Jason Schossler

Thank you Karen Weyant for making Mud Cakes the February Poetry Pick for The Scrapper Poet. I am touched by the selection and your very generous review!

A professor at Jamestown Community College in New York, Weyant’s first chapbook, Stealing Dust, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her second chapbook, Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt, won Main Street Rag’s chapbook contest and was published last year. Weyant also holds a poetry fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and was honored with the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.

For a look at some of her poems, I highly recommended checking out her blog. The precision of her language is both remarkable and inspiring. Among some of my personal favorites are “The Union Steward Tries to Quit Smoking” (originally published in the Minnesota Review) and “Advice for All the Rust Belt Cassandras” (which first appeared in Blast Furnace).

Always good to know I’m not alone in my love of the Rust Belt.

Thank you Melissa Reeser Poulin for your wonderful write up for Bespoke Truckee on my experience publishing with Bona Fide Books! It’s little loving gestures like these that help keep the world of small press literature alive and well.

And speaking of baseball — Smooth transition, right? But only 19 days until pitchers and catchers report… just sayin’ — Sport Literate went and did a cool thing by posting one of my newsest poems, “Early Exit,” on its Web site. My loving tribue to Indians great Mike Hargorve, the poem won top honor in Sport Literate‘s 2012 Best Poem Contest.

Now, let us pray, 2013 is the year the Tribe wins a few things.

A major congratulations to fellow Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize winner Lexa Hillyer, whose first book of poems, Acquainted with the Cold, is now available from Bona Fide Books. Jeanne Marie Beaumont says the “greatest gift of this book is that it makes me feel more alive as I read, like a crisp, clear winter day.” This is precisely what I like about Hillyer’s collection. These poems, which are bound together by images of ice and rain and snow, feel physically sharp. Hillyer is a master craftsman. Her poems feel raw and spontaneous, but they are finely tuned pieces of art.

Lexa Hillyer received her BA in English from Vassar College and her MFA in Poetry from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. She was the recipient of the Inaugural Poetry Prize from Tusculum Review and the First Prize in Poetry from Brick & Mortar Review, and was named one of the “Best New Poets of 2012” by Matthew Dickman. Hillyer worked as an editor at both Harper Collins and Penguin, and is co-founder of boutique literary incubator Paper Lantern Lit. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and a very skinny orange tree.

Acquainted with the Cold is available online through Bona Fide Books and Amazon, and in select bookstores.

The Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize was created in memory of Lake Tahoe artist Melissa Gregory, the inspiration for Bona Fide Books. The prize is awarded annually for an unpublished collection of poetry. The winner receives a cash prize, publication, and a reading at Lake Tahoe.

Two poems from Mud Cakes have been selected for inclusion in several forthcoming textbooks. I just signed an agreement for “Amelia Avenue” to appear in Welcome to My World: A Writing Course. Co-authored by Theresa Malphrus Welford and Martha C. Pennington, the book is under contract with Equinox Publishing and is due out in 2013 (hardback, $90; paperback, $35). Pre-order information is already available here .

Ms. Welford and Ms. Pennington also plan to include “Amelia Avenue” in another textbook, Writing & Place, while “Cereal Prizes” (oh, how I loved those Dig ‘Em spinner tops!) is slated to appear as a model poem for an exercise/assignment in their third forthcoming text, Creative Approaches to Writing Essays.

Today I am humbled by this news, and I hope these small poems, if nothing else, encourage students and readers to stay true to their own voice and what inspires them. And to know that it’s not always the prize that counts, but the digging.

This week I am saddened to say goodbye to Karen Blomain, novelist, poet, playwright, friend, mentor. I first met Karen as an undergrad at Kutztown University in 1994 soon after I decided to major in Creative Writing. I was immediately impressed by her constant optimism and enthusiasm and her passion for literature.

It was in Karen’s short story literature course where I discovered Alice Munro, Amy Bloom, Bobby Ann Mason, Gustave Flaubert, Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Mansfield, John Updike and many other great writers. It was where I first read “Babylon Revisited” and “Hills Like White Elephants” and promptly fell in love with Fitzgerald and Hemingway, as so many of us do. But perhaps my greatest discovery in that course was how to read, really read − with a pencil in my hand, check marking passages and scribbling notes in the narrow margins of our text book, The Story and Its Writer, so that I could process the mechanics of each author’s craft in hope of one day writing my very own story or poem, and one Karen would be proud to read.

There were other firsts. It was Karen who introduced me to the utopian world of writing colonies and residencies, providing valuable letters of recommendation for me when I applied to the Ragdale Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She was the first person to push me to try my hand at adjunct teaching. And the first to welcome me back to Kutztown, many years after graduation, as her guest to teach a Master Class in Creative Writing.

Then there is her writing. Karen practiced what she preached and had a tremendous influence over me as I continued developing over the years. There is never a wasted word in her work. Her economy of language is stunning, particularly in her 2002 novel, A Trick of Light, which constantly calls our attention to the smallest nuances and gestures that collectively bring a character to life, as I said in my Amazon review of the novel.

It breaks my heart to say goodbye to such a warm and loving and giving person. But Karen left behind a legacy. In her work. In the classroom. And for those who had the good fortune to know her, in our hearts and minds. She will be dearly missed.

To read Karen’s obituary in the Times Leader, please click here.

Just got word that Sport Literate will publish my new poem, “Early Exit,” later this year. It’s my tribute to former Indians First Baseman Mike Hargrove, my favorite player from the “bad old days” of ’80s baseball in Cleveland and one of the few, precious bright spots in the lineup. Mike batted .290 with 80 home runs and 686 RBIs in his 12-year Major League career.

But those are just numbers. What I loved about Hargrove was the way he drove pitchers bananas with his deliberate routine at the plate. Before each pitch, he’d pull up each shirt sleeve about an inch, press tightly down on his helmet, and then go to work on his pants, his socks, his batting glove – a series of prolonged ticks and gyrations that earned him the nickname “The Human Rain Delay”. As sportswriter columnist Terry Pluto said in his book, The Curse of Rocky Colavito, “it often seemed as if a Hargrove at-bat lasted longer than the Gerald Ford administration.”

Another reason why I like Mike? He got us close to a title – twice – when he later managed the Indians. Once in 1995, and then again in 1997 when we were one strike away from winning the World Series against the upstart Marlins. For a Cleveland fan, close is the cigar.

My humble thanks to Sport Literate for buying first publishing rights to the poem. A subsidiary of Pint Size Publications in Chicago, the journal focuses specifically on life’s leisurely diversions. But as its editors say, Sport Literate is “less interested in the final score than in figuring out why we play in the first place.”

Pieces first published in Sport Literate have been recognized in anthologies such as The Best American Sports Writing and The Best American Essays. Robert Lipsyte, author of The Contender, also had this to say about the journal:

“Sport Literate is as welcome as the start of a fresh season, filled
with those breath-taking swings of phrase, catches of insight,
and the assurance that, yes, this year the word will win.”

Look for it in October!

Go Tribe!

For a chronological listing of news stories, reviews, video links and other online resources for Mud Cakes and other publications, please check out the new and improved LINKS tab on this site! My thanks to my Web designer, James “Garfield” Nicnick, for helping me retool things into what we hope is a more reader-friendly reference page.

Okay. I’m ready to retire. Ride off into the twin sunsets! I’ve been linked to YodaTV. My ally is the Force, and a powerful ally it is.

It’s here: Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction! It’s an anthology of 88 “short short” stories and includes one of my pieces, “For Wile E. Coyotoe, Apetitius Giganticus“, which originally appeared, in a different form, in the Green Mountains Review and won Honorable Mention in the 2010 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest on winningwriters.com.

You can check it out on Amazon! And my special thanks to Art & Literature, the literary blog of Metro Magazine in North Carolina, for the glowing review!

Mud Cakes has been chosen as a Finalist for the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize. The winner of this year’s prize is Dorriane Laux for her book, The Book of Men. To commemorate the winner and finalists, the Poetry Center will host a reading on Saturday, April 6, 2013, at Passaic County Community College as part of its Distinguished Poets Series. A big thanks to the Poetry Center, The Paterson Literary Review and editor Maria Mazziotti Gillan for this honor, and I look forward to reading alongside the great Ms. Laux next spring.

For a complete listing of all finalists and other information about the Paterson Poetry Prize, check this out!