HPN Issue 21 comes cloaked in black like a thief in the night, a lock pick in one hand, a Bible in the other, citing & reciting chapter & verse by Ace Boggess, Geoff Howes, Peycho Kanev, John McKernan, Llewellyn McKernan, Joey Nicoletti, Kirby Olson, John Popielaski, Paul Smith, Patricia Walsh, & me; fiction by Clyde Liffey, Richard Stimac, & Andrea Tillmanns; nonfiction by K. McGinnis Brown; & art by Brian Michael Barbeito. Many thanks to all!
On a sad note, John McKernan, my friend & mentor, died this spring. I met John when I was a sophomore at Marshall University, where he taught in the English Department. John was a true poet down to the pointy nib of the inky goatee he sported back then. He had poems in books & magazines & I wanted to be like him.
In those days, I was far too shy to let anyone know my literary aspirations, but taking his creative writing class, I got my first poems published when he, unbeknownst to me, submitted them to the student literary magazine. Over the next few years, John became my academic advisor, my honors seminar sponsor, &--with a thousand apologies to William A. Smith, my high school English teacher--my all-time favorite teacher.
I could talk ad infinitum on what he taught me about poetry, writing, & life at large. Indeed, sometimes I do. I doubt if anyone could have been more helpful to a young writer--not only me, but countless others--than John McKernan. He will be missed, but not forgotten.
Many thanks to Llewellyn McKernan for allowing Home Planet to reprint a selection of John's poems here as a small memoriam to him. Requiescat in pace.
For those who may have missed it, Home Planet News is looking for book-length manuscripts of poetry & fiction to publish via Half Inch Press.
Here's a little information about Half Inch:
Half Inch Press was created for writers who find major publishers mostly unapproachable & small presses only available through contests which, due to the roulette nature of that route, often prove both expensive & iffy.
We don’t require reading fees. Printing costs will be paid via royalties. In olden days, printing was a major expense, but thanks to the number of print-on-demand publishers now available, we don’t need to mortgage the house to buy our own printing press or truck on down the road to ruin to purchase bulk copies of books from a print shop. Thus, Half Inch Press can operate on a shoestring.
Books previously published by Half Inch Press are available at a number of booksellers, including Amazon, Books-a-Million, Booktopia, IndieBound, Indigo, Kyoto Books, Thrift Books, & others (even Walmart).
What are we looking for? The kinds of work that appear in Home Planet News should serve as a general indication of our tastes. See HPN's guidelines for specific information about submissions.
Enjoy Issue 21, & as always, many thanks!
Matt
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