Action Stations!

The periscope has risen, the torpedoes fired. The explosion is about to hit your screens. Stand by for the latest war-filled issue of the Shit Creek Review.

http://shitcreek.auszine.com/issue11/

This issue, number 11 in a continuing odyssey, sees another casualty with the sad departure of Pat Jones, our long-suffering art editor. Happy paddling, Pat! We'll miss you on the oars! And thanks to Paul for his long-suffering at the helm and for floating this baby in the first place.

Issue 12 will be 'A Fetish for Good Poetry'

'Ah thy people, thy children, thy chosen,
Marked cross from the womb and perverse!'
—from Swinburne’s “Dolores”

Submissions - yes - you will submit! - to be with us by the end of May 2010.

Paddle on!

The Flea Footeth It Featly

A Flea moreover which transmuteth that which is base imperfect Mettle into Gold,  & whych projecteth many a Stone Philosophickal or Nugget Poetickal thereby; as witnesseth Philip Quinlan, Leo Yankevich, Joseph Salemi, Fr. Robert J. Pecotte, Geoff Page, Amit Majmudar, Rose Kelleher, Nigel Holt, Bill Greenwell, Alan Gould, Louis Gallo, Angela France, Nausheen Eusuf, Stephen Edgar, Ann Drysdale, Kevin Cutrer, Peter Coghill, C.E. Chaffin & Jared Carter.

http://www.the-flea.com/

Take me to your leader

There's been quite a shakeup at SCR recently. Most of you probably already know that the esteemed, distinguished and eminently spongeworthy Paul Stevens has stepped down as editor. We're also going to have to muddle through somehow without Don Zirilli and Pat Jones, our erstwhile art editors. Wahhh!

All is not lost, however. Nigel Holt has volunteered to take over as editor-in-chief. I've joined Angela France as a co-editor. What this means is that Nigel gets to do the scutwork of forwarding the submissions to Angela and me in anonymous batches for scoring (so you could say that our selection process is 2/3 blind). We also get to blame him if anything goes wrong.

We've completed the selections for the February issue and will release it soon, or at least sometime this month. We're still looking for a new Art Director. In the meantime, Nigel's calling this issue "the Austerity issue" because the layout is a bit plainer than usual. Thanks to Peter Bloxsom, who built the site and has been very generous with his time and advice, the technical side of the transition has been relatively painless. So we're paddling on.

Seen in Shit Creek

In SCR's 'Talking to the Dead' issue way back last August, Shit Creeker Michael Cantor had this abso deffo brillo sonnet:

'Death Watch'

What a little ripper, eh? But absolutely YONKS later the rest of the world finally catches up with Shit Creek as Associate Press releases this story in Feb 2010:

Feline's fatal streak: Oscar the cat predicts patients' time to die

Moral: Up Shit Creek in a barbed-wire canoe without a paddle is a weird place to be, but it definitely puts you at the cutting edge in talking to the dead. Or something.