Emerging Writers Network

Fall Poetry Conference in Ann Arbor

Coming this weekend, the Fall Poetry Conference returns to Ann Arbor courtesy of the Copper Colored Mountain Arts Organization!

Jericho Brown, A. Van Jordan, and Aaron McCollough will all be featured as visiting poets.

Friday October 7, 7 p.m. - Reading with a Book Signing Reception

Saturday October 8, 10:30 to Noon - Conversations with the Poets

Saturday October 8, 1 to 4 - Workshop and Craft Lectures ($45 tuition for the workshop)

 

National Short Story Month - FWR and The Collection Giveaway Project

The fine folks over at Fiction Writers Review are celebrating National Short Story Month too, and their big addition to the month is The Collection Giveaway Project. 

The easiest way for me to explain it is to simply lift the words of Contributing Editor, Erika Dreifus as she explains the idea over at their site:

 

To participate in Short Story Month 2011: The Collection Giveaway Project , here’s what to do:

(1) Post an entry on your blog recommending a recently published short story collection (or two, or three).
The post can be long or short, a review or merely a rave. The one requirement is that you, the blogger, have read and loved the book(s) in question.

(2) Offer a copy of the book (or each book) as a giveaway to one lucky person who comments on your blog.
You can choose the winner through a drawing, or by the wittiness of his/her remarks, or by whatever criteria you choose.

NOTE for blogger-authors: You can absolutely give away a copy of your own collection—but in an effort to keep this as much about community as publicity, please also offer to give away a second book that isn’t one of yours.

(3) Announce the winner(s) on May 31, 2011, and arrange to send out copies of any books you are giving away.

If you’re participating, drop Erika an email at erika [at] fictionwritersreview.com **with the link to your giveaway post!** to let us know. We’ll add you to the list of participating blogs/sites and link to you from this page on our site. We’ll update the list now and throughout May!

 

We here at the EWN will certainly be participating.  We will do so with the following collections:

a)  Visiting Hours edited by Daniel E Wickett

b)  Love Doesn't Work by Henning Koch

c)  Knuckleheads by Jeff Kass

d)  Misfits and Other Heroes by Suzanne Burns

In order to be eligible, I need you to comment on this particular post (at the blog, not on Facebook--though comments at FB are always appreciated, they just will not be eligible to win a free book) and how you were last affected by Visiting Hours, or why you don't think Love Works, or how you are a Knucklehead or a Misfit.  At the end of the month, I will go through these and select the one for each scenario that grabs my attention the hardest and ask for those addresses. 

Burke's Books--Special Deal on Signed Grisham Titles

A small confession.  I've never read anything by John Grisham.  Call me snobby, or elitist, or whatever other terms there are for it, but I never have.  I vaguely recall seeing the movie of The Firm, but know I never saw The Pelican Brief.  If the dates are right, The Firm came out not too long after I had really discovered the type of fiction that I liked--and I was burying myself in new story collections from University Presses, and haunting used bookstores to find copies of things like old Delillo novels and the original five Cormac McCarthy novels.  At that time, authors like T.C. Boyle and Madison Smartt Bell seemed mainstream because my local stores always had their new titles in on the day they were published, unlike many of the books I had to special order.  So, no, I never grabbed a copy of The Firm, or any of Grisham's follow-ups.  Not even the one that one of my favorite magazines, The Oxford American, published sections of.

I do know that the man likes the type of books that I do though--knowing some of the names that have come through the University of Mississippi as the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence, including current author, John Brandon, points that out pretty clearly.  He also supported The Oxford American for a period of time when they truly needed it.  And he's been a friend to one of my favorite independent bookstores, Burke's Books, for some 20 years now.

And they are offering a special deal on a couple of signed John Grisham titles:

John Grisham 20th Annniversary Offer

For a limited time only, order at least one signed copy of the new young adult novel (Theodore Boone: The Abduction, $16.99) and receive 20% off your pre-order for the signed copy of Grisham's forthcoming legal thriller, due out in late October.

CLICK HERE TO PRE-ORDER YOUR SIGNED COPIES

DETAILS: This offer good through May 31st. If you order at least one copy of Theodore Boone: The Abduction ($16.99), you may pre-order your signed copy of the As Yet Untitled Fall 2011 Grisham Legal Thriller at a reduced price of $23.00 (regular price $28.95). Theodore Boone signed copies will be available for pickup and shipping in June; the Fall title will be available for pickup and shipping in November.

All orders must be prepaid to take advantage of this offer.

Everyone who takes advantage of this offer will be eligible to win a Grisham prize. We will be giving away signed limited editions of several Grisham titles, signed posters, a signed football (a promo for the Bleachers book), signed The Firm broadsides, and much more.

So, if Grisham is your cup of tea, if you have a reader of YA books in your house, or you just think it's a pretty cool deal and know that there's somebody you could give these books to as gifts, I'm sure a big order of this combo would do Burke's Books a world of good as they head into the summer.  And I'm pretty sure that's what John Grisham had in mind when he set this up with the fine folks there.

New Blog: Gordon Lish Edited This

Those that pay attention to things here at the EWN, or at Dzanc Books, have surely realized there's a bit of an obsession with the works that Gordon Lish edited or wrote.  Reading and posting on each work pubished in every issue of the The Quarterly (yes, this will kick back up again soon), searching out the books he edited for Knopf, publishing authors through Dzanc Books like Yannick Murphy, Dawn Raffel, and Pamela Ryder, that were originally published by Gordon Lish at Knopf, or in The Quarterly, etc.

Recently, Blake Butler posted a list of books that he was aware of (with the help of Justin Taylor) that were edited by Lish over at HTMLGiant.

Even more recently, a new blog has been started up by Michael Hemmingson:  Gordon Lish Edited This, in which he'll discuss, scan pages from, and detail books that are both of the well-known, and lesser-known, variety.  From the about page on this blog:

While some books acquired and edited by Gordon Lish during his time at Alfred A. Knopf (1978-1994) are canon in American literature (Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Amy Hempel), there are hundreds that were equally great but were, for various reasons, forgotten and/or ignored by the general literati, known only to a small cult group of writers and readers — say, books by Michael Hickins, Ben Marcus, Raymond Kennedy, Leon Rook, Thomas Glynn, Mary Robison come to mind, and many many others. (Suggest any we might not know).

This blog fills the whole hole of that deficit. Yes, yes it does, and it does it well, we say.

This blog is also an extension of the book, Gordon Lish and His Influence on Contemporary American Literature by Michael Hemmingson (forthcoming, Routledge).

This blog will also take a look at recent titles from former Lish students and writers, like Dawn Raffel, Terese Svoboda, Peter Markus, etc.

This blog will also look at young writers and new journals that are influenced by Lish’s theory of fiction and the style of his writers, like New York Tyrant, Caketrain, Unsaid, Sleeping Fish, etc; and new voices with a Lish-bent Blake Butler, Tao Lin, Edward Marten, etc.

This blog will also examine Lish’s novels, stories, and texts as well as what is said (or unsaid) about him in the press, past or present).

Unsaid Writing Contest

For the first time ever, Unsaid is having a writing contest:

The rules are simple. Look at the image pasted below and write a story based on what you see and feel. The winner will receive copies of U4 and U5, and his or her story will appear in U6. Send attached submissions to [email protected] with the subject heading, “Arbus.” Deadline for entries is May 1st, 2011. Good luck!

 

The photo in question?  (Borrowed from Unsaid's blog).

On Reviewing

Over at Fiction Writers Review, they've been posting essays on reviewing from the AWP Panel that Jeremy Chamberlin hosted this year.  There's been some fantastic stuff in these and are well worth your time:

"Owl Criticism" by Charles Baxter

"To say that something is “boring” is not a statement about a book, although the speaker may think that it is; it’s a statement about the reader’s poverty of equipment."

"An Education in Book Reviews" by Stacey D'Erasmo

"I learned how to teach writing by editing. I learned how to write essays by writing them and by being edited, and under the urgency of a ticking clock that was not only temporal but monetary: if you didn’t file, you didn’t get paid. And I learned what I very much needed to learn, which was that writers, even the fiction writers I revered, were very human, very alive, very flawed, often very charming, and generally in struggle."

"Some Thoughts on Reviewing Poetry in 2011" by Keith Taylor

"When I was just beginning to publish my poetry in small regional journals in the mid 1970s, it seemed an obvious extension of that process to write the occasional review. I was trying to learn things, trying to figure things out about the art, and organizing my thoughts in a review helped me do that."

The Rumpus Book Club

 

Have you joined The Rumpus Book Club yet?  For $25 per month, you get a first look at a book that basically only the publishers, the author, and reviewers will have had a chance to read.  If a book is due to be pubished in February 2011, you will get your copy early in January 2011 (like the many, many current member sill be getting copies of Roy Kesey's Pacazo, as it's the January selection).  Most of the books selected will be hardcovers, though an occasional paperback original will sneak in to play.  Most of the books will be from indie publishers like Melville House, or Dzanc Books or the like.

Join up before January 3 and you can still get in on the Kesey (trust me, it's great and you don't want to have to wait until February to read it).  Next month is the new story collection from Jim Shepard!

And again,part of the fun of The Rumpus Book Club, getting to weigh in early on a book before the reviewers have their say.

You can subscribe to The Rumpus Book Club here.  (This is where you click on that link and leave the EWN for a short time!).

Lapcharoensap and Peelle receive Whiting Awards

Actually ten authors received Whiting Awards, as announced today, which come with a nice $50,000 chunk of change.  The authors selected this year have been responsible for plays, essays, poems, fiction, chapbooks, full books, etc.

I mention Lapcharoensap and Peelle in the header as I'm actually familiar with their work.  Rattawut Lapcharoensap's short story collection, Sightseeing, was reviewed very positively here (well, back in the email only days) and he did a nice interview with us back in January 2005.  He's currently the Visiting Writer at the University of Wyoming MFA program and working on a novel.

Lydia Peelle's short story collection, Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing was published by Harper Collins late last year and I've had the pleasure of enjoying the bulk of it and if I ever get around to writing reviews again, it's high on my list of books I've enjoyed to write about.

From the website:

The ten writers recognized this year for their extraordinary talent and promise are:

David Adjmi, plays. His productions include Stunning, which premiered at Lincoln Center Theater. He is at work on a book for HarperCollins and lives in Brooklyn.

Elif Batuman, nonfiction. Her collection of essays, Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, was published this year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. She is spending this year in Istanbul.

Michael Dahlie, fiction. His first novel, A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living, was published in 2008 by W.W. Norton. He lives in Indianapolis.

Matt Donovan, poetry. His first collection, Vellum, was published by Mariner/Houghton Mifflin in 2006. He lives in Santa Fe.

Rattawut Lapcharoensap, fiction. His collection of short stories, Sightseeing, was published by Grove in 2004, and he has a first novel under contract with Grove. He lives in Laramie, Wyoming.

Amy Leach, nonfiction. She is at work on a book of essays about animals, plants and stars for Milkweed Editions. She lives in Chicago.

Lydia Peelle, fiction. Her collection of stories, Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing, was published by Harper Perennial in 2009. She lives in Nashville.

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, nonfiction. His memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, was published in 2009 by the Dial Press. He lives in New York City and is at work on a novel.

Jane Springer, poetry. Her first poetry collection, Dear Blackbird, was published by University of Utah Press in 2007. She lives in Clinton, New York.

LB Thompson, poetry. Her poetry chapbook is entitled Tendered Notes: Poems of Love and Money. She lives on the North Fork of Long Island, has completed a poetry collection, and is at work on a book of essays and a novel.

The Story of Dzanc Books

Many thanks to Jeremiah Chamberlin (see much more of his work at Fiction Writers Review), and Poets & Writers, as JC spent a good 4-6 hours talking to Steven Gillis and myself awhile back and put together a really nice article on the forming of Dzanc Books, how it all works and what our big goals are.  If you have any interest in the early days of either the EWN or Dzanc Books, or what exactly makes the amazing Steven Gillis tick, it's well worth your time to read.

Fiction Writers Review Loves the Best of the Web 2010

If you're not visiting Fiction Writers Review on a regular basis, you're missing out on a great website, and journal.  Wonderful book reviews, great essays, books of the week, giveaways, and more. 

Michael Rudin recently reviewed Best of the Web 2010 over there and did an incredible job - statistically analyzing the content, comparing it to Best of the Web 2009, looking at specific works within the anthology, and using some wonderful graphics as well.  To say that we at Dzanc Books were pleased with the review would be an understatement.  And we understand that later today, the Best of the Web 2010 will be named as their Book of the Week and highlighted over there as well.

One way to be sure to keep up to date with what's new over there is to join their Facebook page.