Coming Up On Project U Radio- April And May

     Project U Radio is a radio program hosted by Lynn Alexander and Paul Corman-Roberts that streams live over the internet, with live callers and archives you can download. Brought to you by The Literary Underground, Project U Radio generally airs on Thursday nights, at 11:30 p.m. EST, 8:30 PST. Listen, set reminders, download an archive, and more at the show page: here.  All welcome. Uncensored, unscripted, unhinged. Santorgasmic Family Values programming that will make your Aunt Helen smile. We're already deranged, but we need your illness too. Project U is about asking the tough questions (then straying off topic), hard hitting small press journalism (ok, maybe passive facebook surfing journalism) and a commitment to poetry as demonstrated by random performances and open mic nights. We're gonna make you take a shower and proclaim your poetic tendencies from the top of a box store. Kick it.

Did you know that you can donate to The Literary Underground? Look to the right and FEED THE KITTY. It helps when we can pay the bills.

Listen now to our April 26 show! Listen or download from the archives here! LIVE AT THE TELEGRAPH, OAKLAND-with special guests Missy Church, Hollie Hardy- some of the organizers of BEAST CRAWL. Find out about BEAST Crawl, planned for July. Lynn Alexander and Paul Corman-Roberts. To find out about BEAST Crawl, 2012, check the website here. 

More Literary Underground Radio Goodness: Frank Reardon now hosts Your Mother's Medicine Cabinet, on Monday evenings. Frank interviews small press writers with live call in. Draconian Vampire Tunnel airs in the ass of dawn on Tuesday nights. (Wednesday, East Coast) Frankie Metro will bring you a mixed bag of music, poetry, live callers, and more. Worth staying up for! And let's face it, you are up talking to Brian Fugett anyway.

Coming up on PROJECT U Thursdays. You KNOW you want to call in: 

(Archived) April 26: LIVE AT THE TELEGRAPH, OAKLAND WITH SPECIAL GUESTS MISSY CHURCH AND HOLLIE HARDY. Find out about BEAST Crawl, in July. Listen to Paul Corman-Roberts eat and ramble while Lynn Alexander eggs him on. Will he pass the phone around Oakland? FIND OUT!

May 3: (Go To Episode) The Literary Underground: Community, Collective, Chaos? What IS The Literary Underground? The time has come to share the vision of the Literary Underground community, with founder Michele McDannold, who will speak to her "manifesto". We would also like to hear your thoughts on this segment about this idea of community building, if it can work, or if it is doomed to collapse in a cloud of chaos and ego implosions. If you remain positive about the collective or community model, share your thoughts on what works. If you are cynical and sour, we want to hear about that, too.

And it goes without saying that in small press, some people play nicer than others. Some take a diplomatic stance on disagreements, and some feel that it is important to speak out and call things as they see it. But what happens when people try to work together toward common goals, and personalities clash or there are differences in direction, aesthetics, resources, priorities? Can conflict derail a good thing? Did you ever feel like community can both lift, and splatter? As much as a community can support, it can also create concerns about other people speaking for you. How do you avoid taking on other people's conflicts in a community? Is this particularly difficult with writers, or is this dynamic a problematic area for all cooperative groups of people?

Last, but not least, do you expect a community to have your back, right or wrong? What does loyalty look like? And how can you keep yourself from getting roasted in other people's fires?

May 10: Editorial Affirmative Action? Read the background on this topic in Lynn Alexander's column at Red Fez, "Criticism's A Bitch" on the subject of female submissions in the independent press and the solution (if any) to the problem of female under-representation. Is it a problem, and editors- can anything be done about it?  Open call in, all opinions welcome.

May 17: The Male Aesthetic. Call in, and give your opinions. Is there such a thing in small press, and are you partial to it? What kinds of presses and publications, web or print, do you associate with the term?

May 24: TOXIC ABATEMENT is coming to San Francisco's Viracocha in July. Find out more, and hear some poems from featured readers. Can we get Zarina and Sammy Dwarphobia to talk to us? Depends. Do we have the chops to ask?

May 31: Spectral Ganglia: Poetry and Sound Experiments. Open Mic. Live call in. Spontaneous Poetry, Overheard In Pittsburgh, Poetic Voyeurism. Milwaukee- Midwest Book Fair coming up on June 1, where Michele McDannold and Tim Murray will be out there representing Red Fez, Full Of Crow Press, and the Literary Underground. Hear from Michele. Unless she is sleeping. Hear from Tim Murray, unless he leaves his phone in the refrigerator again.

Midwest Small Press Festival

Greetings!
We are writing as a group of Milwaukee-based independent literary presses including Rescue Press, New American Press, Plumberries Press, Burdock Magazine and others. Currently, we are curating what we hope to be the 1st annual Midwest Small Press Festival, over the weekend of June 1st-3rd. Due in part to your own investment in independent lit, we would like to reach out and invite you to join us.

The weekend-long event will take place in Milwaukee’s Riverwest neighborhood, a cozy little spot full of artists and doers with a cooperative fervor. We’re including some addresses in this note in case you might want to take a look at the layout of the festival.

The festival will center around a book-fair at the Polish Falcon (801 e. clarke st.) on Saturday June 2nd where small presses from throughout the region will have their wares on display and for sale. With presses coming from Chicago, Minneapolis, Michigan and Ohio, as well as from other parts of Wisconsin, (some names of specific mention: Switchback, DoubleCross, Horseless, Xexoxial, etc.) the event will present an impressive introduction to the independent literary presence in the Midwest.

Ancillary events throughout the weekend include an opening reception at Woodland Pattern Book Center (720 e. locust st.) and multimedia word based performances at The Nut Factory (3750 n. fratney) on Friday June 1st as well as workshops and readings at the Cream City Collectives (732 e. clarke st.) throughout the day on Saturday the 2nd and a brunch spelling-bee and literary trivia game at the Riverwest Public House (815 e. locust st.) on Sunday June 3rd as well as live music, gallery showings and more.

Table space is cheap at $15 for half a table, $25 for a full table.

For more information about the festival including a complete schedule and list of visiting presses please keep an eye on www.midwestsmallpressfestival.org

We encourage you to forward this widely.

Hope this finds you well.

--edwin r. perry and all of us in Milwaukee.

Midwest Small Press Festival
June 1st-3rd • Milwaukee, WI

www.midwestsmallpressfestival.org

January 20, 2012, Segment 5, Project U Radio

Segment 5: January 20, 2012.  ”Editorial Discretion”. Editors, would you publish work with content that you think is personally objectionable (i.e. racism) if you thought it was an otherwise good piece? How do you feel about a blanket policy about certain kinds of content, such as “We don’t publish anything that includes sexist elements”. Do you make distinctions as far as language, character, etc. and have you had this issue come up when selecting work for a zine, website, journal, or project? Do you find the line of subjective interpretation to be difficult? Have you rejected work that you thought was well written because it contained something that you thought to be offensive or thought might offend readers? Beyond offensive, but perhaps hurtful or harmful?

If you want to start at the beginning, check out the archives *here* for our Censorship show, December 2, 2011, where we discussed movements like The Citizens For Decent Literature whose aim was to suppress literature that organizers felt was "objectionable". Inspired by this and being a fan of free speech, Literary Underground's Michele McDannold started a printed publication by the same name and soon after, a website to showcase poetry online. Brief editor of the website content, Michael Goscinski, was invited on to talk about censorship and a lengthy conversation ensued.

My distinction on the difference between censorship and editorial discretion is simple- one involves the systemic suppression of free speech through an authority either by their own undertaking or under pressure by a group that has lobbied for suppression. The other involves the discretion of a content producer and their right to have standards with respect to content. If I have a magazine, I have the right to decide that I don't want any content that involves clowns. (to use my example from the show) We are looking at my right as an owner and producer to discretion, which I believe to be important. But censorship would involve the government telling producers that they cannot publish content that involves clowns. This distinction takes away editorial discretion with a blanket rule across the board, presumably (they say) for societal or other benefit. This is an external, imposed control meant to assert one group's moral or religious view onto another group by limiting clown content. ...... 

California Small-Press Publisher Len Fulton Passes Away at 77 : Harriet Staff : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

California Small-Press Publisher Len Fulton Passes Away at 77 : Harriet Staff : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation.

from Harriet: The Blog by Harriet Staff

We are sad to note the passing of a lovely person and key player in the small-press world, Len Fulton, the force behind Dustbooks Publishing and Small Press Review, who died of lung cancer last Sunday morning. Len, who was 77, also worked in California politics, acting as a Fifth District Supervisor in Chico. According to a longtime friend, he was “an artist, talented writer and playwright who had an interest in politics.”

Remembrances abound in the Paradise Post. One of the most striking is from friend and writer Hugh Fox, who writes about Fulton in detail:

Like saying goodbye to Debussy or Hemingway or H.G. Wells. I…first met Fulton in Berkeley in 1968 when we founded COSMEP, a small press org. that had yearly conventions here, there and everywhere: St. Paul, Minnesota, New Orleans, New York, you name it. And everyone would be there, all the editors of small presses and lit mags. And poets and other writers. Always reading-shows, and I’d always read.

I got to know EVERYONE in the literary scene. And visited Fulton up in his place in Paradise, California, way in the middle of nowhere, or everywhere, if what you loved was California wilderness.

Tall dark-haired, a little moustache, always bright, on the ball, kind of Harvard professorish, but at the same time a kind of exploratory cowboy explorer always moving further into the essence of Nature itself. For years, two or three times a year I’d get a huge envelope filled with books and literary reviews to review for SMALL PRESS REVIEW, and he slowly turned me into a kind of central writer for the mag. Which I loved. Sadly COSMEP slowly disappeared over the years. Run by Richard Morris in San Francisco, it’s a book in itself that would go through the slow decapitations of all our dreams and hopes. But Morris died from cancer and COSMEP kind of died with him. There’s a huge file over in Special Collections at the Michigan State University library dealing with my connections with the death of COSMEP.

A couple of years back Fulton turned SPR into an on-line mag, which I wasn’t crazy about. But he’d always send me a printed copy too, and I’ve got this huge file in my bookcases, years and years and years of copies with my reviews in them.

In the last few years he became increasingly solitary. Suffering from lung cancer, but not aware that was what was going on. When I recently told him that I’m dying from cancer, he wrote a beautiful letter back and mentioned he wasn’t “quite up to it” either. But I don’t think he was aware it was lung cancer.

He was/is a central figure in the development of literary culture in the U.S. He published an INTERNATIONAL DIRECTORY OF LITTLE MAGAZINES AND SMALL PRESSES which I always found of central importance in finding publishers for my books and articles. An odd name for a press — Dustbooks. Always aware of the transience of life and everything surrounding him/us. Always Señor High Concentration, High Seriousness. I couldn’t believe the size of the library in his Paradise ranchhouse. I asked him “Any of my stuff here?,” and he walked over the showed me volume after volume after volume, almost everything I’d ever written, the whole library a veritable treasure house of literary treasures.