Announcing the Fall 2012 Issue of The New River
The editorial staff of The New River, the first online journal devoted exclusively to digital writing and art, is pleased to announce the release of the Fall 2012 issue.
The New River was founded by Virginia Tech English professor Ed Falco in 1996. It has consistently tested the boundaries and rules of writing in a digital age. Since 2007, the journal has been managed and edited by the students of the Virginia Tech MFA Program in Creative Writing.
“Digital literature continues to evolve in surprising ways,” Managing Editor Andy Hobin said, “and we felt privileged to work with artists from this innovative genre. Few schools in the country offer their students such an opportunity.”
This issue includes works by Alan Bigelow, Serge Bouchardon, Loss Pequeño Glazier, and Matt Mullins.
Alan Bigelow’s “Last Words” renders a flash of mortality and vulnerability which compels the reader to look a little bit closer at Bigelow’s chosen subjects and their sometimes spectacular yet sometimes relatively pedestrian final moments. Bigelow’s use of overlaying images creates rich inapparent harmonies as he both constructs and answers his manifestations.
In Serge Bouchardon’s “Opacity,” an interactive dream of ‘transparency’ complicates our notions about intimacy. This four-part interactive narrative explores our dogged, collective drive to discover “naked truth” and considers implications for personal relationships.
In Loss Pequeño Glazier’s “Four Guillemets,” image and text ‘string’ variants resonate like conversational silences with “the victory of the echo over the voice.” The sections meditate on form and the interpretive process through wordplay and recombinations both within and between the strands of text. Like any good poem, “Four Guillemets” teaches us how to read as we read.
Two works from Matt Mullins appear in the issue. In “I Will Make An Exquisite Corpse,” the Surrealist concept of the three-sectioned exquisite corpse enters interactive dimensions. The user manipulates video, audio, still images, and text with a slot machine-esque generator, yielding innumerable paths and possibilities. “Highway Coda,” a prose poem both lyric and narrative, loops its four sections into refrains. The stanzas may thus interrupt, disrupt, combine, or comment upon one another, evading closure and producing a caged, caging echo.
“We were thrilled to include past contributors--whose work we have enjoyed over the years as readers--and two new voices,” Managing editor Russell said. “Since The New River helped establish digital writing in the late 90’s, it has featured some of the most exciting new work on the web. Our latest issue continues that tradition, and we were honored to be part of it.”
The Virginia Tech MFA Program in Creative Writing was established in 2005. The New River is currently hosted by Virginia Tech's Center for Digital Discourse and Culture.
Contact: Andy Hobin, Managing Editor ahobin@vt.edu
Meaghan Russell, Managing Editor mrose3@vt.edu