NYC-based poet Iris N. Schwartz has a new poem, "We Are Here", published at New Mirage Journal. You can read it here.

Other contributors to the Winter issue include Marge Piercy, Cindy Hochman, Ernie Rains, Timothy Dean Martin, Kevin M. Hibshman, Geri Radasci, and the featured poet is Farideh Hassanzadeh-Mostafavi.

Enjoy!!

For those among us (writers, anyway) who may have languished in, labored for, or had their work regaled to the small presses for most of their entire careers... check out this really neat interview from the New York Times Book Review section with recent National Book Award Winner, Jaimy Gordon.

Her novel, Lord of Misrule, was published by a press so small that she's the only author they publish and it was a print run of only 2000 copies. Yet, she still won the NBA for Best Fiction. It's a really inspiring interview. It says, in part:

"Ms. Gordon, 66, has taught writing for almost 30 years at Western Michigan University and lives by herself in a two-story house next to a lake here. Her husband, Peter Blickle, 17 years her junior, teaches German at the university and lives by another lake, about a 20-minute walk away. His wife goes over there most evenings with her dog and they have a glass of schnapps.

"Ms. Gordon, who has a graduate degree in writing from Brown but also spent time working at a racetrack and briefly lived with an ex-convict who set fire to their apartment, has never been very conventional. She has a huge corona of springy, tightly curled hair that suggests prolonged exposure to a light socket, and a personality to match: forthright, disarming, uncensored. She is a wiser, chastened version of the reckless young female character who turns up in many of her books and never misses a chance to endanger herself.

"'I’ve spent my whole professional life swirling the eddies of the margins,' Ms. Gordon said over dinner last week, and added, 'I had opportunities, and I blew them.'  (read complete interview here .)