Submissions Guidelines:

Fiction:
Hot Metal Bridge is interested in your well-crafted literary fiction, whether short story, flash fiction, or novel excerpt. What counts as literary? Just don’t send us a story about spaceship-flying dinosaurs. That said, we like aesthetic diversity, from realism to surrealism, maximalism to minimalism. And if you simply write stories and don’t care about literary classifications, send us your work too. We accept submissions as Word attachments sent to fiction@hotmetalbridge.org. Please keep submissions under 7,000 words and make sure to include your name and contact information.

Poetry: 
We are many, and our tastes differ, but as this is an entirely online journal, there’s no reason not to read the past issue before submitting (it’s good, we promise). If you can smell what we’re stepping in, then send something our way. Down to business. We welcome poetry submissions of five (5) pages or five (5) poems, whichever comes first. Please attach your submission as one document (we prefer .doc, but .docx .rtf or .pdf will all work) with your name appearing at the top of the first page. E-mail subject heading should read “Spring Poetry Submission” and in the body, you may include a short bio or cover letter, if that strikes your fancy. Send your work our way:poetry@hotmetalbridge.org.

Nonfiction:
We’re looking for nonfiction writing in all its disguises: memoir, travel writing, literary journalism, satire, etc. We want to hear about dirty kitchens, ill-mannered exchange students, and hydrogen bonding. We will read about decaying vineyards, heroic mall guards, disenchanted cartographers, and sweet potatoes. Look, just don’t James Frey us and everything will be fine. If it’s new and it’s true, send 500 to 5,000 words as a Word or RTF attachment to nonfiction@hotmetalbridge.org.

Criticism:
Hot Metal Bridge criticism is looking for innovative academic or non-academic work from professional, student, and other sources. As a forum for a variety of approaches to cultural criticism, we want your seminar and conference papers, your unpublished chapters, your articles and miscellany. Our aim is to create a space for previously unpublished pieces which may not find an easy home elsewhere. Because critical work is inherently creative, we encourage interdisciplinarity and hybridity in both form and content. Send us your poor, your tired, your huddled pages yearning to breathe free. We want to give voice to ideas that might otherwise be confined to obscurity. Submissions should be about 1 to 30 pages in MLA style. Send Word documents as attachments to criticism@hotmetalbridge.org.

And finally, good luck to all of you and we hope you’ll stay turned for upcoming book reviews, podcasts and our glorious fifth issue.

-Sal Pane and Geoff Peck
Editors

(Norton, June 2008)

Emily Stone

Catapulted between New York State and Thailand, Florida and Chiapas, and even New Jersey and Bloomington, Indiana, the six interlinked monologues in Joan Silber’s The Size of the World explore the “elusive connection between place and happiness.” Silber, whose Ideas of Heaven was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Award, is a master of crafting overlaps in plot that imply larger meanings without compromising unity. Here, honest first-person accounts, equal parts confession and meditation, reveal a shared sense of freedom and displacement that marks American expatriates and, in one case, immigrants living as Americans. Recounting his life in Thailand, Toby describes himself as “a foreigner washed up here once by war.” Kit, a hippie single mother in Mexico, explains, “I was a traveler: I liked my comfort, I was not always brave, and I was only just starting to be curious.” In some cases, the relationship between parallel narrators is apparent within a speaker’s first paragraphs: Toby and Kit, for instance, were high school lovers. In others, the connections are more aloof, less linear–siblings’ stories are separated by decades, and a husband and mother-in-law paint a Rashomon-style portrait of the woman between them.

Of course, tales of international exploration are also tales of international conflict. Silber’s stories in The Size of the World are war stories, but, like the people who tell them, they are inherently off-kilter and framed by peculiar circumstances. Toby begins his story in Vietnam but as a civilian engineer rather than a draftee. Annunziata’s World War II story is of a contented life in rural Sicily under the Fascists until economics prompted her husband to emigrate. Owen alludes to the trenches in the First World War, yet his life in the book only begins (in a chapter spoken by his sister) during the following years when he is a soldier of fortune in Southeast Asia. Mike, a politics professor who raises a liberal voice against the American “War on Terror,” acts as much out of anxiety over losing a wife’s affection as he does out of conviction. In the final chapter, Owen returns as a pensioner and anti-war protester in California in the 1970s, a man whose small actions unintentionally attach him to the fates of the book’s other characters.

On occasion, Silber belabors the connections between her protagonists, assigning them awkward statements about a high-school science teacher or a first husband’s grandfather only in the service of connecting disparate narrative lines. Her writerly voice, too, can break through the scrim of the monologues, though her intellectual omniscience is less jarring than it is utterly captivating. She prompts Mike, the most contemporary and also the most sedentary of the narrators, to say that “if you longed for another place, you longed for another time,” signaling that the “elusive connection” between travel and emotion is the product of contradiction layered over romance.

We apologize for the slight delay and promise to repay you in gold coin — or rather, in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, criticism, and art, all of which we’d take over gold any day.

Yours, with anticipation,
The Editors