As I creep up exit 33 towards Blaine Avenue for the first time in a long while, I see the dusty parishioner that I expected to see.  He holds a sign that simply says, “BAD TIMES- God bless you,” and though I drive by him like the cold-hearted bastard that I am, I still want to know his story.  I consider it the first line of poetry of my day as I head towards my ol’ Alma mater, UC Riverside, to attend the final day of their 35^th annual Writers Week.  When I was a young & terrified creative writing student, Writers Week readings were my first exposure to literary events.  These were people who were actually getting paid, so I went to as many events as I could and asked lots of questions.  I didn’t want to become a college statistic — one of the go-nowhere, do-nothing writers our teachers told us that most of us would become.  The readings were uncommonly good, too.  I still laugh about Tod Goldberg’s noir short story about a Las Vegas rabbi/mafioso in hiding, and still smile about asking Joyce Carol Oates a question while wearing a Dead Milkmen t-shirt.

1. Fiery young poet and bookstore owner Polly Bee.  I left the lens smudges on because they remind me of the ravens that have taken up residency at her Santa Cruz home. 2. Prose poet Gary Young: “I once knew a man who could only catch skunk…you could smell it on his breath, his skin…he wore a cloak of rancid pelts and when I saw him, I thought comrade.”  3. Poet, host, and my old teacher, Christopher Buckley.  I remember him getting straight-up flabbergasted that none of us in the poetry workshop had ever heard of a jam closet or a cake safe.  They sounded like a nicknames someone would give to their dad’s belly.

It claims to be the longest running free literary event in California, always offering a mix of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, new writers, experienced writers, panel discussions, and student workshops over four verbose days.  This final day was to focus on poetry and prose poetry, which I feel could get away with being called flash non-fiction.  The readers were selected and hosted by teacher and poet Christopher Buckley, and can I tell you from personal experience that his standards are ‘effen HIGH.  He’s from the Fresno school of concrete, narrative poetry, and the day was chock full of it.

First up was poet and musician Alexander Long, whose work was filled with honest vulnerability and precise exploration.  He’s been everything from a fry cook to an obituary writer, so his heart is a daring one– going to the dark places that we all need to visit, but never like going to.  Before going into a group of poems about suicide, he recalled two friends of his that took their own lives when he was a teenager.  “What do you with that when you’re thirty-nine?  When you’re fifty?  When you’re 18?”  From his poem Reflections on A Suicide: “When I hear the flutter of a pigeon / I’m closer to the truth than anyone.”  From his poem On Epiphanies, written in memory of a friend who killed themselves on Christmas Eve three years ago: “I’m not enjoying this, but work is love and is my new prayer…maybe good-bye will be the pen-ultimate epiphany.”

1. Keynote speaker and poetry legend, Diane Wakowksi.  She is a wise hawk- one that has been watching.  “Love, oh love, why invent this word if it is all zeros?”   

 Next was late-in-life poet Polly Bee, who wrote her first poem at The Santa Barbara Writers Conference at seventy.  Now approaching eighty-six, she’s one of the most genuinely cool old ladies I’ve ever met, and I get jealous as I hear about the RV trips to Alaska she regularly takes with her two Jack Russell terriers.  In a poem about a friend from a writing workshop that confesses to being afraid of horses, she wonders “where I can find a horse with the right kind of eyes?”  She followed with a poem about “an alcoholic landlady name Jerry who boozed up my brother and took his cherry.”  In “The Basque Hotel Noreaga,” she considers “a reality moving fast enough as to carve a canyon out of rock.”  In her poem on assisted suicide, she asks, “What the hell is a mortal sin anyway?”  In a piece she dedicated to Buckley, who was one of her first writer friends, she lets it be known that she is not interested in being born again as she accounts for “how long it took to become who I am / to not give a shit about what other people say.”  During the Q&A that followed the reading, I asked if she has learned anything from animals that she has put towards her writing.  “Horses, dogs, whatever,” she says, “handled right & patiently, there isn’t much they won’t do for you.”

Following third was Gary Young, one of Buckley’s oldest friends and collaborators.  Young is a printmaker and heads up the poetry department at UC Santa Cruz– a place where cars are not allowed and the deer run free.  He approaches poetry with a journalistic eye, giving his readers tight, quick, open-ended philosophies that they’re left to reckon with.  “I don’t believe in God,” he says, “but I believe in something like God.”  In a poem that Buckley requested, he states, “I once craved latitude.  The ability to become someone better, someone strange.  I realize slowly I have.”  In a poem called “Starfish”: “It is always night.  There are always stars.”  He went on to discuss a land dispute in a Mexican court that a friend was wrapped-up in for twenty years, until he won.  He didn’t make his flight home though– “He was found in an ally with his throat cut.”  He ended with a timeless poem called “When I Was Five” about him losing a sweater, an item he called the first thing he ever really cared about.  “I knew my sweater was not in heaven, but if it could disappear, just vanish without reason, then I could disappear, and God might lose me, no matter how good I was, no matter how much I was loved.”

1. Buckley’s undergrads posing with Young and keynote speaker, Diane Wakoski.  These kids are Bizarro/Shelbyville versions of people that I graduated with, and I’m not sure what that means. 2. The post-reading, poetry-buying scramble.

Closing out Writers Week was its keynote speaker, Diane Wakoski, who’s been publishing poetry since the ’70s, including a few books on the infamous Black Sparrow Press.  She grew up in East Whittier in Orange County and can remember buying popsicles from Mr. & Mrs. Nixon at the Nixon’s family store.  She wrote her poem, “The Butcher’s Apron,” about Dick Nixon’s brother, who became the store butcher after several real estate scandals.  “The beauty of the red on the butcher’s white canvas…never translated to the food eaten.”  While looking at her friend’s rare roast beef sandwich: “That puddle at the bottom of the bag was beef blood.  There in the Lowell school cafeteria, I saw my first still life painting.”

Her pieces were followed by a deafening silence, allowing the audience to hear what had just been said.  Her rhythms sucked me in and made me angry at my task at hand.  I wanted to stop scribbling, stop chasing meaning, and just listen to her.  In her poem “Madea, the Sorceress,” she considers, “how our dark, Dionysian civilization is built on light…It’s a paradox, which means it is true.”  Mentioning how she grew up poor and obsessed with abundance (just like Biggie Smalls!), she read her poem “Pears”: “The beauty of fruit is not often enjoyed by the poor, but the rich have them on plates to ignore.”  She ended with poems from her new book, Diamond Dog Poems, which takes it title from an intense and unforgettable childhood dream.  In her dream, a scottie dog shaped like a diamond leaps out of the ashes of the pepper tree in her front yard and runs after her father, who is dressed in a sailor’s outfit.  Calling the dog, “My own twinkling beast,” she feels the dream was a premonition of her father’s death.  During the Q&A, the day’s token weird guy that has asked bizarre, loud questions to every reader officially made my day, as weird guys often do.  He said, “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.  Dogs are man’s best friend.  Paradox, huh?”  Wakowksi ended the reading the way she says she ends all her readings, by declaring, “If there’s anything important you want to know about me, it’s in my poems.”  Ain’t that the truth…

***

–David Ohlsen, an LA native, is a thoughtless product of UC Riverside’s Creative Writing program and is a regular contributor to Electric Dish.

I’d never been to an event at St. Marks Bookshop in the East Village, though I’m a regular patron. They have the best critical theory section in the city hands down, and when you don’t feel like reading Adorno’s Negative Dialectics on the train, you can now purchase popular Muumuu House titles, like Ellen Kennedys’ sometimes my heart pushes my ribs, or their most recent publication, Megan Boyle’s selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee, which has a funny, curiously charming cover. Last night Tao Lin, founding editor and publisher, brought Brandon Scott Gorrell (writer/editor at Thought Catalog, during my nervous breakdown i want to have a biographer present), Giancarlo DiTrapano (founding editor of New York Tyrant and publisher of Tyrant Books), Marie Calloway (Adrien Brody), Spencer Madsen (a million bears), and Megan Boyle to read some Muumuu work, which included poetry, unpublished blogposts and Tweets, and edited Twitter selections to celebrate. Sweet.

1. Giancarlo DiTrapano, who is wholly opposed to the idea of ZZ Packer. 2. Megan Boyle. I stood on my toes as much as I could to get the crowd into the frame, and by doing so almost fell into Ryan O’Connell.

In the event that this is your sole literary stop on your internet commute, Muumuu House (c. 2008) is a publisher of “poetry, fiction, Twitter selections, Gmail chats online & in print.” That St. Marks now carries Muumuu in-house is a pretty big deal–the last time I saw a Muumuu title for full retail was in 2009 at Skylight Books in LA. Muumuu mostly appears in the internet, getting meme-ed and reblogged by its mostly twenty-something audience, and while most of the contributors are also members of this age group, it also includes established authors that work in periphery veins of the Muu. There’s an excerpt of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station on the site and a short piece by Deb Olin Unferth, from her collection Minor Robberies. Though people love to hate, you cannot deny how positive Muumuu’s general “mission” seems to be: publish what you like, link to other works/people on social media, repeat. I like that.

St. Marks was crowded. The general shape of it was a backwards tongue, the mic being the tip, and stretched all the way to the door. I didn’t get there early enough to nab a seat, but being near the door availed me to hear several confused patrons. Overheard: “‘Oh, they’re having a reading!’ ‘What is this?’ ‘[Chinese, laughter, more Chinese]’” This accidental commentary was more than appropriate for the event. When you think of a reading, you don’t think of someone reading an edited Twitter feed, let alone from an iPhone. But that’s what Tao did, and it was awesome. Tao started a little bit after 7 and read first. “I’m going to read some of my tweets recently,” he said. Clicked his iPhone. Looked up: “It’s not loading.” When he got it to load, Tao read some gems. Here are a few: “what if jeremy lin’s last name was ‘kafka,’”; “‘tweeting in darkness lying on side on bed w/ macbook on side’”; and “‘novel titled ‘100% autism.’” What legitimizes a reading of tweets is editing: Tao maintains another twitter feed called “tao_linunedited” with the typical Twitter behavior: retweets, photo posts, and in-the-moment activity posts. This makes me wonder if Tao saves tweets in gmail to edit later, how much time on each tweet, etc. I’ve thought about Twitter as a new medium in passing, but Tao’s been doing it for a while now, often sharing irreverently literary tweets: “instead of brands every person should have their own religion.”

1. Ryan O’Connell, writer/editor at Thought Catalog, with Gaby Dunn, writer/editor/comedian. Handsome, those two are. 2. Lynn Andrews, an actor, with Daniel London, who does R&D for exhibits at the Museum of the City of New York. Siiick.

Marie Calloway read from her Muumuu story, “Adrien Brody,” which was recently the topic of many a bloggers’ attention. She read from the end of the piece, where her and Adrien Brody initiate in the most awkward act of sex I’ve ever heard or read. Calloway approached the mic cautiously, and admitted she was terribly nervous, but it was perfect for her reading. Calloway read in a soft, reserved tone that communicated both her anxiety of reading to 80 or so people and the emotional nakedness of her character. “‘You’re the one who wants to leave in a few minutes. That’s why I hit you, because I was sad that you have all the power.’ ‘Yeah.’” I imagine there are thousands of twenty-somethings out there who have met people from the internet for non-casual/casual sex, and that Calloway is of the few unafraid enough to narrate it and send it out into the internet. Ballsy.

Giancarlo DiTrapano read selected tweets edited by Blake Butler. Unfortunately, DiTrapano introduced himself and then stepped away from the mic, but the best tweets were heard regardless. “Jul 8. An untitled track on my iTunes, 8 seconds long, at full volume you can barely hear a little girl’s voice whisper, ‘Mommy, a black dog.’” “‘Jul 26. I bet Burroughs told Ginsberg to shut up a lot.’” “‘Sep 14. Should have gotten an MFA in waiting for my dealer.’” I’m not sure about the extent of Butler’s editing, but the Tweets speak for themselves: sarcastic, wholly contemplative, always optimistically bleak. Read the whole piece here.

1. The Muumuus! Tao Lin, Giancarlo DiTrapano, Brandon Scott Gorrell, Spencer Madsen, Marie Calloway. 2. Tyler Madsen, a web developer, with Robyn Jensen, a PhD candidate in Russian Literature at Columbia, and Lev Kanter, also a web developer.

Spencer Madsen is a poet whose work reads like jokes. I think he was the funniest of the evening. “K cool,” he said, holding the mic, “I’m gonna read the first page, which is a retweet of Kanye West. ‘God is dope, yo.’” While his poetry felt like a Twitter feed, there was certainly a sense of craft. The elucidation of the common twenty-something hyper-anxiety, hyper-conscious state that pervades us was immediately clear. “‘High School is a collection of people going through puberty.’ ‘The tragedy is that flying is sitting in a chair.’ ‘Is it gross how much yogurt I eat? Let me know via email.’”

Brandon Scott Gorrell’s (BSG) articles on Thought Catalog are among my favorites, so when he announced he was going to read “5 Embarrassing Social Blunders You Maybe Have Made,” I was excited. Most of BSG’s work are in list form, though he expands the form by deconstructing the circumstances and typical behaviors of, in this case, hanging out. In “Pushed way too hard to get in information of yourself,” I cringed: “You are inappropriately liberal with your definition of ‘related information’ when you abruptly insert this golden nugget of ego into the conversation.” A sentiment everyone feels at one point in adult life, but not one often admitted freely. Someone has to, right?

The final reader was Megan Boyle, author of the most recent physical Muumuu title. Boyle has revealed in interviews that many of the pieces in the book are her own blog drafts edited to better fit a poem or short narrative. The characteristics of blog drafts–an instance of clarity, a seemingly random and inconsequential event, a funny phrase–were still present in her reading, but when strung together they created one experience of the twenty-something internet user. In “1.05.09”: “everything i touch is going to be a fossil someday. … my dad still hasn’t taken down his christmas decorations” … “i looked at the metal bars in the ceiling and said ‘i just want to watch movies all night.’” I think her phone rang during the reading and she debated checking it in front of the mic. Instead, she read “I burn calories and read Richard Yates at a similar rate.”

Muumuu House in St. Marks will hopefully bring its aesthetic and work to a wider audience and into more of a “classic” literary space, something that is positive not only for Muumuu, but for the internet lit scene as a whole. You can buy the books there, read several excerpts here, and find all of the contributors on Twitter here.

***

–Ryan Chang is from Orange County, CA and lives in Brooklyn. He is the Staff Writer for The Outlet, and his work has previously appeared on Thought Catalog. He is in the internet here and here.

When I arrived at East Village’s KGB Bar a little after 7, I was afraid that I would be stuck in the hallway in front of the bathroom again. Thankfully my friend Stephen and I found two stray bench seats in a corner amidst the perfectly attended room: books on the bar and tables with their well-dressed readers, and not over capacity. Last night, their Sunday Night Fiction series presented “Women on the Verge” — with Kate Zambreno (Green Girl), Helen Phillips (And Yet They Were Happy; Here Where The Sunbeams are Green, which is forthcoming), and Suzanne Scanlon (Her debut novel, Promising Young Women, arrives in October) —  and three very awesome fiction writers who practiced a sort of “brinkwomanship” through their characters.

1. Helen Phillips told us we were a “very quiet, gentle audience.” I somehow took this as a compliment. 2. Suzanne Scanlon, indexing. 3. Kate Zambreno in an awesome dress, reading about “hot triangles.”

During her introduction, Suzanne Dottino, curator and host of KGB’s Sunday Night Fiction series, wondered herself what these three women were verging on, and it quickly became apparent to me that the three writers were verging on new and important presentations of desire. The first reader, Helen Phillips, read from her debut, And Yet They Were Happy, a novel sewn together with 300 pages worth of 340-word stories. Phillips read five stories, and was “distraught” by how many verging women populated her book. The first story, “Far-Flung Family #4” reminded me of conversations I’d overheard while walking to class at my community college: one “stupid drunk” girl’s revived childhood memory of returning to her mermaid family. “Can you like even believe that? she says.” I wondered if she was from California. Another woman in “We? #5” had a sadness “so enormous she knew [would] kill her if she didn’t squeeze it into a cube one centimeter by one centimeter by one centimeter.” Phillips’ characters handled their desires through these intangible vehicles that curiously make emotionality tactile. This is how we usually think about constricting emotions: “it feels like…” or “if i could make it…”, and the women here often succeed, only to find a new and different cube or mermaid.

Suzanne Scanlon came all the way from Chicago to read “Her 37th Year, an Index,” the runner up for the 2011 Iowa Review Award, which was described as “an almanac of desire” by the Iowa Review. Structured like an index, Scanlon’s narrator mapped one woman’s desire through topic headings and their complements (My favorite: “Death. See also: Friendship.” And “Desire. See also: Boredom.”). Some entries had longer anecdotes than others, but the finished product elucidated the character’s psychological narrative of desire. Desire’s vignette, for example, was longer than Death. Scanlon’s reading was also the most quotable of the evening, peppered with one-liners like “I had the feeling of kissing a skeleton” and “[We] became friends in an Oscar Wilde way, where it is more tragic than love only because it lasts longer.”

1. Sarah McCarry, a writer, with Anja Morgan, also a writer. They couldn’t read my handwriting. 2. Helen Phillips, her husband Adam Thompson, an artist and past illustrator for EL, and Ilya Lyashevsky, who was the mobile developer for EL’s iPhone and iPad platforms. Yay!

I was excited to hear Kate Zambreno twice in such a short time for the opportunity to compare venues. Something that occurred to me while Zambreno channeled her American ingenue protagonist Ruth, who stars in the novel Green Girl: the acoustics have a huge effect on the reception of a reading. I never thought this mattered in the readings scene, where many take place in bars and bookstores and I’m mostly focused on the sentences, but in the drastically smaller space of KGB made her reading more haunted, eerie and dream-like. She also read from a different section of her novel than at Franklin Park, a sex scene that was “porny and anti-porny,” where Ruth less-than-halfheartedly hooks up with a boy from a bar. “[Ruth] lets him do it even though it hurts, and she would rather be at home, reading fashion magazines.” Ruth’s desire is not only perfumed, but also performed. Zambreno unveils the masquerade that women like Ruth should desire to go home with the boy from the bar. My favorite bit: “‘You smell nice,’ he says. ‘It’s desire,’ Ruth says.”

KGB’s Sunday Night Fiction happens next on Sunday, 2/26, and for other events you can check the calendar here.

–Ryan Chang is from Orange County, CA and lives in Brooklyn. He is the Staff Writer for The Outlet, and his work has previously appeared in Thought Catalog. He is in the internet here and here.        

 On Wednesday night, it was cold and windy and the absolute worst place to be was down by the water. But I didn’t care. The Milan Review was having the launch party for its second issue, and Seth Fried, Lynne Tillman, and Robert Lopez were reading, so down by the water I went– to powerHouse Books in DUMBO.

The Milan Review is making some good shit. As the title suggests, the journal is Italian (although the journal is printed in English), and could keep any Italian fetishist satisfied with the sheer beauty of its product. From the website: “We also plan make sure that all our books will be very pretty objects and will never cost too much money and will never be printed in very large print runs.” Or, as my boyfriend said, after I showed him my newly-purchased copy: “That’s a book, not a magazine.” Yes, and a very pretty book, indeed.

And the prettiness of the object doesn’t get lost in the content, either. The artwork (full color) is varied in terms of style but consistent in terms of quality. The writers, as the three who read at the launch party might suggest, are top-notch, reflecting editor Tim Small’s other gig as the fiction editor for Vice. This is work that is hip, cutting-edge, but — more importantly — fucking good. Oh, and it doesn’t take itself too seriously, which is always a plus.

Normally when writing articles for Dish, I’ll attempt to come up with some sort of snappy title for the blog post, but in this case, the title of the second issue more than suffices. As Robert Lopez said, “It’s one of the grooviest titles I’ve ever heard.” The issue is designed around the concept of the twelve signs of the zodiac, with a story and accompanying artwork for each sign. The authors were not told which star sign they would receive, and the authors and artists were paired arbitrarily. This makes for an interesting curation; one that makes sense more on a gut level than an obvious, logic-based one.

1. Robert Lopez & Lynne Tillman before the reading. 2. Lynne Tillman, doing her usual: Being captivating.

The reading was stated as staring at seven, so that’s when I arrived. I stood around for a while, looking at books, talking to friends, and smoking cigarettes. Ryan Chang, another Dish correspondent, and I got into a conversation with Lynne Tillman about Whitney Houston, her recent trip to Kyoto, and the art of translation. I drank water, and most everyone else drank wine. By 7:30, the crowd was still thin, albeit well-dressed and good-looking. I was surprised– didn’t everyone know how fucking good this reading was going to be? Where were the 131 people who RSVPd “Yes” on Facebook? Whatever, it was cold, and it’s fashion week. Fifteen minutes later the crowd had thickened up a bit, and so we began.

Seth Fried, a Taurus, represented his sign by reading “The Man Who Never Left,” which was about a man who — yup — never left a party. Moreover, it was about how haters can bring down everyone else around them. Of course, that’s a simplistic way of putting it, and the story managed to be both amusing and affecting.

1. Joe Denardo, an artist whose pictures accompanied Tillman’s story, Julie Sengle, who works for the Bronx Museum, and Lauren Flax, a music producer. 

Lynne Tillman, with her hair reflecting her sun sign, read “A Black Rainbow with White Stripes,” from the Capricorn section of the magazine. It was a piece about the nature of being a “translation artist,” or, if you’d prefer, a “narrating animal.” (AKA a “writer.”) It was thoughtful, with the Tillman-trademarked beautiful and elliptical writing, and filled with rather brilliant aphorisms. I asked Tillman afterward if she considered the work to be an essay or a story, and she told me that she thinks of all of her writing to be stories, it’s just that some are more story-like. I quite liked this non-categorical way of thinking. If a piece of writing works, it works, and it really doesn’t matter what one calls it.

Robert Lopez was last. He read a short story not from the magazine called “One of my Daughters is Called Resnick,” which he told us was meant to make the next story he’d be reading “more palatable.” It talked about things that young actresses say, like the words “silly” and “musn’t,” in addition to the dangers of eating the brown parts of bananas, and the something we all seek called “gut love.” It was charming and self-deprecating and yes, palatable. The story he read next, which was called “This Morning I played Guitar Until I Bled” and came from the Gemini section, was not. It was brutal, and, like most every piece of art or entertainment that can be described this way, I fucking loved it. (Short story about myself: One time, many moons ago, I took a couple pills of Ecstasy on New Year’s Eve and went to a rave. Once the pills kicked in, I ran around to all the drugged-out, blissed-out rave goers, and screamed at them, hugging them forcefully and commanding that they had “A BRUTAL NEW YEAR.”) Lopez’s story made me laugh, and laugh uncomfortably, which is the most mysterious kind of laughter.

I hate to use this word to describe these three stories, because it’s so overused in literary criticism, but I’m going to use it anyway because it is apt. All three works read were devastating. Devastatingly beautiful, haunting, and, yes, brutal. I’m broke, but after the reading, I was pretty much forced to shell out the bucks so I could get a copy of THE MILAN REVIEW OF THE UNIVERSE for my very own. And I highly suggest you do the same.

The Milan Review of the Universe

***

–Julia Jackson is a fiction writer and the editor of Electric Dish. Find her on the internet here.

Mortified readers Sheila Ashdown, Kelly Fry, Julie Sparling, Ariel Wilsey-Gopp, Lori Ferraro, and Sam Paul shared personal journals and letters, co-edited by Egan Danehy and his team of producers, to a sold-out crowd at the Mission Theater on Valentine’s Day.
There is a cult following. I know this because they ask newbies to applaud. I did not applaud, even though this was my first show.
A few thoughts crossed my mind as I scanned the crowd. Do these people also go to lit events? Probably not, but maybe sometimes. What is the difference between an author reading and someone sharing their adolescent journals or letters? I guess we expect better writing craft, but you can’t fake the intensity and surprise of writing meant to explore, understand and document personal experience.

You get about 200% of intensity and surprise at a Mortified show, plus the crowd’s expectation that something someone reads will trigger a similar personal experience which they forgot or repressed or whatever.

1. Elliot, Reiko and Joel have journals and tell each other stories. Reiko had a Mortified-themed birthday. 2. Erin, Greg, Shain and Diane were all past performers and two of them are related. The line for beer is behind them.

I grabbed the following lines from a few of the readers:

• “I would probably regret it if I slept with the guy from Chevy’s.”
• “I love him like a pagan loves a God.”
• “I’m so lucky I got hit by Larry’s car.”
• “I really don’t like having to call you for rides when I want to see you.”

 

Tickets were sold out to The Verdi Club a day in advance, and the line to get into The Rumpus’ special Valentine’s Day coming out party for beloved advice columnist Sugar was nearly a block long thirty minutes before the show. With founder Stephen Elliott in Berlin for the opening night screening of his debut film, Cherry, Managing Editor Isaac Fitzgerald ran the show (“Isaac is The Rumpus,” Stephen says). Monthly porn raffle? Not last night. Everyone was there for Sugar, who surely by now you know is Cheryl Strayed, author of the forthcoming memoir, Wild.

1. Pocket Full of Rye guitarist Chris Harrington and sorceress Sonia T. 2. Comedian Janine Brito does a hilarious set. “Is she hot? Like real hot? Like straight hot?”

The Rumpus Women assembled and read early Sugar columns, which were written by the first Sugar: Steve Almond. Steve set the tone for the evening with a beautiful introduction. “I’m not going to ask you to raise your hand if you’ve cried during a Sugar column because we all have,” he said. “The advice column is such a conventional form. Oddly impersonal because they have all the answers and you come and apply to them for the wisdom to figure it out, and they sort of dispense the necessary bromides and we pretend the issue is resolved in the little column. And what Sugar realized is, actually, I’m as fucked up as you are. And as confused and bereft and stuck and lost. And I’m going to confess that to you and, furthermore, try to compel you to realize that we don’t get through those parts of our lives, the unbearable parts, until we look at them honestly and move through them rather than dodge around them.”

1. Rumpus Woman Melissa Tan. 2. Foreplay is finished: Cheryl Strayed is Sugar! 

The room was absolutely silent as Steve pointed out that “Sugar is an internet phenomenon. And the internet is a place we go – it’s a place I go – when I’m feeling needy and lonely and aggrieved. And it is for the most part – not entirely, but for the most part – filled with people who are snarky and resentful and getting off on schadenfreude… all the modern sports of distraction. And what they’re really doing is lying. They’re angry and troubled, and they can’t be honest about that; they can’t face themselves so they’re cruel to somebody else. And Sugar really intuited that what we need is just the opposite of that. We need a place, a kind of community or an oasis where radical empathy is enforced.”

1. Cheryl and husband Brian Lindstrom (aka Mr. Sugar) take questions. “Being married to Cheryl is like being married to a truth machine.” 2. Steve Almond: How can I deal with rejection?

That community recognized itself, and roared. It was a perfect Valentine’s Day celebration. “It’s a tough thing to be a mother to so many people,” Almond concluded. “And I think motherhood is the most under-appreciated job that anyone could have.”

1. We Are All Sugar tattoos were handed out at the door. 2. Cheryl/Sugar has made us all cry one time or another.

Things sweetened up as Sugar/Cheryl answered questions with the help of her husband Brian Lindstrom (aka Mr. Sugar). “What was the most surprising thing, by far, was how much you all gave that [radical sincerity] back to me. It still stuns me; it still doesn’t seem that that could exist.… It feels very much like it’s not me. That it’s us. And it feels funny to me to be standing on this stage above you guys. Because actually… I think of all the heart that you give me and I feel that same stretch… I feel that same reach.”

1. She’s made us smile, too. 2. Dan Weiss of The Yellow Dress is “sorry for everything.”

“I think in the column what you did is you brought your problems to me, and a lot of you felt those problems were – you felt secret and alone in them – and then I published them and the whole world opened up and said Me Too. And I said that too, I said It’s OK that you feel that way. And everyone seconded that emotion. They all said that too. And I think that’s radical. And I think it’s as important or more important than writing about socially significant things or political things.”

1. Cheryl/Sugar is mobbed after the show. 2. Poet/teacher Matthew Siegel and Sheida Neman waiting for Sugar.

Strayed then read an all-new column that you can watch – along with footage of the rest of the evening, which also included music by Pocket Full of Rye and The Yellow Dress and comedy by Janine Brito – here.

For more on the SF/Bay Area check out Litseen.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
by Cheryl Strayed

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–-Evan Karp is the creator of Litseen.com and Quiet Lightning, a monthly, submission-based reading series-turned nonprofit that publishes each month’s show as a book. He writes a literary culture column for the San Francisco Chronicle.

The idea of publishing an entire new collection of very short stories on Facebook was, in part, an experiment to see how literature can become more social. The digital format has enormous advantages for the reader; but most of the time digital formats still try to imitate the experience of reading a book in print (paging, bookmarks, virtual bookshelf, etc). I wanted to see if it could be different: how literature could evolve if the reader can see who of his friends likes the same stories, who is sharing the stories he shared with others, how does the book endure with readers’ comments on every page, visible to all.

I deliberately chose the very low-tech format of a photo album, trying to keep the focus on the stories themselves (but also knowing that Facebook would offer better exposure to a photo than to text). This also made the book readable not only on a computer but also on an iPad or a smartphone, and even by people that don’t have a Facebook profile, without almost any technical effort on my part.

This project is still evolving when I write this; the thing that surprised me from the beginning was to witness (amazed and to be honest a little petrified) how hundreds of people, simultaneously, were reading the book “cover to cover” (by liking story after story), minutes after it was published, almost in real time. My totally un-mainstream art became viral, only by allowing it to be read on a site where people already spend a lot of their time. Or, maybe more importantly, by absorbing the stories into real life – or a representation of real life on Facebook – side by side with status updates and links and photos from other people’s walls.

This deconstruction of the idea of conventional publishing proved to me something I always suspected: people do want to read short stories, they do want to read poetry. Most of the time they just aren’t given a real opportunity to discover it.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Over the next seven days, Electric Literature will be publishing a sample from Alex Epstein’s For My Next Illusion I Will Use Wings on our Facebook page. The stories were translated from the original Hebrew by Jessica Cohen.

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—Alex Epstein was born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in 1971 and moved to Israel when he was eight years old. He is the author of four collections of short stories and three novels; In 2003 he was awarded Israel’s Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature. In 2007 he participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In 2010 he was writer in residence at the University of Denver. Blue Has No South and Lunar Savings Time, his collections of short-short stories, are available in English, from Clockroot Books.

I had the pleasure of attending, reading, and showcasing my vast fake journalism skills  at Vermin on the Mount, “a night of irreverent readings,” on February 11th. The show is typically done in Chinatown up in Los Angeles, but on this evening, San Diego was the place where the (black) magic happened. The venue, 3rd Space, is a creative club and my first impression went like this: “DAMN, THIS PLACE IS FANCY. I’M GLAD I SHOWERED”. No, this was not said out loud. Yes, I do speak to myself in all CAPS.

 

Traci Foust, author of Nowhere Near Normal: A Memoir of OCD, read her essay, “The Guy at Chuck E. Cheese’s cut my Bangs.” She mentioned she enjoys writing about “state funded vacations, mental health, and funny stuff.” I immediately connected to her self-deprecating and dark sense of humor. Lines such as “My head is kind of big” and “My brother told me I looked like the guy from Kajagoogoo, only gayer” had us roaring with laughter.

 

Rafael “Baby Boy” Reyes, tattoo artist, musician, and author of Living Dangerously, took the stage and read from his book. Reyes took us into the seedy and dangerous world of the graffiti scene. Not only did I get a glimpse into a lifestyle I know very little about, I also learned some new phrases! “Billys” are a slang term for billboards. I initially thought “35 second boot party” might be a kind of dance move, but I quickly inferred it was more of an ass kicking. “Bitch ass buster” is an insult I have never used before and I am really excited to try out in the near future. As Reyes described a very graphic oral sex scene, the flirty techno music from the gay bar next door provided a muffled backdrop.

 

1. Oh, hey there, Joshua Mohr! 2. Jim Ruland hosting the fuck out of Vermin. 

  Joshua Mohr read a selection from Damascus, a book about a dive bar in San Fransisco’s Mission District and its colorful patrons. Mohr read about Revv, a gutter punk bartender who recently got tattooed by a drunk guy. “Does that say sexy time panda bear?”

 

Although I was not a winner of the raffle, I did manage to obtain several prizes. Reyes gave me a copy of his book and also signed it. I told him he might want to consider changing the spelling of his nick name to “Baby B0i” because it would make it zestier. (Author’s note: It does not seem Reyes has made any changes to his current spelling. Yet.) Mohr was also gracious enough to not only sign his book for me but to also pose for a picture. I asked Mohr if he had any advice for the internet. Mohr said, “The best writing advice is from Pablo Picasso, which is tattooed on my arm. The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.” When asked if he had any advice for the children, Mohr said, “Stop.”

 

Overall, the night delivered what Ruland promised. Fun, filth, and contagions were had by all.

 

 

 

 

 

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–Sunny Katz is a writer, gamer, and fake journalist. You can find her aforementioned story, “Technical Difficulties,” at her blog, Mecha $unny vs. The Internet.

The ever-popular and awesome Franklin Park Reading Series, curated by Crown Heights local Penina Roth, needs little introduction here, but in this first paragraph I’ll tell you that it’s only becoming more packed every month. I got to Franklin Park around 7:15, a full 45 minutes before the posted start time, and it was pretty damn full of people who love reading. Upon entering the huge main room I spied four or five copies of Ben Marcus’ new novel The Flame Alphabet at the bar and booths. By the time the readings commenced, the bar seemed more like a punk rock show than a seriously massive reading series. It delivered on both counts.

1. Chiara Barzini possessed, apparently. 2. Does anyone remember this symbol from the late ‘90s?: \m/.
 

Quickly: Every second Monday of the month, Roth selects five authors (emerging and established) and invites them to read on a theme at Franklin Park (this one time, Roth let us bring videos and some writers from our journal. She’s neat). Luckily, I nabbed a booth from a departing group, of which one member is a regular from the cafe I work at on Classon (thanks, Hannah!). This only helped my legs, as my line of sight to the microphone was quickly blocked by bodies cramming together. I snuck out to scope Unnameable Books’ table with books by the reading authors, and I got Chiara Barzini’s really, really pretty collection of stories, Sister Stop Breathing, for $5 less than cover price. Sweet.

1. Brandon O’Connor, fiction writer, with Dave Hoss, Kather Perkins, writer/musician and Hannah Leighton, nonfiction writer. Party.

Februrary’s theme–unconventional love–traversed the dark, the sinful, the grim, and the toxic avenues of relationship and love stories. Will Snider, the night’s first reader, read us “Mogadishu,” a story from his collection-in-progress. Our two characters, Richard and Margaret, are journalists in Mogadishu during Operation Restore Hope, and attempt to not hook up. Though after taking turns watching the night bomb raids through night vision goggles, they end up getting down, perhaps out of necessity–“a lazy invitation to love”–or libido (Here’s a madlib version: “Making love at Mogadishu makes you [verb] like a [explicit adjective with gerund] fire hydrant. You get it.). Hot and heavy sex scene aside, Snider’s tale is one of two people trying to find hope and validation in the face of pure destruction of “this dusty corner of the world.”

Roth confessed to the crowd that she is a “Chiara groupie,” the evening’s second reader. After her reading, I am too. Barzini, whose work not only has appeared in NOON and New York Tyrant,  is also a screenwriter, and came all the way from Italy (!) to read from her collection, Sister Stop Breathing. For the theme, Barzini “picked the most traumatic romances” to read, which included a mistress who spends afternoons in the attic: “[W]hat am I doing in this attic, scavenging through boxes? Shouldn’t I get a haircut and proceed toward the world? Shouldn’t I be presentable to her?” Friends had gushed to me that Barzini was a fantastic reader, and her performance is exactly what I look for in a reading: heavy tone, a clear delivery, and pauses that let the sentences breathe. After flipping through her book this morning, Barzini really aurally animated her sentences. The crowd was equally entranced by the haunted prose.

1. Marly Hernandez-Cortez, photographer, with her fiance Stephen Schuyler, fiction writer, agasp at Barzini’s book, Sister Stop Breathing. 2. Novelist Martha Southgate doin’ her thing.
 

In a recent interview with The L Magazine, Kate Zambreno mentioned that her writing has been described as an “enraged, confused scream.” Zambreno quietly screamed scenes from her new novel, Green Girl, a story about a perfume clerk in a London department store, the kind that sprays you upon entrance. In a style reminiscent of Kim Gordon mixed with Damo Suzuki (Can), Zambreno echoed Ruth’s, the protagonist, stale clerk-mantra of “Desire–care to try? Desire, desire … Have you ever experienced desire?” Zambreno made the bleak, soul-crushing pressure of the service and retail industries palpable with her hammering delivery. Here was a “romance” liquefied and forced onto your skin, and it deterred and disgusted everyone in Zambreno’s world. It was pretty punk.
After a break of cigarettes, drinks, and blinding people with my camera’s flash, Martha Southgate read a quiet tale of desire and infidelity from her novel, The Taste of Salt. In the section, Josie, who is the sole black senior-level scientist at an oceanography institute and married to a white scientist, lusts after a black colleague; Josie reminds herself “I’m not allowed… to feel that kinky hair under my hands after so many years of straight hair.” It was Southgate’s first public reading of this particular section, and what struck me besides her tempered, effective delivery of love caught in the throat was the easy insertion of Internet references. In an e-mail Josie receives: “he sent back a little sad face.”

1. Ben Marcus. That’s it. 2. Novelist Kate Zambreno with FP’s new intern, Erika Anderson! She has Twitter.
 

The evening concluded with a reading from Ben Marcus. Ben Marcus is fucking metal. The Flame Alphabet has fire in the title, children kill their parents with riffs of toxic words, and the parents debate abandoning said children. As Marcus himself said: “It’s pretty much good times throughout this book.” Marcus kept the whole room rapt with his rhythmic barrage of love turned inside out, the inner strife of a parent who describes this linguistic disease as more like “divide and collapse. Divide and weep.” Spoiler alert: Marcus read from a scene where our protagonist spends time trying to concoct a new language that doesn’t infect adults. His true desperation was fully communicated in Marcus’ singular prose, and perfectly closed out the night.

Last week I overheard that there were over 150 people crammed into Franklin Park for one of the readings. Amidst the chatter that publishing and reading is in crisis, you don’t feel it here. Roth and cohorts have a true, genuine love for writing and make it a fantastic, communal experience, contrary to that cliche that we’re just loners. The audience turn out, consistent hat-tips of press and draw of nationally-recognized authors testifies that reading is not in crisis. Next month is their third anniversary, and will feature Shalom Auslander (Hope: A Tragedy), Adam Wilson (Flatscreen), and Melissa Broder (her new collection, Meat Heart, is forthcoming). It happens on 3/12. Go go go.

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–Ryan Chang is a writer and student living in Brooklyn. His work has previously appeared on Thought Catalog. He is in the internet here and here.

I showed up at McNally Jackson last night to attend The Way Out, the launch party for Granta 118: Exit Strategies. For John Freeman, Granta editor and the evening’s emcee, the title suggested the precise way to end a poem so that “meaning echoes around you.” For me and an embarrassed audience member, it was exactly what we were wishing for—but not because of the poetry. I spilled wine on two people before I’d taken any pictures. The other person fell out of her chair and into a puddle of wine mid-reading. As John said later, “Our poetry knocks people over.” He was right. I’m glad I didn’t run out in shame.

1. Family/friend matters: Angela Lang; web editor, writer, slightly blurry; Luz Marambio, supporting her sister (get it?); Soledad Marambio, exhausted from reading in two languages. 2. Rowan Ricardo Phillips, poet, critic, translator, dashing dude. He complimented my blazer! Beside him: Joel, designer and illustrator. I’ll admit it, I made them stand together.

Sophie Cabot Black began the evening with her poem “Pay Attention,” from a cycle on her “ongoing bout with atheism.” Black’s poem was inspired by her young daughter’s curiosity about the unknowable, and is suspended by a childlike sincerity that calls out to a God who may not be listening: “You are nowhere to be found, who make no noise.” She also read a love poem and a poem about financial crisis, both which tried to understand the inscrutable. If Black doesn’t answer questions, her interrogations make for subtle, delicate poetry.

Next was Paula Bohince reading her poem, “At Thirty.” Bohince explained that her Granta contribution followed her decision to escape the stress of the city and move back into her mother’s house, “feeling like a total failure.” Bohince mixed relaxation with resignation, presenting afternoons of microwaved food and naps and a poignant image of swimming among “patients doing recovery exercises.” I wish my visits to my mother were so productive.

1. In front: Poets Paula Bohince and Sophie Cabot Black. In back: the guy whose wine I knocked over. 2. John Freeman, Granta editor and master of introductions. 

Ishion Hutchinson followed with “Station,” a poem describing a man haunted by the ghost of his father in a subway station. Hutchinson’s verse is alliterative and musical, with a Baudelairean darkness: “Stranger, father, cackling rat,” the speaker calls into the darkness of the station. I’ll think of Hutchinson’s image of a ghostly train pulling in on “its cold nerve of iron” while I wait at night for the Q. He told me he doesn’t write about New York because he’s too tempted to write about the subway, but “Station” offers a chilling perspective on a ubiquitous experience of the city.

Soledad Marambio was next, reading “sleeping far from home,” which appears in Granta’s Online Edition. She read the poem both in its original Spanish and in Granta’s English translation. But don’t be confused: “You can think of it as one poem, but it is two,” she said. Her poem, four minimalist sketches of a woman awakening away from home, was tantalizing in both languages.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips ended the evening with poems for Granta’s Online Edition.  I liked “Abbington Square Park” so much that I’ll let its first lines speak for themselves: “I once had had a thought/ About a thought I once had had/ About whether it was natural/ For nature to seem so natural.” Phillips’s verse is full of word play and philosophical speculation. “Birds of Fire” asks whether the sun and moon are real, or whether the sky is just “the mind’s conjugation of ‘to live’/Or the brain’s long division of ‘to die’?” Both poems are in his forthcoming collection, The Ground, which I can’t wait to order.

Based on last night’s poetry, Granta is keeping up its reputation of being consistently stellar. I’m adding “Exit Strategies” and each poet’s collection to my ever-growing reading list, and you should too.  Also, go to Granta’s next reading—even the folks covered in wine had fun.

Granta: The Magazine of New Writing #118: Exit Strategies
by John Freeman

 
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–Sam Gold spends so much money on books that soon he’ll have to start eating them. His favorite episode of The Twilight Zone is “Time Enough at Last” because he doesn’t wear glasses.