"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.}

Mark Leidner, On Reading

"Reading is like getting a ride somewhere. You don't have to fight traffic, worry about cops, old maps, malfunctioning GPSs; you don't choose the music, the speed, or how aggressively or defensively to drive; you don't have to use your body, or your eyes if you don't want to; you're not responsible for anything, etc. The driver handles all that. You just sit there and look around while all the scenery you have no control over washes through your field of vision. In this way reading has always felt lazy and unmeaningful to me, compared to writing. But sometimes you're in the hands of a driver so capable, and the ride is so spectacular, that you forgive yourself for not having caused it. I think that's called humility... I'm not sure."


{Mark Leidner is the author of The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover (Sator Press, 2011), a book of aphorisms, and Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me (Factory Hollow, 2011), a book of poetry. He grew up in Georgia and now lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.}

Claudia Smith, On Reading

"I wish I could read the way I read as a child. When I write, I still lose myself the way I did in books back then but now, things are hectic. I can't luxuriate in a book all night, listening to the rain, impervious to time. There are too many things to do.

My grandparents had a room they called 'the junk room.' It was filled with canned goods, decorations for every season, dry goods, and what my grandmother called various and sundry things.

There were also books. We weren't allowed in the room. It was where Santa kept his presents, and thrifty Santa shopped for Xmas all year long. But I read whatever I found.

I was sickly and somehow I always got well when I stayed with my grandmother. She believed if you were sick you had to stay in bed. I didn't mind this at all. I read for hours in the big blue room with a shaggy dog named Poppy curled up beside me. She was a mutt with Beagle eyes and she would gaze at me with love as I read all the Grimm's fairytales -- the ones with the most unfortunate endings -- aloud to her. At some point my grandmother had belonged to the book of the month club, and these books had wonderful titles. She was a James Herriot fan. I read So Dear To My Heart and I discovered Betty Smith. I found a book called Apple Tree Lean Down and must have read it three or four times one summer. I discovered a whole series of Nancy Drew mysteries published in the nineteen-teens. I read Hans Christian Anderson. One winter, my grandmother gave me an old brass bell and told me to ring it if I needed her. I only rang it a once and I was treated to a tray of Campbell's tomato soup with cheesy fish crackers in bed. Sometimes I had a plate of apples and cheese. I gained weight, stopped vomiting all the time, and read and read and read.

That room seems very precious and close to me even now. There were high windows, and trinkets on the dresser. I read At The Back Of the North Wind on a cold sunny day, with curtains stirring slightly in the breeze. I remember this! I also remember discovering Wuthering Heights. I didn't know what it was about at all, and this was my most delicious find. I remember finding the old paperback in a closet. Healthcliff and Cathy were kissing on its cover, and all the muscles of her beautiful white neck were taut. Heathcliff was wearing something velvet with a puffy white shirt. He was tall, dark, handsome. That is my first memory of wanting to kiss someone.

The book started out humdrum, and I almost put it down. But then came a dream with a waifish girl begging to be let in, and the ghost story transformed into a dark love story! I read that one pretty much straight through. I had no idea what Wuthering Heights meant to English departments around the country. I just knew I loved the moors and that twisted romance more than any of the gentle romances I'd pulled off the junk room shelves.

The joy of reading -- and it is my joy -- for me is much like the joy of writing. When I read that dark romance so many years ago, there was nothing and no one between me and the page. It didn't matter how many had read those words; in that blue room, Heathcliff and Cathy were mine alone. I didn't even read about them to Poppy."


{Claudia Smith is the author of The Sky Is A Well And Other Shorts (Rose Metal Press) and Put Your Head In My Lap (Future Tense Books). Her stories have appeared in several journals and anthologies, including Norton's The New Sudden Fiction: Short Short Stories From America And Beyond. More about her work may be found at claudiastories.com.}

Melissa Broder, On Reading

"I am a very hungry and thirsty girl. I have an infinite god-shaped hole inside. I want to be sated and de-thirsted 24 hours a day. If I can’t be sated and de-thirsted 24 hours a day I want to be lifted up out of my body so I don’t have to feel anything or so I can feel only euphoric. Sometimes poetry does one of these things for me: sates or de-thirsts or lifts. I read my first poems at six. I wrote my first poems at eight. I have since tried many other ways to fill the god-shaped hole, but poetry is one of the safest ways I know how. The main consequence of reading poetry, for me, is writing poetry."


{Melissa Broder is the author of two poetry collections, Meat Heart (forthcoming from Publishing Genius, 2012) and When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother (Ampersand Books, February 2010). Visit her here for more information.}

Robert Kloss, On Reading

“I’ve never really thought about why I read or what it means to me. I’ve never had the need to justify the action, even when my father or my teachers made me feel like it was a less than healthy activity — I just sneaked around to do it. Honestly, I think I just fell into the habit when I was very young and I always kept at it. But, then again, I was always good at it and it was one of the few things I was good at so for whatever reason it was a natural activity. It was also one of the few things I liked to do so I did it whenever I could. At the moment I started to read I also started to write and I think the two have always been bound up in each other. Writing was the other thing I liked to do that I was also good at. Had I been able to draw or had I been able to sing or had I been more athletic things may have worked out differently. Slowly I think the writing cannibalized the reading, so now most or all of my reading happens so that I can write — it’s research or its inspiration, searching for power. I read how Melville wrote Moby-Dick while reading Shakespeare and Greek tragedy and Sterne and Rabelais and how those geniuses somehow unlocked his own genius. I have to admit I have always tried to do the same thing, with not quite as startling results. So I suppose if I have any requirement of the books I read, now, its that they should startle me. I don’t read for a good yarn or to gain some insight into why people do what they do or some other abstract insight: I suppose I read to be startled and amazed by something brilliant and awesome, like an old time prophet caught in the glow and hum of the burning bush.”


{Robert Kloss is the author of How the Days of Love & Diphtheria (Mud Luscious Press/Nephew) and The Alligators of Abraham (Mud Luscious Press, 2012). He is found online at rkbirdsofprey.blogspot.com.}

Ryan Call, On Reading

"My mother has a rule regarding books: don't throw them. As children, my sister and I were not allowed to throw books in our parents' house. We could throw other objects, certainly, and we did throw other objects, often at each other, but we did not throw books. Now, whenever I throw a book, I think about my mother and how much I love her."


{Ryan Call is the author of The Weather Stations (Caketrain). His stories appear in Mid-American Review, New York Tyrant, Conjunctions, Annalemma, and elsewhere. He teaches English and coaches cross country at a high school in Houston. Visit him here for more information.}

Alissa Nutting, On Reading

"I grew up in a very safe, boring home. It’s no accident that ‘boring,’ as a verb, means ‘to drill a hole.’ Life as we currently experience it gives us a lot of holes, from boredom and many other places; voids that we fill with a variety of things, by necessity, in order to feel full enough to keep going. I’ve tried quite a few methods of easing the pain of lack (an inescapable pain that even the best live-rs will feel now and then, given our temporary lives, faulty bodies, and general dearth of control). Of every salve I’ve tried, I would like to give my endorsement to books.

As a child, books were the spaces where I could go make all the unwise decisions I knew deep down I wanted to make but was not permitted (they still are, except now I’m the one not permitting myself). For every urge, there is a book (and if there isn’t, you need to write it please). For every problem, there is a book (and if there isn’t…). Putting yourself between covers—inside an open book—is just as intimate and vulnerable an act as putting yourself between the sheets of a bed. You and the author are communing together in a way that no one else can ever know or experience.

Plus reading is the most polite selfish act ever. Sitting in a corner and reading, I emit very little waste or sound. I am not distracting to others. This is a benefit not to be underappreciated in a crowded world.

I mainly live in books, and have ever since I could read. Vicarious is an ugly word to many, but not to me, not when it comes to reading. Unlike a movie or video-game simulation, the act of reading is as personalized as a fingerprint. No two people have the exact same thoughts or visualizations when reading the same book. It’s an experience that is yours, and belongs to you, just as all that any of us ever have beyond the present—our memories—belong to us. Except for the current moment, we have nothing, really, but the slides stored in our imagination.

As a form of acquisition, reading makes me wildly greedy. I try to read up on anything I’m curious about, afraid of, obsessed upon, or unfamiliar with. Reading is another word for more—more experience, more knowledge. More understanding. When I want more, I read, and it feels like I get to throw a few more handfuls of dirt into the chasms, the omissions of life that sting."


{Alissa Nutting, an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at John Carroll University, is the author of the short story collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls. Her website is alissanutting.com.}

Tim Horvath, On Reading

"My daughter is learning how to read right now one room over at the very moment I’m writing this. And I am sitting on the couch, or was until I broke off to write this, learning how to read myself. We talk about knowing how to read as if it is like knowing how to tie shoelaces, or how to prepare a particular meal—an either/or, a process that we might master, proudly strutting in our newly-knotted sneakers and ladling lobster-speckled paella onto plates. But the more I do of it, the more I suspect that we never really know how to read. It might sound like I’m being archly postmodern, taking shots at fish-barrel range at the very possibility of knowledge, but that’s not what I’m going for.

My daughter sounds out words…oftener she gets them right, the short ones almost always. She asks things like “is it a ‘c’ or a ‘k’ in ‘crackle?” She gets stymied on 'musicians.' She writes 'j' for 'ch' and in her own story writes 'ixclamd,' which I can only think of as a word in a language spoken somewhere with a brutal climate. Her questions, when they arise, are readily answered. The fun, for her, has just begun.

It verges on cliché that every difficult book must teach the reader how to read it. These days I am dipping into Joshua Cohen’s Witz, in which I might get hung up on 'the throb of shaigetzes.' But most of the words in Witz are familiar; it is not the vocabulary that makes it a challenging, if uncommonly pleasurable read. It is more that with its gushing, pagelong sentences and profusion of allusions, it is just plain tough going. To know when to count a clause/sentence/page done, or done enough to move on. Impossible? Maybe, maybe not. The point is, though, that I will never know how to read this book. And I often wonder whether reading even simpler, more straightforward books is just as mysterious.

In this spirit, then, I ask, do you know if you’ve read a book? If you have read all but the last twenty pages have you read it? When, as a teacher, I assign reading, I expect my students to read. Sometimes the ones who have can’t provide specific details from what they’ve read, and sometimes those who haven’t can rattle them off like they wrote the thing. But even if we put the most flagrant cases of those who didn’t read on one side of the room (the spine uncracked, rods and cones that don’t know from the ink in question), I wonder how much those who have read really have in common. Have you read a book if you have consciously looked at all the words? What does 'consciously' mean? (Send in the neurophilosophers). Have you read a book if you have read it quickly and enjoyed it but not really reflected, not really thought about it? What is reflection, and how does it differ from recollection? Every reading a rereading, Nabokov mused, okay. But how do you even know if you've reread the first time? What makes you so sure? If your mind wandered, how much attunement to the words on the page qualifies you for to get the sticker, like the ones we wear on Election Day, that announces 'I READ'? In my daughter’s case, she might get actual stickers…

To read is just a damned odd verb, is what I want to say. Can we use place as an analogy? It strikes me that it’s a lot easier to know that you’ve visited a place than that you’ve read something. I suppose we could each visit a place and have such utterly different experiences of it that it seems like an entirely different place, and the same might be said for a book. Could we have such utterly divergent encounters with a book that it becomes, for all intents and purposes, two books? Actually bifurcates? Book cloning? Is that ethical? What I’m getting at, more broadly, can be underscored by this juxtaposition of reading and visiting a place. (But maybe we should problematize traveling, too. One might visit a place deeply or superficially. I want to at least think of myself as a proponent of deep traveling, not only wide.)

What is depth? What is width? In terms of reading, most, I think, would agree that reading widely helps you to read deeply, situates you in a context that helps your understanding of any individual work, and possibly we could say the same about traveling, that having been to many places augments your ability to appreciate a new place. But is that so? Could wide reading, in some instances, dilute, as going a bunch of places in rapid succession can make the places themselves seem too much the same, introduce too many parallels to be useful, turning it into routine and numbing the eyes and ears, all the senses with a surfeit of too-familiar exoticism? Well, could reading too widely do the same? Perhaps one ought to read with a deliberate narrowness, dwell in a single book for a year or more as we do with those we author. When others are consuming by the hundreds, trading favorites, rookies-of-the-year, etc. will you tout your scuffed, dogeared pair fifty times apiece? Is narrowness necessary, or even desirable, for depth? I do not know how to answer these things.

What I do know is that I am always learning to read. Nowhere does the dictum 'Zen mind, beginner’s mind' weigh so aptly. Sure there are times I’ll feel the opposite, the literary equivalent of pulling into the umpteenth city on a puddle-hopping whirlwind tour, jet-lagged and burned out. Another sleep-deprived innkeeper whose mustache flops onto the coffee-stained check-in registry? Another overzealous shopkeeper? I’ll read things where I’ll feel like 'I’ve already read this/seen this/been through this a hundred times before.' But more often I’m daunted. To take in all the undercurrents of sound, of implication, the unsaid, to translate between the spatio-temporal on the page and that in the world, to infuse voice and vision with life, to balance upright on the tendrils of text for the full swerve of a paragraph, giving due heed to every glint of nuance, to appreciate what the hell is going on in the story, to read both with and against the text and orthogonal to what is written…I will never really master this, I think, never get my sticker. Still, you will hear me go with convention and say 'I’ve read x, I’ve read y, haven’t read z yet, hope to get to it someday.' I will always be learning to read. But I do know that 'crackle' is spelled with a 'c,' unless it’s the candy bar, in which case yes, you can have exactly one."


{Tim Horvath is the author of Circulation (sunnyoutside press) and the forthcoming collection Understories, which will be published by Bellevue Literary Press in May 2012. His stories appear in Conjunctions, Fiction, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Chester College of New England and works as a part-time psychiatric counselor.}

Edward Mullany, On Reading

"I was in the park, reading a paperback novel, when the sky darkened, and one or two raindrops plopped onto my knee. 'Come on,' I said to my dog, who was sleeping beside me on the grass, 'if we don’t hurry, we’re going to get wet.' We started out of the park, me walking quickly at first, and my dog trotting, but slowed when I saw that the clouds had parted and that the raindrops I’d felt had not been indicative of further rain. We stood in the middle of a wide path, and I looked up through the branches of a leafy tree, while my dog sniffed the ground patiently, his leash slack. 'What are we doing?' I said to myself and to my dog, who looked at me for a moment before staring off at something he'd seen or thought he'd seen. The book I had been reading was a page-turner. I was enjoying it."

{Edward Mullany is the author of If I Falter at the Gallows (Publishing Genius, 2011).}

Jillian Lauren, On Reading

"It's appropriate that it's late right now (too late for a woman who has to wake at dawn with a toddler), and I'm writing about reading. Because late is when I've always read, since I was a child. First with a flashlight and then when I got busted--as I often did because they were onto me--by the red light of my digital alarm clock.

Late at night is when I conduct my love affair with books.

Now I read late because I don't have any other time in the day to sit down and sink into a book. But that wasn't always the case. When I was young, I read late nights because it was a quiet time during which I could spiral out into the darkness and explore the endless possibilities that I found in books. Books were the only thing in my life that spoke to the kind of magic I suspected was shimmering in the shadows in the corners of my room. I certainly couldn't find it in the people surrounding me in my small, stiflingly conservative suburban town. Nor in the world of school and soccer and temple and birthday parties and sameness through which I shuffled in the daylight.

Or maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe I just couldn't sleep. Maybe I was desperately lonely. But wherever the longing came from, ultimately it made me fall deeply in love with reading.

I have rarely met a writer for whom books were not a salvation, an obsessive passion, the first true love of their life.

And there are times I forget how much I love to read. There are times that reading and I grow too familiar with each other. There are times that I pick up book after book and put them down after thirty pages, unable to stay engaged with them for one reason or another. But inevitably, a book finds its way to the top of my unruly pile and it grabs me by the throat. It blows the top of my head wide open. And I lie there late at night vibrating with the same passion as ever for the singular experience of connecting with a work of literature.

I read for the same reason I write--to experience a space of infinite possibility. And more importantly, to connect. To connect with with my own deepest humanity and with that of others. Which is to say, to fall in love."


{Jillian Lauren is the author of the novel, Pretty and the New York Times bestselling memoir, Some Girls: My Life in a Harem. Visit her website here, and she can be found on Twitter, here.}

How to be a good live reading audience member

This is a guest post by Caleb J Ross as part of his Stranger Will Tour for Strange blog tour. He will be guest-posting beginning with the release of his novel Stranger Will in March 2011 to the release of his second novel, I Didn’t Mean to Be Kevin and novella, As a Machine and Parts, in November 2011. If you have connections to a lit blog of any type, professional journal or personal site, please contact him. To be a groupie and follow this tour, subscribe to the Caleb J Ross blog RSS feed. Follow him on Twitter: @calebjross.com. Friend him on Facebook: Facebook.com/rosscaleb



Etiquette is important. Whether downing clam chowder or chowing down on a clam, understanding the context of any event and knowing how best to position yourself within it is an important skill. This knowledge-set extends also into the world of live literature readings. Long assumed by literary outsiders to be trivial, boring, mind-numbing, boring, despicable, boring events, the live reading fits these descriptions only to the untrained mind. So, let me train some minds.

1. Bring friends. You don’t have to bring the friends that you want to keep, but if you know one or two annoying hangers-on, trick them into coming with you on the rouse of a few photo-ops with your permission that you can be tagged for the Facebook album. Who am I kidding? If you are going to a book reading, you don’t have many friends, let alone ones you can risk losing. So bring that frumpy girlfriend and the awkward guy and get ready to have an appropriately adequate evening.

2. Pretend you are a fan. To the author, the live reading is the equivalent of a twink going down on a Van Nuys, CA movie director in hopes of a starring role in an upcoming porn adaptation of the early 90s sitcom “Life Goes On” (that was a sitcom, right?). Basically, don’t be afraid to get on your knees and…worship the author. Go ahead and stroke his…ego. Besides, he may just make you famous.

3. Don’t be a rogue decibel. As most fancy things are, book readings are quiet. Eating caviar, sipping fine scotch, ruling poor people, all of these are done quietly (in addition to fancy-ily). Literary readings, for the most part, are true to this rule of fanciness. It’s not that the audience doesn’t want to stir up a mosh pit and scream, but when that happens, the reader cannot be heard. Now, if the reader has a microphone and is fronting a punk collective trashcan ensemble, then screaming might be appropriate. When it doubt, copy other people. If everyone else is moshing, mosh you should.

4. Buy a book. Most readings don’t charge admission. So, consider a book purchase the equivalent of dirty money in the hand of a dirty bouncer. Yes, it is true that you might already have all of the author’s books. So, if you are such the fan that already having the books would imply, then…

5. Open you pages to a signature. It’s okay. Just a little scribble. It doesn’t mean anything. Don’t worry about it. Nobody will find out. Just let him crease that spine and spill a few drops of ink on your pasty white pages. There you go. Doesn’t that feel good? It feels good for him, too. Like a conquest. His greasy fingerprints will live forever on your bookshelf.

6. Ask the author to get a beer after the reading. Especially if this author’s name is Caleb J. Ross.

Photo credit: Designated Disaster

Ben Rubin, On Reading

"I never liked reading growing up. I wanted to, but it always seemed little more than a difficulty, one which was not as enjoyable as those to be found in sport and being with one's friends, as those we discover when learning how to behave and misbehave, usually with smiles on our faces.

Being read to, on the other hand, was always looked forward to with that sense of anticipation; the kind we experience when looking toward a joy, and when felt deeply can almost verge upon anxiety, though this is the side of such anticipation we cannot see. Like a thing behind the sun whose blind fingers invent our bodies.

Yes, that was a thing about the stories that were read to us as children: not only did they have to be read aloud, not only did they have to be read to us, not only did their creatures have no be invoked by another's voice; not just another's voice, but by the voice of one we loved, for fairy tales are filled with magic and thus must be brought to life by incantation. They must be spoken as a spell, and that spell must be filled with love, which by any other name is the deepest magic we know. Not just that, but we had to wait for them. Yes, we had to wait; our anticipation of their arrival was necessary too. It was part of that essential readiness which allowed these new worlds to open within us, that opened us as well, into the world outside, the world into which, even if we entered as a freedom, we stepped intrepidly for it was still so new and strange a thing.

It is often that way. Patience is needed. A certain slowness which allows the event to make its way towards us, and to mean more than a complacency or commonplace when it does so; something special. We must only trust in it, that it will indeed find us, that it knows where live, just as the moon did when we were children, and does still today.

Being read to, yes, I loved being read to. I loved my father's words, even though they were not his own. They were those of someone else transformed by his speaking. And he too was transformed. He read these words, and suddenly he was not just my father. Suddenly he spoke with a mouth of buried moonlight. Then, to read was like an excavation, and it was his voice that would guide our going. To where?

To wherever. It didn't really matter, nor did it matter if that destination was delayed. It was the going that was important. It was the invitation to voyage that ripped us from our rootlets, and helped us begin the long, strange journey we continue today, to see that indeed no everyday is ordinary, to learn to call forth miracles from the tamed circle of the commonplace. What we know now is that it might take a long time to get there. All the better:

In art, no deep magic happens quickly, even if sometimes it seems that way, for you do not stop being an artist merely when you're not making art; something essential is happening even then for it is always happening so long as we are open to it. That is precisely why it is deep, because it takes time to develop, because it is allowed that time. That's one of art's great secrets, and thus too life as well, for everything that happens in art happens in life, happens in the world.

It is just in art that those forces are concentrated and condensed so that we may better feel them, so that we too may be touched deeply by them the way, as children, we were touched deeply by stories that were filled with our parents' breath. Wasn't it their voices that lifted those words from the page, the words then already inseparable from the breath of those we love, so that they could enter into us and become once again human? Wasn't it we who waited at night to be moved by them so that we could move the way the wind moves, so that we could know intimately what it was like when the wind of the world passes into and through a human soul, only remaining for a moment before returning itself again to the deep, illimitable space from whence it came?"


{Ben Rubin is the author and illustrator of When Comes What Darkly Thieves, which is available here. For more information, visit his website here.}

Janet Skeslien Charles, On Reading

"Reading is like breathing. Necessary. Reading shows us different worlds, different times, different ways of thinking. I have read in stages.

Growing up in a plains town of 2000 souls, about as landlocked as possible, I was able to visit Russia through Anna Karenina and the South through The Sound and the Fury. Novels helped me escape my own world.

Reading made me want to create my own job for my own characters. This was the job I wanted -- to create new places with my own people. Reading -- analyzing the techniques of other authors, looking at the motivations of their characters -- helped me write my own stories.

As I get older, instead of escape, I seek understanding. Why do we do what we do? How do we survive terrible things? I learn the answers from novelists and historians in reading their words."


{Janet Skeslien Charles is the author of Moonlight in Odessa. It has been translated into over a dozen languages and was named a top ten debut by Publishers Weekly in 2009. She works as the Programs Manager at the American Library in Paris and enjoys interviewing other authors on her blog.}

Laura Ellen Scott, On Reading

"Reading is travel. I read to go. This probably means that everything is travel writing."


{Laura Ellen Scott's debut novel, Death Wishing, will be released by Ig Publishing in October 2011. Her collection of 21 creepy little stories, Curio, is available for free download from Uncanny Valley Press.}

Emily Rapp, On Reading

"I suffered from insomnia as a child. During those all-night benders of wakefulness, I always reached for The Little House on the Prairie series. Sitting on the windowsill and staring out the dark window, I was comforted – and quite possibly kept awake – by this frontier family’s tales of hardship. Blizzards, famines, crops ruined by neglect or a fatal miscalculation. These were books with real stakes, the only kinds of books I've ever enjoyed reading. I would read three and four books in one night, obsessively plowing through them. And thus my obsessive reading habit began. I still eat books – at least one a week – and whereas I used to read to escape my life, I read now to enrich it. I read to learn what other authors have done differently, sometimes badly. I read to learn about the world through the eyes of another human person telling a story, real or imagined or both. I believe that reading is one of the deepest human connections we make in our fragmented world – being inside the theater of another person’s mind and heart is a unique and terribly human experience. Reading – this authentic connection between author and reader -- is not just an insomniac’s go to activity, it’s also a way of staying human in an increasingly inhumane world."


{Emily Rapp is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir, and many essays and stories. She currently teaches creative writing and literature at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design. Her next book, Dear Dr. Frankenstein: A Love Story, is about her journey with her son Ronan, who is dying of Tay-Sachs disease. Visit her website here, and her blog, Our Little Seal, can be found here.}

Noah Eli Gordon, On Reading

"I’m watching a recent episode of That Metal Show online, co-hosted by Eddie Trunk, Jim Florentine and Don Jamieson, who interview mostly forgotten heavy metal stars. That the show focuses on a genre that peeked in popularity two decades ago fills the whole production with an air of dejection. Every conversation here hinges on nostalgia; it’s all past tense. Tonight, one of their guests is Sebastian Bach, Skid Row’s original singer. In a segment called Stump the Trunk, where audience members ask Eddie Trunk obscure metal trivia questions, Bach suddenly skitters across the set to stand next to Jim Florentine, who is taking questions from the audience. The move seems unscripted, and although Florentine appears a little surprised, he offers Bach the mic.

Okay, I have a question for Eddie. Eddie, you used to work at Atlantic Records, right? Megafocre, part of…they were distributed by Atlantic. Okay, so you signed Ace Frehley. Is that correct? Correct. I would like you to name the three songs that I sing on Ace’s record Trouble Walkin’. Eddie answers, but he can’t name all three, so according to the show’s rules, Bach gets to reach into what’s called Eddie Trunk’s Box of Junk and pull out a prize. These are mostly promo materials, new CDs, box sets, musical biographies. Bach reaches in, rejects the first few things he pulls out. Okay, Jim Norton’s Disciple, I’ll take this, he says, tapping the CD cover. Yeah, that’s a good one, Florentine interrupts, His new CD, Despicable.

Disciple. Despicable. I feel an instant kinship and affection for Bach, who appeared not to have noticed his mistake. Ten years ago, on stage at a karaoke bar, surround by other grad students, I belted out as best I could Skid Row’s power ballad '18 and Life.' What I lacked in skill (any sense of melody and the ability to carry a tune) I more than made up for with gusto—throwing a fist in the air and swinging the mic stand as though each gesture were a giant, tactile exclamation point for the lyrics flashing from white to yellow across the monitors. I didn’t have to read the lyrics. I knew all the words by heart. I still do. Although I wouldn’t have admitted as much when the song was first released in 1989, a year I was dead set on developing what I then thought of as taste—the ability to carry a dual-consciousness, projecting one set of values publicly, while cradling an often incommensurate, personal, and private stance on the very same things. In other words, if it’s popular, it’s obviously bad, so don’t let on that you’re among the unenlightened lumpenproletariat, no matter how much joy you get from singing along to Skid Row in your mother’s basement.

Disciple. Despicable. Bach glanced at the cover of the CD in his hand for just a second, just long enough to read the text there, but he got it wrong, and with Florentine’s correction I felt something else, even if Bach didn’t—shame. Bach’s mistake is the same one I’ve made again and again. In the classroom. At meetings. Among friends. The mistake that’s lead me to shy away from reading publicly anything I haven’t already gone over in private. At the bar, it didn’t matter what words were scrolling across the monitors. I’d already committed the song to memory. It’s all past tense."


{Noah Eli Gordon is the author of several books, including Novel Pictorial Noise (Harper Perennial, 2007), which was selected by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series and chosen for the San Francisco State Poetry Center Book Award, and The Source (Futurepoem Books, 2011), a book marking the results of a multi-year investigation in constrained bibliomancy and ambient research. He's an Assistant Professor in English at CU-Boulder's MFA program in Creative Writing.}

Stephen Graham Jones, On Reading

"The trick with reading is that it's its own end. You eat to get nutrition, you breathe to get air, you jump the fence to get the frisbee, you run to get away from the dog, you lie about how big the dog was to impress somebody, you — you write to try to make the world make sense, at least for a few pages. With reading, though, you read just to read, don't you? Sure, maybe it makes you smarter, or convinces you of this or that, or has tricks you can steal, or makes you laugh or cry or cringe, or challenges you in necessary and surprising ways, or connects you to somebody four hundred years ago, or four hundred miles away, or takes you somewhere so much better than where you are now, and leaves you a different person than you were when you opened that book. But none of that's why you opened that book, is it? You opened it just to read."


{Stephen Graham Jones has ten books published, across a lot the genres — always looking for more, too — and four or five or six more coming, and probably a hundred and thirty or so stories published. He got his PhD from FSU and now teaches in the MFA program at CU Boulder, and, the summer he was twelve years old, after reading every Reader's Digest and National Geographic since 1957, he finally had to resort to reading the labels off cans in his grandparents' pantry, making himself hit each word, just to make it last longer. More at demontheory.net.}

Paul Lisicky, On Reading

"I'm taking note of breaths, phrases, lists and their components. I'm looking out for disjunctions and associations, the pattern of thinking in a paragraph. I'm steeped in the work of the senses: the scrape of a knife against a plate, the smell of mulch dropped on the ground. Sometimes I'm not even taking in the facts I'm supposed to be taking in, the stuff of plot or cause and effect. But I'm inside a current, definitely. I'm a particle in a stream of sound, a wave pushed this way and that. How often does it come to us? Once, twice in a year? But I pick up new books in the hope of getting that back, that raw state where we're simultaneously escaping the world and feeling more present in it."


{Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, and The Burning House. His work appears in recent issues of The Iowa Review, Black Warrior Review, Story Quarterly, The Rumpus, and Lo-Ball. He teaches at NYU. His collection of short prose pieces, Unbuilt Projects, is forthcoming in Fall 2012. See his blog, Mystery Beast, at paullisicky.blogspot.com.}

Richard Thomas, On Reading

"Part of what fuels me as a writer is the world around me. I need to get out into nature, interact with people, ride a subway train, or sit in a coffee shop. But I can't travel to Mars, or go back in time, I don't want to be a serial killer, or live in a van down by the river. So in addition to film and television, I read.

And I read a lot. So far this year, I've read 33 books. Part of that is because of my MFA program, and part of that is because of my book reviews at The Nervous Breakdown, but mostly it's my desire to find new voices, and to revisit old friends. And I read everything, I'm no snob. I'll read books off the NYT bestseller lists and I'll read books from tiny independent presses. Doesn't matter. I read just about every genre out there (sorry romance) from fantasy, science fiction and horror to neo-noir, literary and steampunk. I read big names like Stephen King and John Grisham, as well as new indie authors like Amelia Gray, Mary Miller, Lindsay Hunter, and xTx. I read dark fiction from people like Stephen Graham Jones, Benjamin Percy, Paul Tremblay, Brian Evenson, Craig Clevenger, and Craig Davidson and I read literary masters like George Saunders, Flannery O'Connor, and Mary Gaitskill. I read short story collections, and memoirs and non-fiction too. And don't forget graphic novels.

My point here is that whatever you write, read other genres. You can learn something from every style of writing. Pick up the tension that horror writers need. Study the narrative voices of literary giants. Pour over the technology that science fiction put before you. And learn to create new worlds in fantasy, or build on our own with magical realism.

And if you're not a writer, just a fan of writing, just a reader? First, God Bless you! But also, don't be afraid to expand your horizons. Some of the best books I read in 2010 were by authors that I had never even heard of before. Step outside your comfort zone.

I read for entertainment, I read to experience things I could never do in my real life, and I read to embrace the voices of other authors. There is nothing more intimate and personal than reading a book—the details and emotion fusing with your real life. I read for all of that, and more."


{Richard was the winner of the 2009 ChiZine "Enter the world of Filaria" contest. His first novel, a neo-noir, speculative thriller entitled Transubstantiate, came out in 2010 (Otherworld Publications). He has published over 40 stories online and in print. His work is forthcoming or has appeared in such publications as Shivers VI (Cemetery Dance) with Stephen King and Peter Straub, Warmed and Bound (Velvet Press), Murky Depths, PANK, Pear Noir!, 3:AM Magazine, Word Riot, Dogmatika, Opium, and Vain. In 2011 he was awarded a residency at Writers in the Heartland. Richard was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize and in his spare time writes book reviews at The Nervous Breakdown.}