Everyone – I know people are struggling everywhere due to the economy, but if you have a small amount of cash to donate towards worthy causes which support the mission and goals of Synchronized Chaos Magazine, please consider the Valentino Achak Deng foundation, born of a literary collaboration among United States author Dave Eggers and talented Sudanese storyteller and activist Valentino Achak Deng. A few years ago, the pair co-wrote What is the What, a novel loosely inspired by Deng’s early life in Sudan, his surviving the region’s civil war, eventually moving to the United States as a refugee, and then returning to the region to help build a school to educate and empower survivors.

The school’s in its second academic year, and provides a science laboratory, literacy training, safe, clean dormitories for all students, including women and girls, who may be orphaned or homeless due to the civil war. Construction’s begun this year on a new women’s dorm which will fit another 100 students – who are encouraged to attend as much as possible even if they are married with young children (people in rural Sudan can get married in their early teens and become parents with only elementary school educations.)

There’s a moving essay about the collaboration between Deng and Eggers on the novel…what struck me the most was first of all, how open Eggers was to actually listening to Deng and telling the story his partner wanted to share. Deng critiques the imperfections within both Sudanese and American societies, and relates his struggles as an immigrant in a vastly different culture in an age where Westerners are suspicious of outsiders and where employment opportunities are limited and often dependent on one’s pre-existing professional network. And Eggers invested several years in the project, and was willing to go in new directions as befit the unfolding story.

Also, how the school project brings tangible results when there are so many news stories about Darfur, Sudan, civil war, international awareness and pressure, etc which provide many depressing statistics but little information on how to actually solve the problems. Here’s someone from the region who knows what’s going on and is actually practically helping the Sudanese in a long-term, sustainable way.

Here’s the school project’s main website: http://valentinoachakdeng.org/ and the link to Dave Eggers’ story about the authors’ collaboration: http://valentinoachakdeng.org/essay.php

This type of international, mutual mentorship and collaboration, and the long-term promotion of education and literacy, goes right along with what Synchronized Chaos Magazine seeks to promote through providing a forum to curate and discuss ideas and works of art of all types.

Also, along the same lines in Uganda, also wracked by another nasty civil war over economic resources, an international team of Ugandans, Canadians, and people from everywhere else are working together to build a youth center, with space for art, drama, writing, fun, and education. Teens in the area say they have nowhere to go while waiting for businesses to reopen and hire them, and for schools and farms to get started again once the region becomes more stable.

The Paramount Chief of the Ugandan Acholi Tribe donated land for the youth center and people are raising funds to get it off the ground. More information on the project, and links to donate, here: http://www.guluwalk.com/build/

We’d rather see you make donations to either of these groups than to Synchronized Chaos Magazine itself, although if anyone has an extra Amazon.com gift certificate they aren’t using, we’d be glad to purchase some books on the craft of writing or on marketing and send them out to our low-income contributors who couldn’t otherwise invest in their craft.

http://www.cooperdi llon.com/ submissions. html
http://cooperdillon .submishmash. com/submit

Submission Guidelines

The reading period is now open.
Between April and August, we welcome submission of chapbook and full-length poetry manuscripts:
As a new independent literary press devoted exclusively to poetry we’re excited to consider all types of poems. Cooper Dilon Books intends to select two full-length manuscripts and two chapbooks per year. Please adhere to the following guidelines:

Be sure your name and contact information is on the cover page of the document.
Submissions are taken via our online submission system, Submishmash, saving paper, ink, postage, etc. PDF or Word files are perferred. If you’re sending the work to other places for consideration, and it’s taken, you can withdraw it through the system–and please do that quickly.
Please have any cover letter or bio associated with the submission in the space provided.
All manuscripts should have a table of contents, page numbers, and acknowledgments.
There is a $10 or buy-a-book reading fee. Please order a book from the store, or click on the button below to pay a reading fee.* After you’ve done one of those things, please include the order number with your cover letter/bio in the online submission system.

To order a book, visit the Cooper Dillon Bookstore.
To pay a reading fee, click here:
Click here to submit to Cooper Dillon Books through Submishmash.
Any questions about the reading period or submission process can be emailed to us at
<submit(at)cooperdi llon.com> (replace (at) with @).
*At least $1 of every reading fee will be donated to a local charity in San Diego.
All manuscripts will be considered carefully and replied to in a reasonable amount of time. If it’s been more than two months, feel free to send an email. Please note that we are only interested in manuscripts of poetry. Manuscripts of fiction, nonfiction, essay, biography, etc. will not be replied to.

Visual Art Submission Guidelines
We believe in the poetry we present, and feel the art associated with our books should reflect the same quality and intention. If you are a visual artist (traditional or photographer – no digital paintings or collage, please) and would like to have your work considered by Cooper Dillon for use in the cover art of a future publication, please put a letter of introduction into the body of an email, as well as a link to where we can view your work. In the subject line of the email, please format like so: “[medium] by [your name].” Please take the time to familiarize yourself with our press and our books before doing so.
Send these emails to <ArtDirector( at)cooperdillion .com> (replace (at) with @).

Magnapoets, a bi-annual 8.5″ x 11″ print journal featuring poetry, short stories, interviews, and essays, is seeking submissions from May 1-31, 2010 for its July 2010 issue.

We are currently seeking free verse and formal poetry. Send no more than three poems ( 48 lines or less each) to our poetry editor, Ursula Gibson, at <UrsulaTG1(at) aol.com> (replace AT with @). Due to the large volume of submissions, only poets whose work is accepted will be notified by June 15, 2010. Full guidelines found here:

http://www.magnapoe ts.com/magnapoet s/submissions- guidelines. html

Payment: One contributor’s copy per poet.

www.magnapoets. com
Magnapoets: taking over the world one poem at a time

Location: Hunter College 695 Park Avenue, Faculty Lounge 8th Floor West Building, NYC, United States, 10021

Time: This Saturday May 1st from 11am to 1pm

Synchronized Chaos Magazine wishes you a wonderful Cinco de Mayo, May Day, Mother’s Day, Pentecost, Green Day, and whatever other occasions you may celebrate. Our theme is New Treasures from an Old Chest, as our contributors mine old forms of expression for new and different insights.

Russian artist Ruben Monakhov creates still life paintings, in the long tradition of Van Gogh and Vermeer and other European masters. Yet, he isolates and examines the element of perspective through its absence, illustrating how much a sense of depth and proportion helps make life understandable.

Monakhov’s artistic concept functions as a decent metaphor for life, as Patsy Ledbetter shows through her reflection, “Easter Lilies.” Life contains both thorns and flowers, frustration and beauty, and we may persevere through the hard times through keeping them in perspective, holding to our faith in something more redemptive and ultimately beautiful.

Cecilia Woloch also acknowledges both the sorrow of loss and the joy of intimacy through her poetry collection, Carpathia. She admonishes us to fill our lives with experience and awareness so that we are always late somewhere, always on the go to somewhere interesting. And everything can become an occasion for observation, a place to learn and find beauty, whether it’s an ecstatic evening with a lover, bridge over the Seine River, a photograph of former Soviet poverty, the last visions of her dying father, or an old truck near her Kentucky childhood home.

Sarah Abbett, like Cecilia Woloch, reveals psychological truth imperceptibly through describing a specific experience and location. In Abbett’s work, the speaker encounters rushing water, first touching it, then finally taking a small sip. Only a small hint at the end expresses how the water represents new spiritual life, and she trusts that we can grasp bits of psychological insight by looking at how our bodies and minds respond to common physical experiences.

Dave Douglas’ work, although more consciously abstract, still grounds itself in a steady rhythm of concrete images. His “Impossible Poem” celebrates the power of the imagination and expresses openness to the possibilities of an unknown future. Plenty of other poets – Lewis Carroll and John Keats, for example – use clever language to provide a fanciful look at the unknown, but Douglas’ work is uniquely concise and presents the choice between hope and fear.

Romanian collage artist Teseleanu George also plays with the concept of facing an uncertain future. He acknowledges the Dadaist movement as an influence, when leading artists consciously chose after the destruction of two world wars to throw aside traditional ideas of beauty and proportion and give meaning to random and commonplace objects. He creates surrealist art by looking within, observing his dreams and taking notes, rendering dreams and works of the imagination as objects for thought and study in themselves. Where he lives, collage is a lesser-known, experimental form of art, fitting for psychological experimentation – and using collage allows him to identify with older movements in art history, but in his own personal way.

Floyd Logan, poet and author of the small-town Americana meditation “Masonville,” also works within a large and long tradition of pastoral writing describing small villages, ordinary people, and the countryside. In recent years many people have looked to explore and uncover possible, hidden and darker sides of suburban and small-town life, so currently a simple reflection on hardworking families caring for each other stands out as a unique counterpoint. Logan’s work looks at what we do to psychologically protect and comfort ourselves in light of unpredictable natural and external forces – and it is poignant to read this with the understanding that many of the people within the manufacturing towns he describes and celebrates are now out of work due to the economy.

And, finally, California poet Carolyn Havenhill honors both personal and cultural past and present through her memorial tributes to her mother and to the United States’ Native heritage. Her rhythmical, rhetorical style allows her to communicate with the audience by addressing them directly, and through her mentions of past and present losses, she poses questions about what we accept and reject in life, what we choose to keep and throw away. Havenhill will not leave the gift of this existence unopened, and through her writing and educational pursuits will reclaim both her own dignity and that of the murdered Native population she honors.

Thank you very much for taking part in May’s issue of Synchronized Chaos Magazine! We hope and trust this issue will inspire you to look within your own artistic and cultural traditions, or whichever traditions resonate with you, to rediscover and reinterpret the heritage and techniques to discover new forms of meaning and beauty.

In October 2010, Iron Horse Literary Review will publish a Facebook Issue. We’re looking for stories, poems, and essays that parody or make use of Facebook paraphernalia—the quizzes (i.e., What Famous Novel Are You? or Have You Done It?), 25 Random Things lists, status updates, profile pictures, any and all things FB. You can write about your FB experiences, as well, but we’ll be wary of those experiences that seem stereotypical or are represented in a stale fashion.

Surprise us! Be creative! Show off your artistry! Your stories must tell a story, your essays must flesh out an idea fully, your poems must be poems—so write for us some beautiful literary masterpieces. The cover will be a collage of profile pics.

Submission Deadline: June 1, 2010, 5:00 p.m.

And we do pay our contributors: $40 for poems and short-shorts; $100 for prose pieces.

We’ll also be putting together an AWP panel called In Your Face. So please submit early if you want to be considered for that panel.

Send mss to:
Iron Horse Literary Review, The Facebook Issue, English Department, Texas Tech University, Mail Stop 43091, Lubbock, TX 79409-3091

Sincerely,

Jill Patterson, Editor

Through her poetry collection Carpathia, Cecilia Woloch becomes that rare author who can leave home without rejecting it, then return without losing what she has learned.

Many of her poems take the form of prose postcards from various European capitals, reflecting her personal travel schedule and conveying intimacy among her characters and with readers. Then, interspersed among the cityscapes and photographs are impressions from her personal life: Kentucky childhood memories and last glimpses of her sick, elderly father.

Woloch writes of her hometown with the same poetic emotion she uses for faraway countries and moments of historical poignancy. Her gently humorous reflection ‘Why I Believed … That People Had Sex in Bathrooms” describes her parents’ happy and fruitful marriage with the tenderness and unique language of her young, romantic couples. And her memories of adolescence and young adulthood in rural Kentucky leave us with the taste of sweet wine and the fading glimpse of fireflies.

The phrasing and rhythm of all of her pieces, such as ‘let us with wind on the tips of our tongues live those beginnings again and again,’ from “Postcard to Sarah” and ‘burn my beauty onto the very eye of love,” from “Girl in a Truck” gains its strength through its whispered delicacy. We read lines which first sound sweet, nostalgic, romantic – then find ourselves stopping to read them again to take in the full force of what Woloch communicates.

Carpathia experiments with form along with the free verse, including a pantoum concerning a love triangle, “Le Jardin d’ Isabelle.” We scarcely notice the constraints on word choice and rhythm, as the prescribed repetition seems to come naturally from the author’s focus on a particular time and place. Yet even the selections without a specifically named poetic form contain internal rhythm and structure, accented by italicized thoughts and words and dashes.

In Carpathia, the lines blur among childhood and adulthood, romance and domestic life, early comforts and exotic locales. Home never seems a prosaic country town Woloch throws aside for adventures elsewhere, and her faraway travels do not leave her tired and longing for the past. Every place becomes an occasion to savor, a set of moments and emotions to jot down on a postcard for future reference.

Accessible to most adult readers, Carpathia would be an excellent carry-on for a trip through Europe, or just for reading at home, and will keep readers engrossed longer than the short 75 pages suggest.

Carpathia is available through BOA Editions Ltd., Rochester, New York – and you may find Cecilia Woloch on Facebook and ask for more information.