June 6th, 2011

 
Grub Street News

Welcome to the latest installment of the Grub Street Rag, a newsletter of the Boston literary scene brought to you every Monday from the replica of Grub Street made entirely out of pollen spores. As always, if you are receiving this e-mail in horror, please advance to the bottom of the page to unsubscribe yourself.

Questions? Get them answered.

If you haven't been following the advice column on our blog, The Friday Five-O, it's time to start. Our dream team of advice-givers—Jane Roper, Stuart Horwitz, Allison Adair, Jim Scott, and Jenna Blum—answer writing questions from the community, and they do it with style, panache and laugh-out-loud humor. The comments on their posts say it all: one woman has even printed out a Five-O response and hung it in her cubicle! If you have a question you'd like answered by one of the Five-O team, please email it to whitney@grubstreet.org. Include your name (or a funny alias) and any other biographical info you feel is necessary.

Department of Congratulations, Big League Chew Nostalgia Edition

Lots of great news this month. First up, some student short story and essay news. Since taking his first Grub Street course with Sue Williams, Erik Doughty had his first story published in Stymie Magazine and two more stories published in Annalemma and Word Riot. Robert Oakes's flash story "Fly Away" will appear in the fall issue of Sleet Magazine.   Nina R. Schneider, a long-time Grubbie and Emerson MFA,  published a short creative nonfiction story in the Spring 2011 issue of word~river literary review, published by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.  Nina also recently published a creative nonfiction short in the online journal Long Story Short. Rachel Roth published an essay at The Nation about the Justice Department’s blind spot when it comes to sexual assault of women in prison, and also wrote at MomsRising about a federal court decision condemning the shackling of a pregnant woman in labor in Nashville, Tennessee.  Amin Ahmad has a story coming out in this summer's Missouri Review.  Thomas Gagnon self-published a small book of poetry called Pop Poetry, through Xlibris. Margaret Holmes had a story accepted by Limestone, published at the University of Kentucky, and Grub Street member Todd Washburn just had an essay published in the "Coupling" section of the Boston Globe Magazine on Sunday, June 5.

But that's not all from our students! They have book news too: Sudha Menon's debut non-fiction book, Leading Ladies, Women Who Inspire India, has made it to the longlist of the prestigious Crossword Book Award. Sudha says that for her, "it is a huge milestone because this is an award that has India's best-known and respected authors competing against each other for honours. For a debut author, it is a dream come true." Melissa Coleman's This Life Is in Your Hands has received rave reviews by Janet Maslin in the New York Times, the NYT Book Review, NPR, People, Marie Claire, and more, and it's an Indie Next Pick for May. It has also made it on the New York Times, NEIBA, and National Indie extended bestseller lists.

Our students also have prize news: Tien-Yi Lee was awarded the Missouri Review's Peden Prize for Best Short Story of 2010. Kathy Handley's story, "Jilted," that was published on thenervousbreakdown.com,  won the Word Hustler's Page-To-Screen contest, judged by Sara Gruen.  The story will be considered for screen adaptation.  

Many Grubbies tend to win awards in groups. James Scott and Chip Cheek have both won prestigious 2011 Emerging Artist grants from the St. Botolph Club Foundation. Each receives $2,500 toward their fiction in progress. Sonya Larson,  Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich and Chip Cheek have also been awarded work-study positions at this summer’s Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Not to be outdone by their disciples, our instructors have lots of great news to share as well. Longtime fiction instructor Jane Roper celebrated the publication of her first novel, Eden Lake, with a reading and s'mores extravaganza in Somerville. You may know Jane as the brilliant mom behind Baby Squared, a blog on Babble.com about the adventures and misadventures in parenting twins; her memoir on the same topic will be published by St. Martin’s Press in 2012. Fairytale instructor KL Pereira just had a flash fairy tale published in The Medulla Review. KL says she's excited about "the strong possibility and market for flash fairy tales," and encourages interested students to take one of her two Grub fairytale classes this summer: Monsters and Mayhem and Writing Horror, Making Monsters. Instructor and Muse presenter Jamie Cat Callan's new book Bonjour, Happiness! Secrets to Finding you Joie de Vivre has just been released by Kensington/Citadel. Another Muse presenter, Marie Myunk-Ok Lee, just had her first publication with The Atlantic, an excerpt from her novel-in-progress. Grub Instructor Celeste Ng received a Pushcart Prize for her story "Girls, At Play," which was originally published in the Fall 2010 issue of The Bellevue Literary Review.  The story will be reprinted in the Pushcart Prize XXXVI Best of the Small Presses (2012) anthology this fall. Cam Terwilliger has a bundle of stories coming out shortly from Narrative, Quick Fiction, The Literary Review, Lake Effect, and The Good Men Project. And last but not least, instructor Ogi Ogas has a new science nonfiction book out from Penguin, A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Greatest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire. Newsweek called it "the most intensive study on sex since the days of Alfred Kinsey." We know this book is going to be a huge hit! If you want to follow in Ogi's footsteps, be sure to check out his upcoming seminar, Provoking Thought: Selling and Writing A Book of Ideas.

Finally, Grub Street wants to give a big shout out to the brand new Hinge Literary Center in North Carolina. Started by Warren Wilson MFA-grad Ross White, the center opened recently and is modelled in part on Grub Street! Relocated Grubbie Jamie Chambliss has also been involved in its creation. We are so proud, and wish them success in their new literary endeavor.

Congratulations to all--it's so exciting to see so many great stories pouring in every month.

Do you have writing news and want to be featured in the DoC? The first Monday of every month, we feature Grub Street members who have sent their good news to whitney@grubstreet.org. To be included, please send Whitney an email with information about your publication, award or fellowship. Limit your announcement to 60 words or less. Extra credit if the announcement is written in the third person, which is good practice for your writing anyway.

Our Daily Best

• Let Illicit Passion teach you how to line edit
• Survival tips for your first year as a writer
• Agent and editor advice: the good, the bad and the ugly
• Friday Five-O: Seven Irrational Beliefs about Writing
  

Cheers,
Whitney, Sonya, Chris, Chip, and Eve

Grub Events

In addition to our ongoing workshops, Grub Street offers numerous writing-related events around town. See our website for a long-term view of all we do.

WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Saturday, June 11th, 10:00am-5:00pm, The Time of Your Life
One of the keys to success in writing is using your time properly. That can be tough when you have a job, family, home or other major commitments – and when occupational hazards like procrastination and writer’s block rear their ugly heads. The good news is that all of these issues can be addressed once you’ve figured out the root causes of your time “issues” and applied some practical strategies to address them. (Hint: it’s not that you’re lazy or uncommitted—so stop blaming yourself! Another hint: it is not so difficult to create and stick to a time “budget” and schedule that will help you achieve your goals.) Author Hillary Rettig (The Lifelong Activist) will help you achieve these goals with two three-hour seminars offered on the same day: “Time Management” first, then a lunch break, then “Stop Procrastinating!” The best news of all is that once a writer actually starts solving his or her procrastination problems or blocks and starts managing his/her time better, change can happen amazingly fast!
Instructor: Hillary Rettig
Sorry, this class is sold out. Please click here to be put on a waiting list.

WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Saturday-Sunday, June 11-12th, 10:00am-5:00pm, Line-by-Line
John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is the perfect novel. Each line is a model of economy, crafted with precision. On the first day of this class, we'll explore how Steinbeck structured his work to ensure each scene, every last line, had a purpose, and how it all came together to support one of the most memorable endings in literature. The following day, we'll apply the lessons learned from Steinbeck to the students' own work. Students should come to class with the novel, having read it beforehand, and email up to ten pages of their work-in-progress to be shared with the class.
Instructor: Amy MacKinnon
$220.00/$195.00 members, Grub Street HQ. Register online now.

WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Saturday, June 11th, 10:00am-5:00pm, Characterization
The creation of compelling, vivid characters is the foundation of any successful work of fiction. Whether you’re an experienced author or just getting started, this one-day seminar on character-building techniques will help you move forward as a writer. Through a wide array of readings – from Raymond Carver to Junot Diaz, Virginia Woolf to Z.Z. Packer – we will examine the specific strategies authors use to bring their characters to life. But the primary focus of the seminar will be to practice these strategies in our own work. We will practice both “off the page” techniques used to achieve a nuanced understanding of our characters, as well as “on the page” techniques used to convey that complex humanity to our readers. By the end of the course, you will have a dramatically expanded toolbox for the creation of believable, engaging, and memorable characters in your fiction.
Instructor: Adam Stumacher
*2 spots left* $115.00/$95.00 members, Grub Street HQ. Register online now.

WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Saturday, June 11th, 10:00am-5:00pm, Jumpstart Your Writing-- Creative Nonfiction Focus
This one-day weekend version of one of our most popular courses has a very clear mission: spend the day writing. Through a series of fun directed writing exercises, we will explore the terrain of creative non-fiction (no five-paragraph essays here!) and some poetry: mining for material, constructing characters and settings, shaping vivid dialogue, understanding point of view, exploring the many forms of non-fiction today, and finding your voice.
Instructor: Jennifer De Leon
Sorry, this class is sold out. Please click here to be put on a waiting list. $115.00/$95.00 members, Grub Street HQ.

WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Sunday, June 12th, 10:00am-5:00pm, How to Plan, Write, and Develop a Book
Mary Carroll Moore, award-winning author of 13 books in three genres and a PEN/Faulkner nominee, will guide you through a simple and successful book-writing process that can take your book from idea to publication, a process using a three-act structure that eases organization and makes a manuscript vivid and engaging to readers.
Sorry, this class is sold out. Please click here to be put on a waiting list. $115.00/$95.00 members, Grub Street HQ.

LUNCHTIME WRITING: Wednesday, June 15th, 12:30-1:15pm, Brown Bag Lunch Series
Do you work downtown and want to fit some writing into your day? Or do you have a schedule that gives you free afternoons instead of evenings? Bring your lunch and come on over to Grub Street for a Brown Bag Writing Workshop. For 45 minutes, you’ll meet fellow writers and get your creative juices flowing with some cool writing exercises. Led by one of our award-winning instructors or ambassadors. Best of all, you’ll leave lunch with some new ideas to ponder for the rest of your day, and beyond. No need to RSVP-- just come!
Instructor: Jennifer Elmore
Level: For Everyone
FREE, Grub Street HQ. Register online now.

WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Saturday, June 18th, 10:00am-5:00pm, Read, Publish: Polish and Place your Book Reviews
Itching to write but unsure where to start? Why not turn the last good book you've read into your first published piece of writing? Contrary to what you may have heard, book reviews are flourishing online and, yes, in print. In this day-long workshop John Cotter, Founding Editor of Open Letters Monthly, will talk participants through the good and bad -- the paying and the non-paying-but-prestigious -- in the world of book review publication, from the TLS to The Second Pass and The Quarterly Conversation. Part one of the class will be an overview of the reviewing world, part two will be an in-depth discussion about what editors to approach and how to approach them, and in part three each participant will polish one of their own reviews to publication-quality.
Instructor: John Cotter
$115/$95 members, Grub Street HQ. Register online now.

WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Saturday, June 18th, 10:00am-5:00pm, Our Lives in the Middle AgesThis is a workshop for writers of a certain (middle) age, according to their own definition. Based partly on James Atlas’ book My Life in the Middle Ages, and partly on the instructor’s own experience in facing ‘50’ and beyond, this session will explore how we can use the universal themes of aging—letting go, dealing with physical illness, the earning of hard-earned wisdom, and laughing at our own foibles—as the raw material for personal essays, memoir vignettes, radio commentaries, etc. In this day-long session, we will examine the work of writers such as Nora Ephron, David Sedaris and others, and then write on a series of prompts, which touch on themes of growing older and (hopefully) wiser. We will share ideas to strengthen and further develop these drafts. Finally, we’ll share ideas about getting our work ‘out there’ through publication in various media, including literary journals, newspapers, and on-line publications.
Instructor: Judah Leblang
$115/$95 members, Grub Street HQ. Register online now.

WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Sunday, June 19th, 10:00am-5:00pm, From Blog Post to Personal EssayThe personal blog is an incredibly popular and effective way for a writer to find his or her voice—but how do you move beyond blog posts to rich, complex, publishable personal essays? With the current cultural focus on personal writing, the essay, too, is “hot” right now—but where do ideas that go beyond navel-gazing come from? In the blog you write (or the blog you’ve imagined) you already have a record of the ideas you find most interesting. The next step is to develop them into fully realized literary explorations, and in this one-night seminar we’ll discuss how to do just that. Appropriate for the blogger and the aspiring essayist alike, the seminar will cover the narrative techniques established essayists like Didion, Lopate, and Dillard use to, in the words of Aldous Huxley, “look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description." We’ll discuss strategies for identifying those potential keyholes and how to use different structural models to produce writing with the simultaneous acuity and complexity that characterizes great personal essays. A reading packet will be distributed, containing both how-to craft articles and examples of the form both classic and modern.
Instructor: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
*2 spots left*, $115/$95 members, Grub Street HQ. Register online now.

Be sure to check out our website for a comprehensive view of upcoming events.

Spreading the Love

Grub Street wants to promote YOU! Please send events for consideration to whitney@grubstreet.org. Bonus points and undying gratitude for submitting your event info in the same format as the events below. Our apologies in advance if we cannot fit you in. Please note that we do the best we can to evaluate requests, and do privilege requests from members, but cannot be held responsible for the quality of these events and programs or the legitimacy of contests. We expect that readers will do their own due diligence before sending their work or their money to any individual or organization.

--MAGAZINE LAUNCH and READING: Wednesday, June 6th, 7pm, The Common Literary Magazine with Ilan Stavans and Sabina Murray
Celebrate the first issue of the new literary magazine The Common with Ilan Stavans and Sabina Murray. Finding the extraordinary in the common has long been the mission of literature. Inspired by this mission and the role of the town common, a public gathering place for the display and exchange of ideas, The Common seeks to recapture an old idea. The Common publishes fiction, essays, poetry, documentary vignettes, and images that embody particular times and places both real and imagined; from deserts to teeming ports; from Winnipeg to Beijing; from Earth to the Moon: literature and art powerful enough to reach from there to here. In short, we seek a modern sense of place.
FREE, Porter Square Books

--READING AND PERFORMANCE: Monday, June 13th, 7pm, Funny as a Crutch
The Drum Literary Magazine presents “Funny As a Crutch,” a performance of dirty limericks, educational raps, recipes for cooking raccoon, Dungeons & Dragons-inspired poetry, children's stories that shouldn't be read to children, and fiction about the miracle of motherhood as seen from the bottom of a martini. Performed by Massachusetts, Vermont and Maine residents Kevin Kennedy, Ethan Gilsdorf, David Petrie, Carol Hammond, and Jeff Stern. Presented by The Drum (http://www.drumlitmag.com/), the “literary magazine for your ears.” $5 donation encouraged, The Enormous Room, 567 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA.

--READING AND BOOK PARTY: Tuesday, June 14th, 7:00pm, Michelle Toth
Harvard Book Store and Grub Street are very pleased to welcome Harvard Business School graduate and debut novelist Michelle Toth as she reads from Annie Begins. Annie Thompson is as brilliant in business as she is disastrous in relationships. It’s the dawn of the dot-com boom, and Annie is determined to make it big. But her love life takes a turn for the unexpected when her young, terminally ill cousin, April, makes it her mission to find Annie a husband. The fiancé April picks is definitely not the kind of man Annie would have chosen. Now, Annie has to ask herself what exactly she wants and values most deeply in a man—and in herself. Join co-sponsors Grub Street and Michelle at Grafton Street Pub after the reading (buy a book at the reading, get a free drink!)
FREE, Harvard Book Store, 1256 Mass. Ave.

--READING(S): Monday, June 13th and Tuesday, June 14th, 7pm each night, Aimee Bender and Jim Shepard
It's a literary double header brought to you by our friends at Newtonville Books. Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, reads on Monday night. Come back on Tuesday to hear Jim Shepard read from his new collection, You Think That's Bad.
FREE, Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newton.  www.newtonvillebooks.com

WORKSHOP: Thursdays, 6:30-9pm starting June 30th, Poetry and Pictures
Explore the MFA collections to find inspiration and content for your writing. Discover the deep relationships between visual art and poetry. The class includes presentations of artists and poets, group discussions, and a personalized tour of the galleries. Develop a polished poem or short prose and complete your project by creating an optional audio/video performance of your written work accompanied by fine art imagery or your personal photography.
$225 MFA members / $285 non-members. mfa.org.