Fall Lines 2021 RESCHEDULED for January 2022 Due to Covid

As per the directive of Richland Library,

the release and reading for

Fall Lines Volumes VII & VIII

has been rescheduled for

Sunday, January 23rd at 2 pm

in the auditorium of the

Main Branch of Richland Library.

All contributors are invited to read ONE piece of their work from the combined volumes.

As per the request of the Jasper Project, all attendees should be vaccinated.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Announcing the Accepted Contributions to 2021 Fall Lines - a literary convergence & Winners of the Broad River Prize for Prose and Saluda River Prize for Poetry

Fall Lines image.png

The Jasper Project, in conjunction with Richland Library, One Columbia for Arts and Culture and Richland Library Friends & Family , is proud to announce the authors whose work has been accepted for publication in part II of the combined seventh and eighth edition of Fall Lines – a literary convergence, as well as the recipients of the 2021 Fall Lines Awards for the Saluda River Prize for Poetry and the Broad River Prize for Prose.

Congratulations to

Kasie Whitener whose short fiction, The Shower,

was selected from more than one hundred prose submissions as the winner of the Broad River Prize for Prose, and to

Angelo Geter, whose poem, Black Girl Fly,

was selected from more than 400 submissions as the winner of the Saluda River Prize for Poetry.

All additional contributors are listed below!

Judges for this year’s awards were

Randall David Cook for fiction and Nathalie Anderson for poetry. 

jasper logo.jpg

Mark your calendar for Sunday October 17th at 3 pm for the 2020-2021 Fall Lines Release and Reading at the Main Branch of the Richland Library. All contributors are invited to read ONE piece from the combined issues. The event is free and open to the public!

All accepted contributors should send a 75-word bio to be included in the journal to editor@JasperColumbia.com

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE FOLLOWING!

Aida Rogers – From Proust to Gibbs

Hannah Pearson – Where the Fox and Hare Say Goodnight

Liesel Hamilton - Drifting

Susanne Kamata -  The Lump

Loli Molina Munoz - Distance(s)

Carla Damron - Breaking the Surface

Arthur McMaster - Connecting Flights

Kasie Whitener - The Shower

Tim Conroy - Pendleton Street

Debra Daniel - How to Make Peach Jam

 

Angelo Geter -  Black Girl Fly

Lisa Hase Jackson – Dead Birds of the Great Leap Forward

Ray McManus – When You Can’t Tell the Vine from the Branches

Landon Chapman – Odysseus

Ken McLaurin – Procrastination

Terri McCord – Sense Making

May O’Keefe Brady – Pandemic’s Box

Adam Corbett – The Keys and Gertrude Stein

Patricia Starek -  Glass Travels

Jenny Maxwell – My Father on Tap Dancing

Nicola Waldron – Peach Harvest

Ken Denk – Propitiating the Pulmonic Plague and After the Fight

Ruth Nicholson – At Congaree Swamp

Glenis Redmond – She Makes Me Think of Houses and For Dark-Skinned Black Women You Know it’s Not Just About the Red Lipstick

Judith Cumming Reese – Twilight Song

Eileen Scharenbroch – Sisters

Worthy Branson Evans – Blues For Want of a Blues Song

Kristine Hartvigsen – Journey

Roy Seeger – Alluvial Patterns

Randy Spencer – Invitation to the Plague and When it is Over

Betsy Thorne – Quarantined

Amanda Rachelle Warren – How Many Reasons for this Up and Gone

Jo Angela Edwins – The Lichtenberg Figure

Susan Craig – Tell Me it is Enough

Danielle Ann Verwers – When the Lights Go Out

Ann-Chadwell Humphries – Golden Boy

Austin Hehir – Human

Libby Bernardin – Dear October

Horace Mungin – Flip of the Two-Headed Coin

Melanie McClellan Hartnett – untitled

Al Black – Prayers in the Spectrum

John Lane – Two Rifts on Montale

Gil Allen – The Chosen

Jane Zenger – What I Will Do For You

Lisa Johnson-McVety – Sad Feet

 

FALL LINES 2021: CALL for SUBMISSIONS for the 2020-2021 DOUBLE ISSUE

Fall Lines image.png

 

Fall Lines – a literary convergence is a literary journal presented by The Jasper Project in partnership with Richland Library and One Columbia for Arts and Culture.

Fall Lines will accept submissions of previously unpublished poetry, essays, short fiction, and flash fiction from April 1, 2021 through June 30, 2021. While the editors of Fall Lines hope to attract the work of writers and poets from the Carolinas and the Southeastern US, acceptance of work is not dependent upon residence. 

Publication in Fall Lines will be determined by a panel of judges and accepted authors (ONLY) will be notified by September 30, 2021, with a publication date in October. Two $250 cash prizes, sponsored by the Richland Library Friends and Foundation, will be awarded: The Saluda River Prize for Poetry and the Broad River Prize for Prose.

DOUBLE ISSUE: Due to restrictions surrounding COVID-19, the 2020 issue of Fall Lines will be published in conjunction with the 2021 issue as a DOUBLE issue. Two unique sets of poetry and prose and two sets of winners will be bound together in ONE BOOK and celebrated with ONE Launch and Reading event at a TBD date in October. Both 2020 and 2021 prizes will be presented at the October 2021 launch event.

Ø  POETRY: Up to five poems may be submitted with each submitted as an individual WORD FILE.

Include one cover sheet for up to five poems. Submit poetry submissions and cover sheet to FallLines@JasperProject.org with the word POETRY in the subject line.

 

Ø  PROSE: Up to five prose entries may be submitted with each submitted as an individual WORD FILE.

Include one cover sheet for up to five prose submissions. Submit prose submissions and cover sheet to FallLines@JasperProject.org with the word PROSE in the subject line.

 

COVER SHEET should include your name, the titles of your submissions, your email address, and mailing address. Authors’ names should not appear on the submission. Do NOT send bios.

ALL ENTRIES SHOULD BE TITLED.

There is no fee to enter, but submissions that fail to follow the above instructions will be disqualified without review.

Simultaneous submissions will not be considered. Failure to disclose simultaneous submissions will result in a lack of eligibility in any future Jasper Project publications.

 __

 The Columbia Fall Line is a natural junction, along which the Congaree River falls and rapids form, running parallel to the east coast of the country between the resilient rocks of the Appalachians and the softer, more gentle coastal plain.

Fall Lines 2020 Saluda River Prize for Poetry Winner LISA HAMMOND talks with Jasper & Shares a New Poem

Hydrangeas 

by Lisa Hammond

They plant them in trailer parks. I am standing

between the topiaries and the statuary, mossy urns

hiding me from the women’s view. Fragrant hoops

and balls, rising spires of rosemary—they do not

know I can hear them, back behind stone fountains

splashing, zen temple bell, the little St. Francis.

Poor Hortensia, with her matronly name, flowers

I mostly see now run rampant alongside fallen fences,

old foundations, old fashioned, blowsy pink or blue.

At home I have the county extension agent’s flyer,

Change the pH of Your Soil, and I remember

how the grandmothers buried tin cans at the roots,

to bring out their blue eyes. I loved the fat conspicuous

blooms, thick-barked stems, how they’d overtake beds

when your back was turned. One neighbor poured hot

bacon grease on roots to kill hers—come spring they’d leg

themselves right up over her sorry fence again. Standing

in the nursery next to the pot feet, those two old ladies

so like that cranky neighbor, I remember the spring

I planted mine, my first year in the new house, how

I hoarded catalogues, Ayesah or Annabelle, Blue Bunny

or Snowqueen, how the first years it struggled, every

winter I thought it dead, every spring it crept back

a bit, a lone small nosegay budding, nothing like

the wild oakleaf outside my old bedroom window.

I had thought them so Southern Living, lacecaps

and mopheads trailing with grapevine over the silver

and linen. I carried them at my cousin’s wedding,

thirsty bouquet drooping alongside the sheer ribbon

before well before the toasts, photographs hurried.

O Dear Delores, O Silverleaf, O Brussels Lace,

here your solitary representative, a potbound pink

Everlasting tucked away behind begonias, object

of scorn. O Endless Summer, unhurried maiden,

I wait months for your snowballs, each heavy flower

spreading open to the wind, minding her own business.

~~~

Lisa Hammond

Lisa Hammond

Earlier this summer Jasper announced the winners of the Fall Lines 2020 Broad River Prize for Prose & the Saluda River Prize for Poetry and shared some of winner Randy Spencer’s prose and process.

Today we’re delighted to talk with Lisa Hammond, winner of our poetry prize.

Welcome Lisa!

JASPER: For the Jasper followers who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting you yet, please tell us a bit about how you got to where you are now. For example, where did you grow up and go to school, and how and when did you make your way to Columbia?

HAMMOND: Cindi, thank you so much for the chance to meet some new friends through Jasper! I’m originally from South Carolina, born in Florence, and I’ve lived in South Carolina most of my life. I was a first-generation college student at Francis Marion and then went to graduate school at the University of Alabama. I felt like such a country girl on campus (well, I was such a country girl!)—it was a big, exciting university, amazing faculty and writers, beautiful architecture, a great library and natural history museum. When I finished my PhD, I taught for two years at Michigan State University. I loved the fall in Michigan, but winters seemed endless. I was very fortunate to find a job at a small university in Lancaster, South Carolina, close to my family, and I have been there ever since.

JASPER: Call you tell us about your work as a professor as USC Lancaster? What do you teach and what is your area of research?

HAMMOND: Most of my teaching is first-year composition, general education courses—so ENGL 101 and 102, Intro to Poetry, that sort of thing. I enjoy teaching those courses because I remember so well what it felt like to be a new college student who had no idea what to expect from college. I love helping students learn to see from different perspectives, to understand their preconceptions and to test those—do they always hold up? how does new information change your first way of thinking about and seeing a question? how do you present your ideas in a persuasive way? You hear a lot these days that college professors indoctrinate students—goodness, sometimes it feels like a victory if I can get them to do the reading! I think what we are actually seeing is students beginning to understand new ways to read, interpret, analyze. Those processes, fully engaged, change your thinking and your life.

Most of my research falls under the broad category of gender issues in American literature and culture. I’ve done a good bit of research on teaching with technology—I taught my first online women’s studies class in 2000, which is hard to believe now. I’ve written a great deal about Ursula K. Le Guin, one of American’s most talented and powerful writers. I study contemporary American women’s memoirs about motherhood. And I gave a talk at a conference about a year and a half ago called “What We Did in the Resistance: Public Poetry, Political Response, and the Women’s March” that I should really finish up as an article, but the political landscape is changing so quickly that it’s hard to keep up with. I’ve lately focused more on writing and publishing my own poetry as my scholarly work, but I like to stay in touch with my academic research areas too—my interest in one area informs my work in the other. Sometimes that means it takes me a long time to finish a project, but I think the work is richer for the connections.  

JASPER: Does your work at the university inform your writing much? How so?

HAMMOND: Grant Snider, the artist of the Incidental Comics series, has this great comic called Day Jobs of the Poets. I am pretty sure that if I won the lottery and suddenly could write full-time, I wouldn’t want to. I’m very lucky to have a professional life with a lot of range, many interesting projects and colleagues and students, so I often stumble across ideas at work that plant writing seeds. One drawback to my work for my writing life, though, is that I write a great deal for my job; the larger part of my job the last few years is my work as Director of Institutional Effectiveness and Research at USC Lancaster. I write a series of large reports every year. I just finished our annual state agency accountability report for the Governor and the General Assembly. Writing a university reaccreditation compliance document and writing a poem are two very different projects, but they both use my writing brain. So when I’m on deadline for large work writing projects, my own writing really dwindles in those periods.

My teaching, though, often brings me back to my own writing. Teaching any kind of writing keeps you close to your own writing, I find. In the last few years, I’ve been teaching more upper-level courses writing courses. I teach a senior-level business writing class that is fascinating—so much analysis of your audience there, understanding how to direct a message. I’m teaching an internship class right now, helping students learn outside the classroom; those students work in all kinds of organizations and businesses, so I have the opportunity to learn more about their careers and interests and am always running across interesting new ideas as I respond to their writing. I occasionally get to teach a 300-level creative writing class, which I LOVE because I write alongside my students. I write so much more in the semesters I teach that class because I stay in a daily writing practice with them. I find that writing a little every day means that I rarely finish a first draft of a poem in a sitting, but I write more over time. If I waited until I have big blocks of time, I’d never write another poem again.

JASPER: Are you primarily a poet, or do you practice prose writing as well?

HAMMOND: My prose writing is largely strategic planning documents! I am working on a prose poem series right now, which is something of a surprise for me, because I have always been in love with the poetic line and stanza form. Where does the line break? How does using couplets change the rhythm of the poem? The prose poem is an interesting challenge because you can’t rely on the line break to help you signal the importance of a word, for example. It’s also freeing; sometimes I spend so much time worrying a poem over stanzas and lines, but with the prose poem, you just start and keep going. The rhythm of a prose poems is different too, more accumulative, sometimes faster, so there’s an interesting opportunity to find ways to vary those rhythmic patterns. I’m finding these poems great fun to write, although I sometimes have to stop myself stewing over a line that ends with of, for example, or the—it’s not really a line, I have to tell myself. But often I tweak the spot that’s bugging me to shift the end word anyhow.

My mother took me to the library every week, usually when we came into town to the laundromat. She tells me I was an old soul early on

JASPER: Are you a life-long poet or did you begin writing later in life? What was the impetus for you to start writing?

HAMMOND: I can’t remember starting to write, so I’d say that qualifies me as a lifelong poet! (That sounds like a grand title, doesn’t it?) I come from a family of storytellers. My mother took me to the library every week, usually when we came into town to the laundromat. She tells me I was an old soul early on; I remember a second-grade teacher who made a deal with me—as soon as you finish your work for the day, you can skip recess and read the rest of the day. What a great year that was! I teach students who want to be writers that first they must read, often and widely. It may be that writing just runs in the family, though. One of my cousins is a poet, and so is my daughter. My daughter is at least as good a poet at twenty-five as I am now after a lifetime’s practice. Maybe better, if you consider that she won this same prize in 2018. I have a dear artist friend who says that it takes three generations to make a real artist. Now, having said that, let me hasten to add—talent is not inborn. What makes a writer is writing. Practice and persistence and putting the pen to the page, the fingers to the keyboard. 

JASPER: Who has influenced your writing and who are some of your favorite writers?

HAMMOND: I mentioned Ursula K. Le Guin above; one thing I love and admire about her writing is that her books can be so different from each other. When people ask me what Le Guin they should read, I say, well, if you like myths and fairy tales, The Wizard of Earthsea. If you like politics, The Dispossessed. If you like exploration, The Left Hand of Darkness. I love how she challenges her readers and herself. When The Left Hand of Darkness was published, she faced criticism for using male-gendered pronouns to describe an androgynous race. She defended her thought experiment and found it good—and then she came back several years later and said, wow, wasn’t I defensive? and I was wrong. She wrote an afterword for a later edition acknowledging her critics’ and imagining other ways she could have written the book. She changed the pronouns in three different chapters—three different approaches to the pronoun problem—so readers could see how the change affected their perception of the characters. She couldn’t rewrite the book, but she never stopped seeing it again either. I think she would have loved to see the current moment when the third person pronouns have been accepted by major style guides. What a gift, to watch a writer grow and change over such a long and amazing career.

I read a great deal of contemporary poetry, keeping a stack of books in rotation on my desk when I am writing: Claudia Emerson, Camille Dungy, Louise Glück, Kevin Young. Chelsea Rathburn, Tina Mozelle Braziel, Li-Young Lee, Eavan Boland, Nikky Finney. I tend to stay close to the lyric exploration of ordinary moments, so I love Linda Pastan, and Pablo Neruda’s Odes to Common Things is a special favorite. I am also fascinated by how we understand history through poetry—Robin Coste Lewis does amazing things in Voyage of the Sable Venus. And Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin, wow. I love poetry anthologies as a way of meeting new poets and finding things outside of what I might normally first reach for. Sandra Beasley’s Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. Sam Hamill’s The Erotic Spirit: An Anthology of Poems of Sensuality, Love, and Longing. Sandra Gilbert’s Inventions of Farewell: A Book of Elegies. You can while away quite a few lovely quiet hours with food, sex, and death.

And once you see something a new way, you can’t unsee it.

JASPER: You are the winner of the Saluda River Prize for Poetry in this year’s Fall Lines – a literary convergence for your poem, Hydrangeas, with which we opened this post. What can you tell us about the roots, if you will, of your poem Hydrangeas?

HAMMOND: Hydrangeas come in so many beautiful varieties, with all these amazing names.  Some names suggest the flower itself, like Brussels Lace, while others have these old-fashioned people names like Hortensia. The names are a song by themselves.

Hydrangeas seem to embody the contradictions of the South, lovely and vexed all at once. As part of the traditions of Southern entertaining, they suggest wealth and elegance, but some see them as common pests. I’m not sure they are actually classified as invasive plants, but some people do seem to see them that way. And they can change colors, like magic! How can the same plant mean such different things? But this is true throughout the South, with the many ways we tell our histories. The same wedding venue through one set of eyes is a gracious home, but through another, it is a haunted gravesite of enslaved people whose names have been erased. And once you see something a new way, you can’t unsee it. I can’t imagine wanting to. Hydrangeas grow in elegant Charleston gardens, but they also grow in ditches. In our grandmothers’ gardens, Alice Walker might say.

I was working on this idea at a retreat and went one afternoon to a greenhouse in Pawley’s Island, where I did actually overhear the first line of the poem. In some respects, this poem feels unfinished to me, perhaps because as Le Guin did, I am always learning to see things a new way. I don’t think the poem says everything I want to say. But at a certain point, the poem is done. You have to go write another one. And I’m still not very good at growing hydrangeas, although I do have a big beautiful bunch of them dropping those little blue speckles all over my desk right now.

JASPER: What do you do with yourself when you aren’t writing, teaching, or doing research?

HAMMOND: I’m a photographer and I love to draw. My poor family—I am always taking photos of them and writing poems about them. Art is another way of seeing, and my poetry and art are deeply connected, but for me the visual arts feel more like play. When I travel, the first thing I do is find the local museums and bookstores and art supply stores.

I don’t think our world will go back to what it was, and I don’t want it to—this moment is teaching us how we can change. But whoever said change is hard was seriously not kidding.

JASPER: How has COVID-19 affected you and your ability to practice your art?

HAMMOND: Artists are struggling, as we all are. Most people I know have either lost their jobs or are working harder than they’ve ever worked. One minute things seem ordinary, and the next you realize you left your mask in the car. Someone you know is sick or dead. The anger boiling in this country, George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, and who knows who will be next. The protests that we march in, or are afraid to march in because we are at risk. Well, we are all at risk. We pass some horrifying marker, 100,000 dead in the United States, 150,000, and we’re approaching 200,000. How do we even understand these numbers? I can’t read anymore—books from before seem very much from before. The real world is as frightening as any apocalyptic novel now.

I’m lucky, I know, to be in the camp of folks who are working harder than they’ve ever worked, though some days that luck feels like hard luck—helping my students navigate the transition to online learning, working with several faculty one-on-one to help them with their classes, working on our university-wide reaccreditation. I’ve written exactly two poems since March, and that I finished anything feels like a miracle. I don’t usually write in the moment—I would love so much to be able to write and publish a poem in Rattle’s Poets Respond! Instead I keep journals and I draw. I note a thing or two each day that in a year I will come back to, will try to see again. I read as best I can and to have faith that I will come back to the writing as we settle more into this moment, the next. I don’t think our world will go back to what it was, and I don’t want it to—this moment is teaching us how we can change. But whoever said change is hard was seriously not kidding.

Sometimes you write your life, and sometimes you live it.

JASPER: Do you have any hints or recommendations for other poets on how to get through this strange period in all of our lives?

HAMMOND: I am doing several things to try to take care of myself.

A big piece of this is managing how I follow the news. The early days of the pandemic, we were all refreshing our newsfeeds constantly. That continuous exposure to changing circumstances meant constant adrenaline, constant anxiety, for me and I believe for many. I am not great at not looking at my phone first thing in the morning, but I do try. I have cut way back on my social media—this makes me a little lonely, but it gives me more time and lets me choose when I can take hearing the day’s bad news. I subscribe to a daily email summary from a small handful of trusted news outlets. I’m grateful for Heather Cox Richardson’s daily Letters from an American, but I have no idea how she writes that and teaches and sleeps. I can’t wait for the day I can read that collection and remember this time, and it will be history.

I feel a great need to do something to help, so I have chosen a few causes and significantly upped my donations. I certainly am saving a lot of gas money working from home, and it makes me feel I am making some small difference. I wish it were a bigger difference, but maybe together all our small differences will make the bigger change.

And I try not to beat myself up, for not being ok, for not getting through everything I need to do, for not having the energy some days to even text a friend. I would never talk to a friend the way I talk to myself in my head, but I have to remind myself of that pretty regularly. Of course you didn’t get through all those papers to grade today, of course you will write again.

I’m a slow writer in normal circumstances—I recommend Louise DeSalvo’s The Art of Slow Writing: Reflections on Time, Craft, and Creativity. Time is so strange in this moment—fast and slow, the markers we normally use to note the progress of our days and years gone or fundamentally changed. It’s ok to take time to sit with this grief and wonder. When you are ready to write again, write a little every day. It’s ok if it’s bad. It’s ok if you don’t finish. A little every day will take you places, when you are ready.

Sometimes you write your life, and sometimes you live it.

~~~

Elizabeth Warren Dreams of Kissing Babies

by Lisa Hammond

It is good and over, the long campaign, debates, VP

speculation. Would you say yes? Yes. I would help any way

I can. He called himself to tell me, of course. He’s a

decent man. Another disappointment, but not a

surprise. All those pinky promises and all those little girls. The

Zoom convention, a soft cornflower blue sweater,

balancing careful scripted banter with hope. Kamala is

making history. All my plans long ago pulled down from

the headquarters wall and recycled, Empowering

American Workers and Raising Wages, Strengthening

Our Democracy, My Plan to Cancel Student Loan

Debt on Day One of My Presidency. Whether or not I

smile enough. Only the election left, and in truth, there’s

some relief—they cannot blame me for what is

coming. The reporters yelling from the sidelines, will

you be a key player in the new administration? We both

want the same thing. The reporters and the crowd surge

forward, I know it is before because the mothers push

their babies towards me, no one masked, no one

distancing, no one knowing what is coming. Dream big,

the mama says, fight hard, the children reply. I can’t stay

in this crowd and I want to say it again but don’t, I am

running for president because that’s what girls do. The choices

left now. We want this country to work and we want it to work

for everyone. Smiling or strident. Either way my face

hurts.

Announcing Accepted Submissions for Fall Lines & Winners of Fall Lines Awards

Fall Lines image.png

The Jasper Project, in conjunction with Richland Library, Friends of Richland Library, and One Columbia for Arts and Culture, is proud to announce the authors whose work has been accepted for publication in the seventh edition of Fall Lines – a literary convergence, as well as the recipients of the 2020 Fall Lines Awards for the Saluda River Prize for Poetry and the Broad River Prize for Prose.

Congratulations to Randy Spencer whose short fiction, Ghost Ship, was selected from more than one hundred prose submissions as the winner of the Broad River Prize for Prose, and to Lisa Hammond, whose poem, Hydrangeas, was selected from more than 400 submissions as the winner of the Saluda River Prize for Poetry.

Judges for this year’s awards were Barrett Warner for fiction and Julia Wendell for poetry. 

Barrett Warner is the author of Why Is It So Hard to Kill You? (Somondoco Press, 2016) and My Friend Ken Harvey (Publishing Genius, 2014. He has won the Salamander fiction prize and his short stories have appeared in The Adroit, Phoebe, Crescent Review, Oxford Magazine, Berkeley Fiction Review, Quarter after Eight, and elsewhere. He has also won the Princemere, Liam Rector, Luminaire (Alternating Current), and Cloudbank poetry prizes; and the Tucson Book Festival essay prize. In 2016, he was awarded a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award for his personal essays on farming and the rhythms of farm life. He used those funds to move to South Carolina. In May, 2019 he received the nonfiction fellowship at the Longleaf Writers’ Conference. Recent efforts appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, Disquiet Arts, Sou’wester, and Pirene’s Fountain. 

Julia Wendell received her B.A. from Cornell University, her M.A. in English and American Literature from Boston University, and Her M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Iowa, Writer's Workshop.  She is the author of five full-length collections of poems and three chapbooks. Her most recent book of poems is Take This Spoon (Main Street Rag Press, 2014). Additionally, she is the author of two memoirs, Finding My Distance (Galileo Press, 2009) and her recent Come to the X (Galileo Press, 2020). A Bread Loaf and Yaddo Fellow, her poems have been widely published in such journals as American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Antioch Review, The Missouri Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Nebraska Review, Crazyhorse, and many others. She is the Founding Editor of Galileo Press since its inception in 1979. She lives in Aiken, South Carolina, with her husband, editor and critic, Barrett Warner.

While the annual release of Fall Lines is typically accompanied by a reading and celebration, this year, due to restrictions accompanying COVID-19, the editors have opted to reveal the names of the authors whose work has been accepted for publication, but delay the actual release event and book distribution until the writing community can safely gather together to share and celebrate.

Fall Lines – a literary coalition is edited by Cindi Boiter and Ed Madden, with assistance from Lee Snelgrove and Tony Tallent.

Congratulations to the following authors:

Ann Humphries – Kite Boy from Bangladesh, To Think I almost Missed These Paintings, and The Bench

John Gulledge – Forgetting Pop

Al Black – Night Watchman, Pandemic Meditation on the Second Anniversary of My Mother’s Passing

Lisa Hammond – Hydrangeas *

Lawrence Rhu – Amends

Lisa Hase-Jackson – Her Wild Self, Privilege

Derek Berry – landscape with ritual superstition, on the morning I tell my father

Jennifer Gilmore – Flecks of Gold

Debra Daniel – Why the Rabbit Died, As we Move On

Nathalie Anderson – Lamp-Lit

Betsy Thorne – For the Love of Pete, View from Office in a Small City

Ruth Nicholson – Spring Safari:  Hartsville, SC, Overdue

Ellen Malphrus – Refusing the Flood, Premonition: January 2, 2020

Eric Morris – Medicine Game, They, and The Gift

Rachel Burns – mortality tastes Like key lime pie

Dale Bailes – Time/Travel, Columbia to Pawley’s, After the Hurricane

Arthur Turfa – unfinished Kaddish

Betsy Thorne – New Restrictions

Danielle Verwers – The Governor Issues an Executive Order Before the Evening News, 1993, and Horseshoe Falls

Randy Spencer – Quarantine, Ghost Ship

Susan Craig – The Way We See a Goldfinch

Libby Bernardine – Ode

Kristine Hartvigsen – Sleepover

Tim Conroy – Balances

Bo Petersen – Little Gleams

Ceille Baird Welch – The Inevitable Unfriending of Merrily Thompson, Merrily Thompson Remembers

Jon Tuttle – hush

Francis Pearce – Retreat

Fall Lines Volume VI Announces Winners - Kimberly Driggers and Derek Berry!

Jasper is delighted to announce the winners in this year’s competitive Fall Lines categories.

Congratulations to Kimberly Driggers whose poem, IMAGINE THE SOUND OF WAVES, is the winner of the Saluda River Prize for Poetry and to Derek Berry whose prose piece, SASQUATCH, is the winner of the Broad River Prize for Prose.

Both literary artists will be published in Fall Lines - a literary convergence, Volume VI which launches on Sunday, August 18th from 2 - 3:30 with a reading and awards ceremony at Richland Library. The event if free and open to the public.

Fall Lines is sponsored by the Jasper Project in partnership with Richland Library and One Columbia for Arts and Culture. The two winning authors will each receive a check for $250 sponsored by the Richland Library Friends & Foundation.

Judges for this year’s contests included Judy Goldman (prose) and DeLana Dameron.

~~~

Additional authors whose work will appear in the 2019 volume of Fall Lines include:

Teresa Haskew

Ellen Malphrus

Loli Molena Munoz

Libby Bernardin

Len Lawson

Susan Craig

Lawrence Rhu

Worthy Evans

Curtis Derrick

Terri McCord

Al Black

Ruth Nicholson

Heather Dearmon

Randy Spencer

Tim Conroy

Suzanne Kamata

Frances Pearce

Bo Petersen

Jon Tuttle

Kathleen Warthen

Kristine Hartvigsen

Gil Allen

Andrew Clark

Kevin Oliver

Yvette Murray

Ed Madden

Ray McManus

Nathalie Anderson

Fall Lines.png

Fall Lines Literary Magazine Accepting Submissions for 2018 Issue

Fall Lines.png

Fall Lines – a literary convergence is a literary journal presented by The Jasper Project in partnership with Richland Library and One Columbia for Arts and History.

Fall Lines will accept submissions of previously unpublished poetry, essays, short fiction, and flash fiction from January 15, 2018 through April 1, 2018. While the editors of Fall Lines hope to attract the work of writers and poets from the Carolinas and the Southeastern US, acceptance of work is not dependent upon residence.

Publication in Fall Lines will be determined by a panel of judges and accepted authors (ONLY) will be notified by May 30, 2018, with a publication date in July 2018. Two $250 cash prizes, sponsored by the Richland Library Friends, will be awarded: The Saluda River Prize for Poetry and the Broad River Prize for Prose.

Each entry must be submitted as a single independent entry and include its own cover sheet.

Submit each individual poetry submission, along with its own cover sheet, to FallLines@JasperProject.org with the word POETRY in the subject line.

Submit each individual prose submission, along with its own cover sheet, to FallLines@JasperProject.org with the word PROSE in the subject line.

Cover sheets MUST include your name, the name of the one individual entry you are submitting with that cover sheet, email address, and USPO address. There is no fee to enter, but submissions that fail to follow the above instructions will be disqualified without review.

Please limit short fiction to 2000 words or less; flash fiction to 350 – 500 words per submission; essays to 1200 words; and poetry to three pages (Times New Roman 12 pt.) Please submit no more than a total of 5 entries.

___

The Columbia Fall Line is a natural junction, along which the Congaree River falls and rapids form, running parallel to the east coast of the country between the resilient rocks of the Appalachians and the softer, more gentle coastal plain.

Fall Lines - new Columbia-based literary journal CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Fall Lines

a literary convergence

 

Fall Lines – a literary convergence is a new literary journal based in Columbia, SC and presented by Jasper Magazine in partnership with Richland Library, the University of South Carolina Press, Muddy Ford Press, and One Columbia.

With a single, annual publication, Fall Lines is distributed in lieu of Jasper Magazine’s regularly scheduled summer issue. While a limited issue of three thousand copies of Fall Lines will be printed, Fall Lines will be available in its entirety in a downloadable e-format via RichlandLibrary.com.

Fall Lines will accept submissions of previously unpublished poetry, essays, short fiction, and flash fiction from January 1 through March 1, 2014. While the editors of Fall Lines hope to attract the work of writers and poets from the Carolinas and the Southeastern US, acceptance of work is not dependent upon residence.

Please limit short fiction to 2000 words or less; flash fiction to 350 – 500 words; essays to 1200 words; and poetry to three pages (Times New Roman 12 pt.) Submit your work via email to Editor@JasperColumbia.com with the words “Fall Lines” in the subject heading along with the category (above) of the item being submitted. While you are invited to enter up to five items, each item should be sent individually as a single submission. Please include with each submission a cover sheet stating your name, age, email address, and USPO address. There is no fee to enter.

Publication in Fall Lines will be determined by a panel of judges and accepted authors will be notified in May 2014, with a publication date in June 2014. Accepted authors will receive two copies of the journal.

___

The Columbia Fall Line is a natural junction, along which the Congaree River falls and rapids form,runningparalleltothe east coast of the country between the resilient rocks of the Appalachians andthesofter, more gentle coastal plain.