News and Events – Page 3 – Willow Springs Magazine

Issue 81 Contributor Robert Long Foreman Publishing New Fiction Book

Issue 81 Contributor and 2013 Willow Springs Fiction Prize winner Robert Long Foreman has announced Weird Pig, a new fiction book coming out on October 1st. According to the Southeast Missouri State University Press site, “Weird Pig is about Weird Pig, a pig who wants to do right. But doing right isn’t always easy. He drinks. He eats pork chops. He rides a skateboard. He gets his fellow farm animals murdered, and fathers an illegitimate son who has a messiah complex. When Weird Pig leaves the farm he calls home, he inspires a series of children’s books that help bring on the end of his little world–a farm where human and beast alike toil in the shadow of an ever-growing factory livestock complex. From farm to table and beyond, follow the misadventures of Weird Pig in this kaleidoscopic portrait of America, seen through the eyes of a crazed animal who insists on making himself at home there.”

Erin Somers, author of Stay Up with Hugo Best, writes that “Weird Pig is one of the funniest books I have ever read. Robert Long Foreman has a special talent for capturing the chaos, brutality, and absurdity of life in America. Like Huck Finn meets Animal Farm on acid.” The book has also been awarded the Nilsen Prize.

Weird Pig can be pre-ordered now from the Southeast Missouri State University Press website, and goes on regular sale October 1st. It can also be pre-ordered and purchased via Amazon, as well as from Target’s website and from Book Depository. The original short story that inspired Weird Pig can be found in Copper Nickel magazine.

This is Robert Long Foreman’s third book. You can listen to a reading he did from his second book, I Am Here to Make Friends, here. You can also read his featured story, “The Vinyl Canal”, from Willow Springs Issue 81 here on our site. In addition, his short story “The Man with the Nightmare Gun”, which won the Willow Springs Fiction Prize, is in Issue 82 of Willow Springs Magazine.

Issue 86 Contributor Bruce Bond to Publish Sonnet Sequence Trilogy

New from Bruce Bond and Etruscan Press, Scar comes out in October of this year. As Bruce Bond described it in a recent announcement, “This trilogy of sonnet sequences explores trauma, self-alienation, and the power of imaginative life to heal–to reawaken with the past a better understanding of its influence, both conscious and unconscious, to gain some measure of clarity, empathy, and freedom as we read the world.”

As esteemed poet and author of Another City David Keplinger reviewed the book on Amazon, “These unrhymed sonnets, as if one whole note struck repeatedly from beginning to finish, are technically superb, but the genius of Scar is its faithful translation of an ache. I know no other poet writing today whose capacity of perception is so sensitive to the harmonies of language and truth, sphere music composed by the difficult, nearly impossible, work of listening closely and hearing what is real.”

Scar can currently be pre-ordered on Amazon, and will be available for general sale by November 10th. Additionally, it can be pre-ordered through the Etruscan Press website, where it will also be officially released on the 10th of November. Etruscan Press has also released a Scar study guide for interested readers and instructors.

This is Bond’s twenty-fourth book. He has been published in multiple issues of Willow Springs, including in our most recent Issue 86, which you can find more about here on our website.

Issue 85 Contributor Michael Hettich’s New Book of Poems

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Recently, Issue 85 contributor and award-winning Floridian poet Michael Hettich gave a reading on Facebook Live with the Carolina Poets to promote his most recent book of poems: To Start an Orchard (Press 53, 2019).

Quoted from the Press 53 website, author Lola Haskins (How Small, Confronting Mourning), writes, “Michael Hettich has written, with extraordinary empathy, a book about vanishment: of dreams and fathers, of love and animals and birds. Look carefully at the glinting lights he paints. Like everything beautiful, they will be gone before you know it.”

This is Hettich’s twelfth published book of poems. His other recent book publications include Bluer and More Vast (Hysterical Books, 2018) and David Martison Meadowhawk Prize winner The Frozen Harbor (Red Dragonfly Press, 2017).

You can learn more about Hettich at his website here, and you can purchase his latest book through the Press 53 site and on Amazon here. It is also available on the Barnes and Noble website.

Willow Springs Magazine and Gettysburg Review to Host Joint Online Reading

Next Friday, January 29th at 5pm PST, Willow Springs Magazine and the Gettysburg Review will host a joint online reading featuring contributors from their upcoming issues. The reading will be a Zoom webinar and is free and open to the public. Anyone with the link can attend. It will also be livestreamed through the EWU MFA Visiting Writers Series YouTube page. There will be an opportunity for guests to ask questions and interact with the readers through Zoom at the end of the event.

To attend, guests can use this Zoom link. The reading can also be viewed back after the event ends through this YouTube link.

The readers from Willow Springs Magazine are Tom McCauley, A.D. Nauman, and Heikki Huotari. The readers from the Gettysburg Review are Julialicia Case, Allison Hutchcraft, and Christine Schott. You can find out more about each of the readers through their bios below:

Tom McCauley

Tom McCauley is a writer, comedian and musician whose work has appeared in Superstition Review, Leveler and What Rough Beast. His poem “People Are Not Lights” won the 2018 Joseph Langland Prize from the Academy of American Poets. In 2012 he scored Constance Congdon’s play “Tales of the Lost Formicans” for the Great Plains Theatre Conference, and in 2018, he was a writer-in-residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center of Nebraska City. Currently, he works for the nonprofit AIM Institute and teaches contemporary literature at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.

A.D. Nauman

A.D. Nauman has published short fiction in TriQuarterly, Necessary Fiction, The Literary Review, Roanoke Review, The Chicago Reader, and many other journals. Her dystopian novel, Scorch, was published in 2001 by Soft Skull/Counterpoint. Nauman is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award, and her work has been produced by Stories on Stage, broadcast on NPR, and nominated for a Pushcart prize. She lives in Chicago with a very pampered tuxedo cat.

Heikki Huotari

Heikki Huotari, in a past century, attended a one-room school and spent summers on a forest-fire lookout tower. He’s a retired math professor and has published poems in numerous literary journals, including Crazyhorse, Pleiades, and the American Journal of Poetry, and in three collections. A fourth collection is in press.

Julialicia Case

Julialicia Case has had work appear in the Gettysburg Review, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, the Pinch, Willow Springs, the Writer’s Chronicle, and other journals. She earned her MA from the University of California, Davis, and her PhD in fiction from the University of Cincinnati. Currently, she teaches creative writing and digital literature at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. You can learn more about her writing and scholarship at www.julialiciacase.com.

Allison Hutchcraft

Allison Hutchcraft is the author of Swale, published by New Issues Poetry & Prose in October 2020. Her poems have appeared in the Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, Five Points, the Kenyon Review, and the Southern Review, among other journals. She teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Christine Schott

Christine Schott teaches literature and creative writing at Erskine College. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Converse College and a PhD in medieval literature from the University of Virginia. Her memoir “Bone-House” appears in issue 33.1 of the Gettysburg Review and is her first published essay.