WELCOME to the October issue of Connotation Press: An Online Artifact. For those that have been here before you’ll notice some changes. First, we have new categories coming up: Music, Book Reviews, and Craft! Second, we have begun posting the Featured artists on the first of the month, and the Poetry/Fiction/Creative Nonfiction artist categories on the 15th. We’ve been blessed with even more editorial staff to handle some of the new categories we’re dealing with, and we gratefully welcome Joshua Fardon our new Drama editor, and Josh Hardina our new Book Review editor. This month, we’ve made a few changes and added some new columns, but the purple remains the same. We love purple, we don’t know why. But I digress; we are thrilled to announce the addition of Joshua Fardon to the Connotation Press staff. Josh will edit our Drama column and has immediately broken his own rule about “no musicals” and brought in a great play by Bill Robens, A Mulholland Christmas Carol. Why, you ask, are we doing a Christmas play in October? Josh has his reasons, and just who are you to go bossing Josh around and telling him when he can publish a damn Christmas musical, anyway?! Ho Ho Ho! And don’t miss the interview, too. Great job, Josh!
John Hoppenthaler curates our Poetry guest editor column and this month Nickole Brown is our guest. Nickole has brought together a wonderfully eclectic collection of brilliant artists including Oliver de la Paz, Ilya Kaminski, Ralph Angel, Doug Van Gundy, Patricia Smith, Eleanor Lerman, Ellen Bass, Jason Schneiderman, Ellen Hagan, Jake Adam York, Christian Flores, Nance VanWinckel, Alex Lemon, Philip Jenks and Simone Muench. Thank you so much Nickole!
A Poetry Congeries, with John Hoppenthaler débuts this month in its new slot with another stellar line up starting with an interview and new poems by Kathy Fagan. Additionally, John has brought us the work of Honoree Fanonne Jefers, Margot Schilipp, Peter Makuck, Rita Mae Reese, John Gallaher, Carol Peters, Gerald McCarthy, Jeffrey Thomson, Harriet Levin, and the poems of Salgado Maranhao translated by Alexis Levitin. Once again, John sets the bar!
We made an editorial decision this month and decided to flip the Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction columns on the 15th from here on out. We’ve decided this for a number of reasons, but the most important one is we can spend more time focusing on those great artists and keep them from getting overshadowed by the featured artist we’ve been so fortunate to publish. We hope you’ll come back all month to check out the site as new art and artists spring up.
And come back throughout the month to see the artists in our new column selections. This month, in the Music column, you’ll find videos from Brian Porterfield and the Love-Me-Knots, a truly authentic musician from Morgantown, West Virginia, and Garrett Anderson, an emerging talent from Baltimore, Maryland that gives us hope young people still have an idea of what to do with a guitar and a voice. Our Craft column will provide essays discussing the various components of what makes art effect us in the many ways it does, and this month we’ve got an amazing piece on the use of hostage characters in screenplay by Robin Russin. Finally, our Book Review column will do exactly as the title suggests. It’s headed by the newest member of our editorial staff here at Connotation Press, Josh Hardina. Welcome, Josh!
We hope you’ll enjoy our offering this month and consider submitting your work. With all the categories of artistic expression we’re adding, there is no longer an excuse!
Connotation Press: There Is A Crack, A Crack in Everything. That’s How the Light Gets In
This issue of Connotation Press is dedicated to Ken’s grandfather, Joseph Machado Borges. “Pops” was a hard working foreman of the dairy at the California Institution for Men in Chino, California. The son of Azorean Portuguese immigrants, he was a fair and honest man and the inmates at the prison loved him as did everyone that knew him. Pops was crazy for bowling, playing poker, westerns, and his family, and we understand what it means to be a man because of him.Photo: Editor-in-Chief with Joe Reeves, his far more attractive and available brother.