthologies, including Fantasmas: Supernatural Stories by Mexican-American Writers, edited Rob Johnson with an introduction from Kathleen Alcalá (Bilingual Press, fall 2001), and Love to Mamá: A Tribute to Mothers, edited by Pat Mora and illustrated by Paula Barragán (Lee & Low Books, 2001).

Vanessa Weibler Paris lives in Erie, Pennsylvania, where she works in health care public relations. The story in this issue of Eclectica was based loosely on an actual incident. She reports, "During a particularly stormy summer, we had plenty of trouble keeping the corn in our garden from breaking off, but we did manage to salvage a few ears."

Summer Robinson is seventeen years old and lives in western Washington with her family. She has been writing poetry since falling in love with the work of Emily Dickinson in the sixth grade. She also writes non-fiction, short stories, and creative prose, with an emphasis on nature/environmental subjects.

Paul Sampson labors heroically as a technical writer for a mammoth corporation. He has been a professional writer and editor for many years, but he prefers to do the kind of writing you can't make a living from. Some of his recent essays and poems appear in The Alsop Review, The 2River View, the British publication World Wide Writers II, and the new anthology Best Texas Writing (Rancho Loco Press). He lives on the outskirts of a small town east of Dallas, Texas.

Ann Skea lives in Australia. She is the author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE Press, Australia).

Gary Sloan retired in 1999 from Louisiana Tech University, where he was George Anding Professor of English. After twenty-five years of contributing to academic journals, he now writes for such "popular" publications as Skeptic, Free Inquiry, American Atheist, The Freethinker (London), Freethought Today, and American Rationalist. He lives in Ruston, Louisiana with his wife LaRue, who is the Shakespeare specialist at the University of Louisiana at Monroe.

Alec Solomita lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, where he writes poetry and fiction. His work has been published in the Mississippi Review, the Boston Phoenix, the Boston Book Review and other publications. He also works as an illustrator and is currently finishing a novel.

Bob Thurber has appeared in a number of publications, including Zoetrope's All Story Extra, elimae, Cafe Irreal, The Melic Review, The Providence Journal, In Posse Review, Blue Murder and Linnaean Street (which awarded him its coveted Award for Excellence and Clarity in Writing for stories published in the Spring 2000 issue). He recently won second place in FlashQuake¹s Themed Flash Fiction issue, and he has work forthcoming in a fiction anthology from Agony Press. Bob is now a contributing editor to Linnaean Street, and co-editor of the critically acclaimed literary site, Gargoyle: Arts and Letters on the Web.

Amy Unsworth says that her love of language comes from her mother who would always point out the ridiculous and humorous. She studied literature and theatre in college, and since graduation has been teaching three children to speak and love language. Her work has appeared in The Poet's Canvas and at Poems Niederngasse where she is now a contributing editor. Regarding her poem "Double Yellow," she says: "I enjoyed the challenge of incorporating four particular words into a poem, and tried to pick a subject that I wouldn't expect too many others to be aware of. My parents spent several years in a big rig, and the subject matter is drawn from their stories of life on the road. They often saw girls "working" the lots and rest areas where the truckers park. I think we sometimes forget that there are many people whose ways of living differ radically from the traditional 9 to 5. Of course, this poem is only one aspect of the trucker life-style. While some may indeed be like the man in this poem, there are hundreds more who are out on the road just to make a decent living for themselves and their wives and children back home."

Alexis Vergalla is a senior at Voorhees High School in Glen Gardner, New Jersey. She studied under Lois Harrod, B.J. Ward, Rich Weems, and Cathy Day at the 2001 New Jersey Governor's School of The Arts. She looks foward to pursuing writing in her future, and wants to always have poetry in her life.

D. Harlan Wilson has appeared most recently in Redsine, The Café Irreal, Driver�s Side Airbag, The Dream Zone, Ascent, Diagram and Samsara Quarterly. A chapbook of his stories was published in 2000, and his first full-length book, a collection of forty-four stories called The Kafka Effekt, is due to be published in November. Wilson holds two M.A. degrees, one in English Literature (University of Massachusetts-Boston), the other in Science Fiction Studies (University of Liverpool). Currently he is working on his Ph.D. in Twentieth Century American Literature and Theory at Michigan State University.

Alessio Zanelli was born in 1963 in Cremona, a quiet town in Northern Italy, pretty famous in the world for its secular tradition in the craft of violins. He works as an investment adviser and his main hobbies, apart from reading and writing poetry, are science (cosmology above all) and all forms of art. He learned English as an autodidact and has been writing verse in what has then become his second language since 1985. His first collection, entitled "Loose Sheets" and spanning 15 years of his poetry itinerary, was published in July 2000 in the United Kingdom. He has scores of works featured in several British and American magazines, among which the most renowned are Möbius (DE), Little Brown Poetry (NH), Hadrosaur Tales (NM), Poetic Voices (AL), The Journal (UK), Poetry Monthly (UK) and Pulsar Poetry Magazine (UK). The poem in this issue, "As If (Lara's Story)," was formerly published in Breathe Poetry Magazine. This is Allesio's third appearance in Eclectica.

Sheri Zollinger along with Scott Clevenger, is an expert at decoding the secret agendas of crappy motion pictures. The article featured in this issue of Eclectica is adapted from their epic book-in-progress, Subliminal Cinema: Life Lessons from Lousy Movies.