February 27th, 2012
"Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers."
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Welcome to the latest installment of the Grub Street Rag, a newsletter of the Boston literary scene brought to you every Monday from the Lederhosen critics at Grub Street's World Headquarters. As always, if you are receiving this email in horror, please advance to the bottom of the page to unsubscribe yourself.
Have you been meaning to sponsor an item for Grub Street's new home? So far, over 250 donors have contributed to our campaign, naming items from markers to refrigerators. We'll be showing off the nameplates at our Grub Goes...Up party on March 30th, and if you want to see your name in all its glory that night, sponsor an item by March 10th. Plenty of items are still available at all donation levels. Thank you for helping to make Grub Street an inspiring community center.
Over 140 new workshops have been added this spring, from classes in short fiction and non-fiction to new classes on self-publishing, the graphic novel, writing suspense, and much more. Classes fill quickly-- check them out.
The 9,000+ writers planning to descend on Chicago this week for the AWP conference have a lot of session options from which to choose. Because we know you love the presenters Grub selects for its programs, we’ve combed through the many hundreds of panels and readings and created a list of those that feature Grub instructors, guest authors, staff and students. We’ve then placed each of these panels on the “Grubbie Scale” from 1 – 10; the higher the number, the "Grubbier" the panel. Panelists who are current instructors and staff get 2 points; Muse conference presenters and visiting seminar leaders get 1 point. We found that there’s at least one Grubby option for every session, which we hope makes this guide the only one you’ll need to feel at home in the Windy City. Check out the full guide here: http://grubdaily.org/?p=4723.
We're revising our address, and we want you to help us celebrate. The literary party of the year takes place on Friday, March 30th, and tickets are selling fast. There'll be celebrity author bartenders, music, literary-themed drinks and appetizers, and word game throwdowns all night long. The fun doesn't wait until sunset, though: we'll also have daytime activities: tea and tours, family friendly activities, etc. Buy your tickets today.
Our new space needs a Muse! We're actively seeking ideas from the community. To find out what we mean, visit our blog at http://grubdaily.org/?p=4722.
The application period is now open for Grub Street's 2012 Summer Teen Fellowship. The fellowship is a three-week creative writing program open to all 9th-12th graders in the Boston area and will be taking place from July 16th to August 2nd. This is a great opportunity for all aspiring writers, with intensive writing workshops, visits from established authors and publishing professionals, and much more. The program is free for attendees and pays all participating students a stipend for their time spent as working writers. The deadline to apply is Friday, April 6th at 12:00pm. For more information and to apply please click here.
Cheers,
Whitney, Sonya, Eve, Chris, Rowan and Sean
The P.S.: Don't forget: the first of our Winter Term Open Houses takes place tonight from 5:30-6:3opm at Grub Street Headquarters (160 Boylston Street). See you there!
For the next two months, The Rag will be spotlighting sessions from our annual conference, The Muse and the Marketplace. We hope you’ll be able to enjoy these sessions in person the weekend of May 5th & 6th at the Park Plaza Hotel. For all details, including registration info, go to www.museandthemarketplace.com.
"Muse" Spotlight: This is Miroslav Penkov’s first year as a Muse and the Marketplace presenter. On Saturday, May 5th, he will be offering the all-important “Reading Like a Writer” session, in which he will lead a discussion of three classic short stories in an attempt to understand how they are put together. The discussion will investigate the authorial decisions regarding the use of point of view, setting, tension buildup, conflict escalation, confrontation, and character change. Mr. Penkov’s stories have won The Southern Review’s Eudora Welty Prize and have appeared inA Public Space, One Story, Orion, The Sunday Times, Granta Online, The Best American Short Stories 2008, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012. Author of the internationally acclaimed East of the West: A Country in Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), he teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas, where he is a fiction editor for the American Literary Review. He was born in Bulgaria and received an MFA from the University of Arkansas.
Marketplace Spotlight: We are looking forward to meeting Jamison Stoltz, a senior editor at Grove/Atlantic, and another new face at the 2012 conference. He will be meeting with writers in the Manuscript Mart on both Saturday and Sunday. Jamison edits nonfiction – recent titles include Rez Life by David Treuer, Paradise Lust by Brook Wilensky-Lanford, and Harlem by Jonathan Gill – and mysteries and thrillers, including Donna Leon’s Commissario Guido Brunetti series and the novels of Deon Meyer, Mike Lawson, and Mark Haskell Smith. Other notable books he has edited include The American Home Front by Alistair Cooke, Mint Condition by Dave Jamieson, The Fighter’s Heart by Sam Sheridan, and the original publication of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Before joining Grove/Atlantic, he worked at the William Morris Agency in London and New York, and in publicity at Houghton Mifflin in New York.
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.
LUNCHTIME WRITING: Wednesday, February 29th, 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 – a series recently profiled in the Boston Globe. 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: Tom Meek
FREE, Grub Street HQ.
DAYTIME SEMINAR: Friday, March 2nd, 11:00am-2:00pm, The Messy Essay
Don't have time to take Six Weeks, Six Essays? Come to this workshop where we'll tackle the joys and pitfalls of essay writing. The first half of the course will be spent looking at the essay form and dissecting a few essays to see what makes them tick. Next, we'll take a look at our own essay attempts, talk about the challenges that come up when trying to structure the essay, and discuss tools and ideas to help take your work-in-progress or ideas to the next level. Bring an essay you are working on, or just your ideas.
Instructor: Amy Yelin
$65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ.
READING SERIES: Friday, March 9th, 7-8pm, Grub Street Reading Series
Do you want a chance to read your work out loud? Join the new Grub Street Reading Series for a fun open mic event and practice the art of reading to an audience. This event is open to the public, and limited to 10 readers. Sign-up begins at 6:30pm. Readings will run from 7:00pm to 8:00pm. This is a great opportunity for any members interested in sharing their work and connecting with other writers. For more information or to join the reading series mailing list, please email sean@grubstreet.org.
LECTURE: Tuesday, March 13th, 6:30-8:30pm, Agents For Today's Author: Jason Allen Ashlock
Since founding Movable Type in the spring of 2009, Jason has been a leading voice for change in the agenting community, advocating for "radical mediation," a more expansive and digitally responsible form of representation and creative management. Jason believes that with greater access to production, distribution and marketing tools, authors are poised to be more successful than ever before--but they are also at greater risk of choosing short-term gratification over long-term success. Jason will speak for 45 minutes about the value of literary agent as radical mediator, and then take questions.
Instructor: Jason Ashlock
FREE, Cambridge YMCA Theater.
SEMINAR: Monday, March 19th, 6:15-9:15pm, Writing the Big Moments
We all have them: those events in our lives that seem to change everything. Oftentimes we find ourselves retelling these personal stories, until the retelling itself becomes part of the narrative of our lives. But when we sit down to write about those milestones, and make them the centerpiece of our essays or memoirs, how do we do so most effectively? It’s not enough to have had these experiences; we need to learn how to render them in the most vivid way. In this seminar we will focus not only on the big moments but also on the smaller moments around them, looking with a fresh eye to create a context from which we can deliver our most powerful material. We will use writing prompts and short published pieces, along with the supportive environment of our class, to help bring balance and strength to our work.
Instructor: Rita Zoey Chin
*2 spots left* $65/$50 members, Grub Street HQ.
SEMINAR: Friday, March 16th 7:00pm to 9:00pm, March Member Mixer
Join us on Friday, March 16th for an exclusive member only party from 7:00pm to 9:00pm at Grub Street Headquarters. A wonderful way to kick-off your St. Patrick ’s Day weekend! This is a fun opportunity to meet other Grubbies and connect outside of the classroom. Wine, beer, soda, and light snacks will be provided as well as the company of your fellow Grubbies. And did we mention Irish literary themed trivia?
MUST BE A CURRENT GRUB STREET MEMBER TO ATTEND. MEMBERS MAY BRING FRIENDS.
For more information or to join the reading series mailing list, please email sean@grubstreet.org.
SEMINAR: Sunday, March 18th, 10:30am-5:30pm, Writing the Novella
Whether it's Heart of Darkness or Breakfast at Tiffany's, some of our favorite books are novellas, even if they're not always defined as such. For some Goldilocks-channeling writers, the novella is the perfect fit: not too long, not too short. In this class, we will look at several classic and recent examples of the form in order to further understand the structures and patterns of literature's middle child. Through discussion, we will try to formulate a list of characteristics of the novella as well as some theories as to why this wonderful form is often maligned, and why it was described by Stephen King as "an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic." Exercises will focus on creating a framework and initial scenes for students' own novellas. Students should come to class having read Denis Johnson's Train Dreams.
Instructor: James Scott
$115/$95 members, Grub Street HQ.
Be sure to check out our website for a comprehensive view of upcoming events.
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.
--PREMIERE: Friday, March 1st, 7:30pm, Party Like It's A Verb World Premiere
With a dry, absurd humor and a stripped-down indie aesthetic, Party Like It’s a Verb is a film about people who have cast the illusion of romance aside for a while. A promising first feature from writer/director Rob Peyrebrune, the film presents a unique, off-beat view of relationships and challenges conventional portrayals of romance on screen. The premiere will be followed by a Q&A with the writer/director, producers, and stars. It is a crowd-sourced, micro-budget, locally made independent film. Most of the film’s core creative team met in Boston University’s film program and the movie was shot in Cambridge, Somerville, and New London, CT. Further information is available at partylikeitsaverb.com.
$9.75, Brattle Theater, Harvard Square.
--READING: Tuesday, March 20, 7PM, Laura Barcella and selected contributors to Madonna and Me: Women Writers on the Queen of Pop
It's the final event in Newtonville Book's old space. For nearly 30 years, Madonna has been at the center of the media spotlight. The essays in Madonna and Me are brutally honest, funny, engaging, and real. They delve into the hearts, souls, memories, and moments of contemporary women, celebrating the ways in which Madonna has inspired us and challenged us, pushing us to be bolder, edgier, braver versions of ourselves.
More about Laura Barcella at
http://laurabarcella.com/.
FREE, Newtonville Books, Newtonville, MA.
--LITERARY CONTEST: Solstice: A Magazine of Diverse Voices
Deadline April 5. Solstice announces
The new annual Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry. $500. (Stephen Dunn won the Pulitzer Prize and is the distinguished author of 15 other collections of prose and poetry.)
Fiction Prize, $1,000. Final Judge: Jennifer Haigh, bestselling author of Faith and three other novels. PEN/Hemingway Award Winner.
And the new Nonfiction Prize, $500, donated by Michael Steinberg. Final Judge: Jerald Walker, award-winning author of Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion and Rejection. Winners and Finalists published in the Summer Awards Issue.
Deadline: April 5, 2012. Reading fee: $15.
www.solsticelitmag.org.
Welcome to the end of the e-mail, where like high-fiving the Do Not Walk sign, we offer you the chance to win a prize. This author was so terrified of being buried alive that he insisted that his arteries be cut before he was placed in his coffin. Email your answer to whitney@grubstreet.org. The first correct respondent wins a Starbucks gift card for a coffee treat.
Last week's trivia:February 21st is the birthday of Ha Jin, a Chinese-born writer who writes all of his creative work in English. Winner: Daphne Kalotay.
