As I write this just before Labor Day, the 58th quadrennial U.S. presidential
election dominates the news cycle, terrorists attempt to annul the achievements
of civilization, and the world suffers the harsh realities of climate change.
What better time to open the curtain on the fall issue of KYSO Flash,
allowing our artists and scribes—painters and poets, photographers and
memoirists, fiction writers and other conjurers—to flood the global stage
with their healing, visionary artistry.
KF-6 presents 120 works (by a total of 75 authors and artists) for your reading and
viewing pleasure, including our specialties, flash and micro-fiction (17 works total),
as well as memoir (5), lineated poems (14), prose poems (8), hybrid forms such as
haibun (23) and tanka forms (11), and more.
If you love the visual arts—and we do in almost every manifestation—we
hope you will enjoy our new category, Ekphrastic Works (23 of them!), a genre
represented only three times before in KYSO Flash. You’ll also find in
this issue six additional paintings (in addition to those accompanying the Ekphrastic
Works), five haiga (i.e., visual art + poetry), two photographs, and one graphic
illustration.
A few highlights behind the creation of Issue 6:
⚡ I’m delighted and deeply grateful that
Contributing Editor Jack Cooper has agreed to become my co-editor at KYSO
Flash. While Jack continues to contribute poetry, essays, and other works, he
now also adjudicates contests, reads and votes on all submissions, and consults on
various editorial issues. His pay? Pocket change for coffee, postage, and printing
cartridges. Read all about it in our press release,
Poet Promoted to Co-Editor.
⚡ We were so pleased to receive six richly
rendered Ekphrastic Works by previous contributor Charles D. Tarlton that we
designated him as this issue’s
Featured
Author. We applaud his sharp eye and careful research as he extracts meaning and
perspective from some of the world’s greatest paintings.
⚡ We were pleasantly surprised to see
a baseball anecdote arrive in our Submittable box one day.
Double Play,
a flash memoir from emerging writer Charles Couch, took us back some 50 years
to a shocking moment on the field that made a difference in more than one life,
then and now. We look forward to reading more of Couch’s work, and to
baseball stories in general.
⚡ We are proud to share the winning works
from our recent Haibun & Tanka Prose contest as judged by poet Matthew Paul,
co-editor of the Presence haiku journal in the U.K. Our deepest thanks to
Paul, who generously volunteered his talent and time to pore over scores of
submissions. His accompanying adjudication report could serve as a primer to
aspiring writers in these genres. The winning works, his report and commentaries,
and our semi-finalists appear here in our fall issue:
HTP Contest
Results.
Our next competition, “One Life, One Earth,” which solicits work on the
theme of climate change, will open on the 15th of November 2016; and means to
reward the observations and inspirations of writers and artists worldwide in the
hopes of fostering compassion, understanding, advocacy, and innovation to counteract
this devastating threat to life on our planet. To raise the stakes of our own
commitment, KYSO Flash pledges to donate a minimum of ten percent of each
entry fee received, to an environmental group with global reach and impact. We are
considering several organizations and plan to release the name of our choice when the
contest opens.
In the meantime, details and guidelines are available here in Issue 6:
Competition Opens Soon. Cash
prizes and publication (online in our spring issue 2017, and in our print anthology,
fall 2017) will be awarded.
If you’re on Facebook, please consider supporting our little
journal—and the 248 writers and artists whose works we’ve published in
six issues!—by “liking” our Facebook page and by
sharing our link with
your friends, family, and colleagues. A world of thanks!
As always, we’re so glad you dropped by, and we hope you enjoy what you find
on our menu...
Statistics for Issue 6:
- Content: The total of 120 works includes 108 written
works—98 of which (or about 91%) are new and first published in
KYSO Flash—and 12 works of visual art, one of which is new
and published here for the first time anywhere (thank you, Janne Karlsson!).
(When submitting works for publication, please note that we consider works, both
written and visual arts, which appear on social media such as Facebook to have been
published already, since they may have been viewed and shared by hundreds or even
thousands of folks.)
- VIDA: For readers and writers like me who are interested
in such numbers, KF-6 contains works by a total of 75 authors and artists,
43 of which are women (i.e., 57%).
About VIDA: Women in
Literary Arts
