heartlands magazine

Firelands College in Sandusky, Ohio, publishes a regional literary magazine called Heartlands, which seeks submissions from writers and artists with various community and institutional ties. Larry Smith, the poet who edits Heartlands, manages to showcase high school and college students alongside active "academic poets" (MFA types), visual artists and photographers alongside fiction writers, teachers alongside psychologists and Vietnam vets and union organizers.

The publication has a strong sense of class consciousness which translates at times into political consciousness and at times into an implicit (almost "libertarian") sense that writers and artists (ought to) come from various lines of work. Heartlands, as the name suggests, is also regional in just about every sense of the word. Many of the writers come from Ohio and Michigan and/or take up the midwest as topoi. The magazine's website is not updated regularly but provides a sampling of the work.

I've got a poem in the latest issue and attended yesterday the issue's launch party down in Sandusky, Ohio. I read aloud some poetry at the party, which I rarely do and which tends to freak me out, but I cracked wise about being a transplanted Ohioan living in Michigan and *not* being a football fan and that broke the proverbial ice.

Anyway, the event was a joy. Some local folksingers did Ani DiFranco covers, poets read their work, a performance artist did an odd routine that involved members of the Bush administation doing touchdown dances, and, in a surreal twist, the manager of a local bird sanctuary brought some hawks and a bald eagle that lost its sight due to West Nile Virus.

Kudos to Larry at Heartlands (a mainstay at working-class studies conferences and a compelling poet in his own right) for keeping the regional arts alive and prospering.