Great day to come to the Centrum office. (Happy Earth Day, btw.) Birds chirping, sun cresting over Whidbey Island, and a box full of copies of the latest issue of ZYZZYVA as a gift from Howard Junker. We'll be giving them out as gifts to those participants here for Carolyn Forché's "Literature of Witness" workshop.

ZYZZYVA, a journal of west-coast writers and artists, is one of the most highly regarded literary journals in the country. (But, really, if you didn't already know that, you're probably only reading this blog by accident.)

Literary journals are the life of our literary culture. Every summer, we showcase the work of ZYZZYVA, the Bellingham Review, Willow Springs, the Crab Creek Review, and others at the Conference. This year, Willow Springs editor Sam Ligon and Crab Creek poetry editor Lana Ayers will be giving talks and workshops. 

(I pulled out some of the books from the box to show what the cover looks like, above. Here's more of a closeup.) The issue (#85), explores what Howard refers to as "textimage," words and images in which "text and image collide and collude on the page".

In other Centrum news, the summer Port Townsend Writers' Conference is still pushing at the seams of capacity. One space only remains in the Tony Cohan nonfiction workshop, and all other workshops are sold out, except for a handful of spaces remaining in the Adrian Castro poetry workshop and the Liliana Valenzuela translation workshop.