Upcoming Panel with Jason Mott and Chris Ledbetter.

On October 21, I'll be on a panel about writing diverse characters with Jason Mott and Chris Ledbetter for the NC Writers' Network. We will be waiting for you at 11:30am in the Masonboro Room at the downtown branch of the New Hanover County Library.

Contributor copies, and a launch date.

27 views.JPG

 

27 Views of Wilmington: The Port City in Prose & Poetry came in the post the other day, along with news of our slam-style, 1 paragraph-each reading and launch at Pomegranate Books in Wilmington, NC on October 24th at 2pm. With thanks to Eno Publishers and Elizabeth Woodman for including me.

 

 

Here's the star-studded list of local writers in this anthology:

  • John Jeremiah Sullivan

  • Wendy Brenner

  • Dana Sachs

  • Jason Frye

  • Karen E. Bender

  • Daniel Norris

  • Jean Jones

  • James Leutze

  • Emily A. Colin

  • Emily Louise Smith

  • Michael White

  • Bertha Boykin Todd

  • Robert Anthony Siegel

  • Virginia Holman

  • Ashley Wahl

  • Kevin Maurer

  • Jason Mott

  • Rhonda Bellamy

  • Wiley Cash

  • Melodie Homer

  • Gwenyfar

  • Susan T. Block

  • Philip Gerard

  • Marlon Moore

  • Nan Graham

  • Sheila Webster Boneham

  • Celia Rivenbark

  • Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams

 

Flower Gathering with "Between Dog and Wolf."

Happily joining a group of fearsomely talented writers who call the Port City home and who will be featured in the upcoming anthology, 27 Views of Wilmington, part of a series put out by Eno Publishers. Other city view anthologies feature giants like Holly Reid, Fred Chappell, Allan Gurganus, Randall Kenan, and Lee Smith.

An expanded version of my essay, 'Between Dog and Wolf (Essay as Ideolocator),' previously published in Southern Humanities Review will be included. It's been an absolute pleasure to work with Eno, and the brilliant Elizabeth Woodman in particular.

Stay tuned for details about a launch party and signing in October of 2015. I'm remembering that  the etymology of 'anthology' comes from the Greek 'anthologia' and means literally 'flower-gathering.'

New Poetry at storySouth, and remembering Steinbeck's Letters.

A friend asked me to give him something I'd written down. I said, Do I have to write something new, or can it be some words from a while back? My friend just shrugged and was very easy and patient about it. When I hunted through all my scraps of paper, though, nothing seemed right. And then I wrote down a new thing, which had in it ballet and Mary, the circus elephant who was tragically hung in Tennessee, and the baffling psychology of infidelity.

You can read my new thing, "Choreography for Brief Flight," over here but do wander around. There are stunners in this issue of storySouth.

I was riffing a little earlier off of one of Steinbeck's Letters to Pascal "Pat" Covici, the one included in East of Eden (although The Journal of a Novel is the collection of those letters). Sometimes I think that the best way to write--and maybe, for me, the only way--is in response to someone's request for it. But there's a lot of hubris in that. Who can ever expect to be asked? But I was this time. Thank you, Terry. 

One of Steinbeck's letters to his friend and editor, Pat.

Latino Book Club Reading at Pomegranate Books, Feb 28th

Happily scheduled to give a reading this coming weekend in Wilmington. The event is hosted by the Latino Book Club and will be held at Pomegranate Books. So, on Saturday, February 28th from 3-4pm, come support Latino/a writers and browse a local bookstore and say hi to me, too, while you're at it.

Thanks to Dr. Amrita Das for the invitation and to Kathleen Jewell for providing the space (again!). Also, I'm pretty sure their new coffee shop is open.

The Latino Book Club fosters literacy and the increased representation of Latino culture in the U.S. You can be a part of that effort! The readings are in English.

I'm grateful to the North Carolina Writers' Network for keeping us "the writingest state." Become a member to keep up on readings in NC and to bolster the outstanding group of writers who call this state home. Let's fight the good fight against the creeps who are trying to run us all aground.

 

Reading at Georgia Southern

Later this week, I'm thrilled to be heading further south to give a reading at Georgia Southern! Grateful to the Department of Writing and Linguistics and to the Committee for College Life Enrichment for bringing me. And my favorite part of all this: EMMA BOLDEN LIVES AND WRITES AND TEACHES AND SOMETIMES CROCHETS MANATEES THERE.

So, if you're loafing around Statesboro, whistling at the sky, and wondering what to do, come say hello.

And even if you won't be nearby, would you just look at this poster? Because it is maybe the best poster of all time. It is pink and THE TAPE IS ALL FLOWERS. That's so Bolden, right there.


In the mail...

Contributor copies of Carolina Quarterly. Thank you to Matt Hoffman, Lee Norton, and the rest of the team for publishing me. The other pieces in here are beautiful, as is the cover, and you can get yourself a copy here.

The Carolina Quarterly Volume 63.3

The Carolina Quarterly Volume 63.3

A Literary Blog Tour Interview

Thanks to Vallie Lynn Watson for inviting me to take part in the Blog Tour, wherein one writer answers four process-related questions before passing the torch to a few others. Read VLW's interview here. In remembrance of Nadine Gordimer, I'm threading some of her words in here.

What are you working on?

“Your whole life you are really writing one book, which is an attempt to grasp the consciousness of your time and place– a single book written from different stages of your ability.”
― Nadine Gordimer

My landscape is pretty constant: a smattering of essays; a few, straggling poems; the suggestion of stories somewhere in the background; and endlessly, it seems, a memoir, The Following Sea. Recently, a novel has been ghosting up with increasing frequency. We can reasonably expect that to be done in a few decades.

 

How does your work differ from others' work in the same genre?

“Everyone ends up moving alone towards the self." ― Nadine Gordimer

All I know is what separates any of us: the words we choose, the way we move them across the page, which reveals in any genre, the lone mind of the writer, dimensionless and flashing a rare beam of light.

 

Why do you write what you do?

“What is the purpose of writing? For me personally, it is really to explain the mystery of life, and the mystery of life includes, of course, the personal, the political, the forces that make us what we are while there's another force from inside battling to make us something else.”
― Nadine Gordimer

Because my love is unsolved.

Because I can’t write anything else, or I’d write something better.

Because straight lines are troublesome.

Because I like translation.

Because I am occasionally afraid, often alone, and always a little hungry.

And because this is the only way I know to reach you.

 

How does your writing process work?

“The solitude of writing is also quite frightening. It's quite close to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch.”
― Nadine Gordimer

I think and think about writing. That is something, I hope.  The guilt and shame that I don’t write more, or more beautifully, are hands around my throat. And still, I don’t write as much I should. But eventually I sit down and read something that is so chimeric, so insanely good, and the yearning for it is howling enough that I hunker down at my desk and put on the right music and paw at the keys and hope that with enough effort and persistence the world will yield a single secret, and the ones I miss will walk beside me again and the whole way home.

 

And please tune in next Monday, July 21st, to read these four wise, funny, important writers:

  1. Rochelle Hurt is the author of The Rusted City, a novel in poems published by White Pine Press in the Marie Alexander Series (2014). Her work has been included in Best New Poets 2013, and she has received awards from Crab Orchard Review, Arts & Letters, Hunger Mountain, and Poetry International. She is a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati.

  2. Beth Staples is the assistant director of the Publishing Laboratory at UNCW faculty. Previously, she has worked with The Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University where she managed the literary journal Hayden's Ferry Review and the Center's other publications from 2007 to 2012. Beth also taught in the creative writing department at ASU. Her own work has appeared in Phoebe, the Portland Review, and on 300Reviews.com.

  3. Erica Sklar is a graduate of the MFA program at UNCW, where she served as the associate editor of Chautauqua. Her work has been published in The Master's Review, Barely South, The Newer York, Blue Earth Review, and the Summerset Review.

  4. Emma Bolden is the author of Maleficae  (GenPop Books) and medi(t)ations (forthcoming from Noctuary Press). Her creative nonfiction/mixed genre chapbook, Geography V, is forthcoming from Winged City Chapbook Press. Bolden's four poetry chapbooks include How to Recognize a Lady (Toadlily Press), The Mariner's Wife (Finishing Line Press), The Sad Epistles (Dancing Girl Press), and This Is Our Hollywood (The Chapbook). Poems and prose have appeared on/in The Rumpus, Guernica, B O D Y, The Adirondack Review, and elsewhere. She is a professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University.