The Spring 2012 issue of Santa Monica Review is available now.

SMC’s national literary arts journal, published twice yearly, showcases the works of established authors alongside emerging writers. Founded by novelist and SMC English instructor Jim Krusoe (Blood Lake, Toward You), the Review has presented readers experimental, thoughtful, and funny works of fiction and nonfiction—including essays and short stories by Gary Amdahl, Michelle Latiolais, and Diane Lefer—during more than 20 years of publication, and is considered a leading West Coast journal. Recent work has been selected for the annual Best American Short Stories and PEN/O.Henry anthologies.

The Spring 2012 issue, edited by Andrew Tonkovich, features work by new and previous contributors, including novelists Tara Ison (A Child Out of Alcatraz), Rhoda Huffey (The Hallelujah Side) and Ben Ehrenreich (Ether), short story writers Dwight Yates (Bring Everybody) and Roberto Ontiveros, a frequent contributor. SMC Creative Writing workshop alumnus Cynthia Prochaska contributes a comic story about a writing teacher who destroys books, and JJ Strong destroys Los Angeles in an earthquake. Michael Guista (Brain Work) offers a heartbreaking family story and California poet/essayist Christopher Buckley (Cruising State) escapes drudgery and difficult people who are making him ill. First-time contributor Michelle Chihara constructs a television show “pitch” which undermines reality and encourages imagination. Frequent contributor Jonathan Cohen constructs a sharp memoir about music and history, and funny, fabulist short story phenom Linda Purdy delivers, again, with stories about UFOs and mind-reading airline passengers. No kidding.

Editor Tonkovich notes a mix of traditional and avant-garde writing in this issue, and points to the magazine as a venue for all genres. “As long as the work is smart and engaging, I think readers are willing to go along for the ride, whether it’s a cutting edge experiment or a traditionally told story. At least a couple of these pieces suggest bigger tales, perhaps eventually to appear as novels somewhere.”

Spring 2012 cover art is by legendary LA punk artist Mark Vallen. The fall issue appears in September.

Complete contents of the Spring 2012 issue:

Michelle Chihara – Female Lead or A Pitch for a Character-Driven One-Hour Procedural Television Show
JJ Strong – The Earth Moved
Tara Ison – Fish
Michael Guista – Are You Okay?
Roberto Ontiveros – Curfew
T. Duncan Anderson – Shelter
Benjamin T. Miller – A Fishing Story
Cynthia Adam Prochaska – Tenure
Katya Apekina – My Smell Journal: [orange peels, ink, coffee filters]
Dwight Yates – The Pig in Question
Ben Ehrenreich – 121 Stars
Rhoda Huffey – Rima
Christopher Buckley – Magneto
Ben Slotky – Something Is Doing This
Jonathan Cohen – My Passion
Jenny Shank – Casa del Rey
Linda Purdy – Así es La Vida and The UFO That Stayed

Contributors:

T. Duncan Anderson lives in Santa Monica, California with his wife and a Siamese cat. His stories have appeared in Anthology, Fiction, Xconnect, Zyzzyva. This is his second story published in SMR. He served four years in the Navy before studying creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Katya Apekina is a third-year Fiction Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. Her poetry translations have appeared in Night Wraps the Sky: Writings By and About Mayakovsky (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), and she co-wrote the screenplay for New Orleans, Mon Amour (2008), which starred Elisabeth Moss and Christopher Eccleston. She has stories coming out this spring in the Iowa Review and in Word Riot’s ten-year anniversary anthology.

Christopher Buckley’s newest book is White Shirt. His seventeenth book of poetry, Rolling the Bones, won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry and was published by The University of Tampa Press in 2010. Recent books are Modern History: Prose Poems 1987-2007 and Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems & Poetics from California, edited with Gary Young. With Christopher Howell, he edited Aspects of Robinson: Homage to Weldon Kees. His second book of creative nonfiction, Sleep Walk, was published by Eastern Washington University Press in 2006. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry, has received two NEA grants and a Fulbright Award in Creative Writing, and was awarded the James Dickey Prize for 2008 from Five Points magazine.

Michelle Chihara is a graduate of the MFA program in Fiction at the University of California, Irvine. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Green Mountains Review, Orange Coast Review, Mother Jones and n+1, among others. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter, where she’s getting a PhD and likes to write about mortgage-backed securities and ice. She occasionally comes into glancing contact with “the Industry.” You can find her online at www.thisblueangel.com

Jonathan Cohen has been a frequent contributor to SMR. In 2005, his story “The Infinite Conversation,” which appeared in these pages, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. In addition to editing book manuscripts, he tutors underrepresented students, learning disabled students, and English language learners in remedial writing at Irvine Valley College.

Ben Ehrenreich is the author of two novels, Ether and The Suitors. He lives in Los Angeles.

Michael Guista’s collection of stories, Brain Work, was published by Houghton/Mariner in 2005. “Are You Okay?” is from his new collection, Manhood.

Rhoda Huffey’s novel The Hallelujah Side was a Barnes and Noble Discover Book. She has published fiction in Ploughshares, Tin House and Green Mountains Review, as well as SMR. She is a tap dancer and lives in Venice Beach, California.

Tara Ison is the author of two novels, A Child out of Alcatraz and The List, and a forthcoming short story collection. She is Assistant Professor of Fiction in the creative writing program at Arizona State University.

Benjamin T. Miller is a graduate of the MFA program in Fiction at the University of California, Irvine. He was a 2010 Peter Taylor Fellow at the Kenyon Writer’s Workshop, and his fiction is forthcoming in ZYZZYVA. He lives in Los Angeles, where he has recently completed his first novel and is working on the next one.

Roberto Ontiveros, a frequent contributor to SMR, has published fiction in the Threepenny Review and the anthology Hecho en Tejas. A contributing editor to Latino Magazine, he is a book, film, music, and art critic with about a hundred essays and reviews in places such as the Dallas Morning News, San Francisco Chronicle, and New Jersey Star-Ledger. He is married to the poet Ash Smith, and he is proud father to a one-year-old boy named Maximo Spinoza.

Cynthia Adam Prochaska teaches writing at Mount San Antonio College, where she has tenure. Fortunately, no books were burned in the process. Her work has appeared in the florida review and previously in SMR. Recently, her stories were featured by the New Short Fiction series in Los Angeles.

Linda Purdy has published several short stories and poems and photographs. Her short essay on UFO’s and her UFO photograph will appear in Photography Changes Everything, published jointly by the Smithsonian and the Aperture Foundation.

Jenny Shank’s first novel, The Ringer, was a finalist for the 2011 Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association’s “Reading the West” Award. Her writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Onion, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Poets & Writers Magazine, and Bust.

Ben Slotky is the co-creator of the hit TV shows Kids Say the Darndest Things About White Zombie and So You Think You Can Geode Hunt. He is a frequent and good-looking contributor to SMR. His first collection, Red Hot Dogs, White Gravy, was published by Chiasmus Press in 2010. His second collection, An Evening of Romantic Lovemaking, is really close to being finished.

JJ Strong is a writer of fiction and plays. His short fiction debuted in SMR in Fall 2010 and has also appeared in Raleigh Quarterly and Ramble Underground. In 2012, his short play “The Love of Make-Believe” was performed at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts and the La Jolla Playhouse.

Mark Vallen (“Pat Bag,” Linoleum print.) In early 1979 renowned Los Angeles artist Vallen carved a linoleum block portrait of Pat Bag, the enchantingly sinister-looking bass player for The Bags, one of the first and most notorious late ’70s punk rock bands in Los Angeles. At their earliest performances band members wore bags over their heads, and each was assured anonymity by taking “Bag” as a last name. It was in ’79 that the band posed for Vallen. Soon after, Pat left the group and began performing under her own name, Patricia Morrison. Vallen’s work has been featured on covers of many issues of this magazine. You can view more of Mark Vallen’s prints and paintings at: www.markvallen.com.

Dwight Yates is the author of two collections of stories, Bring Everybody and Haywire Hearts and Slide Trombones.  He lives in Redlands, California, where he and his dog air their differences regarding garden management. A previous story appears in SMR Spring 2011.

Ab Intra

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