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From the Editor’s Desk
Summer, 2014
Cindy Stockton Moore, our art gallery editor, is stepping down after twelve years of editing the inspiring art on these pages. She started as our editor in Summer, 2003, when we knew only that we desperately needed to bring someone on board who knew a lot more about art than we did. Over the years she’s provided steady leadership and a visual aesthetic with something interesting to say about the world. Cindy is also an incisive observer of art and I urge you to go back and read her many essays over the years. She plans to spend her newfound pseudo-freedom with her son, Otto, and husband, Mark, while she also continues to make new work and involve herself in the art scene in Philadelphia. She will also continue teaching and writing about art and we hope her work will occasionally grace these pages now and again. Cindy is our longest running editor (after yours truly): her energy and passion remind me just how important art and culture really are to all of us and we will miss her terribly. Please check out her work and if you’re one of our Philadelphia subscribers, shoot her a note and get involved: http://www.cindystocktonmoore.com/. To Cindy we say: good luck!
With Cindy stepping down we are lucky to have found her worthy replacement so quickly. Though she has big shoes to fill, she’s already shown her energy and passion for us with this issue’s first entry. Jacqueline Bishop is an award-winning photographer-painter-writer born and raised in Jamaica, who now lives and works in New York City (“Jamaica’s 15th Parish”). She has twice been awarded Fulbright Fellowships, including a year-long grant to Morocco; her work exhibits widely in North America, Europe and North Africa. She also teaches Liberal Studies at New York University; is the author of The River’s Song, a novel about growing up in Jamaica and writes a monthly visual arts article for the Huffington Post. Visit Jacqueline Bishop at her website at: http://www.jacqueline-bishop.com. Welcome aboard, Jacqueline!
Our best of Ducts.org anthology, The Man Who Ate His Book, has been flying off the shelves, but we have plenty of copies left. For those new to the book, here’s what it says on the back cover:
Ducts.org, one of the first literary magazines on the web, was founded in 1999 and has since grown into a dependable and ambitious resource for readers looking for engaging and thought-provoking essays, memoirs, fiction, poetry, art and humor. In this, our second collection of some of our best, you will spend time with a dangerous SS man in the Warsaw Ghetto, enjoy sensuous cooking, experience a kiss that lasts forever, discover witticisms lost to time and meet The Man Who Ate His Book.
The book is available in the usual places online, but for now please feel free to email Charles Salzberg at Charles@greenpointpress.org to get your copy now!
As many of you know, Ducts.org is part of an umbrella organization called New York Writers Resources, dedicated to helping writers everywhere. Also under that umbrella are our two sister organizations. Greenpoint Press has continued the tradition of publishing extraordinary books that are too often over-looked by mainstream publishers. This spring Greenpoint Press was proud to release Lisa L. Kirchner’s memoir, Hello American Lady Creature: What I Learned as a Woman in Qatar, which chronicles Lisa’s life as a divorcee in a Muslim land where it’s illegal to date, yet where sex in a souq city smolders. In the Fall, we’ll be publishing another wonderful memoir, Out From the Underworld, by Heather Siegel, and we’re very excited to announce that for the first time we’ll have a table at the Brooklyn Book Fair on Sunday, September 21st, so we hope you’ll visit us there.
Meanwhile, our books Schmuck, by Ross Klavan, which was well reviewed by NPR, and Starfish, by Patty Dann, as well as You’re Not Leaving, by Dr. Benjamin Luft, Call of the Lark, by Maura Mulligan, Between Heaven and Earth, by Doug Garr, and Fierce Joy, by Ellen Schecter, continue to sell well.
And we’d like to say a special word about a special friend of ours, Eli Shaber, who passed away this winter after a long illness. Eli, came to literature late in life. A surgeon, he retired from the medical profession and turned to writing poetry. Greenpoint Press published some of his work, The Dude of Du Jour of Somalia, and White Boy Cool: Seven Acts of Vicious Funambulism. Each year, Eli opened the Trumpet Fiction reading series at KGB with what could best be described as his unique brand of performance art. He was a staunch supporter of Ducts, Greenpoint Press and the New York Writers Workshop and we shall miss him. If you don’t own a copy of one of his books, well, you should.
New York Writers Workshop continues to offer writing classes (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, screenwriting, playwriting, and children’s literature) every fall, winter, and spring at the Manhattan JCC. We also hold free classes at various branches of the New York Public Library, as well as online classes. In addition, NYWW holds Pitch Conferences every spring and fall, where writers from all over the U. S. (and other countries as well) workshop their book ideas and then pitch them to editors from leading publishers. Our track record of books pitched at the conferences and then published includes the recently-released Twerp, a young adult novel by Mark Goldblatt, and Chasing Chaos: My Decade In and Out of Humanitarian Aid, a memoir by Jessica Alexander that will be published in the fall. The fall 2014 pitch conferences will be held October 10-12 for Non-Fiction and November 7-9 for Fiction (for adults and children/young adults). http://newyorkwritersworkshop.com/category/conferences
We continue to raise money as part of our effort to bring you the best personal stories on the web. If you enjoy the thought-provoking essays and memoirs, if you are captivated by our fiction, poetry and art, I urge you to donate whatever amount you can. Every little bit helps!
Thank you for visiting and please return again and again!
-Jonathan Kravetz, Editor-in-Chief
This issue of Ducts is made possible with a regrant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, supported by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.