Notes, Reviews, Speculations
EPOCH’s weblog features criticism, craft essays, and interviews by editors current and former. It is updated regularly during the academic year, and occasionally during the summer.
Foxes and Editors
I owe a lot to EPOCH. My first published story appeared there in 1963, when I was 21. I’d written it for Jim McConkey’s Cornell undergraduate writing class; he asked if he could submit it for me to the magazine. (Our friendship, which continued for almost 70 years until he died at 98, was interrupted only by my years living overseas.) When I saw my story, “Galina,” in print in EPOCH, I suddenly stepped up onto a plateau—an exhilarating place from which to look out on my limitless future: I was now a writer, my career aspirations indisputable.
Review: The Devil’s Fools by Mary Gilliland
Mary Gilliland’s new poetry collection, The Devil’s Fools (Codhill Press), is faster than a speeding time machine, moving the reader from the days of Greek and Roman myths to the present and back again in less time than it takes to read a fifteen-line free-verse lyric.
The Game of Disquiet
If you open Portuguese author Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet (in Portuguese, Livro do Desassossego) in a moment of insomnia, you are not likely to find consolation in lines such as “I’m dazed by a sarcastic terror of life, a despondency that exceeds the limits of my conscious being.” Or maybe you are. It’s like listening to the blues when you’re heartbroken.
On Distraction and Fragmentation
It is a humid afternoon in Edinburgh, summer of 2021, and I am distracted. My group chats are pinging, I am reeling from a recent breakup, and every time I sit down to read or write, I can’t seem to stop my eyes from drifting towards the Royal Mile revelry outside my window, my blinking iPhone. Patricia Lockwood’s latest book, No One is Talking About This, might seem an odd choice for someone with shifting attentions…
The Slush Pile
I was thirty-five when I came to Cornell, having at long last finished my undergrad degree, after a young adulthood misspent (or well-spent, depending on how you look at it) playing music and being generally dissolute. I was what they call in the biz “a late bloomer,” and I was serious about making up for lost time and becoming published as widely and well as I possibly could. Unlike many people who attend MFAs and dip their toes cautiously in the publishing pool, I approached it like the problem kid at a pool party doing the cannonball. I wanted in.
Remembering Our Editor Michael Koch, 1947-2022
Michael Claude Koch, an editor and lecturer at Cornell University noted for having returned the Cornell literary journal, EPOCH, to national prominence, died at home on May 27, 2022, after a brief illness. He was 75 years old and had planned to retire from Cornell on June 30.
Announcing the 2022-23 Michael Koch Memorial Guest Editors
Each year, EPOCH invites two former assistant editors to serve as guest editors in fiction and poetry. The Koch Editor in Fiction for Volume 70 is Lena Nguyen, and the Koch Editor in Poetry is Benjamin Garcia.