CJ MAGAZINE

Cowboy Jamboree Magazine
Good grit lit.

Our Magazine Style and Purpose
It's in the title.

COWBOY [kou-boi] (def.)
1. American plains animal herder who tends cows
2. one who is reckless or ignores risk, i.e. "cowboy attitude"
3. tradesman with questionable or atypical practices, i.e. "cowboy plumbing"
4. fast or careless driver on the highway, i.e. "slow down, cowboy"
5. slang for "outlaw"

JAMBOREE [jam-buh-ree] (def.)
1. a large celebration or party, typically boisterous
2. a carousel of noisy merrymaking

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Many thanks and much love to Rabble Lit and Steven Lambert for letting us reprint a revised version of "Finding Larry Brown." Check out the original and more great stuff from Rabble Lit.

SLC is in the new CJ!!
We've got an interview and new story with one of our all time favorite authors, Sheldon Lee Compton, in the Larry Brown-inspired Winter-Spring Issue. How appropriate since one of our other all time favorites once compared SLC to LB:
"Sheldon Lee Compton is a hillbilly Bukowski, one of the grittiest writers to come down the pike since Larry Brown, and BROWN BOTTLE is his best work yet."
--Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time.

Look for our new issue mid-March!

What We're Reading
Collection Reviews on our Interviews and Reviews page: Thrift Store Coats by Brooks Rexroat (Orson's Publishing) and Five Hundred Poor by Noah Milligan (Central Ave Pub)

GUILTY AS CHARGED
directed by Chris Iovenko: We've got a story in the Fall issue from filmmaker Chris Iovenko, who, along with Tom Thurman, made the awesome "Guilty as Charged" documentary about Harry Crews back in the 90s...check out the doc here and read "Ordinary Crimes," in our Fall Crews tribute issue (one tab over). Iovenko's other credits include his award-winning dark comedy EASY SIX (Showtime) which marked his feature writing and directing debut.
Guilty as Charged: https://vimeo.com/145322593

Check out more from Chris on his website.

Ted Geltner's
Blood, Bone and Marrow

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! Excerpt and interview with the author in the Fall issue! 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.

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.