wild violet | mythic mist

Kathryn Atwood
Kathryn Atwood's poetry and reviews have appeared (or are forthcoming) in numerous print and online journals including The Aurora Review, Afterimage, Void Magazine, War, Literature, and the Arts, The Naked Press, Book Pleasures, and Midwest Book Review. When she's not writing or driving her kids around somewhere, she's either teaching at a local music studio or performing with her husband (www.HistorySingers.com).
Reviews: The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Finding Neverland

Peter Austin
Peter Austin lives with his wife and three daughters in Toronto, Canada, where he teaches English at a community college. He has had over 40 poems published, in various magazines in the USA, Canada and the UK and also writes plays, three of which have been produced.
Humor: One-Eighty, Milkmaid

Matthew James Babcock
Matthew James Babcock recently started using his middle name in all professional correspondence because his wife said it sounded more literary and urbane. He is a former advertising copywriter, treadmill tester, assembly line worker, substitute teacher, freelance sociology textbook proofreader, construction worker, burlesque musical theater cast member, and Dairy Queen ice cream cone architect. He was born in San Francisco the year the Zodiac Killer terrorized the city. To support his writing habit, he teaches literature, composition, and creative writing. He lives in Rexburg, Idaho, with his wife, three daughters, and unfinished basement. His fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared or will appear in Ibbetson Street, Illuminations, Weber Studies, Spillway, Rattle, Poem, Poetry Motel, The Pacific Review, The South Dakota Review, Entre Nous, Irreantum, Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature; and Children, Churches, & Daddies.
Fiction: Mr. Souffard, My High School History Teacher

Tala Bar
Tala Bar is a retired teacher turned writer living in Israel. She holds an M.Phil. degree from the London University, and she's had a number of books, stories and articles published in Hebrew and English, both in print and on the Net.
Essay: Tristan and Isolde

Jean Baur
Jean Baur is a fiction writer who has published short stories in literary journals (both online and hard copy), and whose literary agency, Levine Greenberg, is currently looking for a publisher for her novel, The Real France. Jean has won several awards for her fiction and is known for her humor.
Fiction: I'm Jewish: The Story of Two Cats

Dean Borok
After spending many years in France studying the art of gavage, or the force-feeding of geese for foie gras, Dean Borok returned to America where he operates a training camp for competitive eaters in Far Rockaway, New York.
Poetry: Satan's Gumbo

Patricia Kennedy Bostian
Patricia Kennedy Bostian teach English at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte, North Carolina, while she is busy raising her young children. She was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her work has been published in Edgz!, Frogpond, Potpourri, The Southern Poetry Review, The Main Street Rag, Forpoetry.com, and Yemassee, among other journals.
Poetry: To Rhiannon, Who Will Know

E.G. Burrows
E.G. Burrows has had four poetry collections, a verse play and five chapbooks published. He is a retired broadcaster with poems in more than 200 periodicals, including most recently: Poetry East, Good Foot, Ship of Fools, Asheville Review, Grove Review, South Dakota Review, Pebble Lake, Mochila Review, Comstock Review, and others.
Poetry: Thunder

Bill Carrigan
While earning a B.S. degree from Maryland University, Bill played tenor sax in dance bands. He says he might have stayed in music but, soon married, he “had to go to work.” At medical research institutions, he wrote interpretive matter for laymen, “learning a lot I wouldn’t have known otherwise.” Now retired, he lives in Sarasota, Florida, and writes fiction. Five novels can be sampled at BillCarrigan.com, and he is seeking an agent for his latest, “a realistic doctor love story.” When not writing, Bill heads a critique group, reads widely, and visits his daughters in Florida and Oregon.
Essay: How We Came to See Clearly, Both Near and Far

Keltic Corman
Keltic Corman, copy editor extraordinaire, was born in 1991 in the rolling green hills of downtown Baltimore. After wandering in and out of many a school in the county, he packed his bags and headed west....about five miles, whereupon he was never heard from again. That is unless you're on the Internet. That being his only contact with the outside universe, he created a world just like any other and rocked the masses with this knowledge of cheap places to eat around his place. To this day you can still find him on the net skulking around web pages and creating stories that will never see the light of day...or night.

Lance Cutler
Lance Cutler is a winemaker and writer living in Sonoma Valley. He is the author of The Tequila Lover's Guide to Mexico and two volumes of hilarious wine columns under his pseudonym of Jake Lorenzo. Cutler is also an honorary citizen of New Orleans and has worked regularly in the city for the past twenty years.
Essay: New Orleans: The City That America Forget

Doris E. Dhillon
Born in Cleveland Ohio, Doris Dhillon is the only child of a Scottish Marine officer and his Swedish wife. She earned a B.A. at Ohio State University and a M.A. from Drew University, and she and Raghbir married in 1962. After retiring, she went to India to fulfill her dream of opening an orphanage. She and her husband were in the process of purchasing the property when the Indian police made false allegations that she was a CIA terrorist. On returning to America in 1989, she began chasing her second dream, of writing fiction.
Fiction: Indian Mythologies

Raghbir S. Dhillon
Born in Punjab India, Raghbir Dhillon's father was an English professor and famous writer. He excelled academically, graduating first in his class in college with a B.A. and topping the university when he earned a BSCE in 1947. For 11 years he was a railroad engineer in India before immigrating to America, where he earned his MSCE from Purdue University. He served with several consulting firms in America, retiring in 1987 as chief engineer with Campbell & Associates. Together with his wife, he has written 90 stories and had a few of them published in Indian papers and American magazines. They have also completed four novels.
Fiction: Indian Mythologies

Rada Djurica
Radmila Djurica is a Serbian freelance journalist who has done correspondence work for the Tiker Press Agency and has had articles published in British Sunday and daily newspapers, including the Scottish newspaper, Sunday Post; in Woman Abroad magazine; and at Storyhouse.org. She has served as assistant editor, reading manuscripts for the Reading Writers Service; has published articles with the SCN Television Network in California; is a freelance columnist for the British monthly magazine Code Uncut; and wrote about Serbia's International Bitef Festival of contemporary theatre for Zowie Wowie Magazine, an American e-zine.
Essay: Zagreb International Film Festival
Reviews: Red Eye, Sin City, Megalodon, Eros
Probe: Massimo Savic

Margarita Engle
Margarita Engle is a botanist and the Cuban-American author of several books about the island, most recently The Poet Slave of Cuba (Henry Holt & Co., April, 2006, Booklist Starred Review). Short works appear in journals such as Atlanta Review, Bilingual Review, California Quarterly, Caribbean Writer, Georgetown Review, Hawai'i Pacific Review, and Thema. Awards include a San Diego Book Award, a Cintas Fellowship, and a 2005 Willow Review Poetry Award. Margarita lives in central California, where she enjoys hiking and helping her husband with his volunteer work for a wilderness search-and-rescue dog training program.
Cuttings: The Storytellers, Osmosis

Alex Galper
Alex Galper came to America with his parents at the age of 18. However, he still writes in Russian and is considered a cult underground poet in his homeland. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and translates his poetry with his friends. He has been published in numerous magazines in Russia, USA, Canada, and Romania.
Poetry: Prediction

Anthony R. G. Heffernan
Anthony R. G. Heffernan resides in Melbourne, Australia, where he works as a published writer, sculptor and cartoonist. Beginning his writing career in August 2002, he's since had over 40 short stories accepted and published in both print and on the Internet. To name a few publications, he's appeared in Alien Skin Magazine, Project-M-Magazine, The Dark Krypt, and Monthly Short Stories, where his story, "Werewolves from Earth," won best of issue. On a personal note, he's a family man and enjoys time spent with his wife. He also savors the many hours spent at the nearby beach with his two dogs (which he treats as though they were his children). He aspires to give something back to the world through his writing, sculpting and cartooning, and hopes that the world will enjoy his craft (more so, it puts food on his table, and Pal in the dogs' bowls).
Humor: What's My Neighbor's Name?

Linda Oatman High
Linda Oatman High is a Pennsylvania author of books for children and teens who presents oftens at schools and conferences. Her programs and writing workshops may be found on www.lindaoatmanhigh.com
Reviews: Days Awake at the Bitter End
Essay: Smuggler's Notch

Margaret Karmazin
Margaret Karmazin's credits include short stories in over seventy magazines, including North Atlantic Review, Confrontation, Virginia Adversaria, Weber Studies, Mobius, Chiron Review, and Carve Magazine. Her stories in The MacGuffin and Eureka Literary Magazine were nominated for Pushcart awards. Pipers’ Ash Ltd. published a chapbook of her sci-fi stories, Cosmic Women, and her fantasy novel, Bones, the story of a prehistoric Native American shaman, is available on Amazon.com. At present, she is writing another novel.
Fiction: Echoes (Or the Case of the Smashed Pondu)

Malcolm Laughton
Malcolm Laughton lives in Glasgow, Scotland. He is a member of Glasbow Science Fiction Writers Circle and has degrees in English and psychology. He has worked for a number of years as an advice worker in welfare benefits and now works for a Scottish charity.
Fiction: Moonlight and Whisky and Reflections on the Water

Mike Magazinnik
Mike Magazinnik's texts and translations have appeared in US, UK and Russian magazines. He is the editor of Magazinnik, a Russian-language litmag based in New York, and a co-founder of Koja Press.
Poetry: Prediction (translated)

Janine Margiotta
Janine Margiotta has been published by Small Brushes, Haz Mat Review, Parnassus Literary Journal, and Quercus Review, among others. Originally from New York, she now finds herself in Oregon with nature all around her. She enjoys riding with her husband Scott on their Harley, fishing and camping when time allows, and serving as part of "the staff" when it comes to her animals.
Poetry: Fortune Telling
Humor: Her Lipstick

David Martin
David Martin teaches writing and humanities classes at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Lately he's been collaborating with designers and artists in producing large-format posters and digital animations of his poems. He's also been fortunate to have groups of high school students and high school art teachers create animations of his poems. He says it's exciting (and liberating) to watch how teams of creative people make visual and dynamic sense from a primarily verbal form. Samples of his work can be found here.
Poetry: Patsy Cline

Mary Matus
Mary is an aspiring Dave Barry/aspiring Stephen King (and will acknowledge the weirdness of that combination) who has lived all her life in rural PA (otherwise known as the Land of Cows and Corn.) When not writing, she works as a typesetter in the composing departments of three newspapers (leading to the occasional confusion.) She was once a reporter for Standard-Journal Newspapers and still occasionally writes for the Luminary, a weekly newspaper in Muncy, PA. She is a 1999 graduate of Susquehanna University, where she received a bachelor of arts in English literature and journalism and was active in The Crusader student newspaper. She has recently been published in the online magazine Wilmington Blues. In her free time, she is an avid bookworm, reading anything ranging from Toni Morrison to Dean Koontz.
Humor: Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Football Follies

Chris Martinez
Chris Martinez lives in a shoebox under your bed.
Cutting: Rattle Ride

Kyle Matthews
Kyle Matthews is eighteen years old and was born in San Francisco, California. He is presently a freshman at The Evergreen State College. He has never been published before but has been writing consistently since third grade, when a windy day inspired him to write a poem. Day to day he reads every bit of science fiction and fantasy literature he can get his hands on, and doggedly pursues the epiphany of his fully developed voice. He can be reached by e-mail.
Fiction: A Bone Picket Fence

H.D. Moe
H. D. Moe is one of most original and experimental of the “Baby Beat” poets. He is the author of more than 30 books of poetry and philosophy, including Jazz Pajamas, Always Home, Birth to Birth, Ozone Allah, The Logic of Snowflakes, How To Be God Now, and many others. His writings have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Northwest Review, Practicing Angels, New Now, Smoking Mirror, and Maui Muses. He lives in the Bay Area, and conducts a weekly seminar called “The Living Philosophers.” He is working on a novel about a “real and imaginary journey” called Royal Poetopia and the Wild Law Civilization. His website is www.hdmoe.com.
Poetry: Isis

Susan Kling Monroe
Susan Kling Monroe has been a librarian in the public and school sectors for over 20 years. She is now running a specialized library, where she plays with books and toys. Actively involved in Otakon, the Asian cultural and anime convention for which she was convention chair in 2002, Susan reads and shares her love of literature with a husband, two children, a cat, and various stuffed animals.
Reviews: The Road of Silk by Matt Afsahi & Barbara Dysonwilliams, Bucket of Blood: The Ragman's War by R.S. Sukle

H.H. Morris
H. H. Morris is an old Ozark Mountain boy who went bad in the '50s and '60s by earning an honorable discharge from the U.S. Navy and a couple of college degrees. He taught over 30 years in a community college in Maryland while writing on the side. He's been published in a variety of magazines over the years and finds placing a story as much joy now as it was the first time back in 1963.
Humor: Hephaestus and the Valkyries

Marta Palos
Against her inclinations, Marta Palos almost became a lawyer in her native Hungary when history and circumstance stepped in. Tossed about in the world awhile, she landed in America and turned her attention to literature, her old love. Her life revolves around words — she writes, reads, translates and edits them.
Reviews: Araujo's Stone by Peter Roderick, Wave Watcher by Craig Alan Johnson

Donna Marie Robb
Donna has published a fantasy fiction novel through a small press. She has also had stories published in Dark Moon Rising, Enigma, Femspec, Alien Skin Magazine, Midnight Times and Tales of the Talisman. She works as a children's librarian during the day and enjoys traveling with her husband, Ron Atmur.
Fiction: Resurrection

Margaret A. Robinson
Margaret A. Robinson grew up in New England, now lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and teaches at Widener University in the Writing Center and creative writing program. She has two triolets in the spring 2003 issue of Rattle and three poems in the spring 2003 issue of Chiron Review. Abbey just brought out her cheapo chapbook, Sleeping Outdoors in the Suburbs — 18 pages, fifty cents a copy — available at Book Source in Swarthmore. Pudding House Publications has accepted her chapbook, Sparks.

Maggie Ruff
Maggie Ruff lives in a cave in Maryland where she writes and entertains her two pesky cats. She's published short stories both on the Net and in print, and now she's making a foray into novel writing.
Cutting: Moving House

Mike Ryan
Wild Violet assistant designer Mike Ryan has a distressingly common name. He's not the lawyer or pharmaceutical salesman or the pool club owner. He's the information services manager. The one that loves anime and science fiction. No, not the one from New York, the one from Pennsylvania. Yeah, that one.

Clarise Samuels
Clarise Samuels originally hails from New Jersey but now resides in Montreal, Quebec. She publishes poetry and fiction and is also an experienced journalist. She has a Ph.D. from Rutgers University in German Literature, and she is the author of a scholarly tome on the acclaimed poet, Paul Celan. Samuels has written a novel entitled Loving Brynhild, excerpted in this issue. She has begun work on a second novel about love, perplexity, and Kabbalah and is presently working on a collection of poetry. Her interests include painting and sculpture. She also takes care of her two children.
Fiction: The Exile of Brynhild

Mather Schneider
Mather Schneider turned thirty-six on January 8. His mother told him he was born in the middle of the night during the worst snow storm of the year. This was back in Illinois. He is now a cab driver in Tucson, which is forty-five minutes from Mexico, in the Sonoran Desert. He has no girlfriend, pet, or university degree, but he has a chapbook, Poormouth, available from Interior Noise Press at myfavoritebullet.com. His poems have appeared in the small press for about ten years. "Modern Day Witch" is from a series called "Dreck" about life in a used bookstore. Gregg, the person in the poem, was one of Mather's co-workers.
Poetry: Modern Day Witch

Ed Tasca
Ed Tasca has made a living writing, but probably should have done something else, because he has always envied the professions of others, except roofers. His favorite color is blue, and much of his work begins to make sense on the second or third reading. He's originally from Philadelphia, and is still hoping to be accepted into the seminary, if he could remember where he wrote down the address.
Humor: Special Relativity

Ann Tinkham
Ann Tinkham is a writer and instructional designer based in Boulder, Colorado. She has written over 30 online courses in subjects ranging from emergency preparedness to energetic healing. Ann is working on a nonfiction book, Lessons from Bad Girls, and a novel, Analyzing Abbey. In addition to writing, Ann has talked her way out of an abduction and talked her way into the halls of the United Nations. She hitchhiked up a mountain in Switzerland and worked her way down the corporate ladder. Ann has flown on a trapeze and traded on the black market in Russia. She cycles up steep canyons, hikes to glacial lakes and mountain peaks, and blazes her own ski trails.
Fiction: The Era of Lanterns and Bells

John Tremblay
Although he's an award-winning technical writer by day, John C. Tremblay has more fun writing fiction; in particular, fantasy romps set in the teapot-shaped kingdom of Ratrilpot, a land of magic, mayhem, and mystery. His flash fiction story, "Mother Knows Best," was published in AlienSkin Magazine last year. And his Web site was named a finalist in the 2005 Best Writer's Web Site contest sponsored by Writer's Digest. He's currently wrapping up the first novel in a planned trilogy, and when he's not writing (which is rare), he divides his time between reading, traveling, spending time with friends, and (on occasion) sleeping.
Fiction: The Fourth Kiss

John Vanderslice
John Vanderslice was born on the East Coast of the U.S. from rather varied Irish-American stock — his parents grew up on opposites sides of the tracks in Philadelphia — but later migrated to the deep south in search of grad school fellowship money and has never really left. Currently he lives, more or less amiably, among Bible Belters in Conway, Arkansas. He stayed way too long in grad school, earning not one but two terminal degrees in English/creative writing. On the other hand, a lot of his stories have found their way into print. So maybe all that learning wasn't for nothing.
Fiction: Genesis Two

Mylan Vaugeois
Born in New York City, Mylan Vaugeois graduated from New York College of Osteopathic Medicine and is currently a psychiatry resident. She adores music, anime and role playing games. In her spare time, she helps with Otakon's Gofer Operations department. She also writes fanfiction and poetry, and is currently planning a wedding to an amazing fiance.
Review: The Road of Silk by Matt Afsahi & Barbara Dysonwilliams

Joanna M. Weston
Joanna M. Weston was born in England and is married with three sons and two cats. She writes poetry, short stories and reviews and has been published internationally in journals and anthologies. Her middle-reader The Willow Tree Girl was published 2003.
Poetry: Witchcraft, Where Would I Go If It Were Yesterday?

Amelia Winger-Bearskin
Amelia Winger-Bearskin is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Texas in Austin, where she is majoring in Transmedia, the study of time based art, which includes video art, performance art, and time based installation. Amelia is greatly interested in exploring the fourth dimension in art, that begins to push not only our experience visually but our temporal connection to artistic experience. Her mother is a traditional native storyteller from the Seneca Cayuga tribe of the Iroquois nation. Stories of all kinds weave themselves into her works and are re-contextualized to shape her work, unfolding destination, space and time. She currently is working on a series of installations about the experience of a Native Women in modern society and women of mixed race backgrounds and the effect of their culture on their psyche and creative spirit. You can see her online gallery at StudioAmelia.com.
Artwork: Lobby Show, Medicine Wheel, Story Teller

Paul Worthington
Paul Worthington lives in Indiana, where he enjoys both idling through the teeming masses and scurrying about in the hinterlands. He reads novels, short stories, novellas, novelettes, articles, essays, reviews, interviews, maps, nonfiction books, understands little of it, and sometimes writes his own versions of these things. He also enjoys referring to himself in the third person. If you are struck by any of his works, you can tell him so.
Fiction: Beyond the Mist