Hugo House | The Conium Review

Editors & Contributors at “Lit Crawl Seattle”

Oct 20, 2015

Lit Crawl Seattle is a couple days away (Oct. 22nd). Ahead of the event, the Lit Crawl organizers are promoting the #whatsyourcrawl hashtag. If you’re going to Lit Crawl, remember to Tweet, post on Facebook, e-mail, post creepy notes around your apartment building, whatever. A contributor and a couple of our editors share their Lit Crawl schedules below:

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke’s crawl (editorial director of The Conium Review):

6:00pm, “A Salty Reading” presented by the awesome folks of of APRIL at Hugo House.
7:00pm, “Good Sports” at Vermillion Art Gallery and Bar, where I’m reading with Matt Kelsey and Jay McAleer.
8:00pm, back to Hugo House for “Jacks-of-All-Trades,” where Gary Lilley performs with his band, Norf Cackalack, Adam Boehmer reads some poems, and closing the set, Freeway Park will rock it out. Then off to the after party at Fred Wildlife Refuge.

James R. Gapinski’s crawl (managing editor of The Conium Review):

Probably going to The James Franco Review reading at 6:00pm (though I might do “A Salty Reading” at Hugo House too; still debating on the 6:00pm time slot).
Then I’m going to the Future Tense Books event, “Welcome to the Instant Future” at 7:00pm at the Raygun Lounge.
I’m one of the readers at “Lit Level Up,” 8:00pm at the Pine Box. And naturally, closing out the night with the Fred Wildlife Refuge after party.

John Englehardt’s crawl (contributor with his story “This Is Great But You Don’t Need It“):

I’m going to City Arts’ “Use Yr Words” at 6pm (Quenton Baker!).
“Flashers” at the Sorrento Hotel at 7pm (Mattilda Sycamore!).
“Lit Level Up” at the Pine Box at 8pm (James Gapinski!).
Then to the dance party at Fred’s Wildlife Refuge.

If you’re out-and-about on October 22nd, say “hi,” Tweet at us, share your crawl, and purchase a copy of The Conium Review: Vol. 3 during the after party. Find the entire Lit Crawl Seattle schedule here.

Contributor Conversations: Chelsea Werner-Jatzke interviews Christine Texeira

Oct 15, 2015

Chelsea Werner-Jatzke interviews Christine Texeira (contributor to The Conium Review: Vol. 3). Her work has also recently appeared in Moss. She currently works at the Hugo House in Seattle, and she is managing editor of Paragraphiti.

[Chelsea Werner-Jatzke]: What is Paragraphiti?

[Christine Texeira]: Currently it’s an online journal, but we’re about to release our first print issue. It was started by a fellow grad student at University of Notre Dame and is focused on international writers and artists. I’m the managing editor.

[CWJ]: Besides the journal, what else are you working on?

[CT]: I’m editing my graduate school thesis into a novel. It’s a series of stories that feel cohesive to me. One of them was published in Moss. It’s very much a novel of the Northwest. Lot’s of Sasquatch and D.B. Cooper.

[CWJ]: Both the story in Moss and the piece published by Conium are focused on strange sibling dynamics. What’s the deal?

[CT]: I was raised as an only child and had always wanted a sibling. There’s something about that relationship that I have no insight into. It’s like, because I can’t comprehend it I am trying to figure it out in writing. Later in life I discovered that I have an older brother that I’ve never met and I don’t think he knows I exist. Before that discovery I had always written characters that had siblings but it wasn’t the focus of the story. After that discovery I decided to focus on this obsession.

[CWJ]: At AWP I asked you if all your stories were so odd and you were like, “yeah pretty much.” Conium is a journal for experimental fiction, is all of your writing experimental in form or just bizarre in content?

[CT]: A lot of it is form. I become attached to strange bits of information and write about them. Then I begin to see how they can combine. I like to be surprised and am always looking for the funny and the scary that together create the strange. I don’t mean “surprised” or “scary” as in, horror stories. I mean I like to be surprised by my own narratives. To write to the place where I’m a bit afraid because I don’t know where the narrative will go, what the rules are. Then I go back and tame the story, edit a lot of that out.

[CWJ]: Can you describe your editing process?

[CT]: I typically write in sections that are titled and specific. They can have a wide variety in length. Then I cut entire pieces and see what’s left, how they fit together. I consider myself a short story writer but the pieces that I am editing into a novel right now feel unified.

[CWJ]: You have a Furnace reading coming up in 2016 and they publish longish, self-contained stories incorporating audio. What are you presenting for that?

[CT]: That is also a section of the novel, similarly self-contained as the Moss piece. It’s about Mortal Kombat. I’m partial to Mortal Kombat 4 since it’s what I grew up playing so I am going take recordings from that for the reading.

[CWJ]: Are you working anything outside of the novel?

[CT]: I’m writing other stories, not connected, about strange jobs.

[CWJ]: Like what?

[CT]: One is about a continuity editor for a porn production company in futuristic Seattle.

[CWJ]: Do you watch a lot of porn?

[CT]: No not really. I was talking to someone who works at Amazon writing descriptions or reviews or something, and I got to thinking about the job of someone who has to watch a lot of porn, what that would be like.

[CWJ]: Well there’s certainly room for improvement in the cinematic qualities of pornography.

[CT]: Yes, this production company believes porn could be so much more.

Look for more fiction from Christine Texeira to inspire the literary world and the hopefully the porn industry too. Visit her website at https://christinetexeira.wordpress.com and follow her on Twitter @xtinetexeira for more information.

Our 2015 “Best of the Net” Nominees

Oct 4, 2015

We’ve submitted our 2015 nominations for the Sundress Publications anthology, Best of the Net. This year’s nominees are Benjamin Allocco’s “Spider“ and John Englehardt’s “This Is Great But You Don’t Need It.”

Benjamin Allocco lives and teaches in Upstate New York. His work has been published in The Fanzine, The Conium Review, Fiction Southeast, and Prick of the Spindle.

Follow him on Twitter @benjaminallocco.

John Englehardt has an MFA in fiction from the University of Arkansas. He won the 2014 Wabash Prize in Fiction, and his work has been published in Sycamore Review, The Stranger, The James Franco Review, The Monarch Review, and Monkeybicycle. Currently, he edits fiction for Pacifica Literary Review, and is a fellow at The Richard Hugo House in Seattle.

Naturally, this was a tough decision. There were many deserving pieces published on our site in the past year. In fact, we arrogantly think our whole damn website deserves anthologization or some sort of prize (we can provide a gold-medal-sized SASE upon request). Two other favorites that were heavily considered for nomination are Ingrid Jendrzejewski’s “The Box of Skinny Women“ and Jinny Koh’s “Fish Head.”

Susan Lynch to read at the Richard Hugo House

Apr 21, 2014

Susan Lynch (one of our Associate Editors) will be reading at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle, WA on Saturday, April 26th. She’s reading as part of the Lit.mustest reading series.

The night’s featured reader is Carol Casella. She is the author of three novels: Oxygen (Simon & Schuster, 2008), Healer (Simon & Schuster, 2010), and Gemini (Simon & Schuster, 2014).

Where: Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave, Seattle, Washington 98122

When: 7:00pm to 10:00pm on Saturday, April 26th.

This is an all-ages event open to the public.
There will be a cash bar.
Admission is free.
Parking is available at Hugo House. Street parking is free around Cal Anderson Park after 6pm.

Find this event on Facebook.