The NYU Creative Writing Program's Undergraduate Literary Journal
Attention all NYU undergrads: On Thursday, November 3rd, at 7:30pm, join West 10th for a poetry workshop in Seminar Room B at Palladium Hall.Make sure to RSVP and check out the Facebook event, too!Bring up to 750 words of fiction/nonfiction to receive some feedback from your West 10th Editors. See you there!Just a reminder that we are still accepting submissions until December 15th!
High: Making plans with a literary-minded friend to attend a StorySLAM and getting excited about the night’s theme—something like “Doubt” or “Haunted” or “Hot Mess.”Low: Sneaking your phone out during class or work at exactly 3 pm the week before the event, refreshing the page every few seconds, in order to snag tickets before they sell out.Low: Joining one of two massive lines outside of the Housing Works Bookstore Café nearly an hour before doors open, then flooding inside when they do, desperate to score a seat (or a stair).High: Hearing the storytellers’ intriguing and hilarious first lines.
Low: Uncomfortably laughing when storytellers tell inappropriate or overtly graphic sexual stories.High: Hearing the storytellers nail their last lines.Low: Uncomfortably laughing when the storytellers’ jokes don’t quite hit.High: Seeing a storyteller take the mic for the first time and deliver one of the best stories of the night.High: Cracking up at the host’s on-the-spot reactions to the audience’s write-in stories.High: Noticing the diversity and friendliness of the crowd (though, admittedly, a high percentage of audience members are carrying publishers’ tote bags).High: Laughing collectively for two hours at the woes of living in New York, at the quirks of being a literature lover, and at the woes and quirks of being a literature lover living in New York.--Alyssa Matesic, Editor-in-Chief
Attention all NYU undergrads: Our first workshop of the year is coming up! On Wednesday, October 19th at 7:30pm, join West 10th for a poetry workshop in Seminar Room A at Palladium Hall.Make sure to RSVP and check out the Facebook event, too!
Bring up to two works of poetry (two pages maximum) to receive some feedback from your West 10th Editors. See you there!Just a reminder that we are still accepting submissions until December 15th!
It's that time of the year again! West 10th is now accepting submissions of prose, poetry, and art for its 2016-2017 edition, releasing this spring.Check out West 10th's submission guidelines here.
Applications are now open for the 2016-2017 Editorial Board!We are seeking to fill positions on the poetry, prose, art, web, and copyediting boards.Please direct all questions and completed applications to west10th.submissions@gmail.com. Applications are due by 5pm, May 27.Please download and complete the application below:West 10th Editorial Board App 2016-2017*Note: please do not apply to the board if you are graduating in December 2016. This is a full-year commitment.
We are pleased to announce that the 2015-2016 issue of West 10th is complete. To celebrate, we are holding a launch party at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House featuring readings by our contributors and a reading by our interviewee, Mira Jacob (acclaimed author of The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing). This event is open to the public and refreshments will be served. Come grab a copy of West 10th!
West 10th Launch Party
April 15, 2016 at 7:00 pm
Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House
58 West 10th Street, New York, NY 10011
Also RSVP to our Facebook event
Audrey Deng is the Copy Editor at West 10th and the Arts Editor at Washington Square News. She is a sophomore studying Comparative Literature and English. Talk to her about Frank Stella's retrospective at the Whitney, because she's excited about that.In my mind, Paris exists in textbook images from high school, a series of impressions divided by semester. In the fall, French class was a sanctuary; we would sip hot chocolate while thinking about what we should/could/would do in the languid conditionnel tense, snow piling outside of the window. We would read about (and later eat) delectable French holiday pastries like Bouche de Noël and fondant cake. In the spring, we flung open the windows and projected images of tulip-lined streets to "La Vie en Rose." Paris, just saying the word Paris, implied panache. I felt that simply by being in French class, we students sat straighter, spines strengthened by speaking the language of a country heralded for its elegance.
Last Friday, on November 13, I went to my French class where we learned about the subjunctive (il est important que nous brossons nos dents!). I cooked oatmeal, wrote birthday cards, and Paris erupted into frightened chaos. Guns had fired in the Bataclan concert hall of an Eagles of Death Metal concert, along with bombings throughout the city, killing at least 130 people.The hateful act of terrorism scorches a sad chapter in the world's history, but humans have been sad before. The sickening feeling comes from the fact that it is becoming frighteningly easy to measure the passing of time not by how light illuminates the earth, but by how shadows shroud the globe in darkness.I went to a peaceful gathering in Washington Square Park to pay tribute to France, eavesdropping on the sad conversations held through clouds of sad cigarette smoke. Everything seemed sad. People stood sadly, conversed sadly, smoked sadly. Never, in my life, have I heard a sad French conversation take place in real life until that Friday. "Do you know anyone injured or dead?" one would ask another. "No, all safe, thank God. You?" So it went--and it was jarring.Understanding sadness in another language permanently changes the way one listens and reads and thinks, vous comprenez? It sharpens the vision, tightens the eardrums. Once you have heard those words of death and injury, the language and your history with it, changes. Tenses take on different meanings: the conditionnel is a call to action, the subjonctif is what we want to do, and the imparfait is the way we used to be. And French will never be the same to me.Il est necessaire que nous soyons gentils. It is necessary that we are kind.
Written in 1913 but only published posthumously in 1971, Maurice was well ahead of its time in its nuanced depiction of a young man discovering and coming to terms with his sexuality. While Forster carefully examines the difficulties of identity and love, Maurice is ultimately founded on the belief that same-sex relationships have the capacity to be profound, beautiful and happy—a radical thesis for a novel written when men were still routinely arrested and imprisoned for having sex with other men. 
Subtitled “A Biography,” Orlando was written as a paean to Woolf’s friend and erstwhile lover, the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West. With typical élan, Woolf transforms Sackville-West into the novel’s eponymous protagonist, a sex-changing immortal who begins as an Elizabethan nobleman and ends as a successful female author in ‘the present day’ (that is to say, 1928). Traversing three hundred years of Orlando’s life, Woolf relentlessly questions conventional notions of history, authorship, gender and sexuality. Nightwood - Djuna Barnes (1936)
Contained in a deceptively slim volume, Nightwood is a superbly stylized portrait of a doomed lesbian relationship in the bohemian Paris of the interwar years, explicated through the head-spinning speeches of Dr. Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O'Conner (who is just as campy as his name suggests). This modernist masterpiece was lauded by T.S. Eliot as “so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it.” Notre Dame des Fleurs/Our Lady of the Flowers - Jean Genet (1943)
Similarly to Nightwood, this novel renders the Parisian underworld in prose so rich and revelatory it practically creates a new class of literature. The lives and loves of its central characters—sex workers, trans women, and teenage murderers, all bearing charming monikers like Divine and Darling Daintyfoot—are unspooled by a capricious narrator who creates the world of the novel while masturbating in his prison cell (!!!). The Charioteer - Mary Renault (1953)Renault, having worked as nurse at a British military hospital during the Second World 
War and later emigrated to South Africa to live with her female partner, was uniquely equipped to write this novel, which follows a British soldier who falls in love twice over as he recovers from a combat wound. With equal measures of heartfelt psychological insight and cutting social observation, The Charioteer struggles with the tensions between idealism and reality, individualism and community, and innocence and experience. Another Country - James Baldwin (1962)An earlier novel of Baldwin’s, Giovanni’s Room, is often hailed as a masterpiece of gay literature, but while Giovanni’s Room is a claustrophobic investigation of one man’s psychology, Another Country seems to encompass an era. 
The characters are gay, straight, bisexual, questioning and in denial; white and black; working-class and middle-class and destitute and wildly successful. In a rhythm reminiscent of jazz, the novel traces the cast as they move in and out of each other’s lives, coupling and splitting up and getting back together, rising and falling in fortune—but always circling around the specter of a character who commits suicide at the end of the novel’s first act.Su Young Lee—this year’s prose editor here. Currently a sophomore who hopefully and finally narrowed it down to studying English Literature, Journalism, and Creative Writing (fun fact, I’m indecisive). Why (How) I Write I see a man with his daughter on his lap, brushing her hair away from her small sleeping face as if they weren’t sitting in the middle of a crowded subway train. I like their intimacy and decide that maybe I’ll write about them someday. I never do. I sit in a café and eavesdrop on a job interview as the man becomes increasingly and amusingly anxious, visualizing his half-uttered sentences in the air, full of ellipses. I sit in my room on an especially bad day and decide that the imagined tragedy of how I feel will look good on paper, but all I can manage is jot down a few phrases that all sound like half-finished lines from terrible poetry—my poetry—and I throw the piece of paper away. You see, I like thinking about writing. Sometimes I convince myself I’m really a writer because all I can think about is how something will look on a page. Then I come to my senses and decide that a writer is probably someone who actually writes. This is discouraging because writing is kind of hard. I plan characters, conversations, odd little phrases but when it comes to writing them down and filling in the gaps I find that I’m not a writer after all. Not a writer I’d like to be, or maybe I think I should be, the clichéd artist tortured by the task of translating their genius onto paper. The only thing I’m tortured by is my fear, laziness, lack of inspiration. While everything I see and hear and feel I think about writing down, it’s rare that I actually do. This is partly why I sign up to a creative writing class. People say writing comes from the heart, the soul, from whatever other metaphorical body part, but honestly sometimes I just need someone to make me write because otherwise I never will. I have to make it inevitable because when I finally start writing I confirm what I suspected all along—that I hate writing. This is the process of writing that I loathe: in bed. I don’t like sitting on a desk because it seems like I’m doing work, even though writing is really hard work. I put on some music before I decide that it’s distracting. I stare down at a blank piece of paper—or Word document. I tend to start with paper the first few times because I think writing by hand is romantic but I throw down my pen and hate myself finding I have more scribbles and crossed-out words than useable material. Blankness is encouraging—threatening—and maybe promising. The ugly blacked out words, however, are sad visual reminders of my failure that I’m too conceited to stand. But if I hate it so much, why do I do it? Despite all the complaining and self-loathing, there’s something addicting about the adrenaline that comes with writing, beyond the effects of all the caffeine I consume. It’s the starting that’s hard, but once something is on the page the next words tumble after each other. I let myself ramble. When I finish the piece (the draft) it’s like finally letting out air after holding my breath. It’s at that moment when I close my laptop and go to sleep, because I conveniently write in bed, that I think I have found the reason I write. The feeling of satisfaction. There are a lot of other and often forgotten reasons too, like how I want to be eloquent but writing is the only way I can achieve it, how I like to hide behind the anonymity of words on paper, but how I also like the intimacy it provides. Sometimes I hate it because having to write something interesting is a reminder that my actual life is unexciting, but maybe I like that I can live through the pages I write. I don’t know if that’s sad. Sometimes I think being a writer means being sad—dragging up things that have happened, bad things, or things that never will. Ultimately though, being a writer means writing. I may hate the act of writing but I love its effects, a similar relationship I have to cooking and actually eating the food. Hate the labour, if you will; devour the fruit. If I want to be a writer there’s really nothing else for me to do but write. That’s the one thing that all writers of all genres have in common—writing words, instead of just thinking about them. No matter how bad you think you are or how much you dislike the physical act of writing, writers write. So to all you aspiring writers: give yourself deadlines, make others give you deadlines, find some way to force yourself to put words on a page.
Our prose workshop, our second of the year, is coming up! It will be on Thursday, November 19 at 7pm, at Seminar Room B in Palladium Hall. Here is the Facebook event page, you could also RSVP here.
This workshop is open to all undergrad students! So bring up to 1500 words of fiction/non-fiction prose to receive some feedback and comments from your West 10th Editors.Just a reminder that we are still accepting submissions until December 8th!
Hello! I'm Justin Hong, West 10th's poetry editor! I'm a junior studying Asian/Pacific/American Studies and Creative Writing. I am also all about dat anticolonialism, antiimperialism, antiracism, etc. tiny tomorrow manifesto/ Justin Hongafter Arundhati Roy [tomorrow’s instruction manual is nestled inside this very if.]justplaintired, bonefizzy, and looking past yourself, you’re learning how to make happy, freight happywith things that haven’t happened yet. in this sort of invention, the see-do poetics has amagazine you stuff with a dustcoated heirloom dream. you tug on the trigger and the expired ammu-nition shatters, linguafranca barrel shatters. does the handheld poetics shatter? it must. joy! but thatis all prepwork. for real step1 is: how to make rubble [hope] count?
Although art appreciation, or even collection, may seem like a daunting concept for the average college student, it is actually quite an enjoyable experience. Have you ever wanted to look at some amazing art, but found it wasn’t accessible? Galleries are not always the most welcoming environments, with snobby shop assistants or outrageous price ranges that no one younger than their mid-thirties can afford. But, the college student is in luck, because there are also places like The Cotton Candy Machine in Brooklyn—a gallery that accommodates all wallet sizes and has a wonderful staff very eager to be of service.
The shop, located on 1st Street, has a very fresh and modern feel, and caters to a younger audience, so if you’re looking for something to do on a Saturday afternoon, or you just want to see some cool drawings, toys, paintings, wood carvings etc., this is the place for you. The bright blue benches outside will draw you in and the art will make you stay. They break out some crazy and innovative artists that have a lot to say even on small surfaces. In fact, the shop is well known for its quaint sized drawings and paintings.The Cotton Candy Machine (even the name sounds cool and inviting!) was co-founded by an artist herself, Tara McPherson, who makes extremely colorful, detailed paintings that can be bought for as little as $20 as a lithograph. She sells her art in many other forms, including shirts and tank tops. The shop also has featured artists hanging on the walls, a toy, sticker, and button collection by the register, and a center table dedicated to art books and magazines.
Did I mention that this art gallery happens to be a convenient 15-minute walk from Smorgasburg’s Williamsburg location (open Saturdays from 11am-6pm until November 21st) where you can pick up unique foods from over 100 different local food vendors? I seriously recommend the Pineapple Black Pepper Ginger Soda (all natural) from Bolivian Llama Party, the Ramen Burger, and a Hibiscus doughnut from Dough. 
There are also tons of other unique places in the area that deserved to be checked out, like Artists and Fleas, a handcrafted art and vintage market. Brooklyn doesn’t just have an amazing writing atmosphere, but appreciates all forms of art, handcrafting, and individuality. I highly recommend checking out all the above-mentioned places for a great afternoon that won’t disappoint!--Jenny CroninThe credit for the first and third photographs of this blog post goes to IG @thecottoncandymachine!
Now that the semester is in full swing, West 10th is now accepting submissions of prose, poetry, and visual art for the 2015-2016 issue of the literary magazine!Please send your work to west10th.submissions@gmail.com by the end of the day on TUESDAY, DECEMBER 8th.Here are some things to remember:1. You may submit up to 3 poems, 5,000 words of prose, or 6 images.2. Please submit all poetry and prose in .doc or .docx format.4. Keep in mind your visual art must be translatable into print, so instead of sending your sculpture maybe just send us a picture. All art submissions must be at least 8 inches on the longest side at a resolution of 300dpi. Check this information using Photoshop > Image > Image Size. Feel free to include a title for each image. Please keep in mind that all the art featured in West 10th is printed in black and white.4. Fill out a submission form below and attach it with your submission as a word document, not a JPEG.2015-2016 West 10th Submission FormWe look forward to reading your work soon!
Applications are now open for the 2015-2016 Editorial Board!We are seeking to fill positions on the poetry, prose, web, and art boards. We are also seeking a copyeditor.Please direct all questions and completed applications to west10th.submissions@gmail.com. Applications are due by 5pm, Monday, June 15.Please download and complete the application.Please do not apply to the board if you are graduating in December 2015. This is a full-year commitment.ed_board_app_2015-16
The 2014-15 issue features a poem by Guest Contributor Cathy Park Hong, and an interview with the acclaimed author Justin Taylor, plus many magnificent student contributions of poetry, prose, and art. See the online version here, or visit your friendly neighborhood NYU Creative Writing class, where your professors will be handing out copies!http://issuu.com/west10th/docs/west10-2015?e=2900352/12605971
Hi everyone! We're excited to announce that we're hosting a reading at the Lilian Vernon Creative Writing House on April 17th where we're excited to welcome the contributors from the 2014-2015 issue and special guest Cathy Park Hong to read their work. I'm looking forward to seeing you there.Best,Eric StiefelEditor-in-Chief
At my high school, there was an English teacher with a huge black banner on the wall of his classroom that said, “BE UNCOMFORTABLE,” in thick white font. When I first saw it, I was thirteen and afraid of everything and I figured he must be a jerk. Now, I realize the value of being uncomfortable. Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever is the first short fiction collection of the great contemporary writer, Justin Taylor. Many of its stories remind me of those bold white words; Taylor’s writing takes on the awkward and absurd with panache. When I finished reading the collection, I had the discomfort you feel when you’re sure the person sitting next to you in the waiting room at the doctor’s office is reading what you write on the pre-appointment paperwork you have to fill out EVERY TIME you go in. And since I’ve resolved to revel in such discomfort, I kicked off this break reading Taylor’s first novel, The Gospel of Anarchy. It’s a strange and humid story I’d recommend to anyone who’s ever been a little voyeuristic on the subway. The remainder of my winter break reading list:Eyrie—Tim WintonMuseum of Accidents—Rachel ZuckerThe Morning of the Poem—James SchuylerHeaven’s Coast—Mark DotyFire to Fire—Mark DotyEssays in Love—Alain de BottonBlack Aperture—Matt Rasmussen
A couple of weeks ago I received an email from the photo editor at Paragraph Shorts, a digital short story magazine where I work as an editorial intern. Browsing through Flickr, an image sharing website, to look for photos to use in the magazine, she’d come across my old photography profile and wanted to feature one of my pieces in a future issue.I laughed at first because I hadn’t looked at my photography since before coming to NYU. I didn’t mind that my photos from eleventh grade were still floating around on the Internet—in fact, I consciously didn’t delete my Flickr account after I abandoned photography. Some combination of nostalgia and an understanding that someone else might someday find value in my art kept me from sending my photos into Internet exile. I gave the photo editor the go-ahead, and now it’s possible that one of my earliest expressions of art will be published, over three years later.As artists, we’re often tempted to disown our work, unable to look beyond its flaws, always somehow dissatisfied with the final product. We have age-old files in our hard drives that we’ll never open again. We have ink-stained journal pages that never see daylight. We have notes stored in our iPhones from late-night moments of inspiration. I have an ancient LiveJournal diary set to private—a mix of daily life complaints and stress-charged prose from middle school. We writers have entire libraries of forgotten art. The starting three lines of a poem written after a particularly pleasant walk through Washington Square. A phrase jotted down after a revelatory shower. A short story buried under old textbooks after being submitted to workshop.When a friend of mine, an editor of the Minetta Review, asked me if I had any potential submissions, I dug through my art archives. In some cases, I closed the files immediately—too painful to revisit. But I was surprised to find some pieces I actually—dare I say it—liked. Even if we feel we’ve changed artistically since that piece written a year or more ago, it’s important to remember all the effort that first went into it. Disowning those pieces is something like disowning parts of yourself.I texted her at 1 a.m. that night, saying I’d submitted not just to her section, but to all three: “I figured, why not?”“Exactly—why not?” she responded.Within our hidden libraries of abandoned pieces and forgotten projects, it’s possible to find some gems worthy of polishing and resurfacing. We didn’t create them to bury them forever.
The Lake by Banana Yoshimoto is a satisfying read for Banana Yoshimoto fans. This means if you’re not familiar with how the famed Japanese Gen-X writer operates, you might lose interest before the story has any emotional payoff. There are many things that might make you lose interest, for example, her utter disregard for the “show, don’t tell” rule of fiction writing, or the thin plot that progresses only incrementally. But give enough patience, and the characters in the Lake will grow on you, enough for you to disregard everything else. This is an enjoyable read, even if not much happens in the story. The two main characters, Chihiro and Nakajima, are whimsical, but also fragile, troubled, and depressed. They’re like two hedgehogs who huddle together closer for warmth, but constantly at risk of hurting each other with their spikes. Do you like hedgehogs? Do you like desirous characters filled with longing à la Haruki Murakami? This is the book for you.Like her hit, Kitchen, this novel is deceptively simple and rewards those who examine it further. It explores the themes of isolation, emotional weariness, and impermanence (Mono no aware) as they relate to the concept of death. How do we deal with the collateral damage that death brings? How can we cope? And are emotional wounds recoverable in the long term? These are the questions that Yoshimoto constantly bring up through the ethereal interactions between our two protagonists.Chihiro is a mural artist whose mother recently passed away, and it’s during her struggles to overcome loss that she meets Nakajima, an emotionally-stunted man with a traumatic past. They soon strike up a relationship, though Nakajima’s past is a shard that threatens to sever the two apart. Both characters fit pretty well into the mold of Yoshimoto’s previous characters: detached, scarred, filled with longing. The story uses these characters to explore the sameness of a hollow life to death, and how people are always looking to fill up this hollowness. If Kitchen was a declaration of youth caught on fire, The Lake is the sober, older aftermath. The titular lake in this novel captures that idea perfectly: hazy, secluded, quite - the novel is ultimately a contemplation on life’s harder realities.
