Cowboy Jamboree Magazine
Good grit lit.
Good grit lit.
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Been meaning to check out one of last year's most acclaimed books, Blood, Bone and Marrow: a Biography of Harry Crews?
Check out our review and order the paperback, out now! Interview with the author in the Fall issue! Ted Geltner's Blood, Bone and Marrow Order the Paperback of Blood, Bone and Marrow a Biography of Harry Crews |
Harry Crews, 1979
(photo by Tom Graves).
Be sure to check out
Style & Submit for our
current call for submissions for our Harry Crews
tribute issue in the Fall! We'll have an excerpt from Tom Graves' Grit Lit novel Pullers of which Crews himself said "If you buy one book this year, this is the one" in 1998. Graves will also answer our questions about his 1979 interview with Harry Crews.
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Fall issue sneak preview:
"Underneath All the Sham: Dinty W. Moore on his 1992 Harry Crews Interview" (full interview fall 2017): AV: 1992-Scar Lover is being marketed as a "classic Southern" story, Crews discusses his autobiography in your interview, as well as the merits of being a "southern novelist." What was Crews' view of himself in the "Southern novelist" tradition as far as you know? DM: He deeply respected those writers before him who had been tagged “southern,” but he wasn’t at all happy with the limits of the label. “I don't think any novelist worth his salt wants an adjective in the front of the word novelist,” he told me, pointing out that no one calls Updike a “Northern novelist.” He didn’t seem angry about it, of course. He just seemed to find it all – the notoriety, the criticism, the reviews, the pigeonholing -- a bit ridiculous. Dinty W. Moore is an American essayist and writer of both fiction and non-fiction books. He received the Grub Street National Book Prize for Non-Fiction for his memoir, Between Panic and Desire, in 2008. Moore's essays and stories have appeared in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Arts & Letters, The Gettysburg Review, Utne Reader, and Crazyhorse. He also edits Brevity, an online journal of creative nonfiction, and he is on the editorial board of Creative Nonfiction magazine. He is currently Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Ohio University. "The Grit in Himself: A Conversation with Tom Graves about Harry Crews" (full interview Fall 2017): AV: How aware was Crews, if you know, of himself as a kind of forefather to Grit Lit? Did he see himself simply in a Southern Grotesque tradition (like a Flannery O'Connor), or did he view himself and others as creating something innovative with hardscrabble characters and language and setting? TG: He absolutely had a sense of himself that he had staked out something new and original in the literary world, that no one else was like him...Harry often talked about how he couldn’t write anything worthwhile until he recognized the grit in himself. I always felt that what was at the root of Harry’s existential dilemma was the fact he was from the rickets belt, as he said, but also and just as important that he was an intellectual too, a profoundly deep thinker, and this too served to ostracize him from those he grew up with. He was always made to feel he was an outsider from both worlds. Tom Graves is the award-winning author of Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson, the Blues Foundation's choice for book of the year in 2010. Graves' first book was the "grit-lit" critic's favorite, Pullers, which was praised by the legendary Harry Crews, crime writer Robert Campbell, Charles Gaines, and critic Dave Marsh. Compared favorably to the gonzo style of Hunter S. Thompson, Pullersis a novel about the high-octane, high-testosterone world of professional arm-wrestling. He is the former editor of Rock & Roll Disc magazine and has written for numerous national publications including Rolling Stone, The New York Times, The Washington Post, American History magazine, The Oxford American, Musician, The New Leader, and others. He is a professor of English at LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis, Tennessee. |
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[Our Sentiments]
We're a Grit-Lit magazine focused on the rural working class and revisionist western writing. We are named after the cowboy jamboree tradition of campfire songs. If it'd go in a Hank Williams song, we'll probably like it in a story too. We are not a traditional western magazine. Western stories we accept tend to stray from archetypes of females as damsels and cowboy gunslingin' heroes. We like nontraditional western stories that, just like the rural grit lit we tend to accept and promote, blends working class and literary language to explore characters and places that find themselves on the hardscrabble rather than heroic side of life. In other words, our cowboys are more likely to jump off a '71 Maverick than rope a bull.
We do like old westerns. Hank Williams is one of our favorite writers. Used boots are better than new sneakers. At Cowboy Jamboree we believe all that. If it is nontraditional western, western noir, new south, bluecollar midwest, folk, or rural, it is our kind of writing, fiction or non-.
Plain and simple, Cowboy Jamboree is dedicated to publishing those stories and creative non-fiction pieces that stir our passions for the people and places that we call rural, be they about the woods, the Old South, the New South, the hills of Kentucky, or the western plains. We prefer our writing to have grit and rough edges. See our Style & Submit page for guidelines on getting your stuff read for publication, as well as some more insight into our favorite writing styles.
[Just Come Across the Cable]
4/13/2017: New Call for Submission! Special Edition Fall 2017 issue: "All We Need of Hell," a Harry Crews homage
4/7/2017: New Feature: Reviews! Got a new grit lit or nontraditional western book coming out? We'd love to consider it for our new feature, Reviews, which will appear in an online page and in the next issue. We'll gladly accept submissions of reviews written or you can send an inquiry for CJ to read with an eye for review. We'll have all the cool covers up with author pics so it's a great chance to get some eyes on your new book.
3/28/2017: Our new Spring issue is now live! Check out the current issue tab above.
3/26/2017: Check out CJ editor Adam Van Winkle's new novel, Abraham Anyhow, out today! Order here!
3/15/2017: Spring issue out 3/28!!! Submissions for "The Family Strain" Spring issue are now closed. If you are still waiting to hear from us on the status of a submission you will find out this week so stay tuned. Thanks so much to all that submitted and check back 3/28 for the new issue!
[Current Cowboy Jamboree call for Fiction and Non]
Current Call for Grit Lit: Rural and Revisionist Western Stories, Fiction or Non-: We need your best Harry Crews homage for our Fall 2017 issue "All We Need of Hell." Crews is one of our favorite authors, and we'll take any interpretation you have of grit lit that is "Crewsesque." We picked All We Need of Hell for the theme because we are at the 30th anniversary of its 1987 publication, but feel free to work in your favorite Crews stuff (Feast of Snakes is our favorite if we just had to pick). We'll have special articles, vintage pieces and Crews relevant interviews. Give us stories to put in this Celebration of The Knockout Artist that is Harry Crews. We dig short stories, creative non-fiction, flash fiction, vignettes/prose poetry, photography, and illustration. As always we like our stuff gritty and rough-edged in some way. See our website for past issues, submission guidelines, authors we dig, and style preferences: www.cowboyjamboreemagazine.com Deadline: 9/1/2017 (or earlier if we meet our acceptance for volume)
[Our Sentiments]
We're a Grit-Lit magazine focused on the rural working class and revisionist western writing. We are named after the cowboy jamboree tradition of campfire songs. If it'd go in a Hank Williams song, we'll probably like it in a story too. We are not a traditional western magazine. Western stories we accept tend to stray from archetypes of females as damsels and cowboy gunslingin' heroes. We like nontraditional western stories that, just like the rural grit lit we tend to accept and promote, blends working class and literary language to explore characters and places that find themselves on the hardscrabble rather than heroic side of life. In other words, our cowboys are more likely to jump off a '71 Maverick than rope a bull.
We do like old westerns. Hank Williams is one of our favorite writers. Used boots are better than new sneakers. At Cowboy Jamboree we believe all that. If it is nontraditional western, western noir, new south, bluecollar midwest, folk, or rural, it is our kind of writing, fiction or non-.
Plain and simple, Cowboy Jamboree is dedicated to publishing those stories and creative non-fiction pieces that stir our passions for the people and places that we call rural, be they about the woods, the Old South, the New South, the hills of Kentucky, or the western plains. We prefer our writing to have grit and rough edges. See our Style & Submit page for guidelines on getting your stuff read for publication, as well as some more insight into our favorite writing styles.
[Just Come Across the Cable]
4/13/2017: New Call for Submission! Special Edition Fall 2017 issue: "All We Need of Hell," a Harry Crews homage
4/7/2017: New Feature: Reviews! Got a new grit lit or nontraditional western book coming out? We'd love to consider it for our new feature, Reviews, which will appear in an online page and in the next issue. We'll gladly accept submissions of reviews written or you can send an inquiry for CJ to read with an eye for review. We'll have all the cool covers up with author pics so it's a great chance to get some eyes on your new book.
3/28/2017: Our new Spring issue is now live! Check out the current issue tab above.
3/26/2017: Check out CJ editor Adam Van Winkle's new novel, Abraham Anyhow, out today! Order here!
3/15/2017: Spring issue out 3/28!!! Submissions for "The Family Strain" Spring issue are now closed. If you are still waiting to hear from us on the status of a submission you will find out this week so stay tuned. Thanks so much to all that submitted and check back 3/28 for the new issue!
[Current Cowboy Jamboree call for Fiction and Non]
Current Call for Grit Lit: Rural and Revisionist Western Stories, Fiction or Non-: We need your best Harry Crews homage for our Fall 2017 issue "All We Need of Hell." Crews is one of our favorite authors, and we'll take any interpretation you have of grit lit that is "Crewsesque." We picked All We Need of Hell for the theme because we are at the 30th anniversary of its 1987 publication, but feel free to work in your favorite Crews stuff (Feast of Snakes is our favorite if we just had to pick). We'll have special articles, vintage pieces and Crews relevant interviews. Give us stories to put in this Celebration of The Knockout Artist that is Harry Crews. We dig short stories, creative non-fiction, flash fiction, vignettes/prose poetry, photography, and illustration. As always we like our stuff gritty and rough-edged in some way. See our website for past issues, submission guidelines, authors we dig, and style preferences: www.cowboyjamboreemagazine.com Deadline: 9/1/2017 (or earlier if we meet our acceptance for volume)
