From the Editor’s Desk
Ducts.org has finally caught up to the rest of the universe. Or, at least the universe that exists in tiny pixels that come to you through your computer monitor. For the first time our readers (that’s you) can add comments to their favorite articles! Click on any article and try it out. In addition, if you indicate, while commenting, that you want to receive a note when someone follows up your your sparkling wit, you can do that too. Ducts.org will live in Dickensian times no more! Special thanks to our incredible programmer, Matt Kressel, for his slick rejiggering of our website.
In other news, I wanted to remind anyone who missed it last time that Ducts.org has officially merged with the fabulous teachers collective, the New York Writers Workshop to form a brand new parent company, the New York Writers Resources. This merger has been a long time in coming, but makes perfect sense. Yours truly is a member of the NYWW and enjoys the privilege of teaching at the JCC in Manhattan on a weekly basis. In addition, two NYWW founders, the esteemed and peripatetic Tim Tomlinson (Fiction), and the silver haired and slap-hitting Charles Salzberg (Memoir), have been staff members of Ducts.org for several years. This merger, we believe, will lead to online writing classes (making us available to writers worldwide), more book publications, overseas classes and a great deal more.
Greenpoint Press, our publishing wing, is happy to announce that our latest book is selling like cheese-filled pierogis! Long Gone is Richard Willis’s memoir recall of growing up on an Iowa farm between 1933 and 1947. Family-size farms are at best hazy memories, the subjects of politicians’ lies, but Long Gone provides a glimpse of what life was like on an old-time farm and in a small town nearby. Richard’s book is our third and is available right now! In addition, Greenpoint Press, in collaboration with PIF magazine, is proud to be republishing Dan Wakefield’s memoir, New York in the Fifties. Here’s what Publisher’s Weekly says about this classic:
“While Allen Ginsberg howled that the best minds of his generation were being destroyed by madness, Wakefield, who lived in the same town, was high on just being there, on making it as a freelance writer if not yet as a novelist, on the camaraderie he found in Greenwich Village, on hanging around with James Baldwin, Vance Bourjaily, Norman Mailer, Seymour Krim, John Gregory Dunne, Gay Talese, William Buckley and other “writer writers” who would later become our eminences grises of letters. Wakefield had fled Indianapolis in 1952 to study at Columbia; yet eight years later, “all scratched out,” he would flee New York City–and end up in Boston, permanently. This is his memoir of ’50s Manhattan, a charmed, gentle, evocative re-creation of a time when sex was more talked about than done (and when done, was done in secret), a time when psychoanalysis was hailed as the new religion, booze was the soporific, Esquire and the Village Voice the journalistic pacesetters, jazz the music. Then the atmosphere changed: McCarthyism hovered, Timothy Leary came around with the “cure-all elixir” psilocybin, the Beatles landed. Wakefield, whose novels include Home Free , has written his generation’s kinder-spirited Moveable Feast , marking his era as a cultural divide.Litterateurs will treasure the book. So will aspirants”
Please go to Greenpointpress.org to order these wonderful books. And guess what? Our ten year anniversary is fast approaching (2009), so look for our second ever Best Of Ducts anthology coming soon.
Also, you probably noticed an ad for another book, The Portable MFA, on the main page. The Portable MFA gives you all the essential information you would learn in an MFA program, covering fiction, memoir, personal essays, magazine articles, poetry and playwriting. Authors include Tim Tomlinson and Charles Salzberg. We’re lucky to have them on our staff! To buy a copy of The Portable MFA, please click here.
Due to the heavy volume of submissions we’ve been receiving, we have instituted a reading period. Ducts.org editors will read submissions only from January through August of every year. Material received between September 1st and December 31st will be returned, although we’ll encourage writers to resubmit their material during the reading period.
Of course, 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.
We’re happy to announce that our humor section has leapt back to life thanks to the boundless energy of our new editor, the slick-fielding Gail Eisenberg. We hope you laugh out loud and inside all at once. Thanks, Gail!
And as always, you’ll find great essays, fiction, memoirs, poetry, and art within these pages. Please return again and again!
–Jonathan Kravetz, Editor-in-Chief, Ducts.org
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.
