We’re pleased to announce that the first annual Sonora Review poetry contest will be judged by Caroline Bergvall. We honor work that displays innovative technique and a fine attention to craft. The winner of the contest will receive 500$ and publication in the Winter 57th issue of Sonora Review. All contest entrants will be sent a complimentary Winter issue.

Entrants can submit 3 poems with a 10 page limit.

Multiple submissions to the contest are accepted, but every set of three poems must be accompanied by the reading fee.

All work will be considered for publication for the Winter issue.

Entries will be screened blindly by Sonora Review staff. The top entries will be sent to Caroline Bergvall, whereupon she will choose the winning entry.

The winner will be notified by email in November.

Eligibility

Alumni from the University of Arizona who have graduated in the past three years are excluded from the contest. Participants in contact with Caroline Bergvall or former students of hers are also excluded.

1. For mailed submissions: Send complete manuscript with check and SASE to:Sonora Review Poetry Contest
   Department of English
   University of Arizona
   Tucson, AZ 85721

2. For online submissions:
Sonora Review is now accepts manuscripts through ManuscriptHub.com.

Create an account at ManuscriptHub and follow their instructions to submit your manuscript electronically.

The reading fee for the contest is: $14.00

Hello Everyone,

The orders for the latest Sonora Review issue, featuring an expansive in-addition-to-the-awesome-fiction/non-/poetry-lineup Wallace tribute section, including the uncollected Wallace story, Solomon Silverfish, essays and reflections from Sven Birkerts, Michael Sheehan interviewing Tom Bissell, Charles Bock, Marshall Boswell, Greg Carlisle, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Ken Kalfus, Glenn Kenny, Lee Martin, Michael Martone, Rick Moody interviewing Michael Pietsch, and art and prose from Karen Green, are still available and are being shipped. We’ve had a wonderful response, and while issues are still for sale they’re no longer available through paypal: just follow the check mailing instructions below and you should be able to get your hands on this truly remarkable issue, which also includes new work by Aimee Bender, fantastic short-short contest winners, and interviews with Marilynne Robinson, Junot Diaz, Ron Hansen and Ben Marcus. THEY ARE STILL AVAILABLE!!!!!

The issue’s DOUBLE FANTASTIC complete content (as if the tribute wasn’t enough), work that makes up our Sonora 55/56 pages, includes:

cover art by Matt Furie

&
fiction from Etgar Keret, Kellie Wells, John Holliday, Ryan Call, Jarod Rosello, Sharma Shields, Wendy Rawlings, Katherine Lien Chariott, Michael Conn and David Lombardino
&
non-fiction from Sean Lovelace, Elizabeth Bennett, Riley Hanick, Henry Ronan-Daniell, Jennifer Schaller and Luis Alberto Urrea
&
poetry from Eliot Khalil Wilson, Yi-Fen Chou, Peter Jay Shippy, Tamiko Beyer, Dan Pinkerton, Martin Moran, Ryo Yamaguchi, dawn lonsinger, Keith Montesano, Laynie Brown, Joshua Butts, Clinton Frakes, Cralan Kelder, G.C. Waldrep, Cynthia Arrieu-King, Tim Peterson and Gregory Lawless
&
reviews of James Wood, Marilynne Robinson, Eça de Queirós and David Ohle.

If you’d like to order the issue now you may send a check for 18$, payable to “Sonora Review,” with an accompanying note with your address, to
Sonora Review
55/56 Order
Department of English
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721

Any questions? You can hit us up at sonora@email.arizona.edu. We should be responding in a timely fashion; don’t get upset if it takes a few days! Thanks so much for the interest.

Sonora Review

Now that we’ve got some rock-solid (or paper-solid) copies of 54 in our hands, it’s time to continue the hype machine for 55/56. We’re not giving away the full lineup yet (I know, I sound like some Coachella or Lalapalooza promotional manager) but believe me when I say it’ll be the biggest Sonora issue you’ve seen in a long, long time. Not just physically, of course, but conceptually as well. In addition to a tribute section to David Foster Wallace, we’ll have some fantastic short stories, poems and essays to round out the double issue.

We’ve got the fabulous co-EIC Michael Sheehan to thank for the bulk of the tribute content, as he’s been working tirelessly to get in touch with important and insightful writers about the influence and scope of David Foster Wallace’s work. The table of contents, which is going to be both mind-bogglingly deep (you’ll have to see it to believe it) and respectfully emotional, has all the earmarks of an important and seminal issue of Sonora (not to be hyperbolic or anything.) I couldn’t be more thrilled with his tireless efforts to make this the best Sonora issue ever.

Brannon Larson

Editor-at-Large

Exciting/Amazing/Incredible News: Issue 54 is finally here! What’s in issue 54?! How about stories from Richard Katrovas, Pinckney Benedict, Gary Finke, Michael Martone and Jill Stukenberg; poetry by Boyer Rickel, Megan Gannon, Thomas Hawks and Sawako Nakayasu; interviews with Jim Shepard and Joshua Ferris; and the winners of our 2008 Short Short Fiction Contest!

It arrived today, in bulky boxes, and in a short while it should be rolling across the country to our subscribers. In the meantime, you can start a subscription by sending 14 bucks for one year (2 issues), 26 bucks for two years (4 issues), or just 8 bucks for this issue, to Sonora Review/ Subscriptions/ Department of English/ University of Arizona/ Tucson, AZ 85721. We know, you’re thinking, “What a drag, they can’t just take electronic subscriptions? Why no paypal account? Are they in the dark ages?” The truth is, we’re a student run lit mag–oldest in the country if we don’t say so ourselves–without many of the technological resources that most larger, well-funded lit mags have. We still, though, run a pretty damn good magazine if we say so ourselves, and this issue is a testament to the hard work and sweat of our former EICs, Amy Knight and PR Griffis, in addition to their section editors and fabulous readers.

Jose Caruci / AFP / Getty

It would be a shame not to acknowledge the proximity, and namesake likeness, between Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 and our magazine’s hometown of Tucson, Arizona. The novel, just published FSG, is set in the fictional Mexican town of Saint Teresa, in the state of Sonora (get it? Sonora Review?), which borders our humble little state. Throughout the novel, writers and professors are flying into Tucson before driving down to investigate either a boxing match, a slew of murders, or the mysterious life of a forgotten German author. Nogales, a border town ninety minutes from South Tucson, is a short drive from Saint Teresa, which is itself a city based on Juárez, Mexico, where hundreds of murders have taken place in the past decade. It’s impossible, when reading the book while sitting in Tucson, not to feel the actual heat and filth that Bolaño describes emanating from the Sonoran desert. The book condemns the entire world, while also revelling in its mystery, but living in the same desert he describes makes it hard not to feel extra-condemned. Which I’m okay with: Bolaño writes beautifully, and powerfully, and the frightening passages of his book–the frightening third of the book–genuinely terrifies me, a borderland desert dweller. For being a writer from Chile who later moved to Mexico, Bolaño certainly understood his surroundings, esp. the desert sunsets, which he describes as being impossible until they happen in front of you.

Not to be outdone by his fellow first-year Assistant Professor Ander Monson, whose Solipsism essay is in the latest Best New American Essays volume, Manuel Muñoz, our first-year Assistant Professor in fiction, was just awarded a Whiting Writers’ Award at a ceremony in New York City. The award, which carries a $50,000 (!) prize, has been given annually for the past 23 years to promising writers early in their careers. Manuel’s latest book, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, is a wonderful collection of some shattering short stories. We at Sonora Review are super thrilled about the award, which serves to prove just how outstanding our teachers are. He runs a pretty sweet workshop, too.

This semester has been exhausting for some of the Sonora staff, but we’re still reading submissions for the journal, trying to get our online submission system up and running. Also, we’re thinking about posting some mean online content, short stories and poems and even essays, in the coming months. We’ll keep everyone posted.

So, this is quite the exciting week: We’d like to congratulate Michelle Morano for her essay, entitled The Funmachine, which appeared in Sonora Review Issue 51. Why the congrats? Because it was listed as a Notable Essay in 2007 in the Best American Essays 2008, the same piece of readable foldable connected pages which contains Ander Monson’s essay, Solipsism.

A few experts from the essay:

“1976 is a little expendable income in families like ours, here in upstate New York and all over the country. Nearly every home has a television now, eight-track tapes have been replaced by cassettes, and music technology is the wave of the future. That’s what two deliverymen assure us as they carry the Baldwin FunMachine through our front door one Friday evening: ‘This here is the wave of the future.’

…

“1976 happens in C or D or E, F, G, A, B. Or if you’re angry or sad it’s a minor chord, holding the ominous sound until someone finally tells you to knock it off. Each chord seems like a miracle, like three notes in perfect harmony. As if dissonance really could become a thing of the past.”

Interested in learning more about the FunMachine? Watch this tutorial.

Do you live in the South Jersey area? Here’s your chance to own a FunMachine!

A number of items worth mentioning on this fabulously crisp day in the Sunny Old Pueblo:

Marilynne Robinson, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop professor and Pulitzer-prize winning author, has just been nominated for the National Book Award for her latest tale from the town of Gilead, Home. Marilynne sat down to speak with us, a few weeks ago, about a number of intriguing ideas. Previously we’d promised to post a couple pictures from the event, but seeing as our photographers (I’m looking at you, Josh and Mike) must have had the caffeine-induced shakes we didn’t want to put any of them up. Really, they’re not that great, although we’ve forgiven Mike and Josh by now.

Additionally, Ander Monson, the faculty advisor for Sonora Review and the newest member of the University of Arizona’s Creative Writing faculty, has an intriguingly strange and compelling essay in the latest installment of Houghton Mifflin’s Best New American Essays, available for purchase from your local bookstore (or Amazon).

The essay, entitled “Solipsism” and residing between pages 155 and 162, is an example of why we at Sonora find Ander so damn intriguing. Give it a read: you shan’t regret it.

Until soon,

Brannon Larson, Editor-at-Large

On Friday night, Marilynne Robinson read from her latest novel, “Home.” Needless to say, she was wonderful, composed, and thoughtful, and genuinely seemed to enjoy her time in the warm Old Pueblo.

On Saturday, she delivered a tremendously subtle and complex lecture on the poetry of Wallace Stevens, and how he, in conjunction with contemporaries like William James and Sigmund Freud (perhaps you’ve heard of them?!), were all concerned with similar metaphysical problems. She was witty and engaging, and so much smarter than most of us in the room (although I should only speak for myself, there were times when her mind blazed ahead) that by the end, I was exhausted. In a transcendent way, of course. She then was kind enough to sit down and speak with a few of us, about liberal theology and the Middle West and the modern political state (hint: she’s a member of the Obama congregation) and the role of art in an ever-expanding universe and the redemptive quality of aesthetics. Needless to say, we recorded it, seeing as none of us could type that quickly.

We should have some pictures, from the interview, on the site later this week. Also, perhaps, an excerpt or two from the illuminating discussion, which will run in its entirety in the next issue of Sonora.

Until then, I’m hoping my mind absorbs at least 10% of Marilynne Robinson’s wonderful ideas. I’ll be a better person because of it.

Brannon Clark Larson

Marilynne Robinson will be reading from her newest novel, Home, tonight (Friday 9/19 @ 8:00pm) and presenting a lecture on Wallace Stevens tomorrow (Saturday 9/20 @ 1:00pm) at the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center. Info: http://poetrycenter.arizona.edu/events/fallreadings_08.shtml

Sonora Review Issue 55 will contain both a review of Home and the text of a conversation-style interview with Robinson, to be conducted by Editor-at-Large Brannon Larson following the lecture. The interview is open to the public and all are welcome.

“That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.”

From Home © Marilynne Robinson