Prick of the Spindle announces the print edition! Issue 1 released late October 2011. Order here. Check out our guidelines and submit here.
Second annual Prick of the Spindle Poetry Open Competition open for submissions.
See guidelines here.
Congratulations to the 2011 Prick of the Spindle Pushcart Prize nominees:
We accept short film submissions. To submit your work, send an inquiry with a link to your work to pseditor (at) prickofthespindle
(dot) com.
Aqueous Books, a print publisher, a relative of
Prick of the Spindle.
Congratulations to Monique Hayes, whose play, "Echoes," was selected through Prick of the Spindle's Outreach Initiative for Youth Drama Competition for production through the Pensacola Little Theatre. See the press release and poster. Production was May 12 and May 13, 2011 for the world premiere in Pensacola, Florida.
We are interviewed on Fictionaut.
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Shatter Me
by Tahereh Mafi
Reviewed by Chelsea Clemmons for The Lit Report
HarperCollins, Nov. 2011
ISBN: 978-0062085481
Hardcover, 352 pp., $17.99
The Young Adult Fantasy-Adventure market has a new crown jewel in Tahereh Mafi’s debut novel, Shatter Me. I have never been a particular fan of stream-of-consciousness writing, but it felt natural and perfect from the first second that I stepped into the mind of Mafi’s heroine, Juliette. My existence was inseparable from hers by the end of the first page. I could not put this book down. The characters feel so real that I expected at any moment to look up from my book and see Juliette sitting in my living room. The sheer beauty of Mafi’s descriptions pulled me head-first into a world on the brink of collapse and didn’t let go. Her metaphors are astonishingly beautiful:
I always wonder about raindrops.
I wonder about how they’re always falling down, tripping over their own feet, breaking their legs and forgetting their parachutes as they tumble right out of the sky toward an uncertain end. It’s like someone is emptying their pockets over the earth and doesn’t seem to care where the contents fall, doesn’t seem to care that the raindrops burst when they hit the ground, that they shatter when they fall to the floor, that people curse the days the drops dare to tap on their doors.
I am a raindrop.
I have fallen in love with the characters and heart-pounding plot that make up this rich, post-apocalyptic world Mafi has created . If I had to boil the essence of this masterpiece down to one word, that word would be epic. The world rendered in Shatter Me is just as real to me as the one I am living and breathing in. This story is like a lovechild of X-Men and V for Vendetta set in an ecologically devastated world. More importantly, Shatter Me is the kind of love story every girl wants to be a part of. Shatter Me is an instant classic.
Chelsea Clemmons, author of A Collection of Reflections, is a college student at Troy University. She is a natural storyteller who loves to capture her readers' imaginations. Clemmons is studying to be a writer and working in the publishing industry. When she is not on campus at Troy, Clemmons spends as much time as possible writing and surrounded by family.
My Mother Received a Wound from Eric Bosse on Vimeo.
Eric Bosse is a fiction writer, poet, essayist, recovering journalist, and occasional film-maker. His stories have appeared in The Sun, Mississippi Review, Zoetrope, Exquisite Corpse, Wigleaf, and Night Train, among other journals. His poems and essays rarely appear, but those dark years as a newspaper arts critic still haunt his nightmares. Ravenna Press published his story collection, Magnificent Mistakes, in the fall of 2011. Eric lives in Norman with his family and teaches writing at the University of Oklahoma.
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The Unemployed Man Who Became a Tree
by Kevin Pilkington
Reviewed by Kathleen Kirk, The Poetry Cheerleader
Read the review here
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New Artists Added to the Galleries,
Including:
* Regina Valluzzi
* Eleanor Bennett
* Sheri Wright
* Ryan Richey
* Andrew Ek
* Brett Stout
The Prick of the Spindle online art galleries feature standing exhibits from more than 30 artists.
Visit them here.
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Prick of the Spindle welcomes talented artist Dr. Regina Valluzzi as its guest artist for the Winter issue, Vol. 5.4. Dr. Valluzzi often paints using ideas and inspiration from her decades of experience in the research sciences. She believes that we are all influenced by what we see, even in the sciences, where much of what is seen is either difficult to interpret or entirely in the mind's eye. Dr. Valluzzi's work dances around key concepts from the point of view of a physicist, touching on ideas, processes, and interactions in the disciplines of Soft Matter, Polymers, Nanotechnology, Physics, Chemistry, and the Biosciences.
Scientific imagery can be as impenetrable as it is intriguing and beautiful. Underlying many technical diagrams, presentations of data, and scientific images is a set of commonly accepted rules that are learned and internalized over years of study and publication. These rules and tightly codified visual metaphors help scientists communicate complex ideas reliably amongst themselves, but they can also become barriers to new ideas and insights. Because her images are abstracted and diverge from the typical rules and symbols of scientific illustration and visualization, they provide an accessible window into the world of science for both scientists and non-scientists. Her approach is often irreverent and mischievous.
The name “Nerdly Painter” describes Valluzzi's approach to her subject matter, while also providing a handy alternative to the myriad misspellings of “Valluzzi” that are common. There are number of numbers, mostly from apocryphal stories, describing the names Eskimos have for types of snow. Communities of Engineers and Scientists, notably the MIT community, have a large number of nuanced terms to describe variants of nerdity, which is as ubiquitous to peoples of the technical regimes as snow is peoples of the polar regions. “Nerdly” is a gentler, less hard-edged and more generally humanistic form of nerdity than the more common “nerdy,” or the unwashed computer-tanned “geeky.”
"D-Branes," debuting for publication in the current issue, has been selected for a Juror's Choice award by the Attleboro Art Museum Members' show. Among the awards given are two Best awards and 6 Juror's choices from roughly 170 exhibiting artists. "Leafy Jewels," (forthcoming in Prick of the Spindle Print Edition, Issue 2), was part of a competitive international show in Budapest. "Rite of Spring," also debuting in the current issue, has appeared in two regional juried shows. "Green Function" was a finalist in the Next Big Idea Festival's international SMART in Los Alamos and was also selected for the Bridges Mathematical Art Organization's International Juried Show at the Joint Mathematics Meeting (in Boston, January, 2012).
Dr. Valluzzi has won awards for her drawings and paintings on the national and international levels. Her work is in private collections in the US, Canada, the UK, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, Japan, Germany, and Malta. She shows frequently through the Massachusetts and Eastern New England area. Many of her smaller works are available online at http://NerdlyPainter.Etsy.com, and giclee reproductions of her work are also available at http://regina-valluzzi.artistwebsites.com.
