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| Reading June 22, 2009I'll be reading in the Solstice Summer Writing Conference Reading Series, held at Pine Manor College. The readings are open to the public. Here's the press release:
PINE MANOR COLLEGE ANNOUNCES ITS ANNUAL SOLSTICE SUMMER WRITERS’ CONFERENCE READING SERIES
[Chestnut Hill, MA, May, 2009] Pine Manor College announces its annual Solstice Summer Writers’ Conference Reading Series, to be held June 22–26, 2009. All readings begin at 7:30 p.m. and are held in the Founder’s Room of Pine Manor College — unless *otherwise noted — located at 400 Heath Street in Chestnut Hill. The President’s Dining Room is in the Rosemary Ashby Campus Center. Copies of the authors’ books will be available for sale after all readings, and there is plenty of free parking! *Monday, June 22 at 8:00 p.m.: David Yoo (author of Girls For Breakfast and Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before); Martha Rhodes (founding editor of Four Way Books, and author of three poetry collections, including At the Gate); & Pablo Medina (author of Points of Balance/Puntos de Apoyo, The Cigar Roller, and co-translator of García Lorca’s Poet in New York). *Tuesday, June 23 at 3:30 p.m. in the President’s Dining Room: Past Conference participants Ching-In Chen, Dave Zeltserman, Laura McCullough, & Michael Sussman read from their recently published books. Tuesday, June 23 at 7:30 p.m.: Solstice Programs Director Meg Kearney (author of An Unkindness of Ravens and The Secret of Me); Stephanie Elizondo Griest (author of Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines and Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana); & A. Manette Ansay (author of eight books, including Vinegar Hill — an Oprah Book Club Selection — and the forthcoming Good Things I Wish For You). Wednesday, June 24 at 7:30 p.m.: Marie Myung Ok-Lee (author of five award-winning young-adult novels including Finding My Voice); Nickole Brown (author of the poetry collection Sister, and longtime marketing director of Sarabande Books); & Peter Selgin (author of Drowning Lessons, Life Goes to the Movies, and two books on the craft of fiction writing)
Thursday, June 25 at 7:00 p.m.: Tanya Whiton (published in literary journals including Northwest Review and Crazyhorse); Kevin Boyle (National Book Award winner for Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age) & Mark Turcotte (author of The Feathered Heart and Exploding Chippewas). *Friday, June 26 at 4:00 p.m. in the President’s Dining Room: 2009 Solstice Conference Participant Reading. Friday, June 26 at 7:30 p.m.: Lee Hope (winner of the Theodore Goodman Award for Fiction); A. Van Jordan (author of Rise, M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A, and Quantum Lyrics); & Special Guest Andre Dubus III (author of four books, including the recent New York Times bestselling novel The Garden of Last Days, and House of Sand and Fog —an Oprah Book Club Selection adapted for an eponymous Academy Award-nominated motion picture). Directions to Pine Manor College, complete bios of our authors, and more information about the 2009 Solstice Summer Writers’ Conference can be found at www.pmc.edu/solstice.
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| Back from Minneapolis...My trip to the IRA Conference was fun. The speech went well (I think), and I got to meet some great authors and teachers. I was on a panel with Laurie Halse Anderson, Alex Sanchez, John Green, and Sean Beaudoin (fyi, apparently his last name isn't pronounced Bo-Doo-Win). It was my first time visiting Minneapolis, and I was stunned at how big a city it actually is. I think my impression of Minneapolis has been distorted over the years from repeated viewings of Purple Rain (incidentally the hotel I stayed at was right next door to First Avenue, the club in the movie) and the random pics I receive now and then from my buddy Paul, who has been living in Minneapolis for the last few years. The pics Paul sends me of his life out there paints such a strange portrait of the city and I don't even know what I was expecting, just not the metropolis I ended up visiting. Here's an example--a photo he took with his iPhone at the cash register of a convenience store a few months ago...
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| IRA Presentation...I'll be attending the International Reading Association's Minneapolis Convention next week. If you're in the area, I'll be doing a signing on Monday, May 4, 2009 from 1-2PM at:
The Minneapolis Convention Center
1301 2nd Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55403
Exhibit Halls B,C&D
Then at 3PM I'm going to be sitting on a panel with Sean Beaudoin, Alex Sanchez, John Green, and Laurie Halse Anderson, entitled: "Invisible Men: Making Guys a Priority in Young Adult Literature."
The presentation I'll be giving is called, “Weaving Together the Issues of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Humorously.” I've been working on my speech for about three hours at this point, and this is what I have so far:
"This afternoon I'd like to talk to you a little bit about weaving together the issues of race, gender, and sexuality humorously. Weaving is really important, especially when it comes to writing about issues of race, gender, and sexuality in a humorous fashion. And the key to writing humorously about issues of race, gender, and sexuality is that you totally have to weave it, because-"
Hopefully I can figure out a way to stretch out what I already have to twenty minutes. If you have any ideas, fire away...
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| Columbine, by Dave CullenToday is the pub day for my friend Dave Cullen's debut, COLUMBINE. For the last ten years Dave's been toiling away on this nonfiction account of the April 20, 1999 school shooting and its aftermath, producing a book that--in its intensely detailed portrait of the two killers and just about everything else having to do with that sad moment in history--sheds considerable light on why it happened. I'd been privy to early drafts throughout the process and yet was utterly stunned at how much of a sucker punch it was when I finally read the finished book. To sit and read the entire thing from start to finish forces you to consider that awful day all over again, but despite the unflinching look at the horror, this is not one of those true-crime books that seem to indulge in the gruesome details to the extent that it almost glorifies the violence, replete with a photo section in the middle of the book. Instead, this painstakingly researched account doesn't shy away from the atrocity not in the name of sensationalism but rather in the hopes of offering a true compendium of the tragedy.
For more info on the book, and its author, check out Dave's web site:
http://davecullen.com/
Here's a trailer for the book:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_BUR8u8a0Q
The book has already received great reviews, and there's a really good introduction to the book, at Salon.com that also includes links to rave reviews in Time and Newsweek:
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2009/04/06/cullen/
It's hard to believe it's been ten years since the shootings. When I finished Dave's book I was reminded of our mentor back at CU-Boulder, the writer and teacher Lucia Berlin. In particular I thought of a story from her final collection, Where I Live Now:
"Time stops when someone dies. Of course it stops for them, maybe, but for the mourners time runs amok. Death comes too soon. It forgets the tides, the days growing longer and shorter, the moon. It rips up the calendar. You aren't at your desk or on the subway or fixing dinner for the children. You're reading People in a surgery waiting room, or shivering outside on a balcony smoking all night long. You stare into space, sitting in your childhood bedroom with a globe on the desk. Persia, the Belgian Congo. The bad part is that when you return to your ordinary life all the routines, the marks of the day, seem like senseless lies. All is suspect, a trick to lull us, rock us back into the placid relentlessness of time."
-from "Wait a Minute," by Lucia Berlin
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