Issue Seven Metamorphosis Spring-Summer 2007   <Samples>  <About Issue Seven>  <Contents>  <About the Authors>

Samples

Click to view full size.  Samples show one side of the two-sided leaves.

About Issue Seven

I present with pleasure a collection featuring authors from the UK, Ireland, Spain, the USA, Switzerland, Pakistan, Canada and Australia, including returning favourites Shane Allison and Brendan Connell, and intriguing newcomers Ivan Faute, Jeremy Wexler and Rizwan Saeed Ahmed. Watch out for the marzipan.

Issue Seven is about change, and is change; tOLR is reborn in professionally-bound paperback format, with a full-colour cover and printed in black on textured off-white paper. Readers familiar with Issues One to Six (hand-stapled collections of pages of differing paper and shape) will mark the evolution. I see cause for celebration and reflection; the words of writer Anatole France come to mind:

“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.”

“If we do not change, we do not grow. If we do not grow, we are not really living.”

Anatole France (1844-1924)

What leads here is a call for clear type, robust binding, and a faithful expression of the ‘orphan leaf’ (what better way to give a page ‘as though taken from a book’ than to print it as a book?). Time also: unshackling from the stapling machine and guillotine allows for the important matter of finding and delivering the best in international creative writing.

James Paul Wallis, editor 

Contents

Cheryl Hicks  From Madness to Mystery
Nuala Ní Chonchúir  Tattoo Thirteen
Ivan Faute  INTERLUDE TWO: Signs of Humility: The Story of Fernando Alberto Javier de los Arcos don Miguel By Tawnya Alberta Brown
Vanessa Gebbie  Selected Advice for Visitors
Brendan Connell  Zurich (a Metrophilia)
Rizwan Saeed Ahmed  Life is a dream, and humans, dreamers!
Jeremy Wexler  Great Aunt Margaret’s Shrunken Head
Maria Zajkowski  Hot
Tom Sheehan  Murder from the Forum
Linda Benninghoff  This Silence
Teresa Stenson  You are the boy, I am the girl
R.S.Pyne  Resurrection is Over-Rated
Bill Teague  Lost Folk Songs of America (Folklore/Oral History;Limited Edition)
Deborah A. Rankine  Something Old, Something New
various  Single Line Quarterly
Renzo Llorente  The Enigmas of Friendship
Shane Allison  A Poem for Charles Bernstein
Andrea Fitzpatrick  Rhetoric for a Professor’s Dinner Party
Susan Richardson  The Northern Line
TK Kenyon  “At the Funeral Mass for Leila’s Lover, Conroy,” an excerpt from RABID: A Novel
Kevin Grauke  Remnants of an Abandoned Reminiscence
Gregory Heath  Part of the Plan
Leigh G Banks  Suicide Elgin
Giles Goodland  Index

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About the Authors

Cheryl Hicks has had prose published in The First Line and Southern Hum, and one of her personal memoirs “The Goat Story” was recently chosen to be included in The Remembrance Project at Howard University. Her poems have been published in Urban Spaghetti, Blue Fifth Review, Heliotrope, Makar, Snakeskin, HerCircle, Creative Soup, Poems-For-All, and 103: The Journal of the Image Warehouse. She has been a featured poet at C/Oasis and is a previous recipient of the Paddock Poetry Award. She recently presented poems from her series titled “Conversations with the Virgin” at the 2006 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Conference in Tucson, Arizona. Hicks currently teaches photography and creative writing at the secondary level and is also a visual artist. Her mixed media canvases have been shown across Texas and in New York, and her work is showcased at the Image Warehouse in Athens, Texas.

Nuala Ní Chonchúir Living in Galway, Ireland, Nuala’s second fiction collection, To the World of Men, Welcome, was published in 2005 by Arlen House. Her first stand-alone poetry collection (bilingual), Tattoo:Tatú, is forthcoming in 2007. She has won the inaugural Cúirt New Writing Prize, RTÉ’s Radio’s Francis MacManus Award and the Cecil Day Lewis Award, all for fiction. She is currently writing a collaborative play, with three other writers, for Turtle Shell Productions in New York. In 2007 she is one of the judges, along with Rick Moody and Segun Afolabi, for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. www.nualanichonchuir.com

Ivan Faute is a doctoral candidate in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He writes short stories, novels and plays. He also devotes a few hours a week to the Uptown Book Chapbook series (myspace.com/uptownbooks) and considerably less time to serving as a board member of Promethean Theatre Ensemble in Chicago. According to Google, he needs “help, and deodorant won’t help THIS time.”

Vanessa Gebbie Short fiction writer, teacher of Creative Writing, Assistant Editor of Cadenza Magazine, Owner/Editor of Tom’s Voice Magazine (a specialist ezine for writing from rehabs and those whose lives have been touched by addiction). Her first collection of short fiction will be published in 2008 by Salt Publishing, Cambridge, UK. www.vanessagebbie.com

Brendan Connell was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1970. He has had fiction published in numerous magazines, literary journals and anthologies, including McSweeney’s, Adbusters, Nemonymous, Leviathan 3 (The Ministry of Whimsy 2002), Album Zutique (The Ministry of Whimsy 2003) and Strange Tales (Tartarus Press 2003). His first novel, The Translation of Father Torturo, was published by Prime Books in 2005; his novella Dr. Black and the Guerrillia was published by Grafitisk Press the same year.

Rizwan Saeed Ahmed is from Kotli, Azad Kashmir. He is 26 years old. He earned his master’s in English literature from IIU, Islamabad, Pakistan, in September 2004. He has had over two dozen poems published in several substantial online and print magazines/journals of poetry in America, Australia, Canada, England, India and Pakistan. He also translates works of Urdu poetry and prose into English for the Pakistan Academy of Letters. He is currently teaching at The University of Azad Jammu & Kashmir, Kotli Campus, besides working on his M.Phil thesis in American studies at QAU, Islamabad. He adheres to the principle of ‘art for life’ as his end and believes in the humanistic and didactic nature of art. He is fond of the romantic school of poetic thought and is currently working on his upcoming poetry. His words can be accessed via: Eratio Poetic Language, issue five, spring 2005, www.eratiopostmodernpoetry.com; Aesthetica: a Review of Contemporary Artists, issue eight, UK, December 2004, www.aestheticamagazine.com; Voicesnet International Anthology of English Poetry, Vol. 10. Ohio, USA, March 2005 edition, www.voicesnet.org; Stylus Poetry Journal, issue 16, 2005, Brisbane, Australia, www.styluspoetryjournal.com; In Our Own Words: A Generation Defining Itself, Vol. 6. www.evenstar.net/mwe/page6.html; and A Literary Bent Magazine, June 2005, www.aliterarybent.com.

Jeremy Wexler is a Montreal-based writer and broadcaster. His short fiction has appeared in the literary magazines Blood and Aphorisms and Grimm. “Goodnight Life” appeared in Maisonneuve online. You can hear various pieces that he has written for CBC radio national radio programs “including DNTO and Tapestry on his web page www.jeremywexler.com. Jeremy edits the CD-format magazine NO DAMN GOOD Art, Music and Tomfoolery from NDG.“

Maria Zajkowski lives in Melbourne, Australia. She says: “Mostly I write poetry, specifically about the personal landscape and identity. I grew up in New Zealand and moved to Australia as an adult, moving only a few thousand kilometres but finding myself in a noticably different culture. In New Zealand I feel like I’m part of the Pacific, while in Australia I feel the focus is on America and Europe. The poems and stories I write are about people and their sense or loss of belonging, and how the environment is an extension of themselves. I’ve had poetry published in New Zealand and Australia for over ten years. More recently I’ve had work in ‘Food - The Alphabet City Anthology’(MIT Press), part of the Alphabet City Festival in Toronto, and here, in the Orphan Leaf Review. Thanks for reading.” For any enquiries please email

Tom Sheehan’s Epic Cures, (short stories), from Press 53 won a 2006 IPPY Award from Independent Publishers. A Collection of Friends, (memoirs), 2004 from Pocol Press, was nominated for PEN America Albrend Memoir Award). His fourth poetry book, This Rare Earth & Other Flights, issued by Lit Pot Press, 2003. Print mysteries are Vigilantes East and Death for the Phantom Receiver. The novel An Accountable Death is serialized on 3amMagazine.com. Six novels seek publication. His short story collections: Brief Cases, Short Spans, will be issued in 2008; and The Quickening Source has been completed, as has Silas Tully, Saugus Cop Now and Then. He has nominations for eight Pushcart Prizes and two Million Writers Awards, a Silver Rose Award from ART for short story excellence, and many Internet appearances. He can be reached at He is a veteran of the Korean War (31st Infantry Regiment), a Boston College grad after Army service, and has been retired for 16 years.

Linda Benninghoff I have published two chapbooks of poetry, Departures and The Street Where I Was a Child. I translated The Seafarer from Anglo-Saxon; the translation appears at www.electrato.com. I have won the Poetry Superhighway contest and been a finalist in it. I graduated from Johns Hopkins University with honors where I majored in English. I enjoy reading poetry and currently review books of poetry for an art magazine. When I was in college, my favorite poet was Thomas Hardy, and I liked his elegies in particular I can be contacted at

Teresa Stenson is 26 but she can’t remember where 22, 23, 24 and 25 went. She writes at an old desk on a hard wooden chair on a laptop which gets less reliable each day, making her think she really should back her work up. Yet she still hasn’t. Perhaps she thinks it makes her more daring and edgy. She’s been writing seriously for almost two years, and has had short stories included in anthologies by Earlyworks Press and Leaf Books, and pieces in Writing Magazine and hum-drum Magazine. She used to teach English as a foreign language but lost confidence when she realised she’d been teaching the incorrect spelling of ‘broccoli’ for quite some time. Now she serves lattes and popcorn to pay the rent, and is currently making a film based on one of her short stories with hum-drum Films

R.S.Pyne Rebecca Sian Pyne has a PhD in Micropalaeontology (very small fossils) and lives in rural West Wales near the university town of Aberystwyth. Work has appeared (or is currently in press) in Scribble, Apollo’s Lyre, New Cauldron, Delivered, Dark Distortions, Twisted Tongue, Albedo One, Countryside Tales, Coin News, Pen Cambria Magazine, Mytholog, Country Smallholder, Smallholder Magazine, Country Quest, Picture Postcard Monthly, SALT, Stitches - the Journal of Medical Humour, 55Fiction, Flash Shots, Crimson Highway, Midnight Horror & World War II Magazine. A current project involves preparing a large family archive of written memoirs and photographs for publication: these detail service in the Fleet Air Arm during the Second World War. Other interests involve volunteer work for the Woodland Trust and traditional dry stone walling.

Bill Teague is a newsletter editor in San Diego, California. Recent poems can be found in Pleiades, Neovictorian/Cochlea, and Raintown Review.

Deborah A. Rankine is a nationally published writer and poet in Canada and the proud editor of The Writers’ Circle of Durham Region’s news magazine, The Word Weaver(www.wcdr.org). “Something Old, Something New” is an excerpt from Rankine’s coming-of-age novel, Pleasant & Divine.

Renzo Llorente A native of Brunswick, Maine (USA), Renzo Llorente lives in Spain, where he teaches philosophy on Saint Louis University’s Madrid Campus. His articles on ethics, Marxism, 19th-century German philosophy and other topics have appeared in a variety of academic journals. He is currently completing a book of aphorisms.

Shane Allison has had poems published in countless magazines, anthologies and e-zines like zafusy, Mipo, East Village Review, New Delta Review, Mississippi Review, Word Riot, This New Breed and tons of others. His fifth chapbook of poems, “I Want to Fuck a Redneck” is forthcoming.

Andrea Fitzpatrick is _____. Her work has appeared (or is shortly forthcoming) in a number of journals, including Hobart, Night Train, elimae & Mad Hatters’ Review. Contact her by email:

Susan Richardson is a writer and tutor of writing based in Wales. Her work has appeared in a wide range of journals and anthologies in the UK, USA and Canada including Dance the Guns to Silence: 100 Poems for Ken Saro-Wiwa (Flipped Eye Publishing) and The Lie of the Land (Cinnamon Press). Her first full-length collection of poetry, Creatures of the Intertidal Zone, inspired by her journey through Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland in the footsteps of an intrepid eleventh century female Viking, has just been published by Cinnamon Press. For further information, please visit www.susanrichardsonwriter.co.uk

TK Kenyon is a microbiologist, neuroscientist, and author. RABID: A Novel was published in April, 2007 and is available at Amazon.com, BN.com, and bookstores in North America. Booklist’s starred review said, “Debut novelist Kenyon isn’t fooling around. What begins as a riff on Peyton Place smoothly metamorphoses into a philosophical battle between science and religion.... Kenyon is definitely an author to watch ... a novel quite unlike most standard commercial fare, a genre-bending story--part thriller, part literary slapdown with dialogue as the weapon of choice.” The next novel, tentatively titled Satanic, will be published in April, 2008. More about RABID and other work can be found at www.tkkenyon.com

Kevin Grauke teaches at La Salle University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he lives with his wife and two children. His fiction has appeared in such journals as The Southern Review, Quarterly West, Story Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Third Coast.

Gregory Heath’s poems and short stories have been widely published, and Staple featured him in their 2005 Alt-Gen collection showcasing the best small press writers of the previous decade. His debut literary novel The Entire Animal was published by The Waywiser Press in 2006. He has a website at www.gregoryheath.co.uk and a MySpace page at www.myspace.com/gregoryheath

Leigh G Banks was a daily newspaper writer for 20 years. Then he lost his job. That launched him on an odyssey across Europe, into Africa and, finally, to America as a travel writer. Along the way, he found the ambition to write well and completed his first novel, Half Moon, and a TV drama, The Orphan Train. So, from a ‘hack’ of some renown, he has become a real-McCoy impoverished writer. His recent publications include City Life, Szirine, Confident Living, Quiet Feather. Leigh also co-authored the Bradt Guide to Slovakia. Contact: Website: LeighGBanksmyspace.

Giles Goodland works as a research editor for the Oxford English Dictionary. A lot of this involves reading old books. He also has had books published by Leviathan and most recently Salt (Capital, 2001). www.saltpublishing.com/books/smp/184471263X.htm