Yes. The 2009 issue can be ordered. It’s awesome and we’ve talked it up in so many places on this website that we ought to just give you the link. So here.

Go with peace.

Hello everybody. Now that we’ve had our release party, and now that the new journal is in the stores, let’s go ahead and open submissions back up. There’s no better time to get started on the 2010 issue than today.

The response to the 2009 issue has been very positive. We thank all contributors, all submitters, and all readers. Lovelovelove.

Keep checking in for details about what we have coming up.

May 7. Mark it on your calendars. Mark it on your calves. The new issue of Words and Images will be in bookstores, including Longfellow Books and the USM Portland Bookstore.

Words and Images 2009 features the work of writers from Maine and elsewhere. Read new poetry by Adrian Blevins, Melissa Crowe, Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, and Mark Melnicove. Read new fiction by Elizabeth Searle. See original artwork by Ben Bishop, Katie Diamond, and Benjamin McDorr. See unpublished photographs by Bern Porter. See your wallet shrink by a mere $10 – but feel your brain explode times INFINITY (note: Words and Images will not actually blow up your brain…yet).

Also, read the poem that won our first annual Dos Cosas Award. The winning piece is “Inexhaustible Rooms,” by Allan Peterson.

In fact, come see and hear some of this work get read at our release party, on May 7, at One Longfellow Square, 181 State Street, Portland, ME. This event is free, all ages, and open to the public. So bring your children. Bring your grandmother. But they might have to cover their ears, because we’re offering up, for the kids, three loud, young Portland bands: Marie Stella, Huak, and the Scrapes.

If you don’t read Words and Images, you’ll hurt our feelings. The editors are not robots. No sir. The editors are human beings who think that this is some great work we have the honor of publishing. We hope that you will think likewise.

The contents of Words and Images 2009:

“Notes from Our Contributors”: A Story by Dan Moreau

“How to Make Fatherhood Lyrical”: A Poem by Gibson Fay-LeBlanc

“Widow of Cyclops”: A Poem by Maureen Ann Connolly

“‘A Hard Man is Good to Find’”: A Story by Glenn Shaheen

“Between Her Lines”: A Poem by Todd Perry

“Dream in Which I’m Told How I Would Choose”: A Poem by Adrian Blevins

“Family Films”: A Poem by James McKenna

“The Third Man”: A Poem by Dennis Saleh

“Seven or Eight Versions of She”: A Story by Willard J. Rusch

“Film Still After David Lean”: A Poem by Alex Merrill

“Soul Train”: A Story by Glenn Shaheen

“The Method”: A Story by Patrick Hanan

“Retrospecter”: A Poem by Layla Carroll

“Pause”: Artwork by Benjamin McDorr

“Day of the Lord”: A Story by Burke Long

“These Two Eleanors”: A Poem by Melissa Crowe

“[Between the lines]”: A Poem by Lindsey Wallace

The Dos Cosas Award

Dos Cosas Award-winner “Inexhaustible Rooms”: A Poem by Allan Peterson

“Puzzles by Pablo”: A Poem by Amanda Nies

“Rule 21”: A Story by B.R. Bonner

“No Place for a Pink Angel”: A Story by Steven J. Dines

“After Fairfield Porter”: A Poem by Linda Buckmaster

“The boy who loved orange”: A Poem by Shelton Waldrep

“A 4X4 (Four Words/ Per Line, 4 Lines/ Per Stanza) Exposition of/ Bern Porter’s Appropriated Photographs”: A Poem About Bern Porter by Mark Melnicove,

with Six of Bern Porter’s Unpublished Photographs

“Ukulele Me”: A Memoir by Zoe Woodbury High

“An Interview with Salvatore Scibona”

“Dream in Which I Find Myself Confronted Yet Again With Why the Marriage Failed”: A Poem by Adrian Blevins

“The Harris Girls”: A Poem by Layla Carroll

“Turkeys”: A Poem by J.R. Solonche

“Exes in the Morning”: A Poem by Jesse Leighton

“True Love and the Giraffe”: A Story by Benjamin Chadwick

“The Way Life Should Be”: A Poem by Mia Cartmill

“Epithalamium with Adultery”: A Poem by Melissa Crowe

“&”: A Poem by Wade Linebaugh

“The Leaves Between”: Artwork by Ben Bishop

“Bloody Show”: A Novel Excerpt by Elizabeth Searle

“Notes on Thirty Years in the Life of a Ventriloquist”: A Poem by Gibson Fay-LeBlanc

“American Children”: A Story by Glenn Shaheen

“Girl Giant”: A Poem by Melissa Crowe

As of February 1, 2009, submissions for Words and Images 2009 and the First Annual Dos Cosas Award are officially closed. We thank all of you who have submitted, and we promise that those of you who have not heard from us yet regarding your submission(s) will soon.

We ask that those who wish to submit for 2010 wait; open submissions will resume June 1, 2009.

For those of you in southern Maine who wish to attend, we will be having a release party for the journal along with several other events. All of these events will be open to the public, but the details are currently TBA.

Jeff Hodenberg is a poetry editor and senior English major at USM. He considers himself a jack of all trades, enjoying myriad styles of literature and art (e.g. Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Vonegut, Hemingway, Blake, Bukowski, Medieval and Gothic texts). On at least one occasion he has made the claim, “Paradise Lost is the greatest book ever written, and I will punch you in the face if you dare disagree.” As a philosophy minor, he enjoys the gritty ideas and questions posed by Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Baruch Spinoza.

Outside of his love of literature, Jeff enjoys video games (often until he has mere hours to turn in a paper), music (from Johnny Cash to Cannibal Corpse to Wu Tang Clan), comic books and graphic novels (Spawn, Aliens, and DMZ, to name a few), watching cartoons, and other things equally nerdy.

Jeff will be completing his studies at USM in the Spring of 2009 and moving to Japan to teach English for a few years. Beyond that, he will travel wherever the winds may take him to pursue his master’s degree and eventual PhD, thus allowing him to lord his lofty intellect over students everywhere

Aubin Thomas is the Art Director of Words and Images and is currently in her third year at the University of Southern Maine.  Although she is majoring in English, her main passion is the creation of art using mixed media such as music, video, paint, collage, etc.  A connoisseur of popular culture, she also enjoys doing amateur research on the icons and somewhat forgotten figures of decades past.  This hobby often leads her on strange journeys to find such people’s gravesites, former residences, and other interesting pop culture and historical locations.  When she isn’t searching for new dark cabaret music and recreating famous photographs with her digital camera, she enjoys collecting pins with interesting subject matter to them and hanging out with her incorrigible two-year-old nephew, Max.

Caroline O’Connor Thomas has lived in too many locations in the Boston area, including: Somerville, Revere, the North End, Cambridge, Medford. She has slept under beds, in beds and on floors. Prefers night, but thinks day has some excellent qualities. Likes mountains as much as skyscrapers. She takes music courses that do not have anything to do with her major in English. Being the poetry editor of Words and Images 2009, she enjoys reading and writing poems. Favorite poem as of today: Wherever You Are, Be Somewhere Else by Denise Riley. It does not take much prompting to get her to dance/ make a fool of herself. Her favorite feeling is indescribable but it includes being a stranger in a crowd/ a small thing in a stream.  Despite the heading of this post, Caroline may actually be a robot. The previous sentence is a lie, as Caroline is secretly sensitive and romantic (please don’t tell anyone). Enjoys adventures in cars with friends, particularly if it involves going to the 76 Diner in Latham, NY past midnight. Does not exclude rap or country music from the blanket statement “I like all kinds of music.” Caroline is going to England next semester, where she hopes to acquire a British accent, meet Julian Barratt of The Mighty Boosh and single handedly destroy Stonehenge (just kidding). If you are a poem that looks sparse on the page but features heavy words that bend their very definitions and like long walks on the beach, soft caresses and the song “Monkey Gone to Heaven” by the Pixies, please contact Caroline, as you may be her soul mate. Take a chance, buy her a drink, read her poetry – you’ve got nothing to lose.

Those interested can read a few of Caroline’s poems here: (LINK!). Her thoughts are also available for mass consumption: (LINK!).

Benjamin Rybeck is the publishing director of Words and Images; from 2007-2008, he served as managing editor. He considers his most important job to be finding the right people with whom to work, and being as he has put together a staff replete with editors who are smarter than he, his job sometimes seems almost ridiculously easy.

Rybeck is a full time English major at the University of Southern Maine, interested in interdisciplinary studies. He is especially drawn to the following: the films of Paul Thomas Anderson and the French New Wave; the stories of Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, and Charles D’Ambrosio; “Winesburg, Ohio”; all things James Bond; and the TV series The Wire.

He’s hoping to find fiction and poetry that all those other idiot literary journals have missed; after all, tons of great stories and poems go to sleep unpublished each night. He’s not looking for “perfect” work, because “perfect” work lacks the rough edges where the soul of the artist can be seen bursting out, trying to struggle free from under a pile of technique, trying to breathe again. Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections,” a novel with a million digressions, is preferable to Geraldine Brooks’ “March,” a perfectly controlled story, because “The Corrections” has energy in its imperfections, and “March” seems overworked and smoothed out until it lies dead on the page.

Sometimes he has trouble finding the time to exercise.

On December 3, at 7PM, Words and Images presents a euphoric explosion of words and love, bringing together local poets and student writers for an evening of excitement, to take place at the North Star Cafe, 222 Congress St., Portland, Maine. This is event is free and open to the public.

The evening’s featured poets will be Melissa Crowe (author of “Cirque du Creve-Cur (Circus of Heartbreak),” whose work has appeared in Calyx, Seneca Review, and The Atlanta Review), and Layla Carroll (a recent graduate of the prestigious Warren Wilson MFA program). They will be followed by a slew of the best and brightest undergraduate writers from the University of Southern Maine, including Words and Images staff members Jill Jacobs, Caroline O’Connor-Thomas, and Aubin Thomas. After this will be an hour of open mic, so that everyone can get involved. Bring your best work, and look for the sign-up sheet when you come in!