As an ice storm encases an upstate New York town in rime, a young girl struggles with the impulse to rewrite her past. My short story “Gemstone” appears in the new issue of Flyway: Journal of Writing and the Environment, Iowa State University’s MFA journal. You can read the story by clicking the button below. Many thanks to Gen DuBois, fiction editor.

The ambulance creaked into the village around dusk. Icy rain had begun to fall; the lakeshore was cold and empty. Gemstone sat in the passenger’s seat, heels pressed to the floorboard where heat from the engine leaked into the cab. Mac drove, as he usually did, leaning forward and squinting to discern the lines of the road beyond the headlamps. The Model T had no odometer, so Gemstone couldn’t tell how far they’d travelled, exactly—but she knew roughly how far the ambulance’s twelve-gallon tank could take them, and by her calculations they needed to stop for gas, or face being stranded in the New York countryside.

Author’s Note: This story contains, among other references, numerous moments of homage to Anton Chekhov and John Gardner (for example, the police officer, Tinklepaugh, shares his cartoonish name with the officer from Gardner’s melancholy novel Mickelsson’s Ghosts). Sharp-eyed readers will see references to stories like “A Boring Story” and “Kashtanka” by Chekhov. Sharper readers may spot other hidden allusions, or they might even figure out the protagonist’s given name.

On July 18, 1945, after his return to Amsterdam from Auschwitz, Otto Frank received an answer to his newspaper advertisement from two sisters who had seen his daughters die in Bergen-Belsen. The grief-stricken Otto couldn’t even inform his family for three days. However, he did recover his second daughter’s notebook, and as he read it he was astonished by “the depths of her thoughts and feelings,” in particular how she “had occupied her mind with the problem of Jewish suffering over the centuries.” In 1947, he excerpted the writing for publication, and the result, The Diary of a Young Girl, came to exemplify the Holocaust’s cruelty, and gave a human face to the tragedy of six million murdered people. The book has appeared in 60 languages and sold over 32 million copies. As the decades passed, the diary became standard reading for schoolchildren, and, like all successful and long-lived books, became a cliché.

Do you like books? Do you like fast-paced intellectual discussions? Do you like drinking in bars and—this is an important one—do you like Chicago in the winter? If you do, you’re invited to join me next year at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) 2012 conference:

My panel 'The Literati' takes place in the Empire Ballroom

I’m speaking twice on Friday, March 2nd: first, at 3:00 pm during “Child’s Play?”, a panel on literary journals in MFA programs; and then again at 4:30 pm during “The Literati: Deconstructing Publishing Myths for Writers” (details below).

These will be followed by a Beecher’s/Parcel Happy Hour Reading at 6:00 pm; we’ll be holding our off-site at Manhattan’s Bar in the Loop (415 s. Dearborn St.).

And, of course, we’ll end at Literature Party 2012 at Lincoln Hall (2424 N. Lincoln Ave.).

If you’re interested, you can read more about each event below.

¶

Child’s Play?: The Literary Presence of Graduate Student-Run Journals
Kathryn Nuernberger, Matthew Cooperman, Catherine Cortese, Jenny Gropp Hess, Ben Pfeiffer
Wiliford B, Hilton Chicago, 3rd Floor
Editorial turnover and maintaining a consistent literary vision can be concerns for any journal but are intensified in those run exclusively by students, as some of the nation’s prominent journals are. Editors who have experienced the process of maintaining a journal’s established reputation and those involved in forming and re-forming processes share their experiences and recommendations for making these journals invaluable contributors to the literary community and not just CV lines.

The Literati: Deconstructing Publishing Myths for Writers
Ben Pfeiffer, Danielle Evans, Brian Shawver, Joe Miller, Jacinda Townsend
Empire Ballroom, Palmer House Hilton, Lobby Level
Authors address misconceptions about publishing, including how agents are found, the importance of networking, and publishing as it relates to writing. Unpublished writers often become consumed with anxiety about the world of publishing, asking questions such as: Why is no one publishing me? Do I not know the right people? The panel seeks to return the focus of publication from gimmickry to writing itself, emphasizing craft, hard work, awareness of form, and the mechanics of language.

Beecher’s – Parcel Happy Hour Reading
Location: Manhattan’s Bar – 415 S Dearborn St
Cost: Free
Website:http://www.beechersmag.com/
Beecher’s and Parcel, two sweet, young, little lit magazines invite you to come enjoy happy hour drinks, free pizza and a great line-up of readers in Chicago’s oldest skyscraper. This fast-paced event, just a few blocks from the conference hotel, will include readings by: Rebecca Evanhoe, Jenny Gropp Hess, Lincoln Michel, Scott Wrobel, James Yeh, and maybe a surprise or two. For more information about the lit magazines, please visit: http://www.beechersmag.com/ & http://www.parcelmag.org/

From a new book review at The Rumpus:

 

Today it’s common for authors to play with reality, memory, and fiction in their writing, but it wasn’t always that way. In the genre of memoir, which evolved from autobiography, writers found refuge from nonfiction’s more inflexible building blocks—facts, for example. But the publishing industry hasn’t always allowed such shenanigans. In the past, memoirists who strayed too far into imagination—through composite characters, recreated events, or multiple points of view—found their books sidelined as fiction. Usually, writers had good reasons for taking that hit and did so to make an artistic point. Sometimes the point was well-founded; other times, ill-conceived. A good example of the latter is Rosalyn Drexler’s 1972 novel To Smithereens, which loosely chronicles the author’s adventures as a lady wrestler: Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire.

Vladimir Nabokov once dismissed as “preposterous” the French writer Alain Robbe-Grillet’s assertions that his novels eliminated psychology: “The shifts of levels, the interpenetration of successive impressions and so forth belong of course to psychology,” Nabokov said, “—psychology at its best.” Later asked, “Are you a psychological novelist?” Nabokov replied: “All novelists of any worth are psychological novelists.”

 

Psychology fills vastly wider channels now than when Nabokov, in the mid-20th century, refused to sail the narrow course between the Scylla of behaviorism and the Charybdis of Freud. It deals with what matters to writers, readers, and others: with memory and imagination, emotion and thought, art and our attunement to one another, and it does so in wider time frames and with tighter spatial focus than even Nabokov could imagine. It therefore seems high time to revise or refresh our sense of Nabokov by considering him as a serious (and of course a playful) psychologist, and to see what literature and psychology can now offer each other.

via The American Scholar: The Psychologist – Brian Boyd.

Over 185 years since Nicéphore Niépce took the world’s first photograph—a photogravure of Pope Pius VII in 1822—the process of photography continues to develop in unanticipated ways. From heliography and silver chloride to Adobe Lightroom and digital single-lens reflex cameras, pioneers would scarcely recognize the 19th-century industry they helped to define. One these innovators, Julia Margaret Cameron, spent her life developing techniques for taking soft-focus portraits, and her surviving prints include an image of her niece, Julia Prinsep Jackson, mother of Virginia Woolf. But that isn’t Julia Margaret Cameron’s only connection to literature: the portrait she took of Woolf’s mother now graces the cover of a novel Cameron’s own life inspired: David Rocklin’s The Luminist.

Next week, the first play of the KU Theatre Department’s 2011–2012 season, “Shakespeare in Hollywood,” premieres in the Crafton-Preyer Theatre at 7:30 p.m. The play reimagines two fairies, Oberon and Puck, characters from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The author, Ken Ludwig, conceived the story as a farce set in Hollywood circa 1934, during a film shoot directed by Max Reinhardt, a historical figure who did in fact direct an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play for legendary producer Jack Warner, one of the Warner brothers.

A few weeks ago, my friend Mark Petterson gave me a medal engraved with the likeness of St. Francis de Sales, the patron saint of writers. Now, though, a different saint needs the help of readers: St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York City. We sell Beecher’s Magazine at St. Mark’s; I hope this turns out well for St. Mark’s and for everyone involved, because it would be a shame to see another great independent bookstore go under. See the article from Publishers Weekly:

Wednesday night, signers of the petition Save the St. Mark’s Bookshop received an e-mail from Frances Golding, a founder of the Cooper Square Committee, and Joyce Ravitz, chairperson, informing them that the board for Cooper Union, St. Mark’s landlord, was asking its Finance and Business Affairs Committee to examine St. Mark’s Bookshop’s request for a lower rent from its current rate of $20,000 per month. The outcome will be announced at the end of October.

“We believe that Cooper Union is stonewalling this issue, hoping our community will forget about the bookstore,” the e-mail said. “We need you to send this petition out to all of your friends and family today. Help us reach 50,000 signatures by the middle of October.”

…

St. Mark’s has been embroiled in a rent conflict with its landlord Cooper Union for months, in the face of its struggling sales. It was reported the bookstore is looking for a $5,000 per month cut in its rent. The petition to save the bookstore appeared in early September, asking for 4,000 signatures. Since then, the called-for number of signatures keeps increasing, but so have the number of people signing it; as of Thursday morning the petition had 38,810 signiatures.

via St. Mark’s Bookshop Rent Fate Settled in October.

September 24−October 1, 2011

Banned Books Week (BBW) is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment.  Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.

 

Intellectual freedom—the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular—provides the foundation for Banned Books Week.  BBW stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints for all who wish to read and access them.

 

The books featured during Banned Books Week have been targets of attempted bannings.  Fortunately, while some books were banned or restricted, in a majority of cases the books were not banned, all thanks to the efforts of librarians, teachers, booksellers, and members of the community to retain the books in the library collections.  Imagine how many more books might be challenged—and possibly banned or restricted—if librarians, teachers, and booksellers across the country did not use Banned Books Week each year to teach the importance of our First Amendment rights and the power of literature, and to draw attention to the danger that exists when restraints are imposed on the availability of information in a free society.

 

Banned Books Week is sponsored by the American Booksellers Association; American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression; the American Library Association; American Society of Journalists and Authors; Association of American Publishers; and the National Association of College Stores.  It is endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. In 2011, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund; National Coalition Against Censorship; National Council of Teachers of English; and PEN American Center also signed on as sponsors.

 

For more information on getting involved with Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read, please see Calendar of Events, Ideas and Resources, and the new Banned Books Week site. You can also contact the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom at 1-800-545-2433, ext. 4220, or b...@ala.org.

 

via ALA | Banned Books Week.

How often at night,
When the Heavens are Bright

With the light from the glittering stars,
Have I stood there amazed,

And asked as I gazed,
If their glory exceeds that of ours.

~Dr. Brewster Higley, 1876, “My Western Home on the Range”

My cousin Robbie fell through the ice on Thanksgiving Day at my granduncle and grandaunt’s farm in Western Kansas. We were in the woods, the less usable part of the farmland, with my Mom’s cousin, Oscar, and my Mom’s brother, Logan. The men had set up dirty mason jars on the polished ice of the catfish pond, a gunmetal disc ringed by trees and snow. They were practicing their marksmanship. When they fired, the reports from the rifles made me flinch. In between rounds Robbie and I gathered up the broken glass, crusted with preservatives. The ice was inches thick but also speckled with bullet holes. As we moved, our sneakers left partial footprints in the dust-dry snow, and coal-colored water seeped through cracks where the ice was weak. Three or four times we set up the shooting gallery while Logan and Oscar watched us from the shore, laughing and talking, exhaling clouds of steam, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and drinking beer. Each man carried a relative’s rifle. Logan, for example, had Granduncle Jack’s antique Karabiner 98 Kurz—the Wehrmacht’s Kar98k—a German bolt-action rifle Old Jack had smuggled back from Europe during the Second World War.