In Print

Costly Habits, a book of 13 short stories by Peter Makuck, has been published by the University of Missouri Press (Oct. 2002).  From the publisher: "A father on vacation nearly loses his eye on an ocean fishing pier while trying to escape the demands of his family.  A systems analyst, embittered by the loss of his job and resentful of a seemingly carefree neighbor whom his estranged wife admires, becomes obsessed with catching squirrels in a box trap.  A woman married to a former police detective festers with anger and plots revenge after a confrontation with a restaurant owner.  A recent widower tries scuba diving with his difficult teenage children as a way to galvanize the family and regain control of his life.  These are some of the people who inhabit the richly textured worlds of Peter Makuck's Costly Habits.  In many of his stories, individuals find themselves in situations where moments of clarity arrive, moments that disclose perspectives of possible change or ways to accept things as they are."

 Peter Makuck's poems, "Dominion" and "At Portside Marina," were published in the summer issue of The Sewanee Review (2002).  Founded in 1892, The Review is published by the University of the South in Sewanee, TN.  Under the editorships of Andrew Lytle and Allen Tate, The Sewanee Review became comparable to John Crowe Ransom's Kenyon Review and Cleanth Brooks's and Robert Penn Warren's Southern Review.  Monroe Spears edited the journal in the 1950s, and George Core has served as editor since 1973.  The Review has published the work of T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Randall Jarrell, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter, Peter Taylor, Donald Davidson, Jean Stafford, and Dylan Thomas, among others.

Michele Turner Sharp's essay, "Wordsworth's Poetics of Speech and Language Acquisition in Lyrical Ballads," has appeared in The Wordsworth Circle 33:1 (Winter 2002).  In the essay, Sharp argues that Wordsworth's compositional practice in the experimental ballads of 1798 is informed by his experiences as a student of French as a traveler in post-revolutionary France in 1792-93, and that the experimental ballads may well be understood as an attempt to teach their readers the "strange and awkward" second language, that of poetry.  Founded in 1970, The Wordsworth Circle is published by the English Department of New York University.  The publication focuses on contemporary studies of the literature, culture, and society of 1760-1850 England.

C.W. Sullivan III's "Lore of the Rings: the Influence of Welsh Myth and Legend on Fantasy Literature in the 1960s and 1970s" appeared in the New Welsh Review 56 (Summer 2002). The article speculates on the literary and cultural reasons for the appearance of 18 major novels, all heavily influenced by medieval Welsh Celtic myth and legend, in the fourteen-year period between 1964 and 1978.  These novels include: Lloyd Alexander 's The Prydain Chronicles, Nancy Bond's A String in the Harp, Alan Garner's The Owl Service, Evangeline Walton's The Mabinogion series, Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series, and reprints of Kenneth Morris's The Fates of the Princes of Dyfed and Book of the Three Dragons.