1. A gender breakdown of articles and stories submitted & pitched to magazines. In my experience with slush piles, they can be quite male-heavy and I’ve heard the same from editors.

2. A gender breakdown of books submitted to agents and publishers. (See above)

3. A breakdown of how many books written by men are marketed as “literary” or serious works versus how many by women are marketed as such. This, I think, is the one of the biggest and harder to tackle problems. Books written by women get a picture of a bare shoulder or a pair of legs on it and then men don’t buy it and “serious” reviewers don’t want to review it. Pretty simple. Pretty much a bummer.

4. A gender breakdown of how many male writers are solicited by these magazines. Because, you know, your short story probably isn’t going to make it out of the The New Yorker slush pile. It just isn’t. We know the major magazines (hell, even a lot of the smaller ones) are made almost exclusively out of solicited material. We know that. And because of the same problems that the VIDA numbers point out each year, editors know less women they want to solicit.  So, yeah, it’s a vicious cycle, blah blah blah, but one thing you can do about it is be a woman and work hard and submit everywhere until you cannot be ignored.

Well, it’s finally started happening. Penn State’s MFA program decided to commit harakiri rather than go on forcing its students to go into debt over a degree to no where. I don’t think it will be the last we’ll see to go. I don’t even know if it’s the first (and it seems likely that it isn’t.)

***There’s a good chance I wouldn’t have gotten an MFA if this was true, though, because the competition would have been so steep I would have been rejected or too intimidated to apply, and that’s fine by me. The MFA is a luxury, not a necessity.

 [Matchup #38 in Tournament of Bookshit]

NaNoWriMo

Central question: Can everyone be a writer?

Slogan: Thirty days and nights of literary abandon!

Duration: One month (but up to 1/12th of a person’s life if they get trapped in some hellish circle of annual NaNoWriMo’s.)

Overall effect on literature: High probability of resulting in shitty novel.

Contains a pronounced pseudo-acronym

Likelihood of sanity loss: High, but momentary

Literary Marriage

Central question: Can anyone stand to live with a writer?

Slogan: Infinite days and nights that you might rather abandon!

Duration: Eternity or until Literary Divorce

Overall effect on literature: High probability of resulting in a novel that makes other people feel like shit.

Does not contain a pronounced pseudo-acronym

Likelihood of sanity loss: Laughably high, but could be somewhat enjoyable, at least from the outside.

- Catherine Lacey

- – -

WINNER: I’m siding with Literary Marriage on this one because it’s messier and more interesting and has a higher probability of being a catalyst for the kinds of novels I like (Most stuff by Jean Rhys, Richard Yates & F Scott Fitzgerald, among others.)

O’Connor: You call your book The Uninnocent. I am very interested in the idea of “un-innocence.” How do you distinguish it from guilt (not in the sense of the emotion, but of being responsible for a wrong act)?

Morrow: The way I think about it, if innocence is a state of grace, an absence of inner darkness, uninnocence is its antithesis: a state of perpetual shadow, one in which serenity and goodness are distant dreams, if that. While the darkness of the uninnocent isn’t always calculating—thepeople in these stories are not all born wicked—through the agency of some flaw or naïveté they simply break bad. Even before they’re guilty of anything, many of them never seem to be fated for an innocent life. The narrator of the opening story, “The Hoarder,” openly admits of his childhood self, “I was a weird little bastard.” He wasn’t yet a perpetrator of any misdeed, but innocence didn’t seem even to him to be a defining part of his character. One could fairly ask why coin the word “uninnocent” when the language is so replete with terms for the reprehensible, the blameworthy, the delinquent, the wicked. But while many of the people in my stories behave in ways that society appropriately considers wrong, or even depraved, my approach to writing about these individuals was from the inside out. It was important to me to locate a deeper grace or humanity within them and use that as an empathic starting place—a tentative innocence they themselves often do not recognize—and weave their failings around that fragile locus. Another aspect of uninnocence in the book is that so many are never caught or convicted of anything, and when they are restrained by authorities, they’re often convinced the system is working against them, don’t understand why the system has targeted them. John, the narrator of “All the Things That are Wrong with Me,” feels perfectly justified in doing the disastrous things he’s done and can’t understand why he’s been separated from normal society, forced to reside in a kind of Cuckoo’s Nest asylum with others who, unlike himself, are truly mad. And I more or less see where he’s coming from, though I disapprove of his basic vigilantism when he exacts eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth punishment on a kid who’s behaved sadistically toward his dog.

O’Connor: Many of your characters are decidedly “uninnocent,” and, in fact, commit acts that many people would describe as “evil.” And several of these same characters seem to be possessed by ideas or impulses that could themselves be called “evil.” The clearest examples of both manifestations of “evil” would seem to be the protagonists of three stories right at the center of the book, the title story, “Tsunami,” and “(Mis)laid.” I am wondering what you think of the concept of “evil.” Do you see it as designating anything that actually exists in the world?

Morrow: In other words, do I believe in the devil? I probably should, but I don’t. Humans manage to be quite bedeviled on their own and do unforgivably destructive things—i.e., “evil” things—to one another, without the influence of some satanic beast operating out of a fiery underworld. That said, the stories at the heart of the collection are clearly dark, although I myself find aspects of “Tsunami” and “(Mis)laid” comical, as well. I like your expression “possessed by ideas or impulses” as a way of describing how Angela, Lorraine, and the man who mislaid his mind function in a world that is somewhat alien or incomprehensible to them. Angela, who believes she is following suggestions given to her by her dead brother, suggestions that lead her to act reprehensibly, may be delusional but her ghost is more real to her than anyone actually alive. Lorraine murders from two equally viable (to her) perspectives: quiet rage and maternal compassion. “(Mis)laid” is a kind of drawing-room-cum-police-procedural comedy fueled by jealousy and a couple of snapped minds. As hurtful and even murderous as these protagonists’ actions are, though, I doubt I would be able to get any of them—were I able to sit and discuss matters, one on one—to admit to any feelings of guilt. None would associate the concept of evil with their activities.

O’Connor: As the previous question indicates, many of your characters are possessed by powerful ideas that inspire not only brutality, but oddly charming and very funny acts. My favorite example of the latter is the protagonist of “Ellie’s Idea,” whose conviction that she should apologize to everyone she has ever wronged backfires in ways that she never quite recognizes. Another result of so many of your characters being blinded by powerful ideas is that several of them make decidedly unreliable narrators—the most striking being the narrator of the aptly named “The Enigma of Grover’s Mill.” Could you talk a bit about your use of the unreliable narrator, and, in particular, about how you manage to get your narrators to convey things to readers that they themselves don’t notice or understand.

Morrow: Well, as Shakespeare wrote, you can smile and smile and be a villain. Some of the nastiest people I’ve met have also been among the most charming. In the same way that it takes a lot of truth to fabricate a believable lie, a good sense of humor and alluring charm are invaluable to the success of, say, a serial killer. Each of us contains multitudes, as the saying goes, and for me the psychological interplay betweeniniquity and more socially negotiable behavior is fascinating. Don’t forget that Reinhard Heydrich, the Butcher of Prague and one of Hitler’s favorite sons, was a good family man, a devoted husband, a lover of classical music. Any character who is all bad is a thin gruel of a character. Ellie, who is no Heydrich by any stretch, is an interesting character to me. I’ve encountered an Ellie or two in my life and probably you have, too. She’s a particularly good example of what I mean by uninnocent. To her mind, her mission is to wipe her slate clean through the simple act of apology. On the surface this seems like a pretty good idea. But her naïveté proves to be unintentionally (for the most part) destructive, and the very innocence that prompts her to think her confessions will make a positive difference in her life begins oddly to corrupt her. As her world ostensibly improves—or so she sees it—and her small sins are self-absolved, the tangled and fragile worlds of everyone in her acquaintance begin to collide and implode. Motivated by goodness she morphs into a figure of, if not evil, certainly catastrophe. That old saying “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” might have made a good epigraph for “Ellie’s Idea.” Regarding unreliable narrators, my sense is that one of the hallmarks of unreliable narratives is that the narrator does not feel that he or she is unreliable in the least. Wyatt’s growing obsession with and hatred for his grandmother’s houseguest Franklin does begin to blind him, as you say, so that by the end of the story it is utterly unclear whether or not Franklin is a Martian (I realize this comment will sound crazy to anyone who hasn’t read the story yet, but in context it does seem possible that Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds, set in Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, might have created a kind of wormhole for a true alien invasion, at least in one young man’s mind). And though the reader may consider Wyatt unreliable, Wyatt would strongly disagree. I’m not sure there’s a particular writerly trick that is used to allow narrators to convey things they don’t understand, though I must admit that in fact most of my characters are blind to their shortcomings (one quite literally) and cast the blame elsewhere. But I think that’s a fundamental way many of us negotiate our paths through life—although, granted, not generally to the degree those who populate The Uninnocent do.

O’Connor: There is a great deal of anger and violence within the families of your stories—between brothers, a brother and a sister, between husbands and wives. There are also several stories in which a brother and a sister are so close that their relationship seems to have negative effects on both their lives. I wonder if you care to talk about the inspiration for these families.

Morrow: Few relationships in life are more fraught than family. We choose our friends, but our families are the result of genetic fate. So yes, I love exploring the deep dynamics, not always pretty, of kin. I find it interesting that siblings, those with whom we grow up and share so many early, formative experiences, who intimately know our flaws and frailties, can either be true soulmates or else use that knowledge to undermine us, even hurt us the most. Families are stew pots, and the stew can be either healthy or poisonous. As for the inspiration behind some of my brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, I can’t really point to my own small clan, although we had and have our own issues, like any other family. Over the years I’ve observed the families of friends or loved ones, and while none are necessarily as psychotic as those I draw in my stories, the possibilities are there. Scratch just beneath the surface of many a holiday family photograph and you will find the attic monster, the cellar psycho, sitting at the table ready to enjoy turkey and trimmings along with everybody else. Usually he’s the one with the biggest grin. Sometimes he’s the carver.

O’Connor: Things seem to have powerful connections to people in these stories. Two of your characters steal things from important people in their lives. The narrator of “The Hoarder” collects things, and the narrator of “All the Things that Are Wrong with Me” collects animals. And several of your characters are amateur or professional archeologists—most notably the brother in “Gardener of Heart”—who reconstruct lives from the things left behind. Could you talk about how our relationship with the things we possess came to play such a prominent role in your imagination?

Morrow: You know the word numen? A magical spirit or power that inhabits an object? A numen can reside in a bush, a stone, a house. It animates any otherwise inanimate object. My fictive worlds are decidedly numinous in this way, and the things my characters collect sometimes come to define who they truly are. As a writer, when I’m working my way into characters’ heads and hearts, one of the first things I like to figure out early in the process is how they view the physical world, what their relationship is with the world they find themselves in. The young guy who narrates “The Hoarder” is a bit of a loner, his mother having left the family, his father itinerant and going from job to job, his older brother never missing an opportunity to cut him down to size. He collects little things at first. Seashells, birds’ nests. But as his hormones kick in along with a deepening resentment toward his brother, his ambitions grow and skew, and his earlier rather harmless pastime turns sinister. Inanimate objects like seashells and pottery shards, though compelling and even enchanting to him when he was younger, don’t cut it anymore. Whatever numen may have resided in any of those objects wouldn’t prove to be quite as interesting as the living, breathing spirit that was his brother’s girlfriend, Penny. Once he graduates from one kind of hoarding to another, his passion for collecting, perhaps obsessive-compulsive from the get-go, moves decidedly into the realm of uninnocence. Somewhat similarly, John, the narrator of “All the Things that Are Wrong with Me,” doesn’t function well in human society and so he prefers the company of animals, assembles his “menagerie” of animal friends which, though relatively harmless at first, will get way out of hand and bring him down. With regard to archaeology, I think that in another life I’d have loved to be either an anthropologist or an archaeologist, puzzling out civilizations through their languages, their myths, their artifacts. The archaeologist in “Gardener of Heart” has spent a lifetime sifting through the ruins of ancient dwellings, cobbling together possible narratives of the people who lived there long ago, that I believe he may have slipped into a city of the dead himself without at first noticing any difference. I’m particularly fond of that story, by the way. Like “The Enigma of Grover’s Mill” and possibly the title story, it combines elements of the gothic with those of fantasy.

O’Connor: As Hemingway did in In Our Time, you seem to have arranged your stories in such a way that, although none of your characters reappear, the characters in each successive story seem, to some degree, to be living out the consequences of the actions of the characters in the stories that have preceded them. Sometimes actions are repeated in juxtaposed stories—scarves are stolen, for example, in both “Ellie’s Idea” and “The Road to Nadeja.” And, of course, there are repeated situations: all those angry families and those over-close brothers and sisters. But, when read in order, the stories seem to follow what we might term an “inverted narrative arc,” descending toward catastrophe from the beginning to the middle of the book, and then rising thereafter toward some sort of rough redemption, which is most fully achieved in the collection’s very moving final story, “Lush.” Could you talk a bit about how you arranged your stories? Did you actually conceive of them as forming a “secret” novel? Did your desire to unify the collection have any effect on how you wrote the individual stories?

Morrow: I did agonize over the order of the collection and did my best to arrange them so that a kind of symphonic narrative, a series of movements, would be in play as one read through the book. While I didn’t intend for The Uninnocent to be a secret novel, I knew that “Lush” absolutely had to be the last story with its final note of tentative redemption and that “The Hoarder” and “Gardener of Heart” offered readers the best entree into these thematically connected narratives. You’re right about certain images, gestures, themes, even objects echoing here and there in the book. The decision (or intuition, more like it) to do this was as much a musical one as anything else, a patterning that would help gather the individual pieces into a whole.

Although most of the stories were written separately over the past ten years, they definitely share a gothic sensibility, and that undoubtedly lends the collection a coherence as well. At one point I toyed around with the idea of titling the book All the Things that Are Wrong with Me, because every individual story includes a confession of or exploration into our deepest defects, and frailties, the things that are wrong with us. Despite their flaws, though, I have a great fondness for even my most ruined and bleakest of characters. At times I found myself horrified by what they were doing and saying while I was writing, and I wanted to step in and tell them, No, you can’t possibly do this or think that. But each of these souls was on a set spiritual course. I could no more deny them their sins than try to add two and two up to something other than four. In other words, there were inevitabilities that began to surface in the actions and behaviors of the protagonists in these stories, inevitabilities that I myself couldn’t stop or even impede without being unfaithful to my characters. I tried to stay true to them at each and every turn, even when that turn took them on a descent into sorry, even tragic places.

Someone named Dave Pollard made this.

Thoughts on the question: Does a writer owe anything to their readers?

1. A blind item: A writer I think is really talented and original capable of making amazing things severely disappoints me with his current work. I want him to go back to the stuff he wrote near(ish) the beginning of his career. I usually read any of the new work, hoping for the old work to have come back, somehow.

1 a. This new writer-I-don’t-like-so-much came along and ate the writer-I-liked-a-lot. He swallowed him whole. It’s over. Sometimes I tell myself, “go read something else or write something better.”

1 c. I think about a good friend’s adorably woeful expression after she completed Lorrie Moore’s A Gate At The Stairs. “Don’t even think about reading it. Don’t put yourself through what I did,” she said.  This friend loved every other word Lorrie Moore had ever written. A “bad” novel feels, somehow, like a personal insult.

2. Some writers say that the minute you think of your audience you’ve stopped writing.

3. A few readers acted as if Ben Marcus had personally come to their home and punched them in the face when he published a story in The New Yorker that didn’t look much like their favorite Ben Marcus stories.

4 a. Other writers think you must consider the reader, that you owe those eyes something.

4 b. So there is a distinction between the “reader” and the “audience,” and the message would be, don’t consider the audience, but do consider the reader? Are we asking writers, then, to be in a more personal relationship with a faceless reader rather than be aware of what an audience, on average, might be expecting?

4 c. How does one make a bridge to those eyes moving across the page, the unspeaking mouth, the concentrated mind?

4 d. And can one consider the reader too much?

5 a. I once was at an author’s reading and there were questions at the end and a woman who had been sitting in the front row and staring hard at the author (I assumed it was some encouraging friend) asked a question that turned into a profuse and unyielding compliment that then turned to a love song that turned into an extended awkward moment while the woman asked the author, “How do you cope with it– telling stories so personal and touching people so directly?” Someone said she had a prozac quiver in her voice and I thought she was going to explode with tears.

5 b. The author just said he doesn’t, that it wasn’t his problem. He puts it out there and you turn it into whatever you want.

+ Two months ago, on the first day of Occupy Wall Street, this video caught a smug gathering of the “1%” (whether just figuratively or actual) sipping champagne in a balcony just above the street, waving and laughing at the protestors as they marched and chanted. That balcony was attached to this place, Cipriani, a restaurant and luxury venue for galas and awards ceremonies and fundraisers.

+ As I walked up to the massive, castle-fortress at 55 Wall Street, I could not unlatch it from the image of the smug, clueless champagne sippers. I know that that those people did not have fangs and yellow eyes but in my memory they have fangs and yellow eyes. Now I was standing here, dressed up in a way I am not often dressed and standing among rented tuxes. I felt out of place, but all the friends I saw at the after-party felt similarly out-of-place, so our cumulative out-of-placeness, in a way, placed us.

 + Ed Champion had this to say: “I have arrived at the Cipriani Ballroom, feeling — after my considerable Occupy Wall Street coverage from weeks before — to be weirdly on the other side of what I usually cover… I just talked with the main man Harold Augenbraum and asked him if this was the craziest National Book Awards, security-wise, he’s ever dealt with. Not so. “One year I actually hired security,” said Augenbraum. “Someone threatened to disrupt the ceremonies. We hired security guards.” Apparently, some party objected to the specific choices that year — which may have been 2005. Of course, nobody ever did disrupt the ceremonies….And there aren’t security people that I’m aware of inside. Yet I can’t help feeling too comfortable in here — even if I’m wearing a suit, which is not something I entirely associate with comfort.”

+ Because what could be worse than being mistaken for the people that OWS has been glaring at since September? Since the actual ceremony ran late, a line of 29-year-old after-party guest queued up outside. A bunch of cops that were not affiliated with the NBA paced around, waiting for the protests that would begin the next morning, ready to arrest a few hundred people for any reason they could bullshit.

+ Inside, Ann Lauterbach made a quick mention of OWS during the ceremony, simply pointing out, since no one else had, that they were, in fact, “occupying wall street.”

+ It’s possible that some in the audience may have opposes the OWS movement. Others may have wished they didn’t have to even be in this space, like that Librarian with the button. Maybe she wore it lest she be confused by anyone (the waitstaff, any protestors who may have wandered by, or a one-percent-er who may be bank-rolling the NBA) think she belongs to this space.

 + Space carries a lot of meaning to me. There are whole blocks of New York I can’t go to without thinking of more significant times I’ve been there. There are neighborhoods so charged I can barely visit them without floating off into hours of nostalgia. I had never been to Cipriani and I wasn’t at the first day of the protest, so I didn’t have a first-hand memory here. What I had was a cumulative memory, impressions from a mass.

 + As a rule, Wall Street is not a place anyone goes to enjoy themselves. It’s a place “people” do “work.” There are bars for those people after they are done working and need to have a drink. I don’t know anyone who works on drinks on Wall Street unless they’re invited to something to drink for free, so I turned to yelp to see what people who actually spend time down there think of this space.

+ Cipriani has three and half stars, and four dollar signs. I looked at the most recent reviews, hoping to find something about the champagne sipping people, but found nothing. All the people who had left recent reviews are “Elite Yelpers.”

+  Angel C’s November 16 review says he came “for the Gotham City Gala honoring Enterprise this year as a member of the affordable housing industry,” and he notes the “grand” space before bemoaning the fact that “halfway through Ed Norton’s speech a pipe sprung a leak from the ceiling about 30 feet from him and out gushed a true water feature that did not cease for at least 2.5 hours.” I am still wondering how “a member of the affordable housing industry” might feel if he was to learn the per-head cost of an event at Cipriani relative to a month of “affordable” rent. He makes no mention of it.

+  Christopher M, who “is blessed to have experiences to yelp about”simply “wasn’t as impressed with this location as I was with the 42nd Street location.  This was even more off-putting when I realized that half of the floor staff present on the evening I was at Wall Street were the same staff on 42nd Street! ” Yes, it is to hard to get blessed with good help.  Chrissy C, describes it as “suit-y, expensive and has an air of douche. Totally my kind of place. I think I saw my future husband about 9 times too.” Obviously, she love love love love[s] the atmosphere. The classic Wall Street vibe is apparent, as are the creepy old guys looking for their next sugar baby,” though admits that they only thing she eats here are the olives from her martini’s.

 + Disappointed that no one had reviewed the opulent weirdness of a the place (I realize I sometimes expect too much from New York) I looked to see if there were any reviews of Zuccotti Park and there were, though as expected they were mostly just political monologues and reviews of OWS in general. “You guys aren’t Gandhi, quit kidding yourself and do your crack somewhere else,” one guy says.

+ Zuccotti Park has three stars and no dollar marks.

 + What is more interesting to me are the reviews that are actually more about the space itself and the reviewers relationship to the space before and after the movement One guy noted that he couldn’t “wait until this turns back into a little park in the midst of a  bustling area. Don’t get me wrong, I believe in the right to protest and as long as the park owners are cool with it being used,” but he really misses being able to “grab a NYC hot dog and some nuts from a vendor and enjoy a quick lunch.” Where else can he “take a few minutes and fuel up before you tackle your shopping trip at Century 21 or do battle on the subway” ?

 + An October 7th review caught my eye in particular because its not clear whether the guy, who obviously works in the area, has any idea what is going on. “A marked increase in the number of vagrants, drifters, and otherwise unsavory characters, all of whom seem to want to talk to you about politics, has made this park entirely unsuitable trying to enjoy a book or eat lunch with colleagues.” Sarcasm, if that is what this is, often gets lost in the internet, but when he goes on to say, “It used to be such a nice plaza.  I only hope that the proprietors of the park, Brookfield Office Properties, can clean it up and get these poor folks into social custody,” I can’t quite tell if he’s kidding.

+ …. Who’s park? No, seriously, who’s park?

10 AM: A panel about using time travel and non-linear narrative featuring Seth Fried, Samantha Hunt and others. Or, if you’re feeling able to handle deep, dark stuff this early in the morning, Granta is having a panel about writing after trauma, focusing on 9/11.

11 AM: The Good, The Bad and The Family, a panel moderated by Rob Spillman of Tin House. Or, Radical Fictions a panel and readings by David Goodwillie, Jennifer Gilmore, and Justin Taylor.

Noon: Something called Epic Confusion which features Nadia Kalman, Chuck Klosterman, Sam Lipsyte, and Tiphanie Yanique who will read and talk about this confusion.

1 PM:  Apocalypse Now, and Then What? featuring Tananarive Due, Patrick Somerville and Colson Whitehead. Moderated by Paul Morris, Bomb Magazine.

2 PM: Politics & Poetry: Timothy Donnelly, Nick Flynn, Thomas Sayers Ellis and Evie Shockley.

3 PM: Lifestyles of the Rich and Richer. Chris Lehmann (Rich People Things) and David Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years) discuss the current state of our economy and where we’re headed.

4 PM:  Where are we? A bunch of critics talk about where we are any why we’re anxious. Or go have a drink somewhere.

5 PM: And because life is not fair, you’ll be forced to chose between three awesome-sounding events all happening at the same time in the same building.
-Amelia Gray & others reading for Short and Sweet (and Sour)
-A panel titled The Sacred and the Profane: A Modern Pilgrim’s Progress. Featuring Darcey Steinke and others.
-Unholy Paths to Redemption:  Jennifer Egan, James Hannaham and John Burnham Schwartz  look at the alternative routes their characters take to lose themselves—jeopardizing work, family, and love—to find themselves again.

(Or, if you walk outside this building, David Shrigley will be drawing on audience members)

Locations & full details after the jump…

ST. FRANCIS MCARDLE HALL (180 Remsen Street)

10:00 A.M. In and Out of Time: Talking about Time Travel. Writers Diana Gabaldon (An Echo in the Bone), Samantha Hunt (The Invention of Everything Else) and Seth Fried (The Great Frustration) read from their work and discuss what happens when you go beyond a non-linear narrative and remove the boundaries of space and time from a novel.  Moderated by Andrea Montejo, Indent Agency.

BOROUGH HALL COMMUNITY ROOM (209 Joralemon Street)

10:00 A.M. Granta Presents Conflict, Trauma and Writing: How we Tell Stories After a Crisis. The attacks on September 11, 2001 brought up many questions about writing and representation. Ten years later, the question is still being asked. Madison Smartt Bell (The Color of Night), Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, and Amy Waldman (The Submission) explore how 9/11 continues to echo in fiction, and how one tells a story following crisis, trauma and conflict.

ST. FRANCIS MCARDLE HALL (180 Remsen Street)

11:00 A.M. The Good, the Bad, and the Family. Families, you can’t live with them, you can’t live without them. Writers Sergio Troncoso (From this Wicked Patch of Dust) Tom Perrotta (The Leftovers), and Elizabeth Nunez (Boundaries) read from their work and, while looking at how abuse, death, divorce, nationality, and religion can impact a person, these three authors examine what constitutes as home and what makes a family.  Introduced by Rob Spillman, Tin House.

BROOKLYN HISTORICAL SOCIETY MAIN HALL (128 Pierrepont Street)

11:00 A.M. Presented by Housing Works Bookstore Cafe: Radical Fictions. A family confronts the end of the Cold War in Washington, DC, 1979. A group of drunk punks await their prophet as the millennium looms in Gainesville, Florida, 1999. A beautiful eco-terrorist bombs an office building in New York, New York, 2010. Jennifer Gilmore (Something Red), David Goodwillie (American Subversive), and Justin Taylor (Gospel of Anarchy) read from their work and discuss the extremist ideologies and cultish communities their characters find themselves entangled in.  Moderated by Marcela Landres.

ST. FRANCIS MCARDLE HALL (180 Remsen Street)

12:00 P.M. Epic Confusion. Readings from Nadia Kalman (The Cosmopolitans), Chuck Klosterman (The Visible Man), Sam Lipsyte (The Ask) , and Tiphanie Yanique (How to Escape from a Leper Colony) followed by a discussion of confusion, the difficulties of communicating with others and the obstacles that create this confusion.  Moderated by Tiphanie Yanique (How to Escape from a Leper Colony).

BOROUGH HALL COURTROOM (209 Joralemon Street)   Tickets Required

1:00 P.M.  Apocalypse Now, and Then What? Sure you survived an earthquake and hurricane in the same week, but what about the apocalypse? Writers Tananarive Due (My Soul to Take), Patrick Somerville (The Universe in Miniature in Miniature), and Colson Whitehead (Zone One) look at iterations of the end of the world as we know it and what that means for their characters. Moderated by Paul Morris, Bomb Magazine.

BROOKLYN HISTORICAL SOCIETY MAIN HALL (128 Pierrepont Street)

2:00 P.M. Politics and Poetry. Poets Timothy Donnelly (The Cloud Corporation), Nick Flynn (The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands), Thomas Sayers Ellis (Skin, Inc: Identity Repair Poems) and Evie Shockley (The New Black) explore poetry’s capacity for social change role and the role of poetry in public life. Moderated by Camille Rankine of Cave Canem Foundation.

BROOKLYN HISTORICAL SOCIETY LIBRARY (128 Pierrepont Street)

3:00 P.M. Lifestyles of the Rich and Richer. We are living in an almost comic enactment of Marx’s predictions about class and labor: the rich get richer, the poor are getting, well, you know… Marx foresaw the decline of small business and the middle class at the hands of unrestrained capitalism more than 100 years ago. With a gimlet eye and wry outlook, Chris Lehmann (Rich People Things) and David Graeber (Debt: The First 5,000 Years…) discuss the current state of our economy and where we’re headed.

ST. FRANCIS  (180 Remsen Street) All these events are at 5 pm.

ST. FRANCIS VOLPE LIBRARY: Short and Sweet (and Sour). Short Story weavers Clark Blaise (The Meagre Tarmac), Seth Fried (The Great Frustration), Amelia Gray (AM/PM) read from their works followed by Q&A.  Moderated by Stephanie Opitz.

ST. FRANCIS MCARDLE HALL: The Sacred and the Profane: A Modern Pilgrim’s Progress. Darcey Steinke (Easter Everywhere), Michael Muhammad Knight (The Taqwacores), and Peter Bebergal (Too Much to Dream) explore unorthodox approaches to faith—how we find it, how we lose it, and how we redefine it for ourselves.  Moderated by Meera Subramanian, editor of Killing the Buddha.
ST. FRANCIS AUDITORIUM (Need Tickets): Unholy Paths to Redemption: Pulitzer Prize winning author Jennifer Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad), James Hannaham (God Says No) and John Burnham Schwartz (Northwest Corner)  look at the alternative routes their characters take to lose themselves—jeopardizing work, family, and love—to find themselves again.  Moderated by Timothy Houlihan, St. Francis College.

NORTH STAGE (Borough Hall Plaza/Columbus Park)
5:00 P.M. Tatoo/Art. Word is that artist/author David Shrigley will be drawing some temp tattoos on audience members!

1. When posed to a musician friend of mine, he thinks for a while and looks serious and sad, like we’ve just seen a small animal die. Then he says, “I think I would still make music but it would sound much different.” Then he says, “Lets go get ice cream.”

2. We talk a lot about the work being the reward in itself and that’s true because I think having the time to write can feel sometimes really exciting, but it’s also really grim and lonely and makes me angry, morose, anxious, etc. And yet I keep doing it and I feel like my life depends on whether or not I get enough time to work in any given week.

3. One of the most awesome things ever is finding out that a story you published was read and enjoyed and understood by someone, but we don’t talk about the underside to this– that others may have read it and felt disconnected, isolated, ambivalent. I don’t think you can help but think about those people sometimes and feel sad about it.

4. The publishing high lasts about fourteen seconds for me. Then the anxiety about all the stuff I haven’t finished comes back.

5. For the five-ish hours I ideally get to spend writing, I get about twenty cumulative minutes of sincere satisfaction with a specific sentence, passage or phrase and the rest of the time is spent being mildly irritated that I can’t get that sincere satisfaction to stay.

6. Maybe people who make shit really just want to be alone and then for people to later come along and appreciate the product of their aloneness. Maybe this is a way to confirm that being human and necessarily isolated in your own body and mind is ok.

7. Everything I wrote from when I was a little kid (maybe 7) until I was about 20 was for myself. I didn’t want anyone to read it at all. It was its own reward. I wanted to become a psychologist and I never wanted to publish anything. Then I started wanting to publish stuff and then the writing became much more anxious and every paragraph seemed crucial to something.

8. I would keep writing if no one was ever going to read what I had written but I think I’d have to find some other outlet for myself– some creative endeavor or occupation that made me feel like I was reaching someone with something authentic. Writing would become a totally different habit, and I’d probably write less. I would need to read more, too.