We would like to remind everyone that we are still open for submissions. We are looking for a wider variety of work than we had for the first issue. We would especially like to see more short fiction in the future.

Our target date for the second issue is July (we’re doing our best to make this a quarterly literary journal).

Read the submission guidelines before sending us your work.

Keep up the creativity.

Related posts: Faking It, On a Shoestring

There is new commentary on the historical significance of the Terracotta Warriors. It seems that they may not have been intended as an army, but rather as servants and bodyguards for the emperor.

Mark’s China Blog has a great post about the historical commentary.

After seeing the 兵马俑 up close (as close as the museum allows anyway), I can see how this argument can be made. There are plenty of “warriors” that don’t appear to be actual warriors. Of course, due to the fact that the peasants ransacked the tomb of the weapons to rebel against the emperor, it’s more difficult to determine the function of each figure (at least from the perspective of someone who has studied them in depth).

Still, the change in historical perspective does not lessen the impressive nature of the site. The size and craftsmanship of the Terracotta Army is amazing.

The first issue of Terracotta Typewriter is ready for human consumption. You can read it online or save it and read it later. We have it available as a .pdf file.

Read it here now. Issue #1, April 2009.

Issue #1 features the work of Xujun Eberlein, Doug Johnson, Sun Qixia, Jim Shelley, William Doreski, Gale Acuff, Caroline Monday, and Andrea DeAngelis.

We would like to thank everyone who submitted work for the premier issue as well as those who gave us words of encouragement and technical help. We’d especially like to thank our good friend Tony in Pittsburgh for helping with hosting the site and fixing all the server glitches.

We look forward to reading more work for the second issue of Terracotta Typewriter. Keep those submissions coming.

Keep writing!

Thanks to @stilbiz on Twitter for pointing out this article from CBC.

It seems that Kurt Vonnegut had some unpublished short stories when he passed away two years ago. Delacorte Press will release them as a collection titled Look at the Birdie later this year.

We’re looking forward to reading it and so should you.

The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation has officially launched it’s blog (at http://www.grdodge.org/blog/)–it had been up for awhile, but they decided to make it official today (I’m sure they waited an extra day to avoid any confusion).

The Dodge Foundation has funded poetry festivals in New Jersey–in the years that I attended, it was held at Waterloo Village. In the past they have hosted poetic talent that includes Allen Ginsburg, Taha Muhammad Ali, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Hal Sirowitz, among numerous others.

We at Terracotta Typewriter hope that the Dodge Foundation will continue it’s work bringing great poetry to New Jersey.