We’re excited to show you this preview of the cover art for our fall issue due out at the end of September. The cover painting, “Poet Under Pine Tree”, is by Hedy Habra of Kalamazoo, Michigan. A true renaissance woman, Hedy’s poetry has also appeared in our magazine.
John L. Stanizzi is author of the collections – Ecstasy Among Ghosts, Sleepwalking, Dance Against the Wall, After the Bell, Hallelujah Time!, High Tide – Ebb Tide, Four Bits, and Chants. His newest collection, Sundowning, will be out this year with Main Street Rag. Besides Third Wednesday, John’s poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, American Life in Poetry, The New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Blue Mountain Review, The Cortland Review, Rattle, and many others.
John is a teaching artist for the national recitation contest, Poetry Out Loud. A former New England Poet of the Year, John is the prose editor for the online journal Abstract Mag TV. He teaches literature at Manchester Community College in Manchester, CT and he lives with his wife, Carol, in Coventry.
You can order John Stanizzi’s books at these links:
Hallelujah Time! (Big Table Publishing, 2014), Dance Against the Wall (Antrim House Books, 2012), Four Bits (Grayson Books, 2018), Chants (Cervena Barva Press 2019).
Phillip Sterling is the author of In Which Brief Stories Are Told (short fiction, Wayne State U. Press 2011), and six collections of poetry: And Then Snow (Main Street Rag 2017), And for All This: Poems from Isle Royale (Ridgeway Press 2015), Abeyance (Frank Cat Press Chapbook Award 2007), Quatrains (Pudding House 2006), Significant Others
(Main Street Rag 2005), and Mutual Shores (New Issues 2000). He is the editor of Isle Royale from the AIR: Poems, Stories, and Songs from 25 Years of Artists-in-Residence (Caffeinted Press 2107) and Imported Breads: Literature of Cultural Exchange (Mammoth 2003) and served as the founding coordinator of the Literature In Person (LIP) Reading Series at Ferris State University, until his retirement in 2013. Phillip presently serves as an associate editor with Third Wednesday Magazine.
A Grammar for Snow is available from unsolicited.com or richardluftig.com; $19.99 postage and handling included.
3rd Wednesday contributor, John Sibley Willams is the winner of the Orison Poetry Prize for his poetry collection, As One Fire Consumes Another.
John Sibley Williams confronts the violent side of American history and its effect on our notions of self, fatherhood, and citizenship. […] The poems, which veer from elegiac to declarative to prayerlike, drill down into the beliefs and fears that underpin this violence.
–Poets & Writers
John Sibley Williams’ collection As One Fire Consumes Another transcends beyond the boundaries of family and history and country, beyond the body’s tragedies, the “silenced bones of others.” These poems rise as invocation, as testimonial to life’s unfiltered beauty, violence, and faith, to the “light . . . already in us.”
–Vandana Khanna, judge of The 2018 Orison Poetry Prize
John Sibley Williams is the author of the poetry collections Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. He serves as the editor of The Inflectionist Review and has edited two Northwest poetry anthologies, Alive at the Center (Ooligan Press, 2013) and Motionless from the Iron Bridge (barebones books, 2013).
As One Fire Consumes Another is avialable from Orison Books and at Amazon.
The Old Gardner Homestead
Each year, the forest reclaims more
of the old Gardner homestead
in the glen on the mountain;
but the crows still come
80 years after the family left.
They perch on an ancient oak,
looking out over the sapling-clogged field
as if harboring ancient memories of corn.
(First appeared in 3rd Wednesday, Volume VIII, No. 4)
Crossings, a chapbook by 3rd Wednesday contributor, Jude Dippold is available at Finishing Line Press or Amazon.
This small book of short poems encompasses a surprising span of the territory of the human heart. After you read Crossings, don’t return it to the shelf—keep it handy. Go back to it now and then. Open it to random parts and feel the pulse and poignancy of your own humanity reflected in this wise and wonderful mirror.
– Reginald Darling
Jude Dippold was educated and trained as a philosopher, spent his career working as an editor and communications specialist, and now finds refuge in the worlds of poetry and photography. He has spent most of his life on the edge of Allegheny National Forest where he found both solace and inspiration. He now resides in the North Cascades of western Washington and has traded the Allegheny River for the Skagit. In addition to Third Wednesday, his poetry has been published in literary magazines at Jamestown Community College, the College of Central Florida, and most recently in Exult Press’ “The Yes Book, Writings About Yes.”
Well, you’ve got a book’s worth of poems and you’re not ready (so you think) to jump into the swamp of publishing or even to self-publish a book. What do you do with them? Maybe you just want to get them organized or you’d like to be able to finally show your poetry to friends or family but not put yourself out there to the general public. A self-publishing website like Lulu may be an answer.
Having your poems bound and printed is not the same as publishing. If you’ve written a lot, you’ve got poems in notebooks, journals and on scraps of paper shoved into drawers. If you’re the organized type, maybe you’ve even managed to put them together in a loose leaf binder. If you have, congratulations on at least getting that far, but it’s cumbersome to lug a binder around to open mics and other places you might want your poems at hand, and you probably have only that one precious copy. What if something awful were to happen to it or, worse, you should lose it?
Wouldn’t it be great if you had your poems in a small package with multiple copies so that you could always have them with you, would have copies to give away and so that you could never loose the only copy?
Most of the places we think of as self-publishing resources are little more than glorified, 
highly automated on-demand printers that can print and bind a 6 by 9 inch trade paperback for less than the cost you can print your poems at home, considering the high cost of ink cartridges. Assuming you do your own layout using the templates they provide, most such places can print a book of between 50 and 100 pages for around five or six dollars per copy and, for that price, you even get a glossy cover of your own design.
The example I cited, Lulu Publishing, has options for not assigning an ISBN code to your book and for archiving your book privately so that only you can order copies. There is no minimum number of copies when you do order, no “initial print run”. You’re free to order one copy, or two, or five, or ten.
The template handles the complications like setting margins, paginating, page numbering and even automates the table of contents as long as you follow the page by page instructions that are embedded in the template. There is a separate online cover design module that allows you to upload a cover photo if you want one and choose fonts, background colors and patterns. Once you’re satisfied with everything, your .docx file will be converted to the PDF file that the printer requires and you can download a copy that shows you exactly how the cover and the interior pages of your book will look.
Once you approve the PDF, it’s time to print. You’ll have a hard “proof copy” in about ten days. Once you approve that, you can order as many or as few copies as you want any time you want at a price you can afford.
– David Jibson, 3rd Wednesday Magazine
Third Wednesday Magazine 