Emerging Writers Network

Damn! Bat Segundo Reaches 300

With today's posting of his podcast interview with J. Robert Lennon, Ed Champion's Bat Segundo Show has reached the 300 podcast mark.  Consider us impressed.  We'll be listening to this one tonight for sure as we've recently enjoyed Lennon's Castle and Pieces for the Left Hand and find the blog, Ward Six, that he co-writes with his wife, Rhian Ellis, as well as Ed Skoog, is also very enjoyable.

Keyhole Shows How to Use Technology

Stephanie Johnson, author of One of These Things is Not Like the Others (Keyhole Press, 2009), used UStream TV this evening to read three stories to viewers from anywhere in the world so long as they had an internet connection.  She looked very comfortable in her own den or library, reading to the camera via her computer.  Keyhole's Peter Cole set this up and has Stephanie set up to read the next two nights as well.

This is something that can change how reading tours are run, especially for authors that might have the ability to go on week or two long bookstore tours. To see how tonight went, just wander over here.

Congratulations to Laura van den Berg

The following information can also be read over at the Dzanc Books blog:

Laura van den Berg’s Story Collection Selected as B&N Discover Great Books Pick

 July 23, 2009 - Ann Arbor, MI —Dzanc Books is excited to announce that Laura van den Berg’s short story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, has been selected by Barnes and Noble to be a Discover Great Books pick for the Holiday season.  The collection is set to be published by Dzanc in mid-October and both Laura and Dzanc are excited to have What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us continue to receive this sort of recognition.

The title story of Laura's collection will appear in The Pushcart Prize XXXIV: Best of the Small Presses (November 2009, Pushcart Press).  Laura has also had another story from What The World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us included in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008 (2008, Houghton Mifflin), and yet another that will be in Best New American Voices 2010 (October 2009, Mariner Books).  As for Dzanc Books, Laura's selection continues the high regard their books have received lately, in particular their short story collections.  The Kansas City Star included 3 collections published by Dzanc or their imprints in their Top 10 Story Collections of 2008.  Two Dzanc collections also won medals in last year’s IPPY Awards.

Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief had this to say about What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us: 

“Laura van den Berg finds the tension between science and magic and walks it like a tightrope. . .  Any reader will be glad to have found it.”

About Laura van den Berg

Laura van den Berg was raised in Florida and earned her MFA at Emerson College. She is the recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences, the 2009 Julia Peterkin Award, and the 2009-2010 Emerging Writer Lectureship at Gettysburg College. Her fiction has or will soon appear in One Story, Boston Review, Epoch, The Literary Review, American Short Fiction, StoryQuarterly, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Pushcart Prize XXIV: Best of the Small Presses, among other publications. The winner of the Dzanc Prize, Laura’s first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, will be published by Dzanc Books in October 2009.

New Evenson

I'll start this off by stating I feel a little bad.  I made damn sure I had a copy of this book ordered before sharing the news with you.  Tyrant Books comes out of the gate in incredible fashion with a limited edition (400 copies), hardcover, 8 x 8.5", white linen with brass emboss novella from Brian Evenson (you may have read his name here at the EWN once or twice - if not, wander over to Blake Butler or Matt Bell's sites).

Update:  Man, as William Walsh was so kind to point out to me, I was so excited about this I forgot to mention the book's title.  It's Baby Leg. 

The price is $30 plus shipping, for those that pre-order, if you wait until October the price will up itself to $35 (though, to be honest, I can't imagine ANY being left that late in the game).  Here for more information and the link to order.

Preview?  Really, you need to see a little more.  It's not good enough that it's Brian freaking Evenson?  Fine, here's the first paragraph:

"Night after night, Kraus dreamt of a woman with a normal leg and a baby leg. In the dream, she clomped about on her adult-sized knee and the baby leg, wielding an axe, lurching. He kept watching her pass, yawing with each step. He would hear her first, the thud of the knee and the soft slap of the baby foot, and then see her come by, slow and off-kilter, the sound of her slowly fading. He couldn't move, not even his eyes. He had to lie there, listening to his own breathing, until he heard her coming back. She kept coming and going, until finally, shaken, he managed to wake up."

From wandering around online, I can tell you for sure they're down to 397.  I'd hurry.

Source of Lit - Dzanc Books' Best of the Web 2009

Dzanc's Best of the Web 2009 is invading the internet today, with many of the authors included in this year's anthology participating in guest posts across the literary blogosphere.  Below you can find links to them (quick note - this has been pre-posted and a few of these may not go live until a bit later during the day):

Marcela Fuentes has a guest post over at Clifford Garstang's Perpetual Folly.

M. Thomas Gammarino writes about his story over at The Short Review's blog (along with a great introduction by Tania Hershman!).

Todd Hasak-Lowy's guest post can be found just below this one at the EWN.

Matthew Derby's post about his story is at www.mdbell.com.

Philip Holden was given the reins for a post over at Isak today.

Amy L. Clark has a guest post you can read at Sean Lovelace's It All Relates 2 Writing.

Corey Mesler's guest post can be found at the PANK Magazine blog.

Kate Peterson at Brevity's blog, has a post up too.

Amber Cook writes about her work over at Keyhole Magazines's blog.

Jeff Parker writes about his story over at HTML Giant.

Karen Heuler wrote one up for All Art Everywhere Is Free.

Terese Svoboda's essay about her short essay can be found at GDCS + SWDP.

And David at Large Hearted Boy has added a new book notes today with write-ups from over a dozen of the BotW authors.

Best of the Web 2009 Internet Invasion - Todd Hasak-Lowy

Confessions of an Inconsistent Autobiographer

Todd Hasak-Lowy

 

Step 1: Denial

I like getting published.  It certainly beats the alternative.  I even like, often a lot, finding myself in some public space and fielding questions, at times asked by perfect strangers, about the things I’ve published.  I usually feel very fortunate at these times.

But there is a certain question that can turn such moments sour.  It’s actually a cluster of questions, all of which include some form of the word “autobiography.”  The otherwise admirable question-asker, who, against all odds, willingly transported him or herself to this public space in order to listen to me and my nonsense, wants to know: did any of this happen to you, and if so, which parts?

The curiosity behind this question is understandable enough, since an honest response can, on occasion, provide a far-from-boring bit of information.  Examples: “Wow, Writer Q really did sleep with his mother’s dental surgeon!” “Did you know that Writer Z was addicted to Afrin?” [It’s a nasal spray, and no, I was not addicted to it.  Nor does my mother have dental surgeon.]  I suppose such knowledge counts for something.

All the same, this question displays disinterest, and possibly even contempt, for the entire fictional enterprise, which, as Tolstoy may once have said, is “all about making shit up” (loose translation from the Russian).  Asking about autobiography is to fail to value fiction on its own terms.  This line of questioning replaces an interest in the writer’s imagination with a desire for gossip. 

So, when I first got published, my hostility toward this question would lead me to respond with a curt “No.”  Unlike most of my answers to other questions, I would keep this response short, in part to nip the whole aggravating matter in the bud, and, honestly, in part to make the person who asked it feel just a tad uncomfortable and thus less likely to ever ask this question, to me or anyone else, in public ever again. 

Step 2: Accept You Have a Past

The other reason I didn’t feel bad about that blunt “no” of mine is that it was, I believed at the time, an accurate answer.  With the exception of pages 41 and 43 of my short story collection (involving me and my fifth-grade breasts), nothing in these fictions had ever happened to me.  The events and characters were imagined.

Yet over time I realized the situation was actually a bit more complicated.  Many of these stories had, sometimes at their very core, an emotion that was drawn directly from my own psychological past.  I had felt something specific and complicated, and some version of this feeling had been transplanted, however consciously, into my fiction. 

This realization concerning my private past didn’t lead to me changing my public answer, and not only because my book tour was pretty much over by then.  It was just that an answer of this sort stuck me as a) unnecessarily revealing, and b) not really what the question-asker was looking for in the first place.  In order to illustrate point “b,” ask yourself who would ever want to say, or even think, the following:  “Wow, can you believe that Writer Y is, if he’s going to be entirely honest about it, haunted more by his sense of helplessness in regards to fixing our broken world than he is about the brokenness of the world itself, however much this feeling of helplessness could only be felt with such force if Writer Y did in fact truly feel horrible about our world’s brokenness?” 

Step 3: What Doesn’t Kill Us Might Make for a Good and even Useful Premise For a Short Story

Acknowledging the place of my emotional past in my writing didn’t change my answer to the question of autobiography, but it did, in at least one case, alter my writing.  And not just the content, but also the very motivation behind writing fiction in the first place.  The idea was to move beyond sublimation straight to exorcism. 

To get a little more specific: I have been a Detroit Lions fan for my entire conscious life.  This is, as far as these things go, a horrible fate.  The Lions suck.  They have sucked, consistently and often intensely, for the vast majority of my conscious life.  All the same, I care about them and in this way invite disappointment and sorrow to be delivered into my world each Sunday for sixteen straight Sundays from September through December every year.

This example may sound surprisingly and hilariously insignificant.  I won’t argue.  But I will say that the above paragraph was not intended to serve as one of my essays (many?) comic moments.  Tragic-comic perhaps.

So I thought: maybe if I write a story about a guy who shares this feeling with me, a feeling stemming from the pointless suffering endured by an incurable Lions fan, and maybe if this guy tells his story as an act of finally and officially rejecting his allegiance with the Lions, then maybe, whether or not he succeeds, I’ll be able to stop caring (about the Lions).

Step 4: My Name is Todd and I’m a Lions Fan

The result of this plan is a story called “Silver and Blue,” which, for whatever reason, takes the form of a very long letter to Customer Care at DirecTV.  Here I articulated the whole hideous complex of my affection for the franchise so that I might consider it from a distance and then, finally, walk away once and for all.  I sent the piece to the handful (the very small handful) of people I know who are both literate and Lions fan.  They congratulated me, both for the story and the plan.  I thought I was done.  One stone (the story), two birds (artistic glory and pigskin detox).

But, as it turned out, I was not so fortunate.  After 7600 words and a number of revisions, I found that I still cared for the Lions.  I learned this the hard (and weird way) during a year I spent abroad in Israel, where, for reasons that still elude me, the Lions’ games were picked up no fewer than six times over the course of a single, pointless season by whichever Fox affiliate is responsible for sending its digital signal to the Middle East.  Thanks to the time difference, my stubborn habit had me staying up until 4am to watch my team continue to be very bad at playing football.  Like a masochistic lover mistreated time and again, I stared the Detroit Lions (the players, the coaches, the ownership) straight in the eyes, told them I never wanted to see them again, but then stood transfixed by the television, unable to turn away from another 34-6 drubbing at the hands of the Minnesota Vikings.  That’s the sad autobiographical truth.

Step 5: One Game at a Time

The only consolation here is that my story seems to have been favorably received by the good man running this site.  It was even anthologized.  And I supposed that ought to count for something.  Maybe even you, fair reader, will be inclined to hunt down my piece.  And then maybe you’ll read it, and maybe you’ll like it, and maybe, just maybe, it will finally get you to address that Pittsburgh Pirates habit of yours.

As you have may have noticed by now, the present piece is loosely organized along the lines of some sort of AA twelve-step confession.  I can’t say I’m entirely sure that was the way to go, but it’s too late to turn back now.  As I search for an appropriate ending to this silliness, I will pretend I’ve earned the right to offer some wisdom to those fellow travelers who recognize a bit of themselves in my journey.  So here it is, do’s and don’ts from the intersection of fiction and fandom:

- Don’t ask writers about autobiography.

- Don’t raise your children in any of the following cities if you intend on having a television:

Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and, if you have any weakness for basketball, Golden State, which I think is a city in Northern California.

- Don’t write short stories (or novels, probably) about feelings (or sympathies) you have that you wish you didn’t have.  Not because it’s bad literature (which it may be), but because it won’t do anything for you except give it all a name. 

- I don’t know how a poem might operate in this instance.

- There are no do’s on this list.

Step 6. Hitting Rock Bottom

We’ll here’s the good news: it can only get better.  The Lions went 0-16 last year.  Sixteen games in which you score less than your opponent.  Which, in case you’re wondering, had never been done before.  In other words, it’s not a stretch to say that last year’s team was the worst team in the eighty-nine year history of the NFL.  Not that I care, but this season will have to be easier on us all.  At least I hope it will be.

Citywide Poets Head to Chicago

Desiree Cooper has a great post about InsideOut's Citywide Poets from Detroit, and their most recent event just before they head off to Chicago to be part of Russel Simmons' Brave New Voices series.

I've had the pleasure of seeing members from CWP in the past and agree with Ms. Cooper, they're fantastic.  It's a great organization that Terry Blackhawk has put together in InsideOut Literary Arts Project.   Wander on over and see all the great things they're doing.

The Afghan Women's Writing Project

Apologies to those of you that believe my covering the lengthy career of an author already selling I'd guess somewhere around 3,000 copies or so of his work somehow goes against the spirit of the Emerging Writers Network.  Silly me believing that I might have an understanding of what I've been doing with the EWN for the past decade.

Anyway, while I will return to Mr. Everett and his 23rd book later on today or tomorrow, in the mean time I'd like to point toward some writers that are absolutely emerging.  A month or so ago I had the pleasure of bumping into Masha Hamilton at the Ann Arbor Book Festival.  While she has a new novel due out soon from Unbridled Books, she was just as excited, if not more, to share with me the news of the Afghan Women's Writing Project.  True apologies to Masha for needing to be reminded recently of this fantastic project she's put together.

The following bits will all be from the Afghan Women's Writing Project website.

The Women

The Afghan Women’s Writing Project began as an idea during novelist Masha Hamilton’s last trip to Afghanistan in November 2008. Her interest in Afghanistan was sparked in the late 1990s during the Taliban period, when she understood it was one of the worst places in the world to be a woman. Masha first visited the country in 2004, and was awed and inspired by the resolute courage of the women she met. When she returned, she saw doors were closing and life was again becoming more difficult, especially for women. She began to fear we could lose access to the voices of Afghan women if we didn’t act soon. The Afghan Women’s Writing Project is aimed at allowing Afghan women to have a direct voice in the world, not filtered through male relatives or members of the media. Many of these Afghan women have to make extreme efforts to gain computer access in order to submit their writings, in English, to the project.

The Teachers

The project reaches out to talented and generous women author/teachers here in the United States and engages them, on a volunteer, rotating basis, to teach Afghan women online from Afghanistan. (We are using women teachers solely due to cultural sensitivities in Afghanistan.) Through this ongoing interaction, we hope to encourage the women to develop their voices and share their stories. Portions of the work will be put on a blog on a regular basis. Due to security concerns, we will use the Afghan women writers’ first names only, editing out all names of family and friends and removing locators. Nevertheless, the existence of the blog in the world is a key part of the project for several reasons. First, it is intended to instill a sense of pride for these women. Secondly, it is also intended to educate us, the teachers and readers of the blog, about what the Afghan women’s childhoods and young adulthoods were like under the Taliban, and what they feel about current conditions in their country. The blog is also meant to be a record of the project itself. Finally, it is intended to provide a positive link between Afghans and Americans at a time when those relationships have to some degree soured.

The Project

Everyone involved in the project has donated their time and energy, from Jeff Lyons, the California-based blog master, to Rose Daniels in Brooklyn, NY, who contributed blog design, to Terry Dougherty, the Indiana-based technical specialist who worked tirelessly to set up the online classrooms. The author/teachers themselves are teaching pro bono, making time in already very busy schedules. In finding the writers in Afghanistan, Masha sought the guidance and advice primarily of American Ted Achilles, founder of SOLA (School of Leadership, Afghanistan), who has been living for more than five years in Kabul and Kandahar. She also sought advice from other American friends living there who have connections with young writers at Kabul University. Sally Goodrich, of the Peter M. Goodrich Memorial Foundation, provided the link to Ted Achilles and others. Mrs. Goodrich, along with her husband Don, supports Afghan students here in the U.S., and has spearheaded the building of a girls’ school in Afghanistan.

The pieces I've read so far have been fantastic and really, just the idea that these women are writing and getting it out there makes the project worthwhile, talented or not.  Why say that?  Here is a notice from the website:

• Security Notice:

  The security situation can be difficult for many women in Afghanistan, especially those who are determined to further their education or those who frankly tell their stories. Out of concern for their safety, this blog will not use family names or specific locators.

What Masha has done here is pretty incredible and she's got 55 other women that have volunteered their time and efforts to mentor these women. 

Wander on over and read the work, see if there's a way you can help out, etc.

Source of Lit - Percival Everett - The Poetry Collections

Poetry collections?  A bit of a surprise when 2005 rolled around and I heard that Percival Everett had a poetry collection coming out in early 2003.  A response only 2 1/2 years earlier in an interview will explain that - you'll see below.  I'd really never written out full reviews for either of these, only mini-reviews.  I had enough information from that for re: f (gesture) but needed to re-read the newer collection last night.  I know for sure that the cover to Abstraktion is a Percival Everett painting.  Both of these titles were edited by Chris Abani.

re: f (gesture)

2006 by Red Hen Press, 72 pages

 

Abstraktion Und Einfühlung

2008 by Black Coat c/o Akashic Books, 63 pages

 

“I can't write a poem to save my life.  I wrote the anatomical poems for Glyph, because the character wrote them.  They're political poems.”  So said Percival Everett in an EWN interview back in 2003.  I don’t want to call the man a liar, but there are now two full-fledged collections of his poetry, put out by two pretty well-respected poetry publishing houses.

 

The poems are what might expect, full of philosophical expressions, the occasional formula, wordplay and whatnot though always seeming to just avoid looking gimmicky.  There are things that I’m sure I’m not grasping, either on a philosophical or poetic level.  For instance, there’s a nature of three going on.  In re: f (gesture), the collection is broken into three sections.  The first, “Zulus,” goes through each letter of the alphabet, each receiving a stanza or so of attention, again frequently of a philosophical nature.  Names such as Kant, Robespierre as well as names from Greek mythology such as Leda and Ganymede pop up regularly.  Another section concentrates more on the body, and the poems are, well, a little warmer, a few even sliding towards eroticism in nature.

 

Looking up the phrase Abstraktion Und Einfühlung to see if I could find out what it means, I discovered it’s the title of a book written by a German art historian back in the early 1900’s.  His name was Wilhelm Worringer.  I believe there’s some importance in the fact that he was an art historian as many of the names that pop up in this collection seem to be those that spent their time in the visual art world:  Picasso, Manet, Warhol, Van Gogh and many others.

 

There is also the continuation of focus on trios.  Each of the seventeen poems is broken up into three, numbered, sections.  I’m not fully sure what is going on in the first two sections, but Percival Everett seems to be focusing on language, and its limitations, in the third sections.  Each of these has what I believe would be considered a Joycean (with apologies to anybody that was doing it before him that I’m unaware of) playing of spelling.  For example in the first poem, “Picasso 1916,” the third section reads as follows:

 

hairvery

maynining

ewolves

a forum

 

Which is basically a phonetic repetition of the sixth line of the second section:

 

that every meaning evolves a form,

 

While the two books were enjoyable, I’ll openly admit that I’d prefer Everett write novels or short stories.  There are times that he confuses the hell out of me when writing fiction, but something usually follows what confused me in a manner that helps me figure out what he was doing.  In poetry, there’s just not enough time for him to include that something.  I still believe, though, that he was way off on that interview response.

 

3.5 stars apiece

Source of Lit - Percival Everett - The One That Got Away

Babysitting.  That is what led to Percival Everett's decision to write a young children's book.  At least that's what he said back in the 2003 interview with the EWN.  That's about when this review was originally written and distributed to the EWN too.

The One That Got Away

1992 by Clarion Books, 32 pages

 

The cover of this children's book points us toward what is inside as the One in the title is highlighted by being a different color than the rest of the words in the title.  The One that got away, is literally that, a number one.

 

Percival Everett, fond of wordplay and the need to be specific in one's use of language in his adult novels, teaches children this lesson early on with this book and Dirk Zimmer's illustrations have enough going on in the background to keep them entertained as well.

 

There are often other numbers skirting the edges of the pages, hiding behind rocks, and the like, but Everett is clear that it is One's they are looking for.  They end up catching nine Ones, and each is different in size, shape and color.  During a nice, clear night, one of the Ones escapes.  While they search for it, they come to a mountain with a staircase, missing a single stair.  When one of the riders and his horse go back to find a stair, they look in a hole.  When they pull out a step, the hole becomes a stairwell.  More wordplay.

 

It is a pleasure to find a children's book about language and the usage of it, as opposed to a moral or social message.  To find it done in such an entertaining little story is even better.  I tested it out with my six and three year olds and I'm going to be in a world of trouble when I take it back to the library - they love it and we've read it about 70 times since I checked it out.

 

The ending, when the riders go back to the corral, finds them talking about the Ones they have left.  We have eight, one of them says.  What do you think they found in the corral when they returned?  If you have a young child, this is a great way to help explain to them how important it is to say what you mean.

 

4.5 stars