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2010 Open Reading Winners & Finalists

We’re thrilled to announce that we have chosen Amber Nelson and Harold Abramowitz for publication in the upcoming year. Nelson’s Diary of When Being With Friends Feels Like Watching TV and Aramowitz’s A House on a Hill  will appear in late 2010 or early 2011 much to our delight.

We’d also like to congratulate our finalists whose work we read with great excitement and debate: 

• The Hawk You See May Be Your Own by Temple Cone
• A Practical Guide to Contemporary Economics by Joshua Ware
• Late Sermons of the Ego by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado
• Grimm Realities by Ellen LaFleche
• Midnight’s Marsupium by Michael Leong
• Folding In by Renee Emerson
• (aviary) by Genevieve Kaplan
• A Portable Model of How Memory Works by Joseph Mains
• Seven Pictures by Ben Berman
• Heaven as Nothing but Distance by Joshua Robbins
• Sham City by Evan Harrison
• :Odyssey & Oracle:by Jenn McCreary

Thanks to everyone who submitted a manuscript for consideration. Without the range of wonderful work to choose from, there would be no press and no one to wow our socks off. The following titles are the finalist manuscripts. Unfortunately, we had to pass on many good manuscripts.   But please, as always, consider sending a new or revised manuscript during our next reading period in 2011.

Best,

Slash Pine Editors

 

Guerilla Dancing

There’s this thing—I’m riding public transit for 4 hours a day. I think it’s going to my head. Like, making me a little nutso (er). I love riding public transit. I love listening to the asinine conversations, the wicked drunks and crazies, the occasional too-sassy-for-their-own-good bus driver. But more often than not, I ride with my ear buds in, the tunes blasting at a low level so I can read, or just blasting blasting blasting to keep me from passing out and missing my stop. (Did I mention the 4 hours a day bit… thems be long days).

I blame what I’m about to confess on my not having watched a single episode of So You Think You Can Dance this season, and the requisite withdrawl that such a feat would impress upon me.

I wanna dance! Every once in a while a song comes on my shuffled ipod that has me sort of… resisting the impulse to get up and dance through the bus aisles, rifling through the aisles of people on the commuter rail in their business suits, with their newspapers or trashy romance novels. I want to dance like something out a movie… choreographed, random, people watching with mouths gaping wide.

The problem with this, of course, is that I can’t dance. At least not like that. And I’m sure that train security would be called and I would be forcibly removed from the public transportation system, potentially going before a supreme court judge with several shrinks on the stand vying for my sanity (or lack there of… I told you I’m going nutso (er)).

So yes, withdrawls.

But I saw, recently, two movie trailers that bring me some semblance of hope. Stomp the Yard 2 (featuring Twitch, from So You Think You Can Dance fame), and Step Up 3D (featuring both Twitch and Joshua!). Witness: