Oh hey, y’all. Hope spring’s treating you right.

Down here in Austin we’re still recovering from the unwieldy beast of SXSW and reliving some of the best shows we saw a week or two ago. (Torres! Natalie Prass! Ray Wylie Hubbard!) We’re pulling hard for Kentucky to take it all. We’re also prepping for AWP in early April and getting to work on some new projects.

Speaking of projects: have you checked in on Covered with Fur lately? Since we launched the magazine in February, we’ve been plugging away and publishing bighearted fiction and strange, smart nonfiction—not to mention photo essays, cartoons, and our new Material series, which offers a peek into the backstory and research behind the CWF fiction.

We’re still thinking about Laura K. Wallace’s “The House in the Reader’s Mind,” a meditation on mirror neurons, metafiction, and the “ritual of making and unmaking” that is reading. Lynne Maphies’ “I Can’t See the Arctic Circle from Here” had us looking seriously at summer flights to Iceland. And today we’re dwelling on Alia Volz’s tender portrait of her artist mother and the stink and lure of turpentine.

On the fiction side, we’ve fallen deep into the sea world of “Ocean Songs,” an elegant and inky blue excerpt from Ethan Rutherford’s work-in-progress. New last week, Ethan’s Material installment heads back into his research and features whale-flensing diagrams, lost books on sea monsters, and an original score for the story by composer Peter C. Murray. YES. We also recommend rereading (and rereading) Kelly Ramsey’s brilliant, lyrical “Ulysses S. Grant, His Horses,” last month’s featured fiction. We’re open for submissions for a bit longer, so send along your best work.

AWP is closing in, too. We’ll be in Minneapolis hawking books and bolting from panel to party to afterparty. We’re cohosting Come and Take It, a celebration of Texas indie lit, on Wednesday, April 8, at 7:30 at Liquor Lyle’s. Come get the whole thing rolling and have your first drink on us. Stop by table 1522 and say hello (or howdy, if you want us to smile real big).

That’s all for now. Hope to catch you somewhere soon!