A Preview of Grist's Premiere Issue

Premiere Issue Table of Contents

Grist: The Journal for Writers, a new national literary annual arising with support from the creative writing program at the University of Tennessee, features world class fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction, along with interviews with renowned writers, and essays about craft. Grist is distinguished from other journals by a commitment to exploring the nuances of the writer's occupation. Its pages invite questions regarding the author’s choice of genre, form, and point-of-view, as well as facilitating discussions of those elusive terms ‘aesthetics’ and ‘voice.’ There are plenty of literary journals in the world, as well as a fair number of magazines devoted to aspects of craft, but no publication that we know of blends the two like Grist.

The premiere issue of Grist features dozens of stories and poems from some of America’s prominent writers. Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, travels to Indonesia in search of peace and self-awareness, with a little help from a friend and irrepressible dilettante of zoology. In Tom Franklin’s story “Christians,” a mother’s loss of a son prompts a march through her county in search of compassion and someone to lay both her and her departed son to rest. Bret Anthony Johnston’s essay “On Point-of-View” looks to the author’s choice of POV as the “sole organizing principle of the narrative.” This collection also includes poems and stories by Eric Puchner, Dennis Sampson, Julia Levine, and interviews with Ron Rash and Hannah Tinti. The journal, both readable and engaging, is a congress of voices and writings that matter. It provides the reader with a window into the writer’s occupation—rapt at his or her desk, consumed by this thing we call craft.

        Excerpt from Elizabeth Gilbert’s Planet Eyeball

“[Wade’s] Manhattan apartment today looks like a Museum of Natural History storage room, crammed with whale bones, Icelandic pony skins and taxidermied dik-diks. He even has a little bottle filled with cat whiskers he has collected over the years. It takes a patient eye indeed to find a cat whisker on a Persian rug.”

        Excerpt from Tom Franklin’s Christians

It was August, so she had to bury him quick. Soon she would be able to smell him, a thing she didn’t know if she could endure—not the live, biting odor he brought in from a day in the fields but a mixture of turned earth and rot…”

        Excerpt from Bret Anthony Johnston’s On Point-of-View

“Every semester, I read story after story in which there are no point-of-view violations, no unintentional second-person to third-person switches, but the perspective in each narrative is badly compromised. Take, for example,...the carjacker who, oblivious to the caliber of his pistol, prattles on about his victims’ Ann Taylor blouses, Prada pumps, French-tipped nails.”

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Grist is published annually by the University of Tennessee. Each issue is approximately 200-300 pages and most issues contain a mix of poetry, fiction, interview, creative nonfiction, and essay.  

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English Department
301 McClung Tower
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN 37996-0430.