Please do yourself a favor and read “Aerograms” by Jim Krosschell:I come into the teachers’ room from a class, and the sky-blue aerogram is peeking out of my letter box. I take it to my desk and sit down in my chair. We wait a moment, letter and I, objects of wonder and furtive curiosity among the teachers as usual. The room is big and open and cold, crammed with some 30 desks, and the one coal stove does not sufficiently heat any of us except the vice-principal occupying the position of power next to it. I slit open the aerogram. I am an English teacher in a boys’ middle school, in a seaside city on the sapphire waters of the Korea Strait. My grandmother had died 19 days before, in a small white house on the dry plains of Minnesota. At the desk next to mine my co-teacher asks “what wrong is.”
The Summer 2014 issue of Contrary is out! We feature the poet Mary McMyne, whose poems dance with the memory of the Rev, Robert Kirk, a man who wrote “The Secret Common-wealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies” in 1691.
With new poems also by Emily Van Duyne and Brittney Scott. New fiction by our man in Cork, Edward Mc Whinney, and reader favorites Cynthia Newberry Martin and Jodi Paloni.
And if you recently received an email urging you to watch for a call for submissions, this is it!
SUBMISSIONS:
The deadline for Autumn is Sept 1.
Contrary accepts submissions only through the online submissions form at contrarymagazine.com.
Fondly, the editors,
Jeff McMahon (Commentary)
Shaindel Beers (Poetry)
Frances Badgett (Fiction)
p.s. If you appreciate the work of these writers, please consider a small donation to our Writers Fund. If you buy books from Amazon, accessing them through our Bookshop will get you the same Amazon price, but Amazon will donate at least 4 percent of that price to the Writers Fund. ALL proceeds go to our writers. Thank you for your support.