As a result of the enormous demand for our Fall 2006 issue, we regret that we’ve completely sold out of copies. If you can’t pick up a copy in your local bookstore, which may still have a few in stock, you can always subscribe to VQR. That won’t get you a physical copy of the Fall 2006 issue (at this point, Winter 2007 will be the first issue you’ll receive), but you can read the entirety of the contents of the issue on our website, along with every other issue from the past thirty years.

We hosted a couple of events on Friday that we recorded for your listening pleasure. First we held a series of lectures on the newly-discovered Robert Frost poem, featuring our own Ted Genoways, New Republic poetry editor Glyn Maxwell, and graduate student Robert Stilling (17.8MB MP3). Then, in collaboration with UVa’s Jefferson Society, Glyn Maxwell read from his own work (14MB MP3).

We’ve just been informed that VQR has won FOLIO: magazine’s Gold Eddie Award for editorial excellence in the nonprofit category. We’re delighted by this news—and not a little humbled. The other finalist were two exceptional magazines: OnEarth (winner of last year’s Independent Press Award for general excellence) and Internationalist Magazine (the fantastic publication of the Roosevelt Institution). Unfortunately, we couldn’t attend the ceremony in New York last night, because we were hosting a phenomenal reading at the Wisconsin Book Festival by Benjamin Percy, Dean Bakopoulos, and Dan Chaon. That event capped a long weekend of stellar events at the festival, including appearances by VQR alums Robert Sapolsky, Michael Chabon, Marjane Satrapi, and Chris Ware. The event with Chris and Marjane is being edited for broadcast on NPR’s “To the Best of Our Knowledge,” so keep an ear out for that if you couldn’t make it to blustery Madison this week. More on the festival soon, but for now we’re going to bask in the glow of the Eddie!

Has anyone out there seen the limited release of Running with Scissors? Back in February 2005, we received a request from a production assistant working on the film adaptation of Augusten Burroughs’s memoir for a few sheets of old VQR letterhead. See, Burroughs troubled mother Deirdre (played by Annette Bening) was a would-be poet and apparently was rejected by VQR some time in the early ’70s—something they planned to dramatize in the movie. We sent off the letterhead and gave our permission to use our name, then forgot about it. But today I saw a review of the movie in the San Francisco Chronicle that reads, in part, “In early scenes . . . Deirdre is an Auntie Mame to her adoring child, who listens to her emote into a microphone a poem she plans to submit to the New Yorker. Augusten assures her that the magazine will publish it — even though she’s already been rejected by Virginia Quarterly.” So does anyone know? Is the rejection dramatized? I’m trying to imagine watching an Oscar-nominated actress portraying the author reaction of a rejected author. I’m guessing she doesn’t take it as well as David Keeling. (By the way, David and all submitters, we apologize for taking so long to respond. We’ve been buried in submissions ever since our National Magazine Award nominations in March. I’m pleased to report that we’ve hired additional readers, we’re enlisting new interns, and we’ve just started using a spiffy new submission database that we hope will help us streamline our process.)