Bakeries, fairytales, & more Saturday December 5th at Myopic Books

Check out Myopic Books this coming Saturday to hear Sherrie Flick, Molly Gaudry, Timothy Gager, and Steve Himmer read.

Sherrie Flick's novel, Reconsidering Happiness, has a bakery at the center of the plot. What more could one ask for? Here's a blurb about the plot below:

The two silent Ss of Des Moines beckon twenty-three-year-old Vivette with a
sexy finger, a promise. So, in the mid–1990s, she convinces Grandpa Joe-Joe
to sell his Buick for twenty dollars, leaves behind her friends, her job at a hip
New England bakery, and an affair with a married man, and moves to Iowa.
Margaret, who left the same bakery years earlier on her own restless quest,
offers pointers from her cautiously settled Nebraska life

In a story of lust and longing, love and loneliness, disappointment and
desire stretching from the East Coast to the West, these two pioneering
women navigate through secrets, lies, decisions, and compromises shared
over pool tables, postcards, and shots of whiskey. Starting up, starting over,
slowing down, they crisscross each other’s lives like highways on a map, always
escaping, flying toward a dreamt future, and trying to avoid the charted course.

The book is being published by University of Nebraska Press (http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/)

Gaudry's novella (or novel(la) as the mud luscious press site writes it) is titled intriguingly, We Take Me Apart. As memorably described by mud luscious: "Its sad memory-tropes come from fairy tales & childhood books. With language, Gaudry is as loving & careful as one is with a matchbook . . . when wishing to set the whole word on fire." Here is an excerpt from the mud luscious site below:

long ago
in a different version
it was not a glass slipper but a glass dress
it was not beautiful
it was not flowing like a stream
it did not have a train wider than an acre
in this version everyone could see everything
nothing was left to the imagination
due to the drought
all the people in the town
children too
used their spades to uproot the vegetable gardens
day after day
after day
the day finally came when all they could do was look into the cloudiness & pray
disgraced
for why else would the gray lining of their clear sky withhold unless it had been
decided that the only useful thing was for them to suffer
there was not so much as a cabbage leaf that year
cold came to be known as night
heaviness was no longer a worry
the town turned to violence
a rich man's cook was discovered making sauce in the heart of his house
as everyone knows that food does not smell until it boils
until it sweats
the people still there
who had not yet gone away
their bellies round with malnutrition
tongues useless calluses
detected that woman's sauce
came for her with a knife
the first ingredient they added was her toe
cut at a neat incline
they called it butter
they added her bottom half
called it custard
her top half
they called tea
when she cried they heard only the whistles of their stomachs filled with her
they raised their glasses
toasted
*
It his is the story Mother told to get me to behave
tucked into my bedding
I once asked BUT WHAT ABOUT THE GIRL IN THE
GLASS DRESS & Mother's answer was JUST COUNT
YOUR LUCKY STARS YOU'RE SAFE IN BED & NOT A
COOK FOR A RICH MAN
the way he made her feel
the way he looked at her
she left nothing to the imagination

Waldrop Wins National Book Award for Poetry

Providence poet and Brown Professor Keith Waldrop has won the National Book Award for "Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy."

Check it out: http://newsblog.projo.com/2009/11/providence-poet-waldrop-wins-n.html

This is delicious news. Along with this recognition, I hope it will also deliver Rosemarie Waldrop (his wife and poet in her own right) to the fore.
Rosemarie - she of the hyper-intellectual paragraph poem. She of the lines, "Though truth will still escape us, we must put our hands on bodies. Staying safe is a different death," that I spent a lot of time adoring last winter.

But back to the situation at hand, congratulations to the Mr. of this most illustrious pair.

And congrats to fair Providence! Brain drain? Nay. We have brilliant poets among us.

- Jessica

Lest Ye Be Literarily Lost

Here are some upcoming events unearthed via the interwebs:

Ada Books presents an evening of poetry, Saturday, November 14th at 6pm, featuring Oni Buchanan and Karl Gartung.

Friday the 13th of November, the Providence Athenaeum will be hosting "Part Five: Candy Adriance on the long and winding road to a library in a Kenyan village" at 7pm. The event listing heralds a discussion of why the library is the center of the universe. An exclusive universe, in this instance, as it is only open to Athenaeum members and their guests.

On Thursday, November 19 at 6pm, Symposium Books (240 Westminster St) presents a Reading with Craig Watson, who, besides having written eleven books of poetry, lays further claim to coolness by choosing to live "on an island at the mouth of Narragansett Bay."

Also on Thursday, Nov. 19, Samantha Hunt will be reading at Brown's McCormack Family Theater at 2:30pm. This is a rare fiction event, although she is also listed as a writer of plays and essays, so these may be incorporated into the reading as well. I am beginning to suspect a conspiracy against prose (perhaps because it is such an ugly word?) within the providence literary scene.

Just to readily disprove my thoroughly unresearched anti-prose theory, the next three events at the Brown Literary Arts Program are fictional, as in readings of fiction happening in reality. Most excitingly, here's advance notice that Rhode Island's own (by way of Brooklyn) Jhumpa Lahiri will be reading on Tuesday, December 1st at 2:30pm at 001 Salomon Center for Teaching.

- Jessica

Publicly Complex Reading Series: Event Tonight!

Ada Books has a Publicly Complex Reading Series Event Tonight at 717 Westminster Street in Providence, from 6 to 8 p.m.

The Facebook event description is lovely:
"Joanna Howard & Brian Oakley will gently place their word burdens upon your neck's nape while complimentary wine and beer enrouge your cheeks."

Now, you wouldn't want to miss that right?

Joanna is a visiting lecturer at Brown, and author of Frights of Fancy, a collection of short prose upcoming from Boa Editions.

It's difficult to sneak any blurbs from this book online, so you'll just have to drag yourself out tonight to hear her live!

I am also having trouble internet-stalking Brian Oakley, so hope you have the chance to hear him read live.

I'm, alas, in Cambridge, MA, overdosing on Ricola cough drops or else I'd be there too.

~ kate

"We lived, yes, don't say it was a dream"

I have spent most of the morning delighting in the poet Ilya Kaminsky. How can I even begin to explain my gratitude for the rarity of rapture in the am hours?

I delight in this:

"..on certain afternoons

the Republic of Psalms opens up

and I grow frightened that I haven't lived, died, not enough

to scratch this ecstasy into vowels.."

and this:

"....And we speak of everything

that does not come true,

which is to say, it was August.

August! The light in the trees full of fury, August

filling hands with language that tastes like smoke."

and even this:

"I am reading aloud the book of my life on earth

and confess: I loved grapefruit."

(All excerpts from Musica Humana. Blog title from Dancing in Odessa)

Kaminsky will be reading at Brown on Thursday, November 5 at 2:30pm at the McCormack Family Theater, as part of the ongoing Literary Arts speaker's program.

- Jessica

Studying Poetry

I've been a reader of fiction all of my life, but not a reader of poetry. It requires patience. It requires problem-solving. Rhyme can be off-putting.

When it comes to writing, I've written few prose pieces. I've only written short stories under the watchful eye of instructors, the real incentive being that the course was part of a degree program, and that I did indeed have a g.p.a. to be aware of.

I was briefly a member of a writing group. It was enjoyable until the organizer moved and we scrounged for members with new work to share.

With the group, I did work on one story. It was a sci-fi-esque story about a girl who works in publishing, but one day realizes she is invisible. While she cannot leave the office building, she also cannot work because she is invisible. She has to then befriend the other people who have gone invisible over the years as well. She is seen by some of them as 'the one' who can get them out of this mess.

As you can imagine, the plot was complicated. I had little experience in fantasy to finish it properly.

On the other hand, I've always jotted down sloppy, messy inspirings that are poem-like. So this fall I decided to register for a Seminar in Poetry as part of my Publishing graduate degree.

F***, I know absolutely nothing! Here's some of my thoughts on it so far:

• Yeats (I believe it was Yeats) once said that you shouldn't write poetry beyond your twenty-fifth year without being aware of the history of the form. (I'm turning 30 in 6 months, and I'm just now starting to look at the history of the form.)


• You can do pretty much anything in poetry, but you should have a reason for what you're doing.


• It (may be) important to try to achieve the personal and the political in a poem. Even if you're writing about your kitchen sink, it's useful to try to relate it to what's going on in the larger world. Or to think about how other people might experience that same scene.


• Hearing a poem makes ALL of the different. I would rather not record and then listen to myself reading famous works, so I am lucky to have discovered that there are numerous resources to hear poetry read and discussed online. The best one I've found so far is Poetry Foundation. The audio and podcasts section of the site, found here, has a great series called Poetry Off the Shelf recorded every couple of weeks. The recordings are about 15 minutes in length with poets or other people talking about poetry.
  
• It's not as easy to bullshit about poetry as it is to bullshit about fiction. I've found myself at several wrong turns in every class. The wrong turns can be fun sometimes... but I've never felt so flustered by follow-up questions when I attempt to contribute in class. "The verse was formal," I say. "How so?" asks the teacher. "Ummmmm, it is.... well, it looks formal the way the lines were spaced, but actually maybe it's verse libre."
  
• Are verse libre and free verse the same thing? They are translations of one another. But from the class discussion, I am not entirely sure.

That's it for tonight!

~ kate

Prose Poem

I found this column and prose poem from a former soldier, in a NY Times blog. The writer, an Army veteran, is discussing how a person leaves a place of war and returns home, and what that transition is like: http://homefires.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/20/to-bedlam-and-back/

It's strange to imagine what this experience would be like; the closest experience I've had to joining the armed forces came when I was graduating college, and I called up a service center about a photography position that was likely no more than a recruiting ploy.

~ kate