[Kate Benedict]

Umbrella's Fall all-poetry edition is now online, featuring the special "work poem" section and a wonderful mix of voices familiar and new:

http://www.umbrellajournal.com/

The editorial note contains an introduction to the work poems, another celebratory "issue cento" and news about Best of the Net nominations.

The winter issue, online December 1, will mark Umbrella's first anniversary! Poems on general topics are welcome, and also poems for a planned special section on cold poems, i.e. poems which makes use of winter ideas and/or wintery imagery. Snow, sleet, ice, icicles, glaciers, Norway, whatever calls forth the inner and outer experience of a winter state. For this and all Umbrella extras, poems that have been published in books are welcome. If all goes well, more surprises will be in store for the anniversary edition.

We're reading for the prose section as well.

Bumbershoot, our light verze zine, lives on but as an annual. The next planned issue of the ’shoot will be Summer 2008 and we will begin reading for it next year.

[Janet Kenny]

Congratulations to all concerned and special congratulations to:
Catherine Chandler, Jehanne Dubrow, Paul Hostovsky, Patty Paine, Henry Quince
& James R.Whitley, who were picked as "The Best of the Net".


Janet

[Diane Dees]

Kate, I love the Cento! And I know how much fun you must have writing those. When I was in graduate school, a classmate and I did a patchwork of all of the semester's readers' theatre presentations, pulled in some other classmates as readers, and it turned out to be a very silly, very good performance. And when I went to the Arts & Letters writing workshop in 2002, I wrote a short story based on all of the short stories that had been critiqued in our group and read it aloud our last night together. I wish I could always enjoy writing that much.

[Anne Bryant-Hamon]

Kate,

I began reading it yesterday. Very classy presentation and plenty to enjoy there. Thanks for the labor of love. I enjoyed reading the story behind "Umbrella'.

And congrats to those who got published.

Anne