escarp | a semi-literate blog of the mini-literary

Two open editorial seats--a call for applicants

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 19:20:28 -0400

We’re looking to fill two (unpaid) spots on escarp’s editorial panel in the next two weeks. The time commitment is rarely more than 2 hours a week.

The basics:
1.) editors must be able to receive submissions via SMS 24 hours a day.
2.) editors must be able to respond within 12 hours via SMS.
3.) editing is done collaboratively via group SMS; we don’t use the group for chatter but editors should expect SMS volume commensurate with a 5-person conversation.
4.) editors are required to have a Twitter account.

To request the (brief) application packet, send a DM to @escarp on Twitter with your email address. The application will consist of a brief written questionnaire and an interview via SMS. No resume/CV necessary. We’ll be accepting applications until midnight EDT, August 12th, 2011.

Updating properly again.

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 15:27:10 -0400

A small issue had kept our update scripts from running for a few days, but the site should be back to updating properly.

Reply, retweet, favorite

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 10:59:30 -0400

We launched a new layout this February, but there were a few things we wanted to do that we couldn’t at the time, due to some limitations with the Twitter API. While some of our API wishlist is still outstanding, we’ve implemented reply, retweet and favorite buttons on each posting. We’ll probably continue to experiment with the placement of these as we review and implement other changes in the coming weeks. Let us know what you think.

Congratulations, Meera Lee Sethi

Fri, 20 May 2011 18:23:02 -0400

Congratulations, Meera Lee Sethi:

Meera’s piece, published on May 10th, got a solid review from David Backer of FictionDaily.org today.

ilikeartalot: maria zaikina

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 00:36:29 -0400

ilikeartalot:

maria zaikina

location-based stories, eh?

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 00:12:00 -0400

location-based stories, eh?

Wishing a speedy recovery to Dean Young

Sat, 16 Apr 2011 22:24:22 -0400

Wishing a speedy recovery to Dean Young:

But, more importantly, our condolences to the family of the donor.

63072000 seconds later

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 19:01:03 -0400

@escarp turned two, today (at 10:34:15 AM CST, to be precise). It’s been quite the journey.

Work on escarp began when the clouds opened briefly about two weeks before Spring Break, on March 3rd in Lubbock, Texas and went live from a friend’s dining-room table in Austin, Texas (Thanks, Beth (aka MEGABETH!)) It was mostly coincidence, of course, that the site launched in the middle of SXSW (we certainly don’t have the cash to attend in any official manner), though we did manage to fail horribly to catch The Cool Kids at an off-site show in Austin (but succeed thoroughly in finding 6th Street.)

In the two years since we’ve grown from a one-person operation to a five-person panel currently spread across four states. For all we’ve grown, though, we’re always limited by our ability to find passionate individuals to help out. We’d like to use the occasion, this anniversary, to test the waters. If you’d like to be involved, drop us a line through Tumblr or Twitter. Let us know what you’d like to bring to the project.

Publishers and Libraries Struggle over Terms of E-Books

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 18:43:48 -0400

Publishers and Libraries Struggle over Terms of E-Books:

infoneer-pulse:

“People just felt gobsmacked,” said Anne Silvers Lee, the chief of the materials management division of the Free Library of Philadelphia, which has temporarily stopped buying HarperCollins e-books. “We want e-books in our collections, our customers are telling us they want e-books, so I want to be able to get e-books from all the publishers. I also need to do it in a way that is not going to be exorbitantly expensive.”

But some librarians said the change, however unwelcome, had ignited a public conversation about e-books in libraries that was long overdue. While librarians are pushing for more e-books to satisfy demand from patrons, publishers, with an eye to their bottom lines, are reconsidering how much the access to their e-books should be worth.

» via The New York Times

The story of Dear Esther

Mon, 07 Mar 2011 12:55:19 -0500

The story of Dear Esther:

A PC Gamer review of a non-traditional game focused on telling a story and not on accomplishing objectives.

To the many of you arriving re: Claudia Rankine & Tony Hoagland at AWP

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 03:30:00 -0500

Claudia Rankine has posted the text of her reading on her website. You’ll need to go here: http://www.claudiarankine.com/ and then click the *AWP link to the lower-right hand side.

TITLE CASE

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 12:37:28 -0500

For a long while we’ve published titles on our pieces (when provided) in simple Title Case due to personal preference (we don’t feel ALL CAPS comes off the same in SMS as in a book, etc.), but at the same time we’ve wished we could provide more distinction for titles when they exist. Setting titles in ALL CAPS would allow the site’s display scripts to distinguish a title from the rest of the piece and handle the styling differently.

One of our writers recently made a good case for this change, and we’ve decided to give it a try. We’ll adapt the web interface to style the titles after there’s one in the system to test it on—but consider this a tentative change. If you like it, let us know. If you don’t—tell us why (especially if you subscribe via SMS).

Also, this sort of change can’t be made retroactively, so older pieces will appear as they always have.

As promised, poetry as multimedia documentary

Mon, 07 Feb 2011 14:13:04 -0500

As promised, poetry as multimedia documentary:

This is VQR’s blog post promoting the panel which, quite conveniently, has video/audio for all of the pieces featured in the panel. Watch them. Talk about them. Tell us what you think. We aren’t here to send you over to VQR for shits and giggles, but because we feel like innovative work and forms like this are of the utmost importance as experiments in how we can keep the world of A/V storytelling from leaving traditional modes (poems, short stories, non-fiction, novels) behind.

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 14:36:51 -0500

Things we learned at #awp11, day 3:

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 12:06:00 -0500

The poetry-as-multimedia-documentary panel moderated by the famous/infamous Ted Genoways of VQR brings up the interesting potential of poetry as a sort of narrative pairing with documentary photography/video which is able to overcome some of the viewpoint limitations of traditional or creative non-fiction. It seems like the responsibility of the poet here is enormous, but we like this approach to storytelling. The examples shown in the panel were all very compelling. When we get back from the conference we’ll try to hunt down links and post them here.
The face-to-face communities in the age of facebook suggests facebook is reasonably better than other methods of doing the maintenance work that can keep people engaged with a community/group between face-to-face meetings. Oliver de la Paz mentioned feeling a bit like facebook’s mostly-casual nature makes it a bit like a rolodex—and notes that a rolodex isn’t a community. But when an audience-member questioned the legitimacy of the online community as a functional community, the panel pointed out that they met through their shared status as poets featured on From the Fishouse (http://www.fishousepoems.org) and who probably wouldn’t have met, at least as a complete group, otherwise.
The broader literary community is still struggling to “categorize” projects like ours. In a sense this lack of categorization represents a lack of acknowledgement and validation—but the act of categorization itself has the potential to be its own sort of exclusion or discrimination—one of a more institutional nature than indifference/ignorance. The upside of this struggle is the success of projects like ElectricLit (http://twitter.com/ElectricLit), CellStories (http://cellstories.net), and the Hint Fiction anthology which are operating in some of the same media/formats with nonetheless traditional models, which make it hard to broadly dismiss these new experiments in literature.

What we learned at AWP 2011, day 2.

Sat, 05 Feb 2011 12:10:00 -0500

Literary projects (we won’t name names) which engage with users via apps are interesting, both as revenue sources and as a new creative publication space. But we have some reservations, as do others, about being overly complicit in the “appification” of the internet.
The hint fiction panel with Robert Swartwood (http://twitter.com/robertswartwood), Michael Martone (http://twitter.com/4foraquarter), Roxane Gay (http://twitter.com/rgay), Randall Brown and Daniel Olivias was packed. There are still plenty of people denying the viability of this thing we do—but the 200+ who overflowed a room to hear more about hint fiction say otherwise. One of the most compelling parts of the panel validated one of our biggest reasons for doing this—hint fiction has really hit home with people who don’t fit the demographics of the traditional literary “reader.”
Claudia Rankine’s response to Tony Hoagland’s poem “The Change” (and his email response to Claudia, which was read) will probably be THE talk of awp. Almost everyone started talking about it as soon as the reading ended. (UPDATE: More on this)
Charles Wright writes really short poems. Some, at least. He read a pair and we geeked out.

escarp_blog: @Hint_Fiction We talked about hintficton v tradition/establishment, but what do you think about it as an ambassador to non-literary publics?

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 16:57:11 -0500

escarp_blog: @Hint_Fiction We talked about hintficton v tradition/establishment, but what do you think about it as an ambassador to non-literary publics?:

escarp_blog: @Hint_Fiction We talked about hintficton v tradition/establishment, but what do you think about it as an ambassador to non-literary publics?

Things we learned at awp 2011, day 1.

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 01:13:23 -0500

The Washington Marriott hates stomach-sleepers. The mattress pad and pillows were both so thick I had to discard them to sleep.
They also love cheap toilet paper and $13 a day internet fees.
There’s a reciprocal relationship between the burgeoning online lit scene and the craft/diy/limited-run book culture.
Bob Hicok is everything we hoped and more.
The Madam’s Organ bar in Adams-morgan is way too small for late-night readings.
Young, inebriated professionals who wander inadvertently into readings are wont to assume they are eulogies.
Curtis Bauer finally caved and got a Twitter account: http://twitter.com/cwbauer
David Backer (http://davidbacker.com & http://twitter.com/davidbacker0) of fictiondaily (http://fictiondaily.org & http://twitter.com/fictdaily) appears to be every bit as smart as we suspected.

escarp_blog: http://tumblr.com/xmc1eom7nh escarp has been redesigned.

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 17:36:19 -0500

escarp_blog: http://tumblr.com/xmc1eom7nh escarp has been redesigned.:

escarp_blog: http://tumblr.com/xmc1eom7nh escarp has been redesigned.

Just in case you didn't notice,

Wed, 02 Feb 2011 03:17:12 -0500

we slipped away from the party for a bit tonight, on the eve of #AWP, to powder our noses and redesign the site. We hope you like the new look.

The biggest departure the redesign presents is the reduced number of posts per page. We hope to put more emphasis on each poem and story—to give each more literal space in which to unfold; let us know how it works for you as readers.

The second-biggest departure is the introduction of this, our new tumblelog. This is intended to augment our @escarp_blog microblog. At the site level, it entirely replaces it, but we hope to use both outlets to augment the community-experience escarp provides.

Also, let us know if anything looks strange or if you have any performance issues. As a side note, we’ve only been able to test this release on a small number of mobile browsers—so we’re particularly interested in feedback on that experience. We’ll be working over the next few weeks to tweak and enhance both the online and mobile layouts.