Scrooge meets Ignorance & Want
What does Relief want for Christmas?
The same thing we want every year: money.
Not for ourselves, of course – we’re still an all-volunteer staff – but to keep us solvent and able to offer high-quality print books in our lo-tech virtual world. We’re also a 501(c)3 non-profit, so when we ask for money the government is looking over our shoulders to make sure it goes back into the business – no stockholders or CEOs to pay off, here, which is why you’re not likely to see an Occupy Relief anytime soon.
But the fact of the matter is that we’re still a very small company and we’re made of creatives rather than accountants and marketers, so we’re still learning how to keep up a steady stream of income in between print runs.
That makes us both Ignorance and Want in the current economy. We have 5.2 all ready to go, and I’m personally very excited about it, but we’re a bit shy of where we’d like to be to print and ship it.
So, what we’re asking is that you consider giving Relief for Christmas Twelfth Night (Jan.6, Epiphany, the namesake of the Twelve Days of Christmas). We’ll keep the print version available at the pre-sale price of $11.47 a little longer, and we also have the eBooks for only $4.99 (those you can get for Dec. 25th; see right —>). Either one would make a great gift and set you right with the cosmos1 to begin the new year.
If you’ve already bought a book, consider buying one for a friend. If you’ve bought an eBook, consider the same. We know there are workarounds for digital files, but this is about supporting something valuable.
Alternatively, if you have a heart like a converted Scrooge, bursting with Christmas spirit and looking for an outlet, or if you know someone who fits this description, we also welcome last-minute, tax-write-off donations.
Some relevant Christmas-y links:
1 Editor’s Note: Relief does not endorse a kharmic view of the universe.
For the first time ever, we would like to present you with our eBook before the print copy is available. Creating a hard copy takes a lot of time and extra energy, so, while our team is still hard at work churning it out, we’ve been able to secure the eBook early!
The eBook comes in PDF format, perfect for reading on your computer, smartphone, or tablet device. And did we mention it’s only $4.99?! Get your copy now by clicking the button below, or you can pick it up on our Buy page along with the eBooks for our last six issues.
| Timothy Bartel "Four Counties" Timothy E.G. Bartel is a husband, writer, and educator from Whittier, CA. He currently resides in Edinburgh with his wife, while he pursues a postgraduate degree in poetry and theology at the University of St Andrews. Timothy's work has recently appeared in The Other Journal, Christianity and Literature, and the St. Katherine Review. |
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| Cindy Beebe "My Son Says What If Jesus Were Playing Basketball" Cindy Beebe lives in Collierville, TN, a suburb of Memphis, with her husband, their two teen-aged sons, and a couple of slacker house cats. She sings in her church choir, home-schools her children, and ministers to the community as a member of Continuum Arts: Engaging Culture With Culture Through Acts of Creative Excellence. Her work has appeared in The Southern Review, Image, The Cincinnati Review, RATTLE, The National Poetry Review, The Atlanta Review, The Evansville Review, Radix, and APJ, among others. She also has poems in previous issues of Relief. Feel free to contact her. |
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| John J. Brugaletta "Itadaki Masu" "Everything Is Otherwise" John J. Brugaletta is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at California State University, Fullerton. He was editor and publisher of South Coast Poetry Journal during its ten-year history, and contributing editor of The Lamp-Post. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, The Tongue Angles and Tilling the Land, and is co-author of Discovering the Way of Wisdom: Spirituality in the Wisdom Literature. He lives in Northern California with his wife Claudia, where he makes tables, clocks and poems. |
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| Sara Burant “After Reading from Genesis I Consider Angels" “Within" “The Place After Words” “Meditation on a Man’s Figure” Sara Burant's poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Comstock Review, and Ruminate Magazine, among others. Her first chapbook, Verge, has just been accepted for publication by Finishing Line Press. She lives in Eugene, Oregon with her husband, a ball-crazy dog, elderly cat and small flock of chickens. This summer she was fortunate enough to be present at the birth of her first grandchild. |
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 | Scott Cairns "Two Trees" Scott Cairns, Professor of English at University of Missouri, is director of MU Writing Workshops in Greece: Thessaloniki/Thasos, bringing graduate and undergraduate students to Greece every June for engagement with literary life in modern Greece. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Image, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, etc., and have been anthologized in multiple editions of Best American Spiritual Writing. His most recent books are Compass of Affection (poetry), Short Trip to the Edge (memoir), Love’s Immensity (translations), and a book-length essay, The End of Suffering. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006. |
 | Maryann Corbett "Knowledge" Maryann Corbett's book Breath Control is due out in 2012 from David Robert Books. Her chapbooks are Dissonance and Gardening in a Time of War. She has been a winner of the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and a finalist for the Morton Marr prize and the Best of the Net anthology. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in many journals in print and online and in the anthologies Hot Sonnets, The Able Muse Anthology, and Imago Dei: Poems from Christianity and Literature. She lives in St. Paul and works for the Minnesota Legislature. |
 | Lynn Domina "Flickering Green, Flickering Bronze" "Omniscience in Babel" Lynn Domina is the author of two collections of poetry, Framed in Silence and Corporal Works. She is also the editor of a collection of essays, Poets on the Psalms. Her recent poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, The New England Review, The Southern Review, Christianity & Literature, and several other periodicals. She currently lives with her family in the western Catskill region of New York. |
| Michael Martin "Visions of Vladimir" "Words written during the suffering and subsequent death of John Paul II" Michael Martin lives on a small, organic farm between Detroit and Ann Arbor with his wife and eight children. He teaches English at Marygrove College in Detroit. His work has appeared in many different journals, most recently in Tiferet and Prose Studies. This is his third appearance in Relief. |
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 | Marsha Mathews "Crossing the Dead" Marsha Mathews’ Sunglow & A Touch of Nottingham Lace has won this year’s Red Berry Editions Chapbook Award. In 2010, her first book of poems, Northbound Single-Lane, was published by Finishing Line Press. Magazines that have published Mathews’ work include Apalachee Review, Appalachian Heritage, Fourth River, Greensboro Review, Hampden-Sydney, Inkwell Journal, Melusine, and Pembroke. Her poems appear in these anthologies, Child of My Child (Gelles-Cole Literary Enterprises, 2010) and Touching: Poems of Love, Longing, and Desire (Fearless Books, 2011). Mathews teaches writing at Dalton State College, in Dalton, Georgia, where she advises the campus literary magazine, Tributaries. |
 Julie L. Moore | Julie L. Moore "Prayer Shawl" Julie L. Moore is the author of Slipping Out of Bloom (WordTech Editions) and Election Day (Finishing Line Press). In addition, her manuscript, Scandal of Particularity, was a finalist for the 2011 FutureCycle Press Poetry Book Prize and a semi-finalist for the 2011 Perugia Press Prize. A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize from Ruminate, Moore has also had her poetry published in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Journal, Atlanta Review, CALYX, Cimarron Review, The Missouri Review Online, The Southern Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Verse Daily. You can learn more about her work at www.julielmoore.com. |
 | Paul Willis "After Saying Goodbye" "The Closet in the Skeleton" "Dinah Morris Digresses in Her Evening Sermon on the Green" "Friday Night" "Looking Away" Paul J. Willis is a professor of English at Westmont College and the current poet laureate of Santa Barbara, CA. His most recent books of poetry are Rosing from the Dead (WordFarm, 2009) and Visiting Home (Pecan Grove Press, 2008). He is also the author of Bright Shoots of Everlastingness: Essays on Faith and the American Wild (WordFarm, 2005) and the four-part eco-fantasy novel The Alpine Tales (WordFarm, 2010). He spends a little too much of his time creating obscure trails through the poison oak canyons of his campus. |
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