The Hyman S. & Freda Bernstein Jewish Literary Festival

The Writer's Center is proud to support several initiatives by the Washington DC Jewish Community Center. If you have the time, check these great events out from Oct 18-28.

SLAM! An Evening of Spoken Word Poetry
Saturday, October 24
9:00 pm | Hillyer Art Space, 9 Hillyer Court NW
Tickets: $10, Discounted Members/Seniors/Under 25 $8
Purchase tickets at washingtondcjcc.org/litfest or (202) 777-3251

Shout-out to all area poets and spoken word performers: come out and show your skills at our poetry slam! Featured artist Jake Marmer will take the stage to show you how it’s done before you take your turn. Share your latest work or cheer on your friends as they compete in this great night of spoken word poetry. Please sign up in advance; e-mail litfest@washingtondcjcc.org.

Jake Marmer merges poetry and performance into philosophically viral mixtures like existentialist dancehall, Talmudic jazz poetry and personalized bop apocalypse. He has performed extensively in New York and Jerusalem, with his band Frantic Turtle and Mima'amakim collective.

Support provided by the Ruth Behrend & Charles Haskell Small Fund, established to support programs showcasing the work and creativity of local artists and poets.

Co-sponsored by Hillyer Arts Space and Poetica Magazine, Reflections of Jewish Thought.

Past Imperfect: New Jewish Fiction
Binnie Kirshenbaum | The Scenic Route
Jonathon Keats | The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-Six
Norah Labiner | German for Travelers: A Novel in 95 Lessons

Thursday, October 22 | 7:30 pm
Ina and Jack Kay Community Hall
Washington DCJCC, 1529 16th Street NW
Tickets: $10, Discounted Members/Seniors/Under 25 $8
Purchase tickets at washingtondcjcc.org/litfest or (202) 777-3251

Moderated by Sheila Jelen, assistant professor of English and Jewish Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Unexpectedly unemployed, 42-year-old Sylvia Landsman takes off for Italy, where she meets Henry, an expatriate living the good life at a steep price. As they journey throughout Europe, Sylvia entertains Henry with pointed tales of her peculiar family, damaged friends and pet cemeteries; tales twist and turn, weaving remembrances and regrets with a delicious love affair. Binnie Kirshenbaum is Chair of the Writing Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of the Arts and the author of two short story collections and six novels.

“The Scenic Route is warm, wise, and very difficult to put down.” —Gary Shteyngart

A liar, a cheat, a degenerate and a whore. These are the last people one might expect to be virtuous. But they are just some of the thirty-six hidden ones, the righteous individuals who ultimately make the world a better place. Echoing the tales of Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer, this cycle revives the art of Jewish storytelling. Jonathon Keats is a novelist, conceptual artist, essayist, and journalist. He has also attempted to genetically engineer God in a petri dish, in collaboration with scientists at the University of California.

“To read [these stories] is to become transfixed with that long-forgotten childhood wonder.” —Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge

In search of the key to unlock a great family mystery, a Hollywood starlet and her cousin travel to Berlin and find themselves on a trail leading back to their great-grandfather, a Jewish pioneer of psychoanalysis in early 20th Century Germany. Alternating between past and present Germany and 1960s Detroit, German for Travelers is a story about a girl whose dreams reveal the future, a family beset by ghosts, and the place that haunts them all. Norah Labiner is the author of Our Sometimes Sister and Miniatures, an American Library Association Notable Book and Minnesota Book Award winner.

“Labiner’s prose has a willfully inscrutable, catch-me-if-you-can quality that can be vigorous, but wildly lush.”—New York Times Book Review

Festival Fiction is sponsored by Francine Zorn Trachtenberg and Stephen Joel Trachtenberg in loving memory of Bruce J. Zorn.

Co-sponsored by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.

The Hyman S. & Freda Bernstein Jewish Literary Festival, October 18-28
See the entire line-up here.

F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Conference

The F. Scott Fitzgerald literary conference is this weekend. The Writer's Center will be there--that is, I will be there! Lots of great stuff happening if you can make it. Schedule here.

The Tricky Part: An Interview with Martin Moran

This is an excerpt from an interview published in the Spring 2009 issue of The Carousel. Richard Washer is a workshop leader at The Writer’s Center and company dramaturge for Charter Theatre. Martin Moran, author and Obie Award-winning actor, will perform part of his one-man show, The Tricky Part: A Boy’s Story of Sexual Trespass, a Man’s Journey to Forgiveness on Monday, October 19 at 7:30pm at the Center.

About Martin Moran:
Martin Moran grew up in Denver and attended Stanford University and The American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. He lives in New York City where he works as an actor and a writer. He has appeared in many Broadway and Off Broadway plays including Titanic, Cabaret, Bells Are Ringing and Floyd Collins. He was awarded a 2001 Fellowship for Creative Non-Fiction from the New York Foundation of the Arts. He won a 2004 Obie Award for his one-man play, The Tricky Part, which New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley praised for the quiet victory of "rendering chaos with this kind of clarity." Moran continues to perform The Tricky Part all over the country. Read more online at the book's website here.


Which came first, the writing or the acting, and what are your earliest recollections of having a passion for that particular form of expression?

When I was boy, I remember harboring a quiet notion that I’d be a writer. I’m not sure if it arose from seeing my Dad’s byline (he wrote for The Rocky Mountain News) or because I just loved books. But the first passion that truly gripped me was the stage and that happened sophomore year of high school when I landed, by what felt like total chance, in a musical, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. I played ‘Hero’ and the instant I stepped on stage, a bundle of nerves wrapped in a toga, I was intoxicated by the attention and by this event called Theater, this vivid experience of human connection. I was hooked, as they say. Theater saved me and, as it turned out, has given me a life. Writing came much later, in my early thirties. It came with an imperative to tell a certain life story.

I am interested in the intersection of the processes you engage in both as writer and actor. How does the craft of acting inform your writing or the craft of writing inform your acting?

Both crafts require a kind of hunger to inhabit, to illuminate, human beings and human experience. Both crafts share, I think, the exercise of compassion. And the practice of one helps me grow more transparent and confident, I hope, in the practice of the other.

The Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, once said: “…a writer must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people’s stories, and to tell other people’s stories as if they were his own, for that is what literature is.” To imagine and/or enter into another’s story, (their) being, even as you enter deeper into your own, this is the gift, the challenge of crafting a narrative or playing a character. I had a friend who used to say regarding the creation of a character: If you can walk him, you can talk him.

The desire to communicate, to offer to others a human story—as writer or actor—is fueled by love, I think: an ache to uncover our common plight and joy, to shorten the distance between ourselves. What draws me to both pursuits, I believe, and where they intersect, is a devotion to the portrayal of complexity. We can so easily fall into a black and white, Us versus Them, a “you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us” view of the world. This objectifies human beings, allows us to bomb, to violate, because people become things, inconveniences. Both writing and acting are a way of recalling, exchanging, and raising consciousness.

Can you name some influences on your work (either in writing or acting) and how they have impacted your work?

My earliest influences came with music (my high school voice teacher) and movement and so I was most drawn to a kind of physical and musical form of story telling. In my twenties, I worked with theater makers like Meredith Monk and Anne Bogart and studied for a time with the French Director Ariane Mnouchkine. I was a dancer and always found movement the thrilling aspect that made theater distinct from work on the screen. And, of course, my love of Broadway musicals influenced much of the direction of my career.

I began to turn my ear and my heart more intensely toward literature. The narrative poets Stanley Kunitz, Akhmatova, playwrights, Brecht and Miller and so many others began to teach me about the power of words and of concision, the force of narrative and of myth. As I began to write for the stage, Spalding Gray’s worked influenced me a great deal.

You have adapted work for the stage (from your own book). Can you identify one joy and one challenge associated with adaptation?


One joy and challenge was learning how grappling with one form nourished the other. The imperative I felt to make the play intensely engaging helped me ultimately find the narrative structure of the book. And the desire to make the words on the page as clean and vibrant as possible helped me find the lucidity of the play.

A big challenge, especially with the play, was deciding what parts of the story belonged in and what out. At every turn I needed to cut and find what was revealed by what was omitted.

The big challenge when approaching the play was always the question: “What makes this an event in the room, alive in the moment?” This is a very different question from what keeps the story true and engaging to a reader sitting alone in a chair. The intimacy of a single reader is different from the communal experience of the theater.

What’s next for you professionally?

Gee, I don’t really know. I sort of wake each day attempting to cultivate faith in what is and what may come. I am at work on a collection of essays about my experiences working with refugees seeking asylum here in the US. I am auditioning for the odd acting job here and there. I was invited to write a piece for Ploughshares’ fall issue and am agonizing over it. I just played a small part in a TV pilot for a Showtime series called “Possible Side Effects.” I have no idea if it will get picked up and go on. It’s all a mystery.

Review Monday: Girl Genius

Today we're going to start a once-a-month feature with Writer's Center science fiction & fantasy workshop leader Brenda Clough: comic reviews! Today she reviews Girl Genius. This review originally appeard on the Book View Cafe blog.

Surely this web comic is one of the great pleasures of all time! It has everything you could possibly want in a comic — a deep back history (running back to 2001) that nevertheless is instantly accessible, a vast and energetic fan base (there are multiple Yahoo groups and a Wiki that goes on for miles!), a new episode three times a week. Step in, and weeks and weeks of happiness are yours. There are too few things in life like that; there are entire celebrity marriages on view in People magazine that don’t give joy for that long, at least to the participants — the divorce lawyers are happy, however.

GG

And the comic itself is masterfully done. The genius of the title, Agatha Heterodyne, begins young and a little passive but rapidly seizes the reins of her own destiny. Intelligent heroes are rare, female heroes famed and valued for their intelligence are very rare indeed. Agatha is even unusual in her relative heftiness — plump was beautiful in Victorian times and so it is historically accurate, but there are no zaftig heroines in the comics, where weightism is the standard operating procedure.

Agatha’s world, an alternate steampunk Europe, is deep and wide and full of complexity. The creators, Phil and Kaja Foglio, show a fine familiarity with SF, a consistent bent towards humor, and admirably demented imaginations. The romance and action-filled plots are paced with the kind of studied cruelty to readers that keeps everybody jonesing for the next episode and biting their nails. Any artist who enjoys drawing death rays and machines of pain and destruction with such vim and detail is destined for greatness. And indeed GG has been a fan favorite for years, and won the Hugo this year.

The comic is also an interesting case in alternative publishing and adapting to new media. Originally appearing in dead-tree format, GG moved to web-only publication several years later. This immediately boosted its popularity and lent wings to the sale of the book collections. Everybody here at BVC finds this profoundly inspiring.

The only real problem with GG is that there is not enough of it. No, nine hefty volumes are not enough; you can prove it yourself by reading them. Are you satisifed? No, of course not! You want more! And there you are, waiting grouchily for the next episode to go up, right along with all the rest of us.

Brenda Clough has written seven novels, including her most recent, Doors of Death and Life. Her short stories have been published in numerous magazines, including Analog SF Magazine and the anthology Starlight 3. Other work has appeared in SF Age, Aboriginal, Marion Zimmer Bradley Magazine, and many anthologies. She was a finalist for both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award in 2002. She can be found on the web here, and her new novel is up at Book View Cafe.

Contestant Application Form for Short Story Competition

The National Society of Arts and Letters
Washington DC Chapter


CONTESTANT APPLICATION FORM
SHORT STORY COMPETITION

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: POSTMARKED BY FEB. 8, 2010
Please print in black ink or type. Complete all three pages.

Name __________________________________________________________________
First Middle Last

Current Street/Apt. Address ________________________________________________

City ____________________________ State _______________ Zip _______________

Email _____________________ Telephone ( )___________ Fax ( ) ___________

Age _________ Date of birth ____________

U.S. Citizen? Yes ______ No ______ If Naturalized Citizen, give date ____________

Social Security number__________________(All monetary awards are taxable by the IRS.)

Address where I can always be reached:

C/O Name _____________________________ Telephone ( ) _________________

Address ________________________________ Email _________________________

City ______________________________ State _____________ Zip _____________
Application continues on next page.


Titles of the stories I am submitting:

1. ____________________________________________________ Word Count _______

2. ____________________________________________________ Word Count _______

Background Information:

Schools Locations Degrees Dates

___________________ ___________________ ______________ _______________

___________________ ___________________ ______________ _______________

___________________ ___________________ ______________ _______________


Honors, awards, publications (Feel free to add additional pages or substitute your CV or resume.)
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Newspapers/addresses (physical & electronic) to which publicity should be sent if I win an award
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Internet Release: My name and photograph may be used on the NSAL website _______________


NOTARIZED DECLARATION OF RESPONSIBILITY

I certify that the information contained in this application is true and complete and I agree to conform to the rules and regulations of the competition. I further certify that I am not under professional management and that the stories I have submitted are my original work and not yet published or accepted for publication by a mainstream press or a first tier independent publisher. If I win the Chapter competition, I agree to attend the Washington Chapter’s May 2010 meeting and to represent the chapter at the National Competition May 20-23, 2010 in Clearwater,
Florida. If I am one of the top three national winners, I will read from one of my entries as part of the Awards Banquet program on the evening of May 22, 2010.

Signature of contestant _______________________________ Date ____________


For Notary Use:

STATE OF _______________________ NOTARY SEAL


COUNTY OF _____________________


Subscribed and sworn to before me on this

______day of ____________, 2010

My commission expires on _____________________


COMPLETED APPLICATION PACKET SHOULD INCLUDE:

 Original manuscripts of two short stories with your name at the top placed in one 9 x 12” envelope with the completed 3-page application form attached to the envelope.

 Four additional copies of the manuscripts with word count of story but no name or other identifying information, placed in four 9 x 12” envelopes. Recheck Manuscript Requirements for format.

 Photocopy of a legal document verifying your date of birth and citizenship (birth certificate, passport or naturalization papers).

 CD with a high resolution JPEG head shot of yourself suitable for publicity purposes.


SEND COMPLETED APPLICATION PACKET TO:

NSAL Washington Chapter
Alicia Klaffky
4101 Dresden Street Telephone: 301-946-5651
Kensington, MD 20895 Email: klaffkys@yahoo.com

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION: Washington Chapter web site: www.nsal-dc.org
NSAL national web site: www.arts-nsal.org

Fifth Annual Sotto Voce Poetry Festival

A member pointed out a poetry festival happening next weekend in Shepherdstown, WV. If you're so inclined or able to head out to West Virgina, only about 2 or so hours from DC, it sounds like a good time. Here's the info:

Please join us for the fifth annual Sotto Voce Poetry Festival. This year's festival will feature readings and book signings by four nationally recognized poets: Rick Campbell, Alice Friman, Stanley Plumly and Peggy Shumaker. Also participating will be noted English professor, critic, and editor Peter Stitt, who will join in a panel discussion with Campbell.

All of the featured poets will lead small-group workshops that include a range of offerings for poets of all skill levels. Campbell and Stitt will also be available for one-on-one consultations with individual poets. Readings and signings are free. Fee for workshops is $50.

Featured Poets:
Rick Campbell, Alice Friman, Stanley Plumly, Peggy Shumaker

October 16, 2009 to October 18, 2009
Various venues, at various locations, Shepherdstown, WV


Full details of the Festival's schedule are posted on the Festival's website at www.somondocopress.com/sottovoce. Those who wish to enroll in the workshops and consultations are urged to do so early because those sessions will be strictly limited. People can enroll online through the website or by calling 888-812-1885.

The Sotto Voce festival was launched in 2005 to promote public appreciation and awareness of poets and poetry and to create a new audience for poetry in the mid-Atlantic region. Sotto Voce means "in a low voice, softly, in an undertone" in Italian. The festival was founded by and continues to be directed by Shepherdstown poet, novelist and playwright Hope Maxwell-Snyder.

Sponsored by Hope Maxwell-Snyder, Shepherdstown, WV

Info:
(888) 812-1885

Washington Writers' Publishing House: Call for Submissions

On October 25, The Writer's Center hosts The Washington Writers' Publishing House, a small independent press now celebrating its 35th year in existence. That event showcases the winners of the poetry and fiction contests this past year. Winners of their contests get their books published--and they are top-quality books. Below I've pasted the call for manuscripts of this year's contest. Come on out to the Open Door Reading on the 25th and meet the press and some terrific writers associated with the press. Then consider submitting your book to the contest.

Call for Poetry Manuscripts

Between July 1 and November 1, 2009, Washington Writers' Publishing House (WWPH) will accept manuscripts from Washington and Baltimore area poets for its annual book competition. The winning manuscript(s) will be published fall 2010.

Poets living within 60 driving miles of the Capitol (Baltimore area included) are invited to submit TWO copies of a POETRY manuscript (50-60 pages, single or 1-1/2 spaced), a reading fee of $20.00, and a stamped, self-addressed reply envelope. Manuscripts will not be returned; rather, they will be recycled.

Guidelines: Author's name should not appear on the manuscript. The title page of each copy should contain the title only. Provide name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, and title on a separate cover sheet accompanying the submission. A separate page for acknowledgments may be included for poems previously published in journals and anthologies. Mail to:

Poetry—
Brandel France de Bravo
Washington Writers’ Publishing House
3541 S Street NW
Washington DC 20007

The winner will receive $500 and 50 copies of the book.

Staffed by previous winners who volunteer their time and skills, WWPH is a non-profit cooperative poetry press reflecting the cultural and racial diversity of the Greater Washington-Baltimore area. Judging is traditionally performed by former WWPH winners who read the anonymous manuscripts, and in case of a tie, turn the finalists over to a judge outside the area.

IMPORTANT: The winning poet becomes a member of the organization and should be prepared to participate actively in the work of the press, in such areas as selecting the next year’s winners, in publicity, distribution, production, fundraising. Our tradition of poets working on behalf of other poets is essential to the continued vitality and success of WWPH. Contest entrants should be willing to make this commitment should their work be selected for publication.



Call for Fiction Manuscripts

Between July 1 and November 1, 2009, Washington Writers' Publishing House (WWPH) will accept manuscripts from Washington and Baltimore area fiction writers for its annual book competition. The winning manuscript(s) will be published in the fall of 2010.

Fiction writers living within 60 driving miles of the Capitol (Baltimore area included) are invited to submit TWO copies of a FICTION manuscript, either a novel or a collection of short stories (no more than 350 pages, double or 1-1/2 spaced), a reading fee of $25.00, and a stamped, self-addressed reply envelope. Manuscripts will only be returned with appropriate return packaging and postage. Literary fiction only, please.

Author's name should not appear on the manuscript. The title page and running head of each copy should contain the title only. Provide name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, and title on a separate cover sheet accompanying the submission. A separate page for acknowledgments may be included for individual stories or excerpts previously published in journals and anthologies. PLEASE DO NOT PACK IN STYROFOAM PEANUTS!

Mail to:
Elisavietta Ritchie, Fiction
Washington Writers’ Publishing House
P.O. Box 298
Broomes Island, MD 20615
The winner will receive $500 and 50 copies of the book.

Staffed by previous winners who volunteer their time and skills, WWPH is a non-profit cooperative literary press reflecting the cultural and racial diversity of the Greater Washington-Baltimore area. Judging is traditionally performed by former WWPH winners who read the anonymous manuscripts, and in case of a tie, the finalists are turned over to a judge outside the area.

IMPORTANT: The winner becomes a member of WWPH and should be prepared to participate actively in the work of the press, including such areas as publicity, distribution, production, and fundraising. Our tradition of writers working on behalf of other writers is essential to the continued vitality and success of WWPH. Contest entrants should be willing to make this commitment should their work be selected for publication.

Also, WWPH will be hosting its first ever Writers' Ball on October 17. For more information, click here.

Become the 500th FB Fan, get a Discount

The Writer's Center now has 499 fans on Facebook. To show how excited we are, we're offering a coupon to the next person who becomes a fan: $25 coupon of the next multisession (4 minimum) workshop. Current Facebook fans will get random offers.

Just click on the become a fan link to the right of this post!

Anne Truitt: Perception & Reflection

There's a new exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum from October 8, 2009–January 3, 2010 that might be of interest to Writer's Center members and readers of this blog. This piece was originally published in Hirshhorn's Magazine, and they've allowed us to reprint it here. It was written by Associate Curator Kristen Hileman.

Abstraction is not easy.

Rather than working in representational imagery that depicts such things as everyday objects or human forms, some artists express themselves exclusively in a vocabulary of color, shape, and compositional arrangements. Broadly speaking, people are used to receiving information in words or pictures that have a fairly direct and recognizable relationship to the reality in which we live (think photography, film, and television, as well as the entire genre of illustration). How then does communication unfold when an artist intentionally distances her or his images from reality, abstracting experience and ideas? Does this process of abstraction make concepts more personal or more universal? And what sort of role should/do art historians, curators, and critics play in mediating abstraction through more familiar modes of exchange?

It seems important to raise these questions in relation to the art of Anne Truitt, the subject of the Hirshhorn’s exhibition Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection. Truitt is a pioneering but under-studied figure in the history of twentieth-century abstraction. She was a contemporary of Color Field artists Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, and her reduced geometric sculpture, notably her hallmark columns, developed in tandem with the work of Minimalists like Donald Judd during the early 1960s. However, her work has not occupied as prominent a place in the discourse of post-1960s art as theirs. Among the reasons that could be proposed to explain this, a particularly provocative one is that Truitt’s work eludes (and given the artist’s independent personality one might even say intentionally eluded) easy categorization, and categorization is a key strategy by which critics, scholars, and curators interpret abstraction, indeed any kind of art, for a broader public.

While her palette was incredibly important to her work, unlike the Color Field artists, Truitt explored color in three dimensions, rather than on canvas. And although she had the rectangular and columnar infrastructures of her sculptures fabricated, Truitt transformed them through non-primary, hand-painted color in a way that distinguished her from the Minimalists. Further, the artist’s work was inflected with the correspondences of its physical dimensions to the human body and architectural elements from her childhood on the Eastern Shore, as well as evocative color compositions and titles that comprise the names of places and literary allusions, among other references. In retrospect, it is the human stamp that Truitt gave to streamlined, geometric shape that seems a crucial and unique link between the generation of Abstract Expressionists that preceded her and the radically reduced abstraction that developed over the course of the 1960s.

However, one senses from writings of that same decade by Judd and others that this connection to art of the past was demoted in favor of the “new” Minimalist mode of art-making in which expressive gestures were replaced by manufactured objects that, broadly speaking, claimed to have no references or dependencies outside of the relationships initiated during a viewer’s physical encounter with them. Interestingly, here we are faced with a more general question of whether the scholarly and critical interpretation of abstraction is not just a matter of analytical categorization, but of taste, judgment, and even fashion, with the result that one kind of artistic practice is promoted over another.

So where does that leave Truitt’s work? Her art is ripe for rediscovery and ready to be considered on its own terms. By the late 1960s, critical dialogue emphasized the “far-out” and forward-looking. Today, we are currently in a scholarly moment that welcomes a re-evaluation of the past and acknowledges the interplay between an artist’s output and his or her individual experience. Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection and its accompanying catalogue, offer a contemporary study of the artist’s career, documenting its evolution from the late 1940s until her death in 2004. The project also recognizes the essential need to enable new generations of viewers to draw their own conclusions through firsthand exposure to pieces from collections across the United States, brought together in the Hirshhorn galleries.

Truitt was born in Baltimore in 1921 and raised on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, a geographic and architectural setting that influenced the art that she came to make. In 1947, she moved to Washington, DC, where she would spend the majority of her adult life. Having worked in the field of psychology and also writing fiction, Truitt delved into the visual arts in the late 1940s, enrolling in Washington’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Throughout the 1950s, she primarily made figurative sculpture in such materials as clay, cast cement, and stone, much of which she intentionally abandoned or destroyed in the early 1960s. Also during this period, the artist and her husband, journalist James Truitt, were part of a lively Washington social circle that brought together artists, journalists, politicians, and government officials.

After visiting the Guggenheim Museum’s American Abstract Expressionists and
Imagists exhibition in November 1961, where she was impressed by the paintings of Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman, Truitt’s work took a dramatic turn toward reduced, geometric abstraction, establishing the focused and individualized area of artistic exploration that she pursued for the next forty years. In addition to producing sculpture, paintings, and drawings (all of which are represented in the exhibition), Truitt also published three auto-biographical books, Daybook (1982), Turn (1986), and Prospect (1996). Truitt lived in Northwest Washington’s Cleveland Park neighborhood since 1969. She passed away in December 2004, after completing the remarkable columnar sculptures Return and Evensong, both on view at the Hirshhorn.

The almost 100 works in Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection embody Truitt’s “life in art,” to quote the title of an exhibition of the artist’s sculpture organized by Brenda Richardson for the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1992. They also present themselves for the contemplation of today’s audiences who will ultimately arrive at their own meanings for Truitt’s rich language of abstraction. No doubt, some viewers will appreciate the work because of its place in the trajectory of art history while others will connect with it by developing their own associations for Truitt’s forms. Still others will look for a universalizing of experience in the artwork—whether that be a shared investigation of how we perceive color and light or how beautiful objects have the power to prompt emotional response and reflection that transcends particular circumstance. But happily and hopefully, many will respond in a way that not only cannot be categorized, but also cannot be fully articulated, just as abstraction in general and Truitt’s art in particular is so much more than the attempts to explain it.

So while abstraction is not easy, it can be as rewardingly and endlessly rich and complex as those who make it and those who consider it.

Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection is organized by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The exhibition is made possible by the Henry Luce Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Judith Rothschild Foundation, and the Anne Truitt Patrons Committee, with additional support from the Hirshhorn Board of Trustees and the museum’s Annual Circle donors. The Anne Truitt Patrons Committee co-chairs are Tim Gunn and Martin Puryear.

Renovating thoughts on Writing with Christine Koubek

When we signed the contract to remodel our home, I expected things like cooking on a rent-a-burner, lunchtimes looking at countertops and a daily battle with dust. But now, three weeks in to this three-month endeavor, I’ve discovered things I never anticipated; like how much I could feel like a stranger in my own home, that I’d learn something valuable about writing from the contractors, and—the thing I really hadn’t considered when I gave carte blanche permission to use whatever bathroom was closest—there is rarely a toilet seat down in this house.

With a husband, two sons, and a rotating bunch of six-to-ten men in the house, I am the only person here who wears a bra.

My weekdays now begin with the arrival of men in trucks. We open the garage door, drop cloths are laid down and the saw starts humming in the garage. I say, “good morning,” then clean up the dishes in our soon to be dismantled kitchen and try to stay out of their way.

The problem is I’m a freelance writer working from home. And now this is their workplace too, a workplace full of tools, Baja Fresh stuff, water bottles, and the camaraderie they’ve grown accustomed to: discussing their work, what kind of lunch Leo (the man in charge here) might want for his birthday, and laughing—at what, I’m not sure. More than half of the dialogue is spoken in Spanish, only bits and pieces of which I understand. I debate whether to leave my Spanish/English dictionary lying around so they can never be sure how much I know.

I used to be productive working at home. The only sound was the music I played. Not anymore. While I’m up in my second-floor office, an editor calls about an assignment as a drill makes its zzt zzt sound. I duck into the bathroom and sit on the edge of the tub with the phone in one ear and a finger pressed to the other.

When I’m finished, I sit down at my desk again and type to a cacophony of nail guns, hammering, grunting (what in God’s name are they doing down there?), chatting, and someone singing along (in a pretty good voice) to the chorus of Macho Man. It sounds like there is a fiesta going on in their part of the house. And I am clearly the odd man—make that woman—out.

I try hard not to listen, but I’ve come to realize that there is no one more distractible than a writer on deadline.

What are they talking about? I wonder. I think someone just said: “loco”—what’s crazy? And what was that sound? It must be the window being taken out below me. Why is it so quiet all of a sudden?

I put my headphones on to concentrate and catch myself singing along a few minutes later.

Damn, I’ve got to stop doing that. Oh! I forgot to tell them about that cable jack.

What was I writing about again?

OK. Time to pack up the laptop and go to Barnes & Noble again to work.

When my husband works from home he seems far less unnerved. At first, I assume it is because his home office is located above our garage and not directly on top of the action. Then I realize there is something about the male bonding that’s available right here at home that he enjoys. He occasionally orders pizza with pineapple for everyone, then hangs out in the kitchen and talks about things like what size TV is best (why is it men equate bigger with better?), the pros and cons of surround sound, and, as I think I overheard once, the indecisiveness of women.

I wanted to barge in to that testosterone-infused room and make a case for myself, for all women, but there were at least six men in there and I didn’t have a quick-witted comeback at the moment. This made me even less likely to attend the next pizza lunch. I’ll stick to making them cookies.

There is no one here who speaks my ‘language,’ no one to chat with about the weekend, or the kids, or about the perplexing part of this assignment I am working on.

Although I will say they are very helpful anytime I ask for advice on trim and stone. And if they see me carrying anything, whether it’s a box of stone samples or an armful of roller shades, they take it from me and ask where it needs to go. I have to admit this part of having them here is very nice.

And then one afternoon, a couple weeks in to this process, I had an opportunity to get to know one of the guys a bit. My kindergartner, Colin, and I were walking up the driveway with cupcakes as Fenix was closing up the house for the day. Colin offered him a cupcake. Fenix said: “Thank you.” I told Colin to say “de nada.”

Fenix asked where I was from. I inquired the same and learned that he is from El Salvador and that his brothers live here, too. We talked about families and music and dancing, and when I went in to the house that night, it felt a little more like home.

At three-weeks in (and woefully behind on an upcoming deadline), I discover one more thing I didn’t expect in this process—a cure for writer’s block.

These last few nights I’ve begun a new routine. After all the guys leave, I go and unzip the plastic doorway that separates the dusty side of the house from ours. Then I stand amid the taken down trim, dangling wires and half-built walls and study their work in progress. As I look around it is hard to imagine this part of the house will ever look good again.

Later on, I head upstairs with the boys and lie down in my older son’s bed to read with him. His is the first room done. I scan the newly wainscoted walls and admire the perfect symmetry of the corners. What Leo and the others have meticulously measured, cut and put up now looks gorgeous in gleaming white paint.

This room looked like our first floor does now just a couple weeks ago…and kind of like what my office looks like now, with files strewn about and one project in such a bad state I’m worried it will never turn out well. And then I realize that these guys are in a business not that different from my own, only they accept—actually expect—disarray to be part of the creative process.

They create with wood. I create with words. I can learn something from them.

Their work reminds me that constructing anything can be a challenging and messy endeavor, but that usually, with enough ingenuity and perseverance, something beautiful emerges (at least that is the plan here for our first floor).

Checking out the progress of their work each evening has inspired me to be more patient with my own. There is something familiar here in my house: construction’s version of a rough draft. Maybe I’m not such a stranger here after all.

*This essay orginally appeared in Bethesda Magazine, and we thank them and Christine for allowing us to post it here.

Christine Koubek is a freelance journalist, author, contributing editor at FamilyVacationCritic.com (a new travel site launched under the TripAdvisor umbrella), and a frequent contributor to Bethesda Magazine. Her articles and essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Ladies’ Home Journal, Modern Bride, Budget Travel, San Francisco Chronicle, CruiseCritic.com, MSNBC.com, Washingtonian, Miami Herald, and more. Christine is happy to report that her renovations turned out beautifully, her Spanish, however, still needs improvement.

Interview with Charles Jensen & Juliana Spahr

The Writer's Center is pleased to partner with Folger Shakespeare Library on bringing this special discount to Writer's Center members. Here's an interview between The Writer's Center's director, Charles Jensen, and Spahr. Following the interview you will find some information on the event, which includes a discount for Writer's Center members.

Both This Connection Of Everyone With Lungs and Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You are concerned with ideas of place. In the earlier book, you explored some ideas of sovereignty as Hawa’ii is both its own place apart from the U.S. and a state of it. In the later book, you explore the separations we experience as individuals because we can’t conceive of earth as a shared or common place for all people. How has “place” become such a significant presence in your work?

I think it probably has everything to do with Hawai'i. And with the interesting and complicated pressure that Hawai'i puts on its writers to think about what it means to be in Hawai'i. But poetry itself has a long tradition of being local, the form where the flora and the fauna are catalogued, where the names of the winds are preserved, etc. And I'm interested always in the sort of work that poetry can do, or does, that other genres and forms can't or don't.

You’ve worked in long sequences or book-length pieces, expansive works that, while they encompass or embrace many ideas and places, remain both intimate and specific. What brought you to writing in longer forms and what opportunities or surprises have you found there?

The modernist tradition. And the idea in modernism, which modernism gets from the epic, that poetry is a place for exploration of large ideas. That it can take on a lot of information and sort it in interesting ways. And I think those might be both the opportunities and the surprises. I'm interested in poetry as a genre for thinking, for inquiry as Lyn Hejinian puts it.

Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You seems concerned in many ways with the “public” world (the world of laws, of culture, of people in groups), but there seems to be a kind of narrative distance between the speaker of the poems and their subjects. The speaker of This Connection of Everyone With Lungs is equally concerned with world wide events, including the gathering aggression of impending war, the stock market report, and tabloid gossip, but the book is so internal it seems like a true departure from the earlier work. Were you consciously working with ideas of inside and outside in these two works, or did the focus of each book come more organically as you wrote? And how did you arrive at the form of the “day book” or journal as used in the later collection?

They happened organically. But when I was writing the second one, I often thought of it as a revision of the first one. So I've thought of Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You as a book where I attempt to think about what it means to be local. And This Connection as a book where I attempt to think about what it means to have the global constantly intruding, insistingly changing what it means to be local. And the day book form was very literal. I sat down to try and chart out, through poetry, what I saw happening in the news. It was an experiment to see if poetry could help me understand the war that was inevitably coming. And I'm not sure it did finally. Mainly though I was attempting to work with lyric. Which I wanted to do because I had spent so many years dismissing lyric, see it as individualist, as convention bound. And so I was trying to think about why I had misunderstood lyric. And to think about how one of the interesting things about lyric is that it is all about building empathy and intimacy between humans.

This Connection of Everyone With Lungs is, naturally, a book about the interconnectedness of the human race, despite our best efforts to remain sovereign from each other at every level. The book feels almost Whitmanesque in scope and in address—was his influence a tangible one for you? Is this collection a modern-day revisioning of Whitman’s Americana poetry in Leaves of Grass?

It wasn't directly. I always feel more sympatico with Gertrude Stein.
But, of course, I'm using his catalogue. Which he, of course, has stolen from the epic and other forms. And many of my concerns are similar...this question of human connection and attempts to extend it.

This Friday you’ll receive the O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library in recognition for your excellence in writing and teaching. What benefit does teaching have for you in your poetic practice?

Oh, it is another way of learning from other humans, with other humans.
When it is working. I'm also always suspicious of teaching, or at least teaching in institutions. Which when it isn't working feels riddled with unproductive hierarchies and unflexible conventions. Or here is the thing... I learn a huge amount from teaching. I've got no reason to doubt that. But I always feel I could learn more, learn better, from a less institutional setting. Teaching is always a pay to play game. Which doesn't disqualify it, or them, but means it is never as egalitarian as one might wish. And the pay to play aspect of it constantly infects its pedagogy. That said, it still might be the best model we've got right now for people talking with each other. It could for sure be more. But it is still something important. Undeniably.

***



As a special offer, members of The Writer’s Center may purchase $9 tickets (a 25% savings) to the 2009 O.B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize reading and ceremony honoring Juliana Spahr at Folger Shakespeare Library on Friday, October 9 at 7:30pm.

Order tickets online at www.folger.edu/poetry and use coupon code FPTWC, or mention The Writer’s Center discount when ordering tickets through the Folger box office, 202-544-7077. Service charges apply.

The O.B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Award honors an American poet whose work and teaching are informed by the spirit of inquiry, imagination, daring, and scholarship of former Folger director O. B. Hardison, Jr.

Juliana Spahr is an associate professor of English at Mills College and recipient of the National Poetry Series Award for her second collection of poetry, Response (1996). She has published six other books of poetry including her latest, The Transformation (2007), a lyric prose memoir. Spahr is also the author of Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (2001), a scholarly study of contemporary poetry that fosters a value of reading as communal, democratic, open process. In addition to teaching and writing poetry, Spahr is also an active editor. Her collaborative efforts with other writers and poets have enriched and extended how we think about contemporary writing and teaching.

A free seminar precedes the poetry reading at 5pm.

R.I.P. Edgar Allan Poe: Bicentennial Celebration in Baltimore

We'll return to our weekly review next week, but first this little tidbit of information from Sonja Patterson.



You’re standing in a group of people dressed all in black mourning someone you think you knew well. You’re waiting at the grave for the funeral procession to come up the path while pipes and drums drown out the sound of sobs around you. The casket arrives, under police escort, in a horse drawn carriage.

Who lies there? Edgar Allan Poe, 1809 – 1849. It may be a little late to pay your respects, but better late than never.

When Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7, 1849 in Baltimore, Maryland at the age 40, he did not get the send off of a literary great. In fact, he was buried in an unmarked grave and only four people attended his funeral. A proper headstone was not erected until 1875.

Since 1949 the famous “Poe Toaster” has been the most dedicated visitor to his grave at West Minster Hall leaving a half bottle of cognac and three roses at dawn on the day of his birth. Baltimore took note and is following the unknown stranger’s lead.

Baltimore invites you to celebrate the Edgar Allan Poe Bicentennial from October 7th to 11th, including a viewing of Poe’s body at the Poe House and Museum on October 7th, an all night vigil at Westminster Hall on October 8th, and Poe’s Funeral on October 11th. For more information, click here: http://www.poebicentennial.com/

Poe was a tormented alcoholic who wrote about love and death. “Annabel Lee” was his last poem before his tragic end. To read it, click here: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/annabel-lee/# In life, Annabel Lee was loved by her husband (the narrator); in death, she was worshiped by him.

Likewise, Poe is worshiped now more than ever. Like many writers, he did not meet critical acclaim until after his death. He was embraced by French and English authors, helped by Charles Baudelaire’s translations into French. Poe helped to create entire genres such as science fiction and the detective story, and has inspired countless artists, writers, and filmmakers.

This time, speakers at his funeral include Arthur Conan Doyle, the author and creator of Sherlock Holmes; Alfred Hitchcock, the legendary film director; H.P. Lovecraft, the author of weird tales and pulp fiction, and many more. Most events are free and open to the public. Tickets to the funeral are $35 in advance and $40 at the door.

While in Baltimore, raise your glass at the place where Poe had his last drink before his death, The Horse You Came In On Saloon. Rumor has it his ghost haunts the place.

If you can’t make it to Baltimore, celebrate in your own way. While it may sound odd to celebrate Poe’s death, it’s suited for the master of the morbid. May he rest in peace.

Sonja Patterson is on staff at The Writer’s Center. Her poetry has appeared in the Faquier Poetry Journal.

Bay to Ocean Writing Contest on Eastern Shore

Yesterday we featured the Delmarva Review on this blog. In association with that post, here's a little extra nugget for you in case you're interested in entering a contest:

The Eastern Shore Writers’ Association has kicked off the second Bay to Ocean Writing Contest with a call for entries from writers.

The contest is sponsored by the Eastern Shore Writers’ Association and will honor first-rate writing in three categories--short fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry. It is open to all writers, regardless of where they live, what type of writing they do or what subject matter they choose.

"There are many fine writers across the Delmarva Peninsula, and we hope to encourage them with this contest," said Wilson Wyatt, coordinator of the Bay to Ocean Writers Conference. "Good writing has no boundaries. We welcome all writers."

First-place winners will receive a $100 cash prize and free admission to the 13th annual Bay to Ocean Writers Conference at Chesapeake College on February 20, 2010 . The winning prose and poetry will be considered for publication by the Delmarva Quarterly.

Only original, unpublished work will be accepted. The length allowed will be 1,500 words for short fiction and creative nonfiction, and up to 40 lines for each poem. Writers may submit up to two entries for fiction and nonfiction or up to five poems.
A processing fee will be charged for each entry--$5 for poems; $10 for fiction or nonfiction. Checks should be made out to the Eastern Shore Writers' Association, marked "writing contest," and mailed to - Writing Contest; P.O. Box 544; St. Michaels, MD 21663.

The submission deadline is December 1, 2009. Entries must be submitted electronically only, by e-mail attachment (as a Word document) to this e-mail address: BTOContest@gmail.com.

Judges of the 2009 Bay to Ocean Writing Contest will be:
• Short Fiction: Award-winning writer and instructor Kate Blackwell, author of You Won’t Remember This and writing instructor in the Washington , D.C. area, including The Writer’s Center (www.kateblackwell.com )
• Creative Nonfiction: Sheila Buckmaster , editor at large, National Geographic Traveler magazine.
• Poetry: Award-winning poet Anne Colwell, associate professor of English, University of Delaware
Contest information is available at: http://sites.google.com/site/btocontest/

The Eastern Shore Writers' Association is a nonprofit organization dedicated to writers and the literary arts across the tri-state Delmarva Peninsula. Its website is www.easternshorewriters.org

The Bay to Ocean Writers Conference is a regional educational conference for all writers. Past conferences have sold out in advance. For more information, see the website: www.baytoocean.com

The Delmarva Review

Today we feature The Delmarva Review. Wilson Wyatt (also a brand new board member of The Writer's Center) is the founder of the journal and also chairman of its editorial board.

Can you tell us a little about The Delmarva Review?

The Delmarva Review publishes an annual selection of the best new prose and poetry by emerging and established writers in the region. However, we welcome all writers, everywhere. Good writing should have no boundaries.

Of the 52 authors we have published in the first two issues, most are from the Chesapeake and Delmarva region, but they have come from 10 states, the District of Columbia and four foreign countries, thanks to the Internet. We are pleased that several of our writers are among the instructors at The Writer’s Center.

When several of us founded the Review, just over two years ago, we wanted to create a new, quality print venue to publish distinctive, excellent writing from the region. Our focus was to expand publishing opportunities for writers at a time when other print publications were diminishing. There are more writers today than ever, with fewer opportunities to be published in print.

The publisher and primary sponsor of the Review is the Eastern Shore Writers’ Association, a nonprofit organization of writers from across the tri-state Delmarva Peninsula. The publication has also been supported by public literary arts grants.

What makes Delmarva Unique?

The region, its culture and people are unique. Many fine writers have found a home here. Some area known and many are aspiring to be heard. They represent the talented new voices of the region. The Delmarva Review hopes to discover these voices and showcase their work.

This large geographic region contains the Chesapeake Bay, the historic Eastern Shore, the rural countryside of the Delmarva Peninsula, the coastal beaches of Atlantic Ocean, and the strong influence of the populous area from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore and Wilmington.

We publish the work of authors outside of these boundaries, with the hope that their writing will inspire the work of new regional writers. We also select at least one featured writer in each issue, and we publish short reviews of selected regional books.

Another unique feature is that we are relatively new, now entering our third edition. While the submission process is increasingly competitive for quality work, we maintain respect for all writers. If a submission has excellence but may need some minor editing, we will work with the author.

Tell us more about how the Review selects work.

A small, hands-on editorial board develops each issue. As the chairman, I oversee the overall operations, but each board member participates equally in the publication process.

The editor is Linda Fritz, a former editor with Sunset publications. She selects the final fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry to complete each issue. We have a number of experienced readers who see all submissions and recommend work to the editor. The editorial board agrees to all final content.

Melanie Rigney, former editor of Writer’s Digest magazine, is copyeditor for the next issue. John Elsberg, editor of Bogg literary journal, is responsible for overseeing poetry submissions. Dr. Margot Miller oversees the fiction readers. Author Kate Blackwell, a former instructor at The Writer’s Center, advises the board on both fiction and nonfiction. Essayist George Merrill oversees nonfiction submissions. Novelist Mala Burt is our managing editor. Our design editor is artist Laura Ambler. All are passionate, dedicated volunteers. All of us have experience as published writers.

Story/Stereo 2, Charles Jensen, and Merrill Feitell

The Writer's Center celebrates the beginning of October with the second part of Story/Stereo, and an installment of our Open Door Reading Series with Charles Jensen (The First Risk) and Merrill Feitell (Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes), as they read from their work. Read on!

Story/Stereo Part II
Friday, October 2, 7:30P.M.

Story/Stereo is the headline event for The Writer's Center's Emerging Writer Fellowships. It features two writers on stage with great local musicians. The musical component of the event is co-curated by local muscians Chad Clark of the band Beauty Pill and Matt Byars of The Caribbean. Last year, The Writer's Center hosted an event with poets Deborah Ager, Sandra Beasley, Bernadette Geyer, and The Caribbean. That event was the prototype for Story/Stereo.

After the success of our first Story/Stereo, please join us for Story/Stereo Part II!

Join Alexander Chee as he reads from his forthcoming second novel, The Queen of the Night. He is joined by Srikanth Reddy, author of Facts for Visitors. Workshop leader and board member Rose Solari will introduce the emerging writer fellows and their will be a performance by special musical guest Bluebrain.

Alexander Chee was born in Rhode Island, and raised in South Korea, Guam and Maine. He is a recipient of the 2003 Whiting Writers’ Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in Fiction and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the VCCA. His first novel, Edinburgh (Picador, 2002), is a winner of the Michener Copernicus Prize, the AAWW Lit Award and the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and was a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the Year and a Booksense 76 selection. In 2003, Out Magazine honored him as one of their 100 Most Influential People of the Year. His essays and stories have appeared in Granta.com, Out, The Man I Might Become, Loss Within Loss, Men On Men 2000, His 3 and Boys Like Us. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has taught fiction writing at the New School University and Wesleyan. He is currently the Visiting Writer at Amherst College and lives in Western Massachusetts.

Srikanth Reddy’s first collection of poems, Facts for Visitors, received the 2005 Asian American Literary Award in Poetry. His work has appeared in various journals. Reddy is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago.

About Bluebrain (from Chad Clark of Beauty Pill, co-musical curator with Matt Byars of The Caribbean):

Bluebrain's music is electric, serrated, often abstract, always texture-fixated. Upon first listening, you will detect a decidedly futurist bent. However, under the veneer of hallucinogenic, technological treatments, there is storytelling and communication. Each song is a vista unto itself and they often highlight this with a video component to their performances. The word "multimedia" is a little banal, but it applies here.

The band is a duo of brothers Ryan and Hays Holladay. Bluebrain was borne in 2008 from the ashes of their respected and recently disbanded group, The Epochs. The Epochs were a clever, mischievous, and inventive pop band who I became acquainted with through my studio work. They were clients who impressed me enough to invite them to open for Beauty Pill, where upon they proceeded to blow us away and, frankly, embarrass us as headliners. Bluebrain's aesthetic extends outward from The Epochs, but has a distinctly different feel and perhaps a darker, more erotic persona. Learn more about Bluebrain here.

We are honored to have Bluebrain, Alexander Chee, and Srikanth Reddy with us for Story/Stereo Part II, and would be even more honored to have you as well!

Open Door Reading Series: Charles Jensen and Merrill Feitell
Sunday, October 4, 2:00P.M.

Charles Jensen reads from The First Risk, his first full-length collection of poems. He is joined by Merrill Feitell, who reads from her first collection of short stories, Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes.

Charles Jensen is the author of three chapbooks, including Living Things, which won the 2006 Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award, and The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon (New Michigan Press, 2007). His first full-length collection, The First Risk, is forthcoming in September 2009 from Lethe Press. A past recipient of an Artist’s Project Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, his poetry has appeared in Bloom, Columbia Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, The Journal, New England Review, spork, and West Branch. He holds an MFA in poetry from Arizona State University and is currently pursuing an MA in Nonprofit Leadership and Management. He is the founding editor of the online poetry magazine LOCUSPOINT, which explores creative work on a city-by-city basis. He serves as director of The Writer's Center.

In four extended sequences, The First Risk confronts the murder of Matthew Shepard and the myth of Venus and Adonis through the eyes of Italian Renaissance painter Luca Cambiaso; the eccentric women of Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother and the search for authenticity; the nature of love and obsession in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and the pain and confusion of loss; and the compelling story of a physicist in search of his lost wife, haunted by a phantom voice that may or may not be hers...

Merrill Feitell was born and raised in New York City. Her first book, Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes, won the 2004 Iowa Award for Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in many publications, including the Best New American Voices series, and have been short-listed in Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Awards. She was selected as one of Fiction’s New Luminaries in the Virginia Quarterly Review, has been a fellow at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and was the Theodore Morrison Fellow in Fiction at Bread Loaf in 2005.


From bookstore manager Janel Carpenter:

Merrill Feitell has put together a superb collection of stories in Here Beneath Low Flying Planes. She has the ability to unravel seminal moments in characters' lives, full of messy complexity and intricacy, in tidy prose. Her stories are at once revelatory and a thoughtful look at the wonder in ordinary occurrences.

Adele Steiner & the Young Writer's Corner

Workshop leader Adele Steiner--and her young workshop participants--are my guests today. Adele Steiner has a B.A. & M.F.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing (Poetry) (University of Maryland). She has been a Poet-in-the-Schools poet, a Maryland State Arts Council grant winner; a veteran artist in residence at Georgetown University Hospital. She's the author of Refracted Love and Freshwater Pearls. Her work has appeared in Wordwrights, Maryland Poetry Review, Gargoyle, Smartish Pace, Promise, and So To Speak. She will be leading two workshops for young people beginning October 31st--Poetry and Narrative Verse for Teens and Kids Write for Kids (8 to 11 year olds)



Welcome to the Young Writers’ Corner!



Many thanks again to Kyle at The Writer’s Center for yet another opportunity to feature the poetry written by students in my workshop, Poetry and Narrative Verse for Teens.

The work I have chosen for this next publication comes from the Mandala Workshop. Mandalas are circular, symmetrical designs that have been used for centuries in Eastern as well as Native American religions as guides to enlightenment. Their various geometric patterns represent the harmony of the cosmos; and Buddhists believe that creating them as well as meditating on them promotes deep states of mental concentration.



Wondering whether the intricately beautiful patterns of the Mandala might sitr the imaginations of young writers and provide them with creative inspiration, I constructed a workshop around the use of the Mandala. I found that in my work at the Writer’s Center, and, in particular, with this most recent group of talented young writers in Poetry and Narrative Verse for Teens, the Mandalas worked their magic. So enjoy!


Adele Steiner

"Refusing Defeat"

I sliced Mr. Pac Man’s tail off with a butter knife, but it grew back.
He hissed at me and slithered into an anthill, an intruder of the Earth’s crust—
into a trumpet.
The monstrous drip-castle comes into view beyond a watery valley
of lily pads and barbed wire.
The dusty Earth is slippery with spilled milk, fried eggs.
Broken glass dots the cratered floor and glistens.
Kaleidoscope.
Mr. Pac Man is nowhere to be found, but I sense him
behind each arrowhead.
Perhaps he has regenerated infinitely, just like his silken tail.
The sound of his sandpaper beard still rings in my ears,
still sends shivers down my spine.
Lustrous ghosts dance around the marble cross, statuesque,
hanging before the eventual entrance.
They try to engage me in a game of peek—boo.
How ignorant they are.
I should leave, but I crouch at the base of the castle
and await my moody prisoner.
He iso n his way.
When he finally gives up, waving that white flag of surrender in my face,
His beard begins to fall out.
I smile wickedly
and ride with him on the backs of seahorses into the sunset.

Molly (age 16)


Her heart lies in the middle of burning flames
Spreading quickly and wildly
Taking whatever comes in their way.
Her hopes, dreams, and fears disappear.
If frustration takes over,
She may lose sight of her hopes and dreams,
The ones she feared she’d never achieve.
Her heart lies in the middle of burning flames.
They’re too wild to be tamed.
She’ll watch helplessly, becoming heartless
Just like the rest of the world.

Karina (age 16)


"At Everest’s Peak"

At Everest’s Peak
Gazing into the unknown
I’m flying in my heart
Falling in my fears

Screaming blizzard
Howling wind
Biting chill
At Everest’s Peak

Luci (age 13)




"Mandala"

Spinning, overlapping eyes
Torment awaiting symmetry.
Behold the death of time in an instant.

An explosion of lost paths. Choose?
A plain, colorless, and intangible illusion

Spinning unrequited hallucinations
This fake reality.

There is no way out of this.
All is nothing.

Camilla (age 15)




"The Zen Wristwatch"

All is not done.
For all has not begun.
It is just
Merely going, going.
Once here,
Always there.
Twice here,
Never there.
Does that make sense?
Of course not.
For that was another time,
And another time is not now—
In fact, now is not now either.
Now is earlier
When later is now—
Does that make sense?
Of course not.
I’ll tell you later,
just not now.

Christopher (age 15)

James Ellroy Photographs and Event Review

Here are some photographs from James Ellroy's reading (thanks to Fall for the Book and their wonderful photographer). I did not write a review, but Charlie did. Read it on his blog.

Tuesday Interview: Brett Friedlander, Chasing Moonlight

With the baseball playoffs nigh--and my beloved St.Louis Cardinals in this year--I've decided to repost this interview I did with author Brett Friedlander (it orginally appeared on Art & Literature).

Chasing Moonlight, by Brett Friedlander and Robert Reising, is the true story of Archibald Graham, a native North Carolinian and brother to former University of North Carolina President Frank Porter Graham. Known as “Moonlight” Graham during an all-too brief baseball career, he was a career minor leaguer until he got one chance to play for John McGraw’s New York Giants in 1905. That chance turned out to be one game, and he didn’t make it to bat. Sent back down to the minors shortly after, he never again spent time in a major league uniform.

But Chasing Moonlight isn’t about a minor league baseball player. It’s the story of a remarkable journeyman ballplayer turned renowned country doctor in a small northern Minnesota town, far from his North Carolina home — a man whose careers in baseball and medicine provided the inspiration for one of the characters in W.P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe and who was then immortalized by Burt Lancaster in that book’s film adaptation, Field of Dreams.

Chasing Moonlight seeks to find the man behind those depictions, and early chapters from the book have already won a 2007 N.C. Press Association Award.

How did you and Robert Reising write this book? As co-authors, how did you determine who would write/research what?

Brett Friedlander, co-author: Since I am a sports writer by trade and Bob is a college professor, I did the bulk of the writing while he did a great deal of the research, though we both made contributions in both areas. The great thing about our partnership, however, is that we worked so well together. We made several trips to Minnesota together and spent many combined hours in the research libraries in Fayetteville, Chapel Hill, and Charlotte, as well. As for the writing, whenever either of us was finished with a chapter, it would be emailed to the other for any additions, subtractions or other revisions. The most cooperative effort came on the final chapter, which was written over the better part of two days together at the Fayetteville main branch library, where we bounced ideas off one another and wrote the conclusion as we went along.

This is a book whose genesis, you write, begins with W.P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe — which, of course, later became the popular film Field of Dreams. Because its subject is a career minor leaguer, it’s easy to see the book’s appeal for baseball fans. What considerations, if any, did you have for those readers who might not know Shoeless Joe or Field of Dreams?

Not as much in the original draft. But thanks to the persuasion of a great editor, Steve Kirk of John F. Blair, we eventually included a lot more background and basic facts that were covered in the novel and movie into our text. I think these were important additions, because without the context of Shoeless Joe and Field of Dreams, the significance of Graham’s accomplishments and the depth of his many sacrifices would have been lost on the reader. By going back and providing that context, I believe we broadened the appeal of this book to an audience beyond that of a typical “baseball book.” As is the case with Field of Dreams, baseball is only one aspect of Graham’s life story. It’s a hook, if you will, that leads you to a much more inspiring and complex subject.

When reading the book, I was struck by a couple instances when you substitute the fictional Graham’s dialogue for the real Graham’s. Oddly, those passages seem very fitting to the person you portray in Chasing Moonlight. Can you talk about the difficulties you faced in discovering just who this remarkable, yet largely obscure man was? Here, I’m thinking especially of the gaps between the facts of his life and the fiction.

The most difficult aspect, by far, in researching and writing this biography is that virtually no records or writings remain pertaining directly to Graham. I remember going to Chisholm, Minnesota for the first time hoping to find some sort of journal or diary or even just a pile of notes he made during his 44 years as the town’s school doctor and being disappointed when I was told that they were all lost or thrown away either after Doc had died or a few years later when the school that housed his office was torn down. No one thought to keep any of that stuff because at the time, there didn’t seen a need. It was only after his death, when Kinsella stumbled across his name and decided to include him in Shoeless Joe, that Graham became famous and people outside of Chisholm began caring about him. That forced us to to rely on personal recollections of his friends and former patients to fill in the gaps of his story. What we couldn’t get from them, we had to find by going back through nearly five decades of newspapers archives in Chisholm, Hibbing and Duluth, Minnesota. Most of the quotes attributed to Graham in the book are from those sources. The others came from the fictional Graham created by Kinsella — who like Dr. Reising and myself, got a feel for Doc’s personality and characteristics through extensive interviews with the people of Chisholm.

While Moonlight Graham was playing ball with the New York Giants and pursuing his medical degree, he’s described as a soft-spoken, almost genteel Southern gentleman. A year later, after Graham’s contract is sold to Scranton in the New York League and the Giants come to town for an exhibition game, this quiet man challenges one of the Giants speediest players, George Browne, to a footrace. This seems to me the most powerful moment in Graham’s baseball career; he’s at the height of his confidence and playing very well. But this brash move seems out of character for him. Do you think Graham was trying to prove his skills to Giants manager John McGraw, or to himself?

While it is true that Graham did not often call attention to himself, something he learned at an early age from his parents and a trait he carried through most of his life, I think he understood that this occasion was different and called for bold action. By this time, Graham had come to the realization that, though his minor league career was flourishing, his chances of ever getting back to the majors and getting that elusive at bat were rapidly slipping away. In other words, desperate times call for desperate actions. While this episode was clearly out of character for Graham, the feeling is that this was one last-ditch effort (that failed) on his part to show McGraw that he was fast, aggressive and confident enough to play for his team.

Though a career in professional baseball was frowned upon by many — as you write — Graham continued to play the game. Did you find any information on what his family thought of his ballplaying career? especially since he continually interrupted his medical studies to pursue it?

There is really no record of how his parents felt about his continued flirtation with baseball, though there’s a very good chance they tried very hard to get him to give it up and concentrate on medicine. His siblings, however, probably encouraged him since they were all very close and frequently participated together in athletic endeavors during their youth. Frank, in particular, was likely the most supportive of Archie because he idolized his other brother and secretly dreamed of being good enough to follow in his footsteps. Instead, he went into coaching and then later, become a staunch advocate for college athletics during his time as president of UNC-Chapel Hill.

Do you think Moonlight Graham’s pain at not getting another shot at the majors was mitigated by his success in the minors, particularly at Scranton?

Absolutely. He knew he had the talent to play at a higher level if only he would have been given the chance. The hope, no matter how faint, that he might eventually get that chance continued to drive him, at least until his final season, when he was persuaded to come back by the Scranton team owner because of his popularity with the fans there (and his potential for selling tickets).

Once Graham’s career as a ballplayer was over and he emerges as a doctor in northern Minnesota, he seems to have settled into a life as a beloved small-town eccentric. For all his quirks, Doc Graham was the very first physician to recognize the importance of taking children’s blood pressure, and his report on the matter garnered him widespread acclaim in the medical field. Was there any indication that Graham would have left Chisholm, Minnesota had a big league hospital come calling?

No, once Graham established himself in Chisholm, he became too entrenched in the community to go anywhere else — especially to a “big-league hospital” where the expectations and pressures would have been much greater than he preferred. I’m sure he had several opportunities to join his colleagues in the blood pressure study at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester (his wife’s hometown), but he chose instead to stay in a place in which, as Kinsella put it, ”the wind never blows so cold.” I think he loved the people and the pace of life in Chisholm too much to look elsewhere, the old big fish in a small pond concept. He also owned so many properties and had so many other things going on in Chisholm that at a certain point, it would have also made his life much to complicated to leave.

Much of Graham’s success was earned beyond North Carolina’s borders, but he was born and bred in the state, and the brother you mentioned earlier, Frank Porter Graham, earned fame in both the educational and political arenas. To what degree would you say Moonlight could be considered a North Carolina figure today?

Though he spent the majority of his adult life in Minnesota, I believe that he is still just as much a son of North Carolina because of the roots he grew here. For one thing, there is his family legacy. Not only did he spend his formative years in both Fayetteville and Charlotte, but because his father and brother made such significant names for themselves here, there will always be that connection. Furthermore, his success on the baseball diamond at UNC and with the record-setting 1902 Charlotte Hornets helped him carve out his own niche in our state’s history’s history books.

Brett Friedlander is sportswriter for the Wilmington Star-News and co-author of Chasing Moonlight: The True Story of Field of Dreams’ Doc Graham