This week we were still focusing on short fiction, but with an additional emphasis on literary journals and the process of moving into workshops. This should hopefully be an interesting experience.
While going through the process of choosing a literary journal to present, I wasn't really sure which one to settle on. The first one that occurred to me was Black Clock (edited by Steve Erickson, who writes some pretty cool books anyway--The Sea Came in At Midnight, etc), except I don't have any of the recent issues and really don't have the money to pay for one anyway.... so, after that, I decided I would have to go with online journals. Some of the really easy ones would have been the American Book Review or the Review of Contemporary Fiction, but they felt too established and not quite right. After that, I played around with the idea of doing something really obscure (even by the standard of literary journals...) but then finally settled on The Collagist, edited by Matt Bell, which is put out by Dzanc books and usually features some very interesting/relevant writing. I read the current issue over the last few days and I'm thinking it was definitely the right choice--and not very difficult to present either, as the issue itself is very concentrated, with emphasis on having a smaller number of strong pieces, rather than a larger anthology.
As to workshopping, I'm looking forward to seeing what happens (though it seems like we might have too many people for many people to actually have their work looked at, as opposed to a smaller MFA sized classroom).
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