"It may sound like a General Motors recall, but it's not: It's a pretty cool semiannual journal published by NorthernPros Creations, a company in Carmel Valley, California, that provides editing, publishing, and promotional services for writers. The premiere issue, published this past summer, is devoted to "story," a broad theme described by founding editor Benjamin Spencer, in his first editor's note, as an account that "not only engages narrative but also articulates the nature of what it is to be human." The issue's stories, by Keith Abbott, Raymond Nolan, Peter Orner, and others, as well as poems by Sam Abrams and Michael Salcman and photographs by Tony Stringer, endeavor to do just that. The next issue, due out sometime next winter, will carry a "creative nonfiction" theme."
- Poets & Writers Magazine
Kevin Larimer, Senior Editor
September/October, 2007
"Cicatrix, noun. 'In botany, it pertains to the tissue left behind when a leaf falls from a plant as it grows,' Benjamin Spencer explains, referring to the title of the Carmel Valley-based literary journal Cadillac Cicatrix, whose second issue releases nationally this month ... 'Cadillac represents the American standard of luxury,' Spencer says, 'and the two together conjure a luxurious or stylish mark of a particular place for the people who we feature as they build their careers. This particular publishing is a cicatrix of their career - a place where they changed, where they grew' ... Spencer had the idea to begin the magazine after arriving in Carmel and learning that there was no substantial outlet for local writers, which he found especially disheartening, considering the Central Coast's extensive literary legacy ... '[Cadillac Cicatrix] is my attempt to reach out to the area, to join and help artists and show that [the legacy] is still alive. It is still happening here,' Spencer says ... Though the magazine is rooted in Carmel, it features the work of writers and artists from around the world.'
- Carmel Magazine
Review by Tessa Stuart
Spring, 2008
"Created as a result of the one-time issue of the same name by the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, Cadillac Cicatrix offers a diverse range of poetry, nonfiction, prose, art, criticism and video. Leaving so much literary food on the readers' plates, they will be forced to ingest its offerings one course at a time ... The journal's expansive art section, which includes photography, paintings and video [takes] viewers to new and imaginative worlds otherwise unknown...Cadillac Cicatrix will return you to the aesthetic and linguistic worlds of the Beat Generation (especially the California segment) and the past they represented without entirely removing you from modern hopes and hardships of the present day. This journal revels in the convergence of all literary genres, and that is why you will be so intrigued that you will continue to read and absorb its contents."
- NewPages.com
Review by Micah Zevin
June, 2008
