Thanks!

Thanks for the new followers! Soon we’ll have a solid website AND the second issue. Please keep an eye on us and like us on Facebook [ginger piglet (press)] to preorder the issue!

A Change.

Hello all.

We are currently building a real website. This will probably take a long time. Thank you for your patience. We hope to be much cooler when it’s finished.

Have a great day.
Libby
Editor in Chief.

Reading Over

Dearest of Dears,

You may continue to submit work, however, we have chosen our pieces for the winter issue of Ginger Piglet Magazine and will not be reading submissions again until January. So, please, no passive-aggressive whining about how long it’s taking for us to get back. We love our magazine, but we don’t get paid for this.

Also, I had Cream of Wheat for breakfast.

Love,
Libby.
Your Editor in Chief.

The next issue and a move.

Look at these pigs!

Things move slowly when you’re still learning, you move 1,000 miles (give or take) and you still don’t have internet at home because you’re a little worried you won’t make your first month’s rent before financial aid comes through (so worried, you’ve stopped checking your bank account and refuse to eat anywhere but home except for that tea and cookie you just bought to get internet at the sweetest cafe ever. Case in point: Crimson and Clover is the song of the minute here and I feel like I’m sitting on my sofa, just with other quiet people around me).

Anyway, Mr. Wyon and I have finished reading submissions for this issue and are about to make final decisions. I updated the ‘The Magazine’ page with an image of the magazine and a couple of teasers from the issue to entice you. I chose Mr. Wyon’s piece, which is brilliant, and why I chose him to assistant edit this issue. That, and he’s much smarter than I am. I also posted my piece from the issue. I won’t be including much of my own work in future issues, but I wanted to take the opportunity to give you a glimpse of what I’m about.

Two or three reviews of Conversations over Coffee will be floating about the net in the near future. We will, of course, link to them when they arrive and probably go red – either with embarrassed modesty or with frustration and anger, but I’ve always thought, any publicity is good publicity, so we will covet them and the fine folks who offered to write them.

In the mean time I start classes next week with a fun bunch of people and I hope I can manage to stay away from the bars enough to get quality work done the next two years. I have a feeling it’s going to be hard. I will keep you posted.

Sincerely yours,
Libby Walkup
Editor-in-Chief

On the Wednesday.

Interview with Richard Vaudrin

It is Wednesday. The reason I know it is Wednesday is because it’s the Wednesday before I leave on the Friday. On Friday I pack a uHaul with all my worldly possessions and uproot my life (and the life of this magazine) for the second time in my worldly existence.

I have just come from an interview. Richard Vaudrin has started, or is part of, a videographers co-op, non profit thing at The Red Raven Espresso Parlor in Fargo and he wants to bring recognition to Fargo’s scenes on a broader scale. He says so much goes on here, but no one knows about it. I agree, but I’ll be honest, I’m more interested in bringing recognition to Ginger Piglet on a broader scale. No matter. We can still help each other out. I think it is a good thing he is doing and he’s offering to do this for free.

I name drop like crazy. Mensah Demary (Though I probably pronounce his name wrong) down below and the co-editor for this issue, Simon Wyon, and Jon Offutt, the only glass blower in North Dakota who I interviewed for an article in June for ArtsPulse, and Suzie Cook, my awesome graphic designer. But – I fail to mention my editors from last issue, Lorenzo Serna and Samantha Kinlin, I forget to mention that I’m certain Suzie did more work than myself on the first issue. Regretfully I refer to Eric Meyer as ‘dude’ when talking about the lit ‘zine he published a few years back, even though he’d just walked down the stairs over my head and we were sitting in the courtyard of a building he part owns. I did it mostly because I couldn’t remember if it was ‘Meyer’ or ‘Meyers’, and I made an executive decision to err in the way of calling him ‘dude’ rather than screw his name up when name dropping. I’m certain I made the wrong choice. He’s a good guy. He put a lot of effort into that ‘zine (Love Child) and into the coffee shop and into the used books he buys and sells there.

This may be the one last thing I do connecting me to Fargo, aside from future publications that will torture the place in all the coldness I saw it as a young person. But maybe I’ll lighten up. It’s not a bad town.

I bring a roll of toilet paper to the interview. It won’t be on the film. I bring it because I have a head cold on the Wednesday before I leave on the Friday. The congestion is making my tummy queasy, but maybe that’s nerves?

After the interview where I forget to say a whole bunch of things and probably speak too openly about submissions I’d received, but did not want, I have to turn around because I’ve decided that on the Wednesday before I leave on the Friday I should have lunch at a place I really like, and I really like Broadway Classic Subs, but it is in the opposite direction of where I am going. I’ve passed it already. I like the Spicy Classic. It’s all sorts of amazing spicy Italianess, and it’s by far my favorite sandwich in town. It is also by far the fattest sandwich in town. I’m certain I gain ten pounds every time I eat one, but I never care, because it’s worth it, and my only regret is that I don’t eat it slower as to savor it’s flavors longer, but I never can. Something about eating with my hands makes me hurry.

I am thinking that I should be thinking about what a momentous moment this is, on this Wednesday. I mean, sure, I’ll be back for visits, and I may even move back here someday, but this is the Wednesday before I leave on the Friday and I am eating my favorite sandwich and there’s an excitement and a sadness in it.

Then a piece of meat gets stuck in my tooth. A piece of meat gets stuck in my tooth on the bottom left side (my left, not yours) and it’s a big piece. A piece I can play with and tug at with my tongue, but it’s deep in there and this does not help remove it, and between each bite of my amazing sandwich that is disappearing much too fast, I play with this piece of meat, and that. is. all. I can think about. In the car on the way home, I play with this piece of meat, so much so that I have to turn around again because I pass my cousin’s hair salon where I mean to pick up shampoo and conditioner. I play with it the whole time she’s helping me choose the right product. While she’s ringing me up. While she’s saying her goodbyes and we talk about my mother and how nothing seems to bother her (she doesn’t know my mother the way I know my mother, but then, people don’t know me the way my mother knows me, and it’s not because she used to change my diapers, or maybe it is). I play with this piece of meat while she’s hugging me farewell. And I should feel – something. But I’ve already felt all of my somethings and now I am in work mode, last minute interviews because we are last minute people, packing, laundry, lunch – and this piece of meat in my teeth.

It finally comes out with a toothpick while writing this. I rush in and nearly decide to forget it or I will forget all this, I do decide not to pee, that it can wait, but I try floss first not in front of the mirror because grandma is trying to talk to me, and then in front of the mirror, but it just sort of moves it around, and then I give up. Lose hope. I figure it will become a permanent part of my gum line. I sit down with my computer and beginning to type, I ask Grandma if she has a toothpick and she does, and that doesn’t work right away, but I leave it in my mouth like my Tato (that’s what I call my grandpa, my grandpa on my mom’s side, not my dad’s, but it’s my grandma on my dad’s side that’s given me the toothpick) and I use my lips to finally get this piece of meat out of my tooth. I think it is a pepperoni slice.

So – on the Wednesday before I leave on the Friday, I write this and swallow a little, giant piece of meat that recently refused to remove itself from in between my tooth with floss and a toothpick sitting next to me on the sofa. Now it is time for a nap.

eve

by mensah demary

this is what we call live blogging except i type in a word document and this, most likely, will be blogged at a later date. live blogging is relative, of course, so right now, it is 11:46 AM on Sunday July 31, 2011–aka 1 day, 0 hours and 14 minutes away from the launch of Specter Literary Magazine, my first foray into the wonderful world of literary magazining.

the day before a magazine’s launch is, in some ways, like any other day–Sundays in particular–as i goof off on Twitter and Facebook, hold a conversation with my wife and co-founder of SLM, watch my dog watch me in boredom, all the while typing away in an attempt to convince you i’m not nervous.

why should i be nervous?

SLM will go live tomorrow and the work will be read–and judged. it stands to reason the writers, not i, will be served up for critique.

i wish this were so.

my literary taste will be front and center tomorrow. it is, for the last day, a private part of my life, something i hold dear and share only with friends and like-minds (but never family). if i enjoy your company, your conversation, i’ll reveal my love for Watchmen, for Nabokov and Morrison (Toni), my disdain for those Girl Who Kicked The Homeless Man books everybody loves to tout.

inquiring minds and keen eyes will see through the fiction and nonfiction i selected for our Issue Zero; they will know quite intimately what i love to read and what i love to avoid. indeed, SLM is not about me, but i’m nervous nonetheless. the writers chosen may be judged individually for their works, but i will be judged as an editor–i will be judged for the magazine’s sum.

i can handle disagreements on the type of work i like to read; literature, like music and movies, is a veritable seedy basement underneath a cozy office building where, at midnight, combatants pound each other into a blood-splashed wonder. my kind of fun, i suppose.

but can i handle someone outright dismissing the magazine? what will be my response? will i respond at all? and–worst case scenario, here–what if no one reads the magazine?

what if the publication is so mundane, so dry and lifeless, not only does it fail to conjure praise, but fails to dredge up even one internet troll? negative feedback in Internetland is not the worst thing to happen; total, deafening silence, on the other hand…

no, i can’t go there. i can’t think about that. not today, not on launch eve.

Athena and i, married to each other and to Specter, are idealists. if you think about it, it takes an idealist to start a literary magazine, whether it’s online, in print or both. there’s a new lit mag born every day; conversely, an old lit mag limps to its death as it announces the end of its run.

literary magazines, then, are far from immune to the ebb and flow of life itself: the coming and going; the rise and fall; the birth and death. idealism doesn’t ignore or dismiss reality, but it proceeds in spite of the truth: that the best laid plans can, and will, fall apart sometime, sooner or later.

everything loses its breath

…lit mags, too…

but on launch eve, i think about the breath we’ve blown into Specter’s body. it is a day away from existence, from life. and like giving birth to a child, there are wishes and hopes and dreams, but reality is a crapshoot–and its outcome can be dire, tragic–but you put your best foot forward, pardon the cliche, and proceed. consider this my small piece of advice to those who want to start a literary magazine. god knows why you have the desire–but the desire exists. go chase it. worry about the fallout later.

such is life.
_

mensah demary, whose fiction & nonfiction has appeared in Up The Staircase, Monkeybicycle, Hippocampus Magazine, and is forthcoming in PANK Magazine, 4’33? and Used Furniture Review, is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Specter Literary Magazine. He is also a regular contributor for PANK Magazine’s blog.

Finally Published

The first issue of Ginger Piglet, Conversations over Coffee, is now available for purchase in print or digital media!

If features poetry from Tiegan Kosiak who writes and does photography over at The Outside Girls, flash from Simon Wyon (give him a banjo, I dare you) and photography from Doreen Joy Barber, an international barista and ocean hopper.

Take a peek. Let us know what you think!

Paper Darts on Book Purgatory

Great guest post at Paper Darts on the collection of books we will never read. You know you have them, probably shelves of them, books you’ll never even break the binding.

Ginger Piglet Press

Welcome to Ginger Piglet Press. We are currently working on publishing Ginger Piglet, a little litzine, caked with mud, all four hooves in the trough, curling its tail, and nudging its brothers and sisters for the best lookin’ brown pellets. The first issue is just, almost, nearly finished. So close I can taste it; it’s the taste of terror and elation; sort of like love.

We love short things with distinct voices, but plan on sticking around for some time; flash fiction, prose poetry, and maybe, someday, novellas and collections. We like innovative literary efforts, but mostly we like stories that are told uniquely well. We like things that are true and untrue, just so long as they make vivid images and have a pace we can feel. Simply put, we like good stuff.

We hope to expand our efforts over time into chapbooks and collections. We embrace both print and literary technology; we want people to keep reading, and to be fair, ebooks do cut back on the massive loss of trees. We’re pretty sure that if everyone in the world were to go out and plant two trees tomorrow the ozone would start to right itself, but we’re not scientists, we’re writers and editors, we’re just speculating.

We like you; come back and visit again.

Love,
Libby Walkup
Managing Editor and Founder