From the Editor’s Desk
Winter, 2013
This past fall New York City was hammered by hurricane Sandy. Several of our editors lost power for weeks and many of our friends and neighbors have suffered far worse devastation. With that in mind, I would like to thank everyone involved with putting our little webzine together. Thank you editors for scrambling to get internet access so you could send me your sections; thank you illustrators for producing amazing art in half the usual time; and finally, thank you readers both near and far, who continue to support us after (I’m counting on my toes now) thirteen years on the web. While we and others rebuild, we are happy we can continue to do what we’ve always done: steadily bring you some of the best essays, fiction, memoir, poetry and art on the worldwide web.
As many of you know, Ducts.org is part of an umbrella organization called New York Writers Resources, dedicated to helping writers everywhere. Also under that umbrella are our two sister organizations. Greenpoint Press has continued the tradition of publishing extraordinary books that are too often over-looked by mainstream publishers. Call of the Lark, by Maura Mulligan, and Fierce Joy, by Ellen Schecter, are memoirs that illustrate the triumph of the human spirit, and we are proud to have them on our bookshelf, along with other non-fiction books like We’re Not Leaving, the story of 9/11 First Responders, as told by Dr. Benjamin Luft, and gOld, interviews with men and women over the age of 70, as collected by Harry Getzov. With our next book, Starfish, by Patty Dann (a sequel to her critically acclaimed novel, Mermaids), we turn our eye back to fiction. But we’re not turning our back on non-fiction, as in the spring we’re also publishing the gripping memoir about a daughter’s stroke and how it affected the family, My Daughter/Myself, by esteemed writer, Linda Wolfe, author of the best-selling Wasted: The Preppie Murder Case. But our biggest news concerns one of our first books, Long Gone, Richard Willis’s memoir about growing up on a farm in Iowa during the Depression. After being named as one of the most important books on the economy by Simon Constable in the Wall Street Journal online, the book has found new life and we are now in our third printing. Visit us here at http://greenpointpress.org/
And once again, this fall’s the New York Writers Workshop held sold out fiction and non-fiction pitch conferences. Writers from all over the country travel to New York to pitch their novels or book ideas to editors in person. Our next conferences are in the spring, March and April. THE NYWW also held a series of free classes at various New York City Public Libraries, as well as holding classes based at the Manhattan JCC. http://newyorkwritersworkshop.com/
We continue to raise money as part of our effort to bring you the best personal stories on the web. If you enjoy the thought-provoking essays and memoirs, if you are captivated by our fiction, poetry and art, I urge you to donate whatever amount you can. Every little bit helps!
Thank you for visiting and please return again and again!
-Jonathan Kravetz, Editor-in-Chief
This issue of Ducts is made possible with a regrant from the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, supported by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.