Hello Everyone!
We are pleased to nominate the following work in VoiceCatcher 6 for the 2013 Pushcart Prize. Congratulations to every one of you for making this issue so stunning and powerful. We are proud and full of gratitude to have worked with you.
Kristin Berger and Toni Partington, Co-Editors of VC 6.
Swimming in a Thunderstorm by Kate Gray
Honored to be among so many fine writers in VoiceCatcher 6, Kate Gray is grateful to join this community, grateful as a boy winging a rock at a dangling mango and breaking its fall. Her first book-length poetry book, Another Sunset We Survive, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in 2008. It followed earlier chapbooks, Bone-Knowing and Where She Goes. Kate teaches at Clackamas Community College.
Summer Flies by Lisa Maier
Lisa Maier has hiked next to a lava flow, jumped out of an airplane, swam above a shark, and battled in a karate competition. Last year, she added “public reading” to her list of adrenalized accomplishments when VoiceCatcher5 published two of her persona poems and she took the stage to share her work—including a visit to KBOO’s live broadcast of “Bread and Roses.” Lisa lives on a mountain in Beaverton with her amazing Austrian husband and two inspiring sons where she continues to create emotional art with the goal of connecting the reader to the soul in her poetry.
nichos: woman at the window by Jodie Marion
Jodie Marion is from the Indian River region of Florida but has lived in the Pacific Northwest for the past twelve years. She is mother to four wild children and teaches writing and Spanish at Mt. Hood Community College. Some recent work appears in The New Guard Literary Review and is forthcoming in the Floating Bridge Review.
Consider the Moment by Alissa Nielson
Alissa Nielsen is a fiction writer, editor, and teacher. Her work has appeared in Ellipsis, Prick of the Spindle, and The Raven Chronicles. She studied literature and writing at The Evergreen State College and Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, and earned her MFA from Pacific University. She has worked as an English teacher, a contracted literary arts programmer for Bumbershoot music festival, a zine curator/librarian for Richard Hugo House, an editor-in-chief of Silk Road, and a chocolate-and-wine pusher for Pix Patisserie. At present, Alissa lives in Portland, Oregon where she is working on a collection of short stories.
Queen Victoria’s Secret by Sue Parman
Sue Parman is an anthropologist who studied the Scottish Outer Hebrides. Most of her plays— and many of her academic and literary works—are about Scotland, although she is frequently waylaid by other topics such as dreams, snails, and water. The play “Queen Victoria’s Secret,” performed in Portland’s Fertile Ground Festival in 2011, turns on a coincidence: The year that Queen Victoria ended her ten-year period of mourning for Prince Albert and returned to public life just happened to coincide with the invention of the electric vibrator. For more details of Parmania, see http://anthro.fullerton.edu/sparman/.
The AquaContrarium by Alida Thacher
Alida Thacher is the co-founder of PDX Writers. She holds a BA in English and an MA in Instructional Technology from the University of Wisconsin. She has worked as an editor, a teacher, a television producer, a multimedia creator, and a web programmer. She’s published stories, memoirs, non-fiction, and technical articles. Alida is also the author of eight children’s books and producer of several award-winning television programs. Her story, “The AquaContrarium,” came from a crazy workshop prompt: a photo of naked women in a fish tank.
All works are available through VoiceCatcher 6.
Click here to purchase your copy.
The Pushcart Prize – Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America. Hundreds of presses and thousands of writers of short stories, poetry and essays have been represented in the pages of our annual collections.