{"id":9590,"date":"2022-03-23T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-23T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9590"},"modified":"2022-03-22T16:53:13","modified_gmt":"2022-03-22T20:53:13","slug":"exciting-news-for-readers-and-writers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=9590","title":{"rendered":"Exciting News for Readers and Writers"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Frank Coffman, editor of the ambitious new publication JOURN-E<\/a> (\u201cThe Journal of Imaginative Literature\u201d), included my short story \u201cThe Old Man of the Mountain\u201d in his inaugural issue, published on the vernal equinox. A call for submissions to the next issue (autumnal equinox) appears on the journal\u2019s home page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This innovative magazine includes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and illustration, all geared around what Coffman calls \u201cthe genres of the high imagination\u201d: Adventure; Detection and Mystery; Fantasy; Horror and the Supernatural; and Science Fiction. In its first issue, the balance among stories by genre is about even, with most sections checking in at around 50 pages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My short stories mostly have \u201cand it all worked out\u201d endings\u2014not necessarily happy, but some measure of situational control reestablished, and not leaving the reader in need of therapy, either. Except this one. I started working on it several years ago, and quite a few drafts were needed to get it into publishable shape.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The experiences in the story could apply to any tragic wartime situation and its lingering impact on those left behind, the so-called \u201csurvivors.\u201d Although the enemy who wreaked havoc in my story is the long-gone \u201cNazis.\u201d Now, perhaps, one could substitute \u201cPutin.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also drew on a frightening experience from my college years, when I was working at a summer theater near Pittsburgh. The theater manager put her interns up in a bedroom in her basement. The other intern hadn\u2019t arrived yet, and I slept down there alone. It was very dark. Very dark. And one night I felt like the dark was palpable, suffocating me. Of course, after a moment of frightened paralysis, I got up and turned on a light. Problem solved. But the feeling of oppressive blackness was something I resurrected for this tale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I must mention Dominique Bibeau\u2019s story, \u201cRussian for Beginners\u201d in the March\/April Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine <\/em>(translated by @JoshPachter), which brought that frightening claustrophobia back once again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Frank Coffman, editor of the ambitious new publication JOURN-E (\u201cThe Journal of Imaginative Literature\u201d), included my short story \u201cThe Old Man of the Mountain\u201d in his inaugural issue, published on the vernal equinox. A call for submissions to the next … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"A remarkable new publication for stories steeped in imagination. ","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[40,5,126,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-imagination","category-reading-2","category-storytelling"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2uG","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9590"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9592,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9590\/revisions\/9592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}