Tenth Anniversary Celebration

by Senior Editor Mary Bast

With our 2019 issue, Bacopa Literary Review rejoices in ten years of publication. To celebrate, below are our First and Second Place prize winners from each year (follow links for more about the authors and/or the works):

2010
Fiction (Editor Gen Aris): First Place Rick Sapp, "What the Old Man Knew About Time;" Second Place Jordanna Faye Brown, "Guardamar"
Creative Nonfiction (Editor Mary Bast): First Place Elaine Jordan, "Swimming with Joan Baez;" Second Place Charles Patrick Norman, "Walking Around the World for Life"
Poetry (Editor David Maas): First Place Angela Masterson Jones, "At the Crossing;" Second Place Valerie Ann Asay, "Arise"

2011
Fiction (Editor Gen Aris): First Place JoeAnn Hart, "Open House;" Second Place Mandy Manning, "Growth"
Creative Nonfiction (Editor Mary Bast): First Place Amanda Skelton, "Warding Off the Monkey;" Second Place Carolyne Wright, "Los Olvidados:The Forgotten Ones"
Poetry (Editor Eldon Turner): First Place Colleen Runyan, "me or the tea;" Second Place Erika Brumett, "Fight Overheard in Sign Language"

2012
Fiction (Editor Gen Aris): First Place Cecile Barlier, "Legionnaire;" Second Place Stephanie Seguin, "Candy Andy"
Short Fiction (Editor Kaye Linden): First Place Grier Jewell, "Girl in the Gibbous Moon;" Second Place Margaret F. Chen, "The Yellow Curtain, The Red Floor"
Creative Nonfiction (Editor Dorothy Staley): First Place Jeremiah O'Hagan, "The Hymnal;" Second Place Colleen O'Neil, "Transplant"

Poetry (Editor Eldon Turner): First Place Sb Sowbel, "Room 5, Guest 1: Being Human, American Style;" Second Place Nancy Hastie, "Barefoot days fall firefly nights"

2013
Fiction (Editor Gen Aris): First Place JL Schneider,  "Dick and Jane Meet Again;" Second Place Shayne Laughter, "The Valentine"
Short Fiction (Editor Gen Aris): First Place Stephanie Barbe Hammer, "Red"
Creative Nonfiction (Editor Dorothy Staley): First Place Gina Warren, "A Sparrow;" Second Place Samantha Claire Updegrave, "Canoe"
Poetry (Editor Eldon Turner): First Place Carolyne Wright, "Sestina: Into Shadow;" Second Place Karen Majorowicz, "(sens of plas)"

2014
Fiction (Editor Gen Aris): First Place Charlotte M. Porter, "Pangs;" Second Place Jim Fairhall, "The Night Baker on Firebase Arsenal"
Creative Nonfiction (Editor Dorothy Staley): First Place Melani "Mele" Martinez, "Burned;" Second Place JL Schneider, "Man in a Bag"
Poetry (Editor E.R. Turner): First Place Julia Wagner, "Coming to Center;" Second Place Richard King Perkins II, "Distillery of the Sun"

2015
Fiction (Editor Shellie Zacharia): First Place Ellen Perry, "Milk--Bread--Soft Drinks;" Second Place Debra A. Daniel, "Assisted Living Home"
Creative Nonfiction (Editor Dorothy Staley): First Place Kaye Linden, "The Linear and Circular One Sentence of Tattoo Designs;" Second Place Michael Kite, "Memories of a Honeymoon and Milk Carton"
Poetry (Editor Gen Aris): First Place Diane Stone, "Local Weather;" Second Place Justin Hunt, "Autumn, Huntington Beach"

2016
Fiction (Editor U.R. Bowie): First Place Afia Atakora, "The Crooked Man;" Runner-Up Joseph Saling, "Eva"
Creative Nonfiction (Editor Rick Sapp): First Place Jessica Conoley, "I Am Descended from Giants;" Runner-Up Debra Burks Hori, "A Clothesline Meditation"
Poetry (Editor Kaye Linden): First Place Carolyne Wright, "Sestina: That mouth...;" Runner-Up Leslie Anne Mcilroy, "Big Bang"

2017
Fiction (Editor U.R. Bowie): Chad W. Lutz, "Ignis Fatuus, and More, at Eleven"
Flash Story (Editor Kaye Linden): Charlotte M. Porter, "Terminal Trance"
Creative Nonfiction (Editor Susie H. Baxter): Raphael Kosek, "Caregiver's Journal: How to Survive, or Not"
Poetry (Editor J.N. Fishhawk): Claire Scott, "A Mote of Dust"

2018
Short Story (Editor Kaye Linden): Dean Gessie, "Nobody Knows How Much You Love Him"
Creative Nonfiction (Editor Susie H. Baxter): Roberta Marstellar, "I Said No"
Prose Poetry (Editor Kaye Linden): Cynthia A. Roby, "U-Turn"
Poetry (Editor J.N. Fishhawk): Patrick Synan, "Outside the Clinic"

2019
Fiction (Editor Mary Bast): Avra Margariti,"The Calligrapher"
Creative Nonfiction (Editor Susie H. Baxter): Hugh E. Suggs, "From One Field to Another"
Mixed Genre (Editor Kaye Linden): Jeff Streeby, "A Brindle Bull, After Kuòān Shīyuǎn"
Haiku (Editor Kaye Linden): Michael Dylan Welch, "Shēngxiào / 生肖"
Poetry (Editor J.N. Fishhawk): Raphael Kosek, "When the saints come among us" 

Call Me Sisyphus: A Dream of Creative Nonfiction

by Editor in Chief Mary Bast

We've celebrated the unique talent of Charlotte M. Porter before, applauding her imaginative use of language in writing that "sweeps enthusiastically through poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, fiction," with examples from her poetry and fiction.

In this post we bring you Porter's Flash Story Honorable Mention for a creative nonfiction piece that will rearrange your ideas about dreams. Notice Porter's unique voice and poetic near-rhymes in the first paragraphs of "Terminal Trance":

Disguised as moderns, poets Homer and Dante duped me with a junket to the Netherworld, an alumni reunion in Hades. I arrive, revive, await Homer in hip hop, Dante in high tops. What a gas! But no. My escorts are grim, thin as shadows.

One is my handsome brother Michael. The other, a former beau always late, a pretty fellow I'll call JoJo. Both lacking likeness to album photos seem taller in black manteaux, their eyes dull cupped candles of souls departed.

In dark dress, too, mine with hood, I lug two drab duffel bags, which a person my size has to slide on well-traveled floors.

Sorry, camp gear, says Michael, younger brother lost to cancer, too tired to lift--he the college batboy with metal plates in his arm, magnets for true North, our family joke, now rusty under skin so grey.

Through her dream travels, she loses and finds and loses her brother:

Call me Sisyphus, but you try pushing duffels across raft of air-filled mattresses. I falter, and Michael disappears. Has JoJo pulled him between creases of my visual field?

Was JoJo always after Michael, not me?

Through sheer will, I bring my brother back, for an instant in existence. His black coat stands grand against the milling crowd. I blink. He's gone--too big for me to see. Or too fleet like river flux or flame on silk.

                                                   Jojo and his yoyo coins evaporate. He, always beyond my ilk, the darling thief dream released through ivory and horn to steal sweet kisses. If this is closure, must I wake?

In what has become an elegy to her brother, our clever prize winner uses travel gear as a telling metaphor in her final paragraph:

A cur guards Hades, but my trusty dogs fail to keep the dead in place as I tarry on the Styx, ferry my stone-cold brother without toll for those duffels--his luggage, my baggage.

 *      *      *

For more about flash nonfiction:

Our own Kaye Linden, author of 35 Tips for Writing A Brilliant Flash Story, describes what she's looking for in Bacopa Literary Review 2018's Short Story genre, with an example of her own flash memoir in "How Can a Mother?"

Beth Ann Fennelly offers suggestions for crafting excellent flash nonfiction in "Making much of the moment," suggesting the best micro-memoir combines "the extreme abbreviation of poetry, the narrative tension of fiction, and the truth-telling of creative nonfiction. . . ." As examples Fennelly cites Anne Carson's Short Talks, J. Robert Lennon's Pieces for the Left Hand, Sarah Manguso's 300 Arguments, and James Richardson's Vectors

2017 Bacopa Literary Review Honorable Mention

Congratulations to Bacopa Literary Review 2017 Honorable Mention winners:

Poetry Honorable Mention: "This is Not a Protest Poem"
Adrian S. Potter

Adrian S. Potter writes poetry and short fiction. He is the author of the fiction chapbook Survival Notes (Červená Barva Press, 2008) and winner of the 2010 Southern Illinois Writers Guild Poetry Contest. Some publication credits include North American Review, Obsidian, and Kansas City Voices. He posts, sometimes, on his blog.

Fiction Honorable Mention: "Cry on Command"
Joe Dornich

Joe Dornich is a PhD candidate in Texas Tech's creative writing program, where he also serves as Managing Editor for Iron Horse Literary Review. His publications include Word Riot and Cahoodaloodaling.

Creative Nonfiction Honorable Mention: "Starvation"
Paddy Reid

Paddy Reid writes about army deserters in wartime, men such as his father, and the consequences for their families. He welcomes readers' feedback to his email address.

Flash Story Honorable Mention: "Terminal Trance"
Charlotte M. Porter

Charlotte M. Porter, published poet and award-winning fiction writer, lives in an old citrus hamlet in north central Florida. Enjoy her recent short fiction in Axolotl and her novella, Agnes Person, currently serialized by Visitant Lit. She is readying Falling from Grace, a short story collection, for press.

Bacopa Literary Review 2017 now available at Amazon.com

Bacopa Literary Review: Winning Words

by Editor-in-Chief Mary Bast

Charlotte M. Porter's writing sweeps enthusiastically through poetry, creative nonfiction, flash fiction, fiction. And the first thing you'll notice about every piece of this oeuvre is the imaginative use of language. Her characteristic verbal verve as nom de plume Wanda Legend is evident in a single sentence from N-word (creative nonfiction, Bacopa Literary Review 2011) as quoted in NewPages:

Not for amateurs, small-town chat is a craft masterful as tractor repair or canning.

In Porter's fiction piece, Rip Curl (Duende), foster child Sierra lives in a trailer park: 

Sierra counts out twenty-eight hop-steps to Trailer no. 78, Home Sweet Home. . . Lake Park is a slum of life-size crates, what the social worker calls a community of manufactured homes. Sierra has never been sure what to call the factory colors – dark white, grubby tan, dishwater blond. . .  The one window, covered with baggy Mylar, reminds her of a big eye with a snotty cold.

Swerve: A Life in Three Parts (SLAB|Sound & Literary Art Book) takes us from B.S. (Before Speech) through A.S. (After Speech), and a Coda:

After Speech, words are my pilosity, nettle cowage, stinging hairs.
Lips lacquered, teeth capped, ventral implants, I look like soccer mom or human rage-cage, gagged hostage inside snare.

Burningwood Literary Journal features two of Porter's poems. 

From Snapshot with Suet:

Say, has anyone found the old lorgnettes, those folding opera glasses?
Nice keepsake my musical sisters agree, sorting our dead Mother’s things.
Vissi d’arte, Vissi d’amore they yodel from Tosca.

From Morning Scrabble:

At my brother Michael’s gravesite, others toss handfuls of earth, stones, flowers. I throw small wooden squares with letters, stuffed in my purse and pockets, pieces from his favorite childhood board game — winning words, our excuse for wagers.

Before they dump out drawers at home, let’s see what’s left to play: O B T X R U D Z E S C H I F N A T M A …W. WOMBAT, RATFINK, tags for schoolyard FOES. FAUX, FINCH, short DEFT words like ZED and UR earned quick points. Easy vocab, RUDE, RAIN, SHINE, AFTER, we learned, ate money vowels that better earned their keep in CRUDE, INTRUDE, SHINER, SHAFTED, RAFTER.

About Porter's prize-winning Deaf Uncle (Talking/Writing flash fiction contest), judge Joanne Avallon wrote:

I fell hardest for 'Deaf Uncle' because the language haunted me, both the Uncle's ('virgin cartilage' for 'Virgil's Carthage') and the narrator's ('crafts for girls, sports for boys...same old Scout badges'). The author packs so much intention into every word that each has a long half-life. . . .

So now you know what to expect in Charlotte M. Porter's Pangs (First Place Fiction prize, Bacopa 2014). And you won't be disappointed:

. . . After we split, I should have dug out all the bulbs and tubers, yanked the corms and grafts, peeled the orchids off their small wooden paddles. . .

Bunky never could say no to the unwanted or underperforming office plant. . . After several months in a kind home, these salvaged plants always gained strength and id, huge, office-bossy with drag-along auras from the culture of mid-level management. Pencil cactus hangs overhead transpiring oxygen like a panting creep. Euphorb snivels, shrivels skin, sprouts thorns to snag curious fingers. Croton reaches out like a mission statement and threatens to crawl on those damn leafy polka dots. . . .

Charlotte M. Porter lives in an old citrus hamlet in North Central Florida. In addition to awards mentioned above, she has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and has placed as finalist in The Calvino Prize (outstanding pieces of fiction in the fabulist experimentalist style of Italo Calvino) and Rose Metal Press Sixth Annual Chapbook contest. She's also been published in Baseball Bard, and the Remaking Moby-Dick project of Pea River Journal (international multimodal storytelling performance). Porter's most recent exhibit, Hem-nal, a collaboration with Christy Sheffield Sanford, explores hemlines through poetry and stitched collages.