Gabriel Garcia Marquez, March 6, 1927-April 17, 2014

…human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Gabriel Garcia Marquez passed away on Thursday, April 17, 2014 at age 87. We are forever grateful for his brilliance, inspiration, and influence. His novels, including his masterwork One Hundred Years of Solitude, are among the greatest works of art of all time. Thank you for your life and work, Señor Garcia Marquez! You will live on!

the garden, The Great Gatsby erasure poem by George McKim

the garden
by George McKim

swirls and eddies
of voices
and words

in the garden
I was roaring drunk

SOURCE: “the garden” is based on page 42 of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Scribners paperback edition, 2004).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: George McKim has an MFA in Painting. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Dear Sirs, Shampoo, Diagram, elimae, Ditch, Cricket Online Review, Blaze Vox, The Found Poetry Review Pulitzer Remix Project and others. His chapbook Found & Lost is forthcoming from Silver Birch Press in late 2014.

NOTE: “the garden” by George McKim will appear in the Silver Birch Press The Great Gatsby Anthology (April 2015).

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: The Great Gatsby Anthology

April 10, 2015 will mark the 90th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald — a book that many people believe is the best novel of all time. To celebrate the occasion, we are planning ahead — and getting started with our latest anthology: The Silver Birch Press The Great Gatsby Anthology, a collection of poetry, prose, art, collage, photography, and other work that celebrates this remarkable novel.

WHAT: Poetry, prose, paintings, drawings, photographs, and other work inspired by The Great Gatsby.

TYPES OF WRITTEN MATERIAL:

Poems (up to three — either original work or found/erasure poetry based on The Great Gatsby)
Short stories (up to 2,000 words)
Essays (up to 1,500 words)
Creative nonfiction (up to 2,000 words)
Short plays or screenplays (approximately 5 typed pages)
Other literary forms (up to 2,000 words)

TYPES OF VISUAL MATERIAL (send jpg files of approximately 1MB):

Photographs
Collage
Paintings
Drawings

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: September 1, 2014

RELEASE DATE: April 2015

HOW TO SUBMIT: Please email written entries as MSWord attachments and visual entries as a jpg attachments to silver@silverbirchpress.com along with your name, mailing address, email address, and one-paragraph bio. (If submitting an erasure poem, provide the edition and publication date.)

PAYMENT: All contributors will receive a copy of the Silver Birch Press The Great Gatsby Anthology.

Ask the Dust, novel by John Fante

The lean days of determination. That was the word for it, determination: Arturo Bandini in front of his typewriter two full days in succession, determined to succeed; but it didn’t work, the longest siege of hard and fast determination in his life, and not one line done, only two words written over and over across the page, up and down, the same words: palm tree, palm tree, a battle to the death between the palm tree and me, and the palm tree won: see it out there swaying in the blue air, creaking sweetly in the blue air. The palm tree won after two fighting days, and I crawled out of the window and sat at the foot of the tree. Time passed, a moment or two, and I slept, little brown ants carousing in the hair on my legs.”

From Chapter 1 of Ask the Dust, a novel by John Fante first published in 1939 and reissued in 1980 by Black Sparrow Press with an introduction by Charles Bukowski. A Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition, released in 2006, is available at Amazon.com.

Dreams of Bunker Hill, novel by John Fante

Black Sparrow Press published Dreams of Bunker Hill in 1982, the year before John Fante passed away at age 74. During Fante’s final years, he suffered the debilitating effects of diabetes — losing both his vision and his legs to the disease. But despite the challenges and disappointments in his life — including frustrating years as a Hollywood screenwriter — Fante never lost that “animal gusto” (to use Raymond Chandler‘s expression) that allowed him to create great works of art.

Case in point is his final novel Dreams of Bunker HIll — a bookend to his masterpiece Ask the Dust — which explores the writing career of his fictional alter ego Arturo Bandini. Dreams of Bunker Hill is fresh, full of life, funny, and feels like the work of a young man — though a blind, septuagenarian Fante dictated the book to his wife Joyce, who transcribed his words into written form.

A Sad Flower in the Sand, John Fante documentary

April 8, 2014 marked the 105th anniversary of the birth of John Fante, author of Ask the Dust, the novel that Charles Bukowski said showed him how to write prose. The Sad Flower in the Sand is a jazzy, moody one-hour documentary from 2001 — directed by Jan Louter — that explores Fante’s life through his words and comments from significant people in his life, including screenwriter Robert Towne, author Stephen Cooper, wife Joyce Fante, and sons Dan Fante and Jim Fante.

Gatsby Summer Night, Erasure Poem by Cathy Dee

For the uninitiated, an “erasure” poem is where you take existing text — in the above case, a page from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald — and mark out some of the words to create a poem. Here’s how the above poem reads when it stands alone…

GATSBY SUMMER NIGHT
by Cathy Dee

Through the summer nights
men and girls came and went like moths
and the stars.
I watched his guests
slit the waters of the Sound,
the city scampered 
like a brisk yellow bug
eight servants left his back door
in a pyramid of pulpless halves.
At least enough colored lights
to make a Christmas tree
bewitched to a dark gold
so long forgotten

###

Learn more about erasure poems at Found Poetry Review.

Raymond Chandler on F. Scott Fitzgerald

He had one of the rarest qualities in all literature, and it’s a great shame that the word for it has been thoroughly debased by the cosmetic racketeers, so that one is almost ashamed to use it to describe a real distinction. Nevertheless, the word is charm — charm as Keats would have used it. Who has it today? It’s not a matter of pretty writing or clear style. It’s a kind of subdued magic, controlled and exquisite, the sort of thing you get from good string quartettes.” 

RAYMOND CHANDLER referring to F. Scott Fitzgerald in a 1950 letter to a friend

Photo: Carl Van Vechten, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Van Vechten Collection, reproduction number LC-USZ62-88103 DLC.

Call for Submissions: Silver Birch Press Great Gatsby Anthology

We have received an unprecedented response to our March 15th call for submissions for the upcoming Silver Birch Press Great Gatsby Anthology — and even though the deadline is nearly six months away, we’re already receiving entries.  In case you missed the post, we’re repeating it again today with a few clarifications (see below).

April 10, 2015 will mark the 90th anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald — a book that many people believe is the best novel of all time. (I agree!) To celebrate the occasion, we are planning ahead — and getting started with our latest anthology: The Silver Birch Press Great Gatsby Anthology, a collection of poetry, prose, art, collage, photography, and other work that celebrates this remarkable novel.

WHAT: Poetry, prose, paintings, drawings, photographs, and other work inspired by The Great Gatsby.

TYPES OF WRITTEN MATERIAL:

• Poems (up to three — either original work or found/erasure poetry based on The Great Gatsby)
• Short stories (up to 2,000 words)
• Essays (up to 1,500 words)
• Creative nonfiction (up to 2,000 words)
• Short plays or screenplays (approximately 5 typed pages)
• Other literary forms (up to 2,000 words)

Note: 1 entry allowed in each prose category.

TYPES OF VISUAL MATERIAL (send jpg files of approximately 1MB):

• Photographs
• Collage
• Paintings
• Drawings

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: September 1, 2014

RELEASE DATE:  April 2015

HOW TO SUBMIT: Please email written entries as MSWord attachments and  visual entries as a jpg attachments to silver@silverbirchpress.com along with your name, mailing address, email address, and one-paragraph bio. We also prefer entries that include a note that describes the creative process related to preparing the submission (why you created what you created, the choices you made, etc.).

PAYMENT: All participants will receive a copy of the Silver Birch Press Great Gatsby Anthology.

Gatsby and the green light, quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light a the end of Daisy’s dock…Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…And one fine morning –”

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Great Gatsby

Read The Great Gatsby for free! The novel is in the public domain in Australia and is available at gutenberg.net. Happy reading!

Photo: Thorsten Shier