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ISSN: 1094-2726

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Stirring
Edited by Erin Elizabeth
Reviewed by Ingrid Woodrow

	Stirring Edited by Erin Elizabeth StirringMag@aol.com

Stirring is a promising new 'zine established in October of last year and edited by Erin Elizabeth. Featuring scripts, prose and poems, they're seeking work that's "fresh and innovative." What's here, in the April issue, is just that. There's Tom De Poto's touching story about Bobo the clown: already nervous about an impending introduction to the parents of his girlfriend, Mary, later in the evening, his afternoon deteriorates quickly after he attends a kids' birthday party. In what's supposed to be a triumphant finale to his act, he accidentally charbroils the pet pigeon and is escorted from the property. There is real diversity in the work here, not only in style but in origin, with submissions from Rome, Mexico, Australia and New York, to name a few. I liked Michael Sposito's "You and Your Plane Crash," about an alcoholic ex-journalist whose wife confronts him about a binge-drinking session the night before:

He felt he was choking and wanted to cry and hold her. He closed his eyes hard. He opened them, stared out the window and saw the low, gray clouds that seemed to seal his fate...alcohol seemed to move into him like a vacant apartment. It moved in, set up shop, and put a sign on the door.

From the depths to the heights, the "wet" theme continues with Peter Lobdell's play, "A Nightcap for Redcap," in which the two main characters, over the course of the play, become "wonderfully and extraordinarily intoxicated...a transcendent physical and emotional place of great freedom and expression." One of the players, Mary, quips, "I don't want to drink wine with anyone who won't play with me naked on a fairy mound in the moonlight." Amen to that!

There's some poetry, too. A highlight was Gabriel Siegel's "South Sea Ephemeral Hymn":

The sky has thickened and dawn is coming
while her still Samson on the verandah
measures with cigarettes and melting ice
the time to take before leaving.

An interesting element of Stirring is that it offers "free critiques" of your work (OK, not free, exactly, but in exchange for a link or a recommendation to a friend, which is easy enough). You can get any kind of work critiqued - up to four pages - and can specify how detailed you want the review to be. The 'zine also offers discounts at places like Barnes & Noble and Big Star, as well as a discussion forum, chat room and bulletin board.

The layout is clean and simple, with a good color image at the start (advertising a photography competition open to those of us who have "something to say"), and easy-to-read bios at the beginning of each piece listing details such as authors' birthdays, locations, other publications, email addresses and Web sites at a glance. I didn't like the annoying ad at the top of some works that consisted of scrolling text - the constant movement was distracting - though I acknowledge the necessity of a 'zine such as this having to rely on sponsors while it finds its feet in the literary world. Stirring looks set to make some waves on the Web - I look forward to seeing the development of this 'zine into a quality forum for intelligent writing.

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Ingrid Woodrow is a writer based in Brisbane, Australia. Her first novel, Goddess and the Galaxy Boy, will be published in early 2001. She is completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland and working on a new novel.She is also the founding editor of the online writing journal Mangrove, which is listed as a "Site of National Significance" in the National Library of Australia's PANDORA archive.

Further information and samples of her work can be obtained by visiting www.uq.edu.au/~eniwoodr