I just got back from our first stop in Durham. Links here: http://www.triangle.com/2011/06/26/68172/tour-de-fat-062511.html , http://yapsnaps.blogspot.com/2011/06/tour-de-fat.html , and

Twelve more cities on the list for the whole tour. I’ll be in Boise, Fort Collins, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tempe, and Austin.

MATTERHORN exists because good news exists. The good news is that our community changes constantly. Our neighbors are innovative and creative. Amidst the dynamo of Fort Collins, we support these forward thinking activities, we applaud those who earn it. We are interested in good ideas paired with right action wherever they occur.

When necessary we also sound our horn to call attention to wrongheadedness and missed opportunity. We exist at a vibrant nexus between journalism and the literary arts. We believe in interviews, information, research, thoughtful exploration, and poetry.

We aspire to do better, to reinvent ourselves incessantly. We’re driven by our community, we encourage everyone to participate, to think, to write, to engage the issues at hand. We crave feedback and participation.

MATTERHORN is a quarterly publicatio

No Perch is a reading series placing writers into spaces where we have not seen poetry before. Our attempts to pick venues seemingly hostile to our readers are always inevitably discovered to have been ideal interstices. The paucity of our imagination to locate venues more antipathetic to our readers’ writing haunts us as an outstanding dare we continually fail to satisfy. Addition can change what we know into what we don’t. We document the products of these summations for posterity, but warn posterity that these records distort what they catalog.

— OR —
a perch is a roundish piece of wood for clasping, for talons. it may also be a fish, in which case it is not stationary. Either way No Perch is doing ••• without •••

— OR —
No Perch Mofo!

Figure 1: Venn diagram explicating No Perch. Note: the intersection of the two perches (e.g. a perch that happens to be plucked from a stream by an eagle) points to an error of our definitions of “perch,” an error in our understanding of the ideas of “perch,” or both.

— OR —

Intersections of ideas and of difference provide an opportunity to discover how our understanding fails. Take the sexiness of black holes as example: they represent a way to explore the intersection between relativity and quantum mechanics. Neither field seems entirely adequate for the idea of a black hole, and a new conceptual leap (whether it is labeled superstrings or quantum gravity or what-have-you) is required. To quote Reading Rainbow’s Levar Burton, don’t take our word for it. The lacuna demands innovation and attention from those who would continually inhabit it. The surrealists’ juxtaposition allowed a space to question why certain things might be found together, but also allowed a further question, must it be this way? The only interesting binary is the binary that points to its own inadequacy and so all binaries are interesting. The placement of poets into unexpected locations is interesting for both how it changes poets and how it changes spaces. What was previously transparent becomes opaque: context is ripe for experimentation.

Photo: Todd Simmons

Matter Journal is looking for writing, photography, and artwork that speaks to the animal in all of us. We like well-written stuff best, especially if it comes with something interesting to say and strives for deeper meaning. Prose that howls us into seeing the world a new way. Poems that knock our zebra-striped socks off. Photographs, illustrations, and paintings to drool over.

See our submission guidelines on our website and then send your best work to Matter, P.O. Box 814, Fort Collins, CO 80522, attn: Matter 14 Animal. It can take 3-6 months for us to respond, so please be patient.

Matter 14: Animal Fiction Prize

If you would like your short story to be considered for the Animal Fiction Prize, include something to that effect in your cover letter and on the envelope, a $5 reading fee, and an SASE or e-mail address for notification purposes. Award is $250, publication, and 2 complimentary copies of the issue in which your work appears. All contest submissions will be considered for publication as well.

Deadline for both submissions and contest: Wednesday, October 15, 2010, postmark date.

When I go out and give speeches, the title of my speech is “The Case Against Intelligent Design.” And I base it strictly on what I’ve observed here in Florida, which is that the human race is actually de-evolving, that we are moving backward on the evolutionary scale. If you picked the headlines from the five largest newspapers in Florida every day, you could make a very solid case that the human race was slipping backward into the primal ooze. The species has not been elevated by much of what’s happened in the last 30 or 40 years. And obviously, it’s not just in Florida

via Carl Hiaasen on Human Weirdness | 40th Anniversary | Smithsonian Magazine.

Seriously, every time I walk past this house I smile a little bit. This is great because they’re between me and just about anywhere I’d walk to. I’ve never had use for adjectives like “trashy” or “crazy”, I’d rather say thank you.

The art of Susan Quinlan on display of the Boulder Library, Alleyshot, and you’ve a long way to go grasshopper.

LenaHerzog.com.