Hilary Plum, On Reading

"I read The Tunnel mornings at my kitchen table, all day had to sweat off the stench. Reading about Sacco and Vanzetti I rode a train across Germany; against the green countryside, red roofs, slim roads diving into fields and threading mountains, they must die. In bed as a girl I read Yeats and Dickinson and remember no more than a rhythm. I hope I am not alone in this, I read that passage from 'Orbit' aloud again and again. My vision descends the archaic torso of Apollo. For a series of nights I read the first page of Der Prozess, Jemand musste Josef K. verleumdet haben, I get no further. Sick I lay on the couch and heard 'Hymn to Life' in Jimmy’s thick tones, a half hour in tears. I sat reading 'The Morning of the Poem' in a library in Concord, Massachusetts, until a man interrupted me. He was from Ghana, was it, and trying to get into a business class, could I read his application? My publisher was the ocean: I read a poem and was almost angry, how much of myself I needed to offer in response, and what fool wouldn’t know this as love? There are days that won’t pass without a detective novel. The mornings in Tucson, some chair at some historic inn, agog at The Making of Americans. Child on each side of my father reading Treasure Island, our eyes on N.C. Wyeth’s men, their round muscled limbs. I lie in a park in Oregon and Bolaño would forgive me each interruption. It is winter, Blood Meridian. I still have some lover’s mother’s William Maxwell, never read. I read every Anne of Green Gables then read each one again and she did the same. Years later I went to the red clay and warm sea of that island; years later I bought books I didn’t want when she sold them. It is surprising, who might give you The Dubliners. I did skip one section of Les Misérables, never finished Portrait of a Lady nor Anna Karenina. Sat in a friend’s hammock before the exam reading Andrei Bely. To my lovers gave Nabokov and Beckett, why; from another borrowed Beckett back. She and I read all of Beckett then went to the ice cream shop where they microwave the cookies, listened to the town fool dictate a personals ad, to whom we couldn’t see. Manuscripts on my desktop that despite guilt I don’t reply to. The Qur’an, the rest of Sebald. I sat on the roof of the dorm reading Blake aloud and like a sophomore hoped someone could hear me. Sick I lay in bed and he read me the poems of Lawrence, which I do not care to read under other circumstances. Lost a manuscript he had given me; panicked; moved out. Skimmed everything on the internet. Stood in Penn Station, book propped open. Wrote a book."

{Hilary Plum is the author of They Dragged Them Through the Streets (FC2, 2013). She’s co-director, with Pam Thompson, of Clockroot Books and is a consulting editor with the Kenyon Review. With Zach Savich she edits the Open Prose Series for Rescue+Press.}

Jessy Randall, On Reading

"A book crush is different from a regular crush. With a regular crush, you don’t want to share the boy with anyone, you’d prefer if nobody else could see him or hug him or smell him but you. But with a book crush you want everybody to read the book. And that's how I feel about Daniel Pinkwater’s Lizard Music.

It's about a kid named Victor who has the house to himself for a few days while his parents and sister are away. He stays up late watching TV and happens upon a lizard band show. Soon he’s on his way to Thunderbolt City, an invisible floating island populated by large, upright, talking lizards. The story is absurd. It’s ridiculous. It’s awesome.

I still think about Lizard Music every day, mainly because of the Museum of Lost Things in Thunderbolt City. Victor visits this museum, which on the outside doesn’t look like much – it’s like a little shack – but on the inside it’s quite big. In it, he gets back his old teddy bear from when he was younger, and he can see (but not touch) the lost things of other people. There are so many of my things there. I’ve made lists.

Here’s another way a book crush is different from a regular crush. It can last for decades. Some books, you read them, you crush on them, and five or ten years later, you don’t know what you ever saw in them. But Lizard Music has stood the test of time for me. I go back to it every few years and it hasn’t disappointed me yet. I still get that heady feeling, that I-must-go-and-tell-everybody-I-know-about-this.

And here’s something else that’s great about book crushes: they’re addictive. You fall in love with the one book, and if you’re lucky, the author has written others. In the case of Pinkwater, there are a LOT of others. You’re set for life. Particularly in this case, because there’s a new Pinkwater, Bushman Lives, and … well, I won’t give away any surprises, but let’s just say that for all fans of Lizard Music, a lost thing has been returned."

{Jessy Randall is the author of, most recently, Injecting Dreams into Cows, a collection of poems from Red Hen Press. Annalee Newitz of io9 says that one poem from it, "The Consultant," is "the best science poem you'll read this month." For more information, visit her website here.}

Brian Allen Carr, On Reading

"At the moment, I'm not a fan of books. By that I mean, I'm not a fan of lots of books. I go through phases. Sometimes I can sit and read anything, sometimes I'm waiting for something, what, I don't know. I get book hangovers like a mother fucker. I finished Broken Glass by Alain Mabanckou a few weeks ago, and everything I've read since has seemed hollow. I need to get the rest of his books. I've got shit tons of books I haven't read. I'm staring at my shelves, nothing's calling. They will. It's odd. I'll look at something's spine 100 times before I decide, 'I'm reading this fucker right now.' I wonder what causes that.

I know this, if I want to read a book, I need it now and forever until I've turned the last page. If I'm suggested a book the chances of my liking it are reduced dramatically. The best is when you happen on a book. It stumbles across you. You're locked in that intimate dance.

Then there are the books I can always read because they just found me at the right time: The Stranger, The Little Prince, Jesus' Son, Norwood, Paris Spleen, Tomato Red, As I lay Dying, and the earth did not devour him.

We can't help the things we're in love with, the flavors our tongue craves. I can't talk my eyes into liking any sentence. I can't tell my mind to cry at a narrative. It's magic, that.

Some books seem fantastic until you start them, and some books seem terrible until they're finished. Which is the fist and what is the palm and who gets to make these decisions? It's peculiar, frightening, worse than nostalgia. Worse then the dances they used to make us go to, where the one you wanted to dance with was the stiffest body of them all, and someone you thought boring dragged you until you understood the music wasn't coming from the speakers, it was playing through their souls. Then you just turn into the kind of flower that no one would buy a bouquet of, but that smell sweeter than all the bullshit. Then you don't need to look pretty. You just fucking feel it.

Maybe I'll read the Bible. Maybe I'll read Henry Miller. Maybe I'll draw a picture with a crayon of an ocean and try to drink it off the page."

{Brian Allen Carr's book Vampire Conditions is out with Holler Presents.}

Gabe Durham, On Reading

Every library with a Banned Books shelf knows that reading is best when it feels like a subversive act. A few weeks ago, I bought and read Nicholson Baker's The Fermata (the Vintage paperback with its innocuous, literal cover) while on a vacation with my wife and parents. It was privately funny to me to be reading such a raunchy book so secretly and yet so out in the open.

But the truth is, I'd have felt that way reading nearly any good book--I'd still get to relish my detachment. 'They all think I'm here with them--I'm not!' Maybe that's why reading at home alone so often puts me to sleep: There's no one there to bear witness to my secrecy.

I was still reading The Fermata on my trip home (my wife having flown back a few hours earlier), and at the airport gate I saw a woman reading a book that made all of us, the citizens of C-9, consider, if ever so briefly, that this comfily clothed women was a sexual being. The book, of course, was 50 Shades of Grey. I was pleased that my raunch was so much more obscure than hers, that her predilections were on display and mine remained in the darkness, that my book simply looked like a history of punctuation, the sort of thing a glasses-wearing skinny white guy would be reading, when it so surely was not.

Then it occurred to me that what I really wanted was for just a few members of my C-9 family be in on the joke, for them (men or women, best if a combination) to look at me in such a way as to have me understand that they knew exactly what I was up to. It is then that we would exchange grins I am nervously willing to describe as fiendish. But this did not happen, not even with one of them. And suddenly I felt very alone.

{Gabe Durham is the author of Fun Camp, a novel forthcoming from Mud Luscious Press. He lives in Northampton, MA and edits Dark Sky Magazine. For more information, visit his website at gatherroundchildren.com.}

hey little songbird what'd you sing when the leaves all around are the color of tin

"Little Sister" by Grand Hallway:

Lysley Tenorio, On Reading

"I'll start by saying the obvious. All writers should read fiction, non-fiction, poetry, plays--that stuff feeds the work, it's inevitable. But I'll add one more thing to that list: graphic novels (which I'll consider interchangeable with comic books). Reading a graphic novel/comic book requires you to negotiate dialogue and exposition with image and layout, with visual sequence. Think of a panel: the form uses the panel as a visual representation of a definitive temporal moment--an actual unit of narrative. As writers, we can learn so much from a narrative moment that's represented visually, with (and often without) text--one of the most powerful things I've ever 'read' is from Frank Miller's The Dark Knight-- a page full of wordless panels depicting the unraveling of Martha Wayne's pearl necklace, that moment she and her husband are gunned down in front of their son, a young Bruce Wayne. Few images (and perhaps fewer words) explain Batman's psyche more clearly than that.

Reading comic books has helped me understand that we read narrative not for information, but for experience. Comic book writers and artists understand this from the very first panel."


{Lysley Tenorio is the author of Monstress. His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Manoa, and The Best New American Voices and Pushcart Prize anthologies. For more information, visit lysleytenorio.com.}

John Minichillo, On Reading

"When the time came that I was too embarrassed to check out children's books I didn't venture all the way into the adult library but stopped at an aisle of science fiction, with covers that promised life and love on other planets, and lasers. Despite the covers these books were work, and I didn't always finish but I learned how one book led to another, one author to another.

In high school I still wasn't a reader, but I had an imagination and I wrote with confidence. In college I wanted to read more because reading seemed the best way to spend time on myself. The old library made the tuition seem worth it. The untrustworthy elevator, the smoking lounges, the reading room, the tapestries, the dust.

Summers I worked in a cemetery where I got more reading done than I did as an English major. We took long breaks in secluded sections where I would sit on a headstone and read. I read Vonnegut. I read Steinbeck. I read Moby-Dick.

After teaching science for a year and working as a bank teller for a year I went and got an MFA. But I was just starting to get it so I went to work on a Ph.D, where they looked at my transcripts and saw gaps. I had studied English but not enough. A professor said to me, 'You've never read Eliot?' Another professor said, 'You've never read Shaw?'

As I neared the end of my Ph.D. work I took a semester without classes to prepare for comprehensive exams. The reading list was insurmountable but I read all day every day. It was a gift, the time to read. I put my back out sitting in a second-hand chair. I bought a new chair and wandered into readings not on the list.

I have always loved that books arrive at my door in brown boxes, but now I read less. I write every day that I'm able. I teach. I have a family. I've gone electronic with my reading so I can sneak it in between classes, or in bed, or I listen to the Kindle robot-voice on my commute. I'm still discovering new writers who open me up. I still feel more confidence as a writer than I do as a reader. I still love the old dust of an old library but I'm not nostalgic about books. Pixels and e-ink get me there. I was hesitant to wander into the adult library as a kid, because I suspected reading was work. And it is."


{John Minichillo's novel, The Snow Whale, a contemporary retelling of Moby-Dick, was an Orion Magazine Book Prize notable and an Independent Publishers Book Awards regional gold medalist for the West-Pacific. Hey Small Press! selected The Snow Whale as a Best of 2011 and called the novel "the funniest book we reviewed all year." He's a 2012 recipient of a Tennessee individual artists grant and he lives in Nashville with his wife and son.}

Skulltoons

Dan Gillen has been posting some cool paintings over at his website, Skulltoons. Visit his website here.

Black Balloon

Neat website and artwork for Black Balloon Publishing: check it out here.

"You Or Someone Like You" by Rob Roberge

Over at The Rumpus, Rob writes about some of the obstacles of teaching--sometimes it's just really difficult. The essay can be found here.

Around And Around And Around And Around And Around And Around

The voice in my head is now speaking in a Cockney accent, saying "qu'est-ce que c'est" and "evening sun" over and over again.

But more importantly:

The Lit Pub, founded by the wonderful Molly Gaudry, is accepting submissions.

Blake Butler's Nothing is insanely awesome.

Roxane Gay's updates are always a pleasure.

Really liking the Research Notes column over at Necessary Fiction.

Recently read Orion You Came and You Took All My Marbles by Kira Henehan--it's a great read.

James Greer and Guylaine Vivarat are rocking out in a new band called Detective.

Cataclysm Baby by Matt Bell is coming out April 15, 2012--a neat trailer can be viewed here.

Always fun to see what Sandra Beasley is up to.

Ravi Mangla's Visiting Writers over at Uncanny Valley Press is very engaging.

Re-read Caty Sporleder's Flay, a Book of Mu and it was just amazing as the first four times I had read it.

Choke On These Words.

Emily Rapp rules.

And locally:

It's Spring, and Greenscape is blossoming.

Artist Terry Grow is in the middle of setting up his new website--here's what it looks like as of now.

Always fun to relax at The Saint Street Inn--great food and drinks.

Enjoying the Leather Candle from Kiki.

Historian Rien Fertel and Photographer Denny Culbert have a Barbecue Bus.

Mais La à la Hollie Gargano.

Art art art over at Freetown Studios.

Love this painting called "Le Lapin" by Catherine Fontenot.

Looking forward to checking out more documentaries over at The Passion Series.

Caught up with Diwang Valdez and the Motion Family Crew not too long ago at Walk On's.

Just ordered this for yonder C. Parker.

More later.

Back to the Cockney voice in my head. Fancy that, I fancy.

Joe Dunthorne, On Reading

"Growing up with two academic parents and a bibliophilic sister in a house seemingly propped up by bookshelves, one way in which I rebelled was by not reading or, at least, by not reading anything printed on paper. Many of my early reading experiences were through text-adventure computer games. My favourite was a brilliant spin-off of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams. You can play it here. After that, I started writing my own games. Much later, I called them stories."

{Joe Dunthorne is the author of Submarine and Wild Abandon. Visit his website here for more information.}

Freetown Studios

From the website:

Freetown Studios believes that Lafayette Artists need to have a space to work with other artists and art enthusiasts. Since there are few established venues or artist studio/production spaces in Lafayette Parish, we have established a public forum/community center for artists and the general public in an up-and-coming neighborhood. The community will be encouraged to take advantage of the space while being introduced to various artists’ work processes and creative influences. The artists, on the other hand, will not only have the opportunity to see their work in the space, but will be able to present their work to the public – a chance many young artists have not had so far. There is also the lack of production space to consider — a problem that Freetown Studios hopes to solve.

Emerging artists often work from home, in small kitchens or living rooms hardly conducive to creative exchange. Having a place to work gives artists the drive to keep going. In addition to workspace, Freetown Studios will further the organization’s mission statement by providing quality services and programming which gives artists a public forum to discuss a variety of artistic mediums, emerging and cutting-edge work, and the importance of local access to cultural resources. Freetown Studios understands this drive and hopes to provide a perfect space to work, teach, and learn, a space that will inspire both struggling and established artists and members of the community to exchange ideas, work in different genres, and understand the extraordinary role art plays in everyday life. The goals of our programming and services scheduled are to provide space and support for multi-disciplinary, interactive workshops which will allow for work to be made and experienced by novices, professionals and spectators alike.

Freetown Studios Inc., is a nonprofit organization located in a 4,000 sq. ft. warehouse and dedicated to promoting emerging contemporary artists who work in Printmaking, Painting, Drawing, Installation, Theater, and other Multi-Media disciplines. We provide the artists with workspace and artistic support.

Freetown Studios
421 E. Convent St.
Lafayette, La, 70501

Freetown Studios 2012 Event Listing:

January

1.9.2012 – Intro Silkscreen begins – runs for 6 classes Mondays from 6-8 ($160 for course + few supplies)

1.21.2012 – Bonnie Camos Live Encaustic Demo 6-8p

February

2.13.2012 – Intro Silkscreen ends

2.25.2012 – Reggie Rodrigue presents Present Tense an open discussion on contemporary arts 6-8p

March

3.10.2012 – UL Writer in residence Kate Bernheimer and playwright Dayana Stetco will read from their writings & theatre productions 6-8p

3.16-18.2012 – Liz Hill figurative painting workshop (weekend workshop)

3.19.2012 – Intro to Relief begins – runs for 7 classes Tuesdays from 6-8p ($160 for course + few supplies)

3.20.2012 – Reggie Rodrigue presents Painting and Drawings 6-8p

April

4.7.2012 – Marie Hendry presents Paintings and Drawings (show opens 4.2.12-ends 4.7.12) 6-8p

4.21.2012 – Slava Broussard presents Paintings, Drawing, and Prints 6-8p

4.23.2012 – Intro Silkscreen begins – runs for 7 classes Mondays from 6-8p ($160 for course + few supplies)

May

5.1.2012 – Intro Relief ends

5.19.2012 – Giorgio Russo Multimedia Performance 8-10p; Doors open at 7:30p

5.26.2012 – Chris Deshazo Music Performance 8-10p; Doors open at 7:30p

June

6.11.2012 – Susan David Live Silkscreen Demo 6-8p

6.11.2012 – Intro Silkscreen ends; Classes will continue to be announced on Facebook and our website

6.23.2012 – Patterson Willis presents the Iconographer: The Publics Theatre 8-10p; Doors open at 7:30p

July

7.21.2012 – Stephanie Patton presents a Multimedia Installation 7-9p

August

8.18.2012 – Catherine Siracusa Live Encaustic Painting on Fabric/Canvas Demo 7-9p

September

9.15.2012 – Reggie Rodrigue Part 3 of Present Tense an open discussion of Louisiana contemporary arts 7-9p

October

10.13.2012 – Freetown Studios “Trunk Show” 3-6p (a live demo workshop including a variety of artists)

10.31.2012 – Printzero Studios travelling Printmaking Portfolio Exchange 2012.

November

11.1.2012- 11.11.2012 – Milena Theatre Group Closed Rehearsals

11.12.2012 -11.16.2012 – Milena Theatre Group OPEN Rehearsals – Open to the General Public; Time TBA

11.17.2012 Freetown Studios presents Sleeping with Vagabonds a Milena Theatre Group Production
Doors open at 7:30p. Show starts at 8p. SHARP. Limited Seating.

December

12.1.2012 – Printzero Studios show ends.

12.1.2012 – Sleeping with Vagabonds a Post Production Art-Space Dialogue
Doors open at 5:30p. Show starts at 6-8p. Show Ends 12.31.2012.

3 x J.A. Tyler

"J.A. Tyler doesn’t write mythsof creation and destruction. He makes language-shards that refract your consciousness, that draw blood and make you wonder if it’s real. If you exist. At the end of the book, you won’t know.”
--Joanna Ruocco

Comatose
Patasola Press




"Read this for the sake of beauty that exists but is not yet inside of you."
--j/j hastain, author of new forms and meditations

In Love With A Ghost
Lit Pub



"In Tyler’s hands, static concepts become Möbius strips of subversion. This incredible text is a kalidoscopic set of bifocals: look up and you’re in a far-away war, down and you’re in a suburban treehouse. Up and you’re the victim, down and you’re the aggressor. What is so important throughout – what Tyler so remarkably and irrefutably convinces the reader of – is all the ways these binaries are indeed, are inescapably, fused together on the same lens."
--Alissa Nutting, author of Unclean Jobs for Women & Girls

Variations of a Brother War
Small Doggies Press

fuckscapes | Sean Kilpatrick

“The violent, sexual zone of television and entertainment is made to saturate that safe-haven, the American Family. The result is a zone of violent ambience, a ‘fuckscape’: where every object or word can be made to do horrific acts. As when torturers use banal objects on its victims, it is the most banal objects that become the most horrific (and hilarious) in Sean Kilpatrick’s brilliant first book.”
– Johannes Göransson

“Pregnancy dream of poetry has this Sean Kilpatrick book by the fist. You learn to signal to others from the woken state, here, line-by-line. Do you have any extra money? Buy this book! If you have to skip lunch, buy THIS BOOK! “I held my breath so hard I ended up in the country.” Some poetry you read is forgotten, and never remembered. Some poetry, this poetry, Sean Kilpatrick’s poetry, is a manual for exciting the engine to throw you out of the vanquished pleasures. Here is your I.V. drip of sphinx’s blood.”
– CAConrad

fuckscapes
by Sean Kilpatrick
Mud Luscious Press/ Blue Square Press
100 pages
December 2011
$12

Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake, by Heidi Lynn Staples

“Heidi Staples is one of the most sparkling, indelibly unique writers in English there is. Smart readers should follow her every move, including this quirky offering. She’s a beauty.”
--Mary Karr, author of Lit

“Like Magritte’s The Son of Man, Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake is a work that unabashedly walks a line between ‘the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.’ It is a work full of a curious and exhilarating obfuscation that, when a reader is willing to look behind it, reveals an unexpectedly touching and delightful memoir.”
--Darby Larson, author of The Iguana Complex

For more information, and an excerpt:

Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake
A Memoir By Heidi Lynn Staples
Caketrain Press

the discoverers the creators the seekers

Daniel J. Boorstin

Catherine Chung, On Reading

"For me, reading is a full-bodied hunger that is spiritual as well as emotional and intellectual. In the poem 'The Cleaving,' by Li-Young Lee, there's this amazing line: 'my reading a kind of eating, my eating/ a kind of reading...' that describes what reading does for me as well as anything can. Reading is essential and sustaining: it nourishes me, fills me up and delights me, teaches me, makes me feel everything and think about everything, and connects me to the world. It not only shows me the path, but is often the path itself."


{Catherine Chung is the author of the novel Forgotten Country, and a Granta New Voice. To learn more about her, visit her website at catherinechung.com.}

William Lychack, On Reading

"Aside from all of the obvious and ennobling reasons to read--information, education, entertainment--I also find that reading somehow suspends the conscious mind. I mean, I've never not found the answer to some problem or question or impediment in my writing life in my reading life. Among other things, the act of reading seems to true my tires, and when my writing life is going well it seems that my reading life is going well as well."


{William Lychack is the author of a novel, The Wasp Eater, and a collection of stories, The Architect of Flowers, and his work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and on public radio's This American Life. For more information, please contact, lychack.com.}

PG-50

PG-50
Theatre 810
Presented by Acting Unlimited Inc.

Have A Pint At The Lit Pub

The Lit Pub

Founder: Molly Gaudry.

Includes articles by:

Ken Baumann

Mel Bosworth

Mark Cugini

Anthony Doerr

Sarah Rose Etter

Kathy Fish

Heather Fowler

Roxane Gay

j/j hastain

Jamie Iredell

Tim Jones-Yelvington

Lydia Millet

Christopher Newgent

Ethel Rohan

Matthew Salesses

Jeremy Spencer

J. A. Tyler

Brandi Wells

Mike Young

Full List Of Contributors: Here.

Currently At The Bookstore:

Matt Bell

Aimee Bender

Kathy Fish

Scott Garson

Miles Harvey

Caitlin Horrocks

Andrea Kneeland

Erinrose Mager

J. A. Tyler

Ben Segal

machado

dan chaon | stay awake

"I think what I start out with is some kind of image or scene, and then from there I'll work towards a character. From the character and that moment then I think plot will begin to emerge. With a lot of stories, the opening image is frequently the thing that I started with -- whether it's the image of the baby with two heads, or the image the guy hitting the deer in the semi. Then I tend to begin to explore the characters in these images and make them move forward in some sort of plot-like way."

--Book Talk: A Peek into Loss and Darkness with Dan Chaon







Stay Awake: Stories
By Dan Chaon

robert j. flaherty | louisiana story

Satyajit Ray: "I had seen Louisiana Story in England. I found it quite inspiring. I liked other films too, but Flaherty's films and Renoir's films had an affinity to my work because of the setting and the people involved... in the trilogy ones."

--British Film Institute







Louisiana Story
Directed by Robert J. Flaherty
October 1948

pincel de zorro

Pincel De Zorro (Ediciones Ondina)








Pincel De Zorro

Direction, Design and Animation: Hug Codinach
Illustrations: Meritxell Ribas
Text: Sergio Sierra
Music: Albert Alay

Mud Luscious Press | Matt Bell

by Matt Bell
Mud Luscious Press
105 pgs.
April 2012
$12 ($10 pre-order special)

\ f. scott fitzgerald / (6:12-6:36) |might have might not have|

Khadijah Queen, On Reading

"Reading is everything: magical, spiritual, practical, easy, difficult, necessary, strange. It's a slog, a transport, an anchor, entertainment and a tool of survival. I learned to read at age three and have loved all of it, my whole life, from Lois Duncan to the Narnia Chronicles as a child – so far away from the gunshot soundtrack of my '80s-in-South-Central-L.A. childhood, yet such relevance, comfort, offer/utterance of possibility; to Stephen King and Alice Walker and Malcolm X as a teenager; to Audre Lorde and Helene Cixous and Lucille Clifton and Fernando Pessoa in college. Recently Craig Thompson's Habibi and Lynn Nottage's Ruined rocked my reading world. And before that, Shahrnush Parsipur's Women Without Men and Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper – (speechless awe). Even books I didn't like (or detested – anything by Heidegger, for example) still activated something in me – if only a fight or flight response. Reading is an endless loop. Books surround and fill me. I have too many. I don't have enough. I write to empty, then turn to reading, to living, fill up again."


{Khadijah Queen's most recent book, Black Peculiar, won the 2010 Noemi Press book award for poetry. Visit her website: khadijahqueen.com.}