The Crow Arts Manor Needs the Classics.
The Crow Arts Manor—a new-ish writing endeavor in Portland that hosts readings and sets up workshops with Massive folks like Kevin Sampsell, Emily Kendal Frey, Zachary Schomburg, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Monica Drake as instructors—is gathering a library. Here’s a note I got from the director, Sid Miller:
Crow Arts Manor, located in a Northeast Portland, is a 501c3 non-profits writing center, that provides low costclasses and workshop. Over the last 9 months we’ve been hard at work assembling a literary library. Through donations we’ve been able to obtain a large amount of current literary journals, magazines, books of poetry, short fiction and criticism. But it’s been difficult to obtain the classics, from writers going back to Whitman reaching to the end of last century. So now we’re asking the public for help. We’re looking for folks willing to donate a title or more from their own personal library. Our library will be open to the public and will be a tool for local writers, as well as local schools and non-profit organizations. It will be a place to read, write, and engage with other writers. We will never charge a fee for use of the library. If you are willing to donate, we are happy to send you a present, a past copy of Burnside Review (our partner). Please e-mail me if you are interested in helping.
sid@crowmanor.org
Help ‘em out?
Midtown Skin Essay Series Part 3 of 5: Lunch Hour
3. Lunch Hour
Can we stop all this? Can we just stop for an hour?
The Indian buffet on 39th Street simmers as fat men in blue suits break their day into two unequal pieces. Neither piece seems palatable, at this juncture. The morning was dull and the afternoon will be a replete – so the whole day is a tangled mess, layers of nothing upon layers of too much. Clients have weighed in, money is on the line, and all of the executives are out of office (OOO) selecting window dressings for their new condos in MiMa.
***
Adam Robinson—
Booksellers, concerned about the prevalence of eBooks, are making their print books look better, says this article in the NYTimes. The paperback of Jay-Z’s book has shiny embossing and costs $25.
5
Privacy, Personal Papers, Pricks, Rumps
Do we have the right to read, discuss and analyze the personal papers of famous writers, often who have died? I think about this a lot because I am as curious (nosy) as I am uncomfortable with the idea of intellectually traipsing through a writer’s personal papers. In Slate last week, Katie Roiphe wrote about David Foster Wallace’s syllabus. Her article wasn’t particularly noteworthy but I was reminded of how often writers write about DFW and, increasingly, draw from his personal papers. Who knows how many hundreds, if not thousands of articles have been written about the man, the writer, and the scholar, each one trying to offer some kind of new insight into the man and his work. Certainly, there’s a lot to be learned from most things related to DFW including his syllabi. He had a unique, at times incisive approach to communicating to his students the material that would be covered in his courses as well as his general expectations of students in his classes. At the same time, as a teacher, I shudder to imagine anyone reading too much into my syllabi because I know how the sausage gets made.
Midtown Skin Essay Series Part 2 of 5: Hedge Fund
Hedge Fund
It’s ten AM, do you know where your money is? Who touches your credit? Who makes it feel safe? Touching candy, scraping paper skin over the fires of the market, these are the goals of the new new Downtown set. These are the men and women who give your money value, who quantify your life growth. They deal your commodity. They are the men and women who take your life and make it fabulous.
She whispers to money before she dreams, in her loft Downtown. Money takes her to bed. She kisses her own power like an empty vase
On the other side of the world, in New Jersey, money begins to seek power. It begins to roll in the direction of Wall St. It divests itself from your retirement plan. Money wants to be in Manhattan. Money wants to be strong with sexy friends, cigars, power boats. A vacation for money would be a week on the beach at Battery Park, in the 1980s, during the bond market boom. Your money wants to merge, to kill. Your kids go off to college, your money goes off to war.
And now your moeny has gone digital – just like your love life. Your money is dating your iPhone. Your money is fucking your second wife in the back of a Towncar. Every morning at 9:30 AM Eastern, your money sits at a Bloomberg terminal and watches itself breathe.
You can’t have your money now. It belongs to math and it belongs to disappearing mental real estate – the headline market, the gold hedge, the metals sector. Your money is bored by you. Your money is long gone – blowing lines of coke in some Russian death bar with the twin daughters of a brand new oil baron. Say goodbye to your money.
Previously: Happy Hour
how to snort an owl
For many years my doctor has prescribed owls to me in pill form to help me cope with the mental disorder of my personality. He said, “Swallowing owl pills will help you not suffer as much attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Owls are composed of a number of amphetamine salts that are thought to increase the amount of dopamine in the brain. Like many stimulants owls affect the area of the brain that controls the amount of rewards or pleasures you are capable of feeling. Sometimes after I ingest an owl I experience a psychological positive value that is beyond any positive value I have ever experienced from the natural pleasure systems of eating, drinking, fighting, or doing sexual movements. Recently, I have been under a lot of stress. My throat has been really dry and it has been very difficult for me to swallow the full grown owls my doctor has prescribed. As a result, I’ve had to develop a new system of ingestion that involves snorting the owl. READ MORE >
Blog Is Still a Four-Letter Word
Monday morning. Cold cat-nose, green tea, sleepy checking of email. Among the messages, one from my workshop leader, asking if I could stop by her office to talk before class.
Back up, explain: I’m a brand-new, first-semester PhD student in a creative writing program. I’m a poet; I’m a woman; I’m forty-two. And I moved to this city exactly three months ago to start the program. It was an astonishing stroke of good fortune to get accepted, and I was deeply excited to move here and to do good work. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that these three months have felt pretty much like trying to drink from a firehose.
That’s okay—that’s how it is when you’re somewhere new. New city, new acquaintances, new university bureaucracies and departmental eccentricities. A new roomful of bright undergraduate faces staring up at me three mornings a week. It’s a struggle to adjust, but as more or less a career academic (in the sense that I career among institutions, jostling back and forth around and between them), I’m used to transitions and I’ll be here for the next five years. I’m a little daunted, but not too badly. I may weeble but I don’t fall down.
Nonetheless when my workshop leader asked me to come chat with her, I was grateful. I knew she’d met one-on-one already with the other members of the class to discuss their writing; they said she’d been extremely helpful and frankly I kind of felt like I needed some extreme help, to get through the whole drinking-from-a-firehose part of the experience. I felt optimistic about maybe getting a dab of reassurance from her—that thin trickle of validation that lets you know there’s some point in continuing the effort.
Imagine, then, if you will, my surprise. READ MORE >
Midtown Skin Essay Series Part 1: Happy Hour
Midtown Skin Essay Series with Parts 1-5
WINTER 2011-2012
1. Happy Hour
The sound from exhaling smoke is everywhere. People breathe with their hearts as rain clouds come from New Jersey. But they do not fall. The sky is gray and empty of a future. Women cruise through revolving doors into catalogs of private romance. Men linger with their fantasies for a moment, on the curb, outside of the brokerage firm. The bosses wait together for their car service, placing bets on who will fuck at the VP afterlounge. Lincolns in line stretch down the blocks past marble stairs and hedges. These cars are thick and black and they do not forgive. At this hour, corporate art can sneak into our souls. The markets change over to Asia. All through Manhattan, the people are killing their day lives. Captains of Industry are embracing their moment of blindness, at the intersection of work and sex. Everyone follows a different path to the gratification called home.
***
Mud Luscious Acquires Blue Square Press
This week, J. A. Tyler’s Mud Luscious Press announced that they were taking over/buying out/merging with Blue Square Press, run by David Peak and Ben Spivey, as an addition to their imprint series. As Tyler says in the brief interview below, the deal gets BSP in on MLP’s distro (and more), while MLP gets to participate in the publication of more great books.
To celebrate the union, they are offering Jack Boettcher’s Theatre State and Ben Spivey’s own Flowing in the Gossamer Fold at a reduced price, here.
I asked the parties involved some questions, starting with J. A. Tyler:
When did you first start paying attention to Blue Square Press? READ MORE >
I Went to Scandinavia
I had a week off. I decided to leave Germany. I booked plane tickets. I packed a bag. In the bag I put six pairs of underwear, six pairs of socks, five tshirts, one sweater, one button-down shirt, a pair of gym shorts, a pair of long underwear, a copy of The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, a copy of The Year of Magical Thinking, and a copy of Miami, a Flip videocamera, my passport, my cell phone, a 2 oz. bottle of hand sanitizer, my toothbrush, a bottle of vitamins, a bottle of zinc supplement, a cup, and a hefty amount of Konsyl psyllium fiber supplement. I was going to Scandinavia.
I didn’t know much about Scandinavia, other than that it was socialist, expensive, and cold. A couple years earlier I’d been published in a short-run magazine called Gustaf, and had limited contact with its editor Audun Mortensen. We’d met briefly in New York and emailed infrequently since then. When I contacted him upon moving to Berlin, he told me he’d been living with his girlfriend, another writer, Victoria Durnak, in Stockholm. He encouraged me to visit and said I could stay with them in their two-room apartment. I asked if he knew anywhere to stay in Oslo, and he seemed not to. I posted on my Facebook asking if I knew anyone in Oslo who wanted to host me for two nights. A few days later I received an email from Kenneth Pettersen, a poet who I’d never talked to as far as I could remember, but somehow seemed a constant in the internet literary scene. A month later I arrived in Rygge, took an hour bus ride through the gray Norwegian countryside, half asleep and flipping through DeLillo stories.
Upon entering Oslo, the scenery changed dramatically. Cranes hung across the sky, like the entire city was under construction. There were buildings coming up everywhere, skyscrapers looming over the damp clouds and foggy ocean. Kenneth met me at a subway station, which took me longer to find than it should’ve, after I paid the equivalent of $40 for a 48-hour pass, after I paid the equivalent of $30 for the bus from the airport. He took me to his apartment, which was a room with half of a kitchen and a bathroom with heated tiles. I had trouble keeping my eyes open and we made small talk, mostly about literature and blogs. He took me to a bar, where I bought a $40 fish and chips and Aass beer. I said something about how I didn’t understand how the money worked and he mentioned wages. He said he worked at a kindergarten.
We drank our beer, then another, and another. There was some sort of a event happening at the bar, hosting an airline company, and a pilot sat in the corner of the room, getting progressively drunker, while his slicked back hair changed directions. He was sweating in a sports coat, tie, jeans. People were silent, drinking from pitchers and then all of a sudden very loud and laughing and then silent again. The bar served Sam Adams and Brooklyn Lager.
Adam Robinson—
Melville House site redo. What do you think? To me, their last site was a model of amazeballs. So much PHP. This one is cleaner? I dunno, but I’m about to explore it and find out.
Adam Robinson—
Autographed by the author — who gives a shit? What is the best autographed book story you got then?
Inside an MFA: Call & Response #1.5
Last week, I put up student responses to the following questions:
Can you teach creative writing? How? How would you teach creative writing that is different from your MFA? How would you “innovate” or “renovate”? What have you “learned” from your MFA? What has been the biggest surprise? Disappointment?
Here is a long response, penned by Jeff Pickell. Enjoy. & read it all. It’s worth it!
- Shitty syntax begets shitty phrases. Shitty phrases beget shitty sentences. Shitty sentences beget shitty paragraphs. Shitty paragraphs beget shitty sections. Shittiness begets shittiness begets shittiness.
- The MFA enrolls in a creative writing program. He does not enroll in a written creations program. Asked what he studies, the MFA replies “creative writing” or simply “writing.” He doesn’t reply “creative.” This is because the MFA doesn’t have a creative deficiency. He has a writing deficiency. He should know this, too. A lot of MFA’s—the shitty MFA’s—don’t. The shitty MFA is a strange creature. More on him later.
- Many contend writing can’t be taught. This is absolutely false, as any MFA with a journalism background knows.
- The shittier the story is, the harder it is to revise. READ MORE >
Q&A #8
If you have questions about writing or publishing or whatever, leave them in the comments or e-mail them to roxane at htmlgiant dot com and we will find you some answers.
Question:
i have a website and published stories. i sell booklets of my stories on the streets. sometimes i feel like no one reads anything i’ve written. how do i put myself out in the public more? how do i get a broader readership?
Inside an MFA program: Call & response #1
We’ve had a bunch of pedagogy posts recently from inside the creative writing classroom, from the professor’s point of view. I thought it would be pretty cool to let some students chime in. And as luck would have it, I happen to have access to a bunch of MFA peoples (at New Mexico State), because I’m professional like that. So, last Thursday night, during my 500-level Form & Techniques in Fiction class (themed Constrained Prose), I put out my laptop and posed the following questions:
Can you teach creative writing? How? How would you teach creative writing that is different from your MFA? How would you “innovate” or “renovate”? What have you “learned” from your MFA? What has been the biggest surprise? Disappointment?
Below, you’ll find the responses. If you have other questions you’d like discussed/answered, this will be an on-going segment for me, so shoot me an email or something.
This Is the Only Thing I Feel Like Posting About Literature Right Now
Your Facebook friends have probably already showed you the We Are the 99 Percent Tumblr, but here it is again. It’s PostFrankness instead of PostSecret. Camwhore angles repurposed for a who’s-there roll call in the deep effed.
Chicks Dig Pink, Frilly Things and (Domestic) Porn
When you write a book with the title It’s A Man’s World, with the tagline “but it takes a woman to run it,” you have to have some sense that your book is going to be marketed in a certain way. I haven’t read the book in question, but the title certainly gives an impression. Maybe it’s just me but when I see that title, I think “chick lit.” I also enjoy “chick lit,” so that label is not a bad thing. That book’s author, Polly Courtney, recently had a very public reaction to how her book was being marketed as “chick-lit,” announcing she was leaving her publisher, Harper Collins, so her writing wouldn’t be pigeonholed. As writers, we often have to worry about whether or not our work will be pigeonholed based on some aspect of our identity. No one wants their creativity limited or misrepresented; pushing back against rigid, often unfair categories is a natural response for a creative person.
In her explanation for why she was leaving her publisher, Courtney distinguishes between women’s fiction, which she writes, and “chick lit,” which she very much does not. I gather that women’s fiction is serious while “chick lit” is not. She writes, “Don’t get me wrong; chick-lit is a worthy sub-genre and there is absolutely a place for it on the shelves. Some publishers, mine included, are very successful at marketing this genre to women. The problem comes when non-chick lit content is shoe-horned into a frilly “chick-lit” package. Everyone is then disappointed: the author, for seeing his or her work portrayed as such; the readers, for finding there is too much substance in the plot; and the passers-by, who might actually have enjoyed the contents but dismissed the book on the grounds of its frivolous cover.”
Depending on the content of the book in question, Courtney is correct in noting that disappointment is possible for everyone involved in the consumption of a book. At the same time, isn’t a cover is just a cover? Eventually, the writing speaks for itself and either readers will like the work or they won’t. Readers are fairly sophisticated these days, aren’t they? I would like to believe readers will, more often than not, have a good sense of what a book is or isn’t about no matter what is emblazoned across the cover. Unfortunately, such does not seem to be the case and certain books are burdened by covers that alienate certain audiences.
“Relationships first, sales second.”
To further the conversation, here are two things about “community” and bookstores that have influenced my thinking on the subject.
First, above, is video of a talk by the amazing Matthew Stadler. In it, he discusses the future of the brick and mortar bookstore. It’s the source of the title for this post.
The second is a short essay from my local alt-weekly, The Stranger. In it, Books Editor Paul Constant takes all the talk of community building and asks someone to go ahead and put up (or rent out) an actual building:
So here’s what we need: a fairly large bar, nothing fancy, not too expensive. Open almost all the time. Maybe a typewriter here or there for ambience. Ratty books on shelves. Some sort of an area that can easily become a stage. Chairs. Tables. No TV, no Wi-Fi. No nattering blogs or flickering videos to distract from the words you’re writing, speaking, or reading. A jukebox stuffed with Edith Frost, the Magnetic Fields, and the Pogues. That’s about it for the hardware.
Both are on the right track, I think.
The Creative Writing Job Market 2011-12
When I was on the job market, my friends and I who were looking for faculty positions obsessively watched the academic jobs wiki, a comprehensive site with everything you could possibly need to know about going on the job market in nearly ever field. The site is rigorously updated by job searchers with dates of contact from universities, when interviews are scheduled, when offers are made and accepted or declined and even salary information for some fields. If there are tidbits of “inside information” those are shared. On the creative writing jobs page each year, industrious people track down who was hired in each position and make note of how many books they have. The site is very useful, very intimidating, and very revealing about the state of the academic job market. If you want to really see some frustration, the Venting Page, is well worth the look.
