July 5th, 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 (except when we are roasting marshmallows on used sparkler sticks) by the road bike pack horses at Grub Street's world headquarters. As always, if you are receiving this e-mail in horror, please advance to the bottom of the page to unsubscribe yourself.

Summer Weekend, Summer Writing

If you scroll down to the "Grub Events" section, you'll see that there are a lot of great workshops coming up on the weekend of July 9th - 10th. Feeling the need to revise? Michelle Hoover's "Revision Bootcamp " is guaranteed to whip your stories into shape. Feeling emotional? Take "Writing Literary Darkness" and turn that intensity into horror or high drama. And no matter what size writing suits you best, we've got a class for you: "Sonnet Generator" (size extra-small), "Flash Fiction Marathon" (small), "Structure as Solution: Form and the Personal Essay" (husky), and "Revision Bootcamp" (big and tall).

Department of Congratulations, As American As A Deep-Fried Burger Edition

New month, new exciting publication news from our students, friends and members! First up, more great news coming out of our workshops. Department-of-Congratulations regular Ethan Gilsdorf has not one but two students with great news to share. Molly Howes got a piece in the coveted New York Times Modern Love column, thanks in part to meeting Daniel Jones at the Muse & the Marketplace conference and partly from taking Ethan's Narrative Nonfiction class this winter, where she workshopped the essay. Another of Ethan's students, Hilary Levey Friedman, who took his "How to Pitch" class, placed a story on beauty pageants in the Boston Globe Magazine. Since taking a course with Mike Marano, once and future grubbie Adam Renn Olenn has had his first story accepted for publication in the annual anthology Dead Calm: Crime Stories by New England Writers, published by Level Best Books, which was founded by Grub instructor Kate Flora. After several stints as classmates in Grub's robust daytime fiction program, Barbara Bielinski Hermansen and Stephanie Thurrott are paired again, this time for publication in Blink Ink's issue 7 with their stories "Marking Turf" and "Keeping Score," respectively. And last in the student news section, two Grubbies wrote in to tell us about their recent publications in The Drum. Dawn Dorland Perry, bound this fall for the MFA program at the University of Maryland, is excited that her flash fiction piece, "Do Us Part," was one of five selected by The Drum editors from stories recorded at the Muse conference this May!  The audio for her piece goes live this week along with four other winning entries.  Dawn started "Do Us Part" as a one-sentence story for Stace Budzko's 6 weeks, 6 Stories and honed it in Adam Stumacher's Fiction II. And Nadine Lynn Johnstone’s flash piece "How to Meet Your Future Husband (And Almost Scare Him Away)" was also published in The Drum, under her maiden name, Kenney. Nadine was inspired to write the story in Michelle Seaton's 2010 Master Memoir class, and it is an excerpt of her memoir-turned-autobiographical-novel, Distance. The other winning Grubbies from the Muse sessions were Catherine Elcik, Michelle Seaton, and Laura Packer.

There's lots of news from our instructors and members as well. Muse 2011 presenter Gary Braver's eighth novel, Tunnel Vision, was published on June 21st. Short humorist Steven Brykman just had an article published in the June issue of Boston Magazine. The magazine forced him to undergo a multitude of local tours which resulted in his piece entitled "My Day as a Tourist." PEN Discovery Award winner Rosie Sultan's novel Helen Keller In Love will be published by Viking/Penguin in the summer of 2012. Iris Gomez's novel Try To Remember just won an International Latino Book Award Honorable Mention in the Popular Fiction category. Grubbie Robert Levine has a roundup review of three recent books by D.C.-area poets in the Spring/Summer 2011 issue of Poet Lore, and a review of Edward Hirsch's volume of selected poetry The Living Fire forthcoming in The Used Furniture Review. Lilly Deng, a new Grubbie, completed the Iowa Writer's Workshop Summer Session in Poetry, published a poem "Love Songs to My Mother" in Blue Moon Literary & Art Review, and is a new contributor to Ink Node. Steve Macone had a cartoon published at Salon.com. Tom Elliott’s essay on masculinity, competence and bondage, “You’ll Have to Ask the Mister,” took third place in The Baltimore Review’s creative nonfiction competition. Harriet Segal has a new novel that she is publishing independently as an eBook.  The Expatriate is the story of an American woman who leaves her native Boston in the 1930s to study art history at Oxford and is caught in the maelstrom of World War II.  Segal recently moved to the Boston area from New York, and is the author of four previous traditionally published novels: Susquehanna, Catch the Wind, Shadow Mountain, and The Skylarks' Song. Grubbie Victoria Fortune had an essay accepted by The Sun. It will appear in the Readers Write section of the August edition. Amy Rodriguez horrified even the editors of babble with the medical mishaps at her daughter's birth. They offered her sympathy and then published her essay, "Not in the Birth Plan," where you can read what she learned from the experience. Also, Amy is thrilled to start blogging for Psychology Today, which asked her to share her first-person narratives on parenting and mental health. And last but certainly not least, Jessica Keener's story, "Bird of Grief," was selected as a feature story of the month in June with author interview at Connotation Press. The story is part of her just completed collection Women In Bed.

A huge sparkly fireworks display of congratulations to all! Keep the good news coming.

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 fill out our brand new Congratulations Form (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/congratulations) or kick it old school and 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.

Missed the Muse? Let Ron Carlson Inspire You Now.

If you were at the Muse, you heard Ron Carlson's provocative keynote speech, but if you missed it (or if you want to hear it again like it was the first time), check out the video of the speech posted on our Vimeo site for the next two weeks. Special thanks to Ron, both for giving the speech in the first place and for allowing us to share it online for a while.

Our Daily Best

• The Virgins are back, this time with a guide to surviving workshop critique
• Leslie Greffenius defamiliarizes herself with things
• SHORT SHARP SHOCK: Plays on the Short Form in Prose & Verse
• Becky Tuch says what we're all thinking: why write?
• Friday Five-O helps you suss out which feedback to keep, which feedback to dump
  

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, July 9th, 10:00am-5:00pm, Structure as Solution: Form and the Personal Essay
The personal essay comes in many different forms, and each of these forms offers its own advantages to the writer. In fact, the choice of structure can help save the essayist, pushing her ideas to greater depth and complexity. Changing the structure of an essay can even help disguise its weaknesses and enhance its strengths. But how do you know what structures are out there, and which would help your essay? Appropriate for both the experienced and aspiring essayist alike, the seminar will cover the wide array of structures established essayists like Didion, Lopate, and Ballantine use to, in the words of Aldous Huxley, “look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description." A reading packet will be distributed, containing both how-to craft articles and examples of the form both classic and modern. We’ll use this packet to practice identifying what structures—and “keyholes”—are at work in different essays. Then comes the fun part: using the essay ideas you bring in, we’ll practice brainstorming how an essay idea might look if realized through different structures. With this exercise, one vague idea can turn into the inspiration for several tightly crafted kernels of essays just waiting to be realized.
Instructor: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
$115/$95.00 members, Grub Street HQ. Register Now.

WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Saturday-Sunday, July 9-10th, 10:00am-5:00pm, Revision Bootcamp
Working with Robert Boswell's concept of "transitional drafts," students will receive feedback on their work in small groups before beginning a step-by-step revision process. We will start with the deeper concerns of theme, structure, character, and conflict, and move on to issues in setting, dialogue, pacing, and refining our sentence style. At the end of the weekend, students will have made their way through several revisions and be closer to a completed story. We will spend the majority of our time doing the individual work of revising, so please bring your laptops if you regularly write at a computer and/or a journal if you write by hand. To start us off, please also bring five copies a short story or novel excerpt (first chapter preferred) that you are ready to revise and willing to share.
Instructor: Michelle Hoover
$220/$195 members, Grub Street HQ. Register Now.

WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Saturday, July 9th, 10:00am-5:00pm, The Unreliable Narrator in Fiction
The unreliable narrator, with his deceits and his confessions, with his justifications and evasions, is one of fiction-writing’s most venerable traditions, and one in which we’ve all probably dabbled ourselves, whether or not we know it. This one-night seminar will deal in isolating and exploring the various ways in which a first-person narrator can be made unreliable (there are many different types besides the scoundrel in Lolita); how unreliability can be used as a tool to draw more vivid characters, weave more complex plots, and complicate the interface of reader and writer; and how for better or for worse, for evil or for good, we are all unreliable narrators of our own experience, so why should our characters be any different, inextricably linked to our selves as they are? Discover how sometimes to lie to your reader is a way to expedite the truth. Or lie, if you want, for the sheer joy of lying. Lie, because that’s what writers do.
Instructor: Adrian Van Young
$115/$95.00 members, Grub Street HQ. Register Now.

WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Saturday, July 9th, 10:00am-5:00pm, Flash Fiction Marathon
The market for flash fiction is booming, and this seminar is perfect for writers ready to crank out some new short-short stories. At the end of the day, you’ll walk away with a brand new assortment of stories, each created through writing exercises designed to unleash your flash fiction genius. The seminar will also feature discussion of published flash fiction—- which we’ll draw inspiration from—- as well as feedback on your own work.
Instructor: Cam Terwilliger
$115/$95.00 members, Grub Street HQ. Register Now.

WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Sunday, July 10th, 10:00am-5:00pm, Writing Literary Darkness Tastefully and Effectively
The one-day version of the popular weekend seminar! Writing a dark domestic drama but can’t quite make the conflict pop? Penning a tale of the supernatural that wants to be taken seriously? Inhabiting a villain or scoundrel who refuses to be plausible? This weekend workshop is geared towards writing from the dark side without the melodrama or the fatal constriction of genre. By looking at the dark successes of some of our best writers, and through lively in-class exercises in everything from non-linear narrative structure to writing first-person unreliability, you will become a seasoned hand in writing violence, both physical andemotional, creating nuanced, relatable villains, mastering the finer points of dark and uncanny description, and making the dark hopes and desires of your characters seethe upon the page, among other strange things not dreamt of in our philosophy.
Instructor: Adrian Van Young
$115/$95.00 members, Grub Street HQ. Register Now.

WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Sunday, July 10th, 10:00am-5:00pm, Sonnet Generator
Have you always wanted to write a sonnet but didn't know how to start? Or maybe you started and then got bogged down somewhere around the sixth line, when the rhyme scheme became daunting. This class is for you. In the morning we will follow an exercise designed to produce a "modern sonnet," and in the afternoon an exercise will guide us in writing a sonnet with borrowed end-rhyme. We will also read published sonnets, both modern and traditional. As time allows, we may critique each other's poems, but the emphasis will be writing. All levels welcome. Bring to class one or two of your favorite sonnets that use end rhyme.
Instructor: Wendy Mnookin
$115/$95.00 members, Grub Street HQ. Register Now.

WEEKEND WORKSHOP: Sunday, July 10th, 10:00am-5:00pm, Jumpstart Your Blog
A blog can be a great way to market yourself, build an audience, and exercise those creative impulses. Whether you're looking to breathe life back into an already established blog or have been wanting to start one and need a push, this class will offer guidance for writing posts others will want to read. You'll learn what makes a successful blog, read examples from the blogosphere, and begin crafting a plan that will include ways to build your audience. You'll also practice different types of posts with in-class writing exercises that will be workshopped in large and small groups. The goal is to leave with some solid beginnings (possibly finished posts), inspiration, and a strategy for success.
Instructor: Amy Marcott
$115/$95.00 members, Grub Street HQ. Register Now.

WEEK-LONG INTENSIVE: Monday, July 11th - Friday, July 15th, 1-4pm, Week of Historical Fiction
Spend a week bringing your historical fiction to life. In this class, we’ll learn how to conduct research, how to organize it into a plot, and how to transmute all this material into compelling scenes and characters. Additionally, the class will offer students a chance to workshop historical fiction in progress, receiving feedback geared specifically to the genre.
Instructor: Cam Terwilliger
$255/$230 members, Grub Street HQ. Register 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.

--READING: Wednesday, July 6th, 7pm, Dawn Tripp reading from Game of Secrets
Muse 2011 presenter Dawn Tripp is the author of Moon Tide and The Season of Open Water, for which she won the Massachusetts Book Award. Inher latest novel, she tells the story of a fifty-year-old murder and the secrets that interweave two families’ tragic pasts. Howard Frank Mosher calls it “a masterwork.”
FREE, Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard Street, Coolidge Corner, Brookline, Massachusetts

--GRUB STREET SOUTH: Wednesday, July 6th, 7pm, Getting Emotional: Writing the Heart Without Slipping into Syrup
The visiting instructor is Robin Black, author of If ILoved You, I Would Tell You This. Black’s collection of short stories has gathered robust praise from leading publications and was among the 2010 finalists for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. The topic is “Getting Emotional: Writing the Heart without Slipping into Syrup.” The workshop will address how so much of fiction involves issues that run the danger of seeming overly-sentimental. What are some tricks for writing moving fiction that never crosses the line into being sappy? The workshop will look at everything from the sorts of characters you include to the structures of the sentences you use. Reservations are requested. Please call Buttonwood at 1-781-383-2665 to reserve.
FREE, Buttonwood Books & Toys, Shaw’s Plaza, Rt.3A, Cohasset.

--CHILDREN'S BOOK READING: Saturday, July 9, 9:30 - 10:30 a.m., Beth Raisner Glass
Grub Street teacher and manuscript consultant, Beth Raisner Glass will read from her new picture book, Blue Ribbon Dad, and sign copies at the "Read to Ride" event at the Yogibo Store in Braintree.
Read to Ride is a program designed to incentivize children to read during the summer months with the chance to win a bike and helmet for every book they complete within the weeks of the program. See www.bethglass.com for more details!
Yogibo Store, South Shore Plaza, Braintree, MA

--READING: Tuesday, July 12th, 7pm, U35 Poetry Reading Series with Ben Berman, Jillian Saucier and C. M. Ohge.
U35 is a bi-monthly reading series for poets under the age of thirty five. Conceived as a space for greater community as well as diversity of voice and vision for young poets, U35 was selected as one of 2010’s ten best event series by the Boston Globe. On Tuesday, July 12th the featured readers will be Jillian Saucier, C. M. Ohge and Grub instructor Ben Berman.
FREE, The Marliave Restaurant and Bar, 2nd Floor 10 Bosworth Street, Boston (MBTA: Park Street)

--READING: Wednesday, July 13th, 7p, Rooms Down the Hallway series, @ the hallway gallery, Jamaica Plain
Rooms Down the Hallway presents... A Midsummer Night's Read!  Featuring flash nonfiction from Carpentrix Nina MacLaughlin, as well as an excerpt from The Fifty-First State by Lisa Borders, Grub instructor and local fictionist extraordinaire.  Dawn Dorland Perry, series host, will also read her essay "Why I Write," featured recently on the Grub Daily.  chocolate -- nips of wine -- hand-picked music.  Come celebrate an evening of local words and neighborhood culture.  A brief Q & A with the authors will follow this reading.
FREE,  the hallway gallery, 66a South Street, Jamaica Plain // thehallwayjp.com

--READING: Thursday, July 14, 7PM, Lynne Griffin and Alethea Black
Two Muse 2011 presenters together again! Lynne Griffin, author of Sea Escape, and Alethea Black, author of I Knew You'd Be Lovely.
FREE, Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut St., Newton.  www.newtonvillebooks.com