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There is truth in medicine cabinets. Despite the lies we tell ourselves and others, our medicine cabinets know us better than anyone. Medicine cabinets are full of worry, memories, encroaching death, and continued life. The prescription bottles, skin moisturizer, and frayed toothbrush reflect our humanity and vulnerability. Study your medicine cabinet. Write an essay about what is in it, and what it says about you.
The MacArthur Foundation announced today that authors Karen Russell and Donald Antrim are among the 2013 MacArthur Fellows. The five-year, no-strings-attached "genius" fellowships, which were increased this year to $625,000 each, are given to individuals working in a variety of disciplines to pursue future work.
Karen Russell is the author of three books of fiction, including her debut story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (2006); the novel Swamplandia (2011), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and, most recently, the story collection Vampires in the Lemon Grove (2013), all published by Knopf. She was named one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 in 2009.
Donald Antrim is the author of the novels Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World (Viking, 1993), The Hundred Brothers (Crown, 1997), and The Verificationist (Knopf, 2000), and the memoir The Afterlife (2007). He is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University in New York City.
In the following videos from the MacArthur Foundation, Russell and Antrim discuss the inspiration for their work, and what receiving the fellowships will mean for their writing and their lives.
As children our imaginations ruled the land. However, years of life, love, and loss erode our creative shores and the rustling trees and vibrant animals that inhabited them. The unstoppable dinosaurs and steaming teacups in our small hands suddenly become pieces of plastic from a toy store. Write a short story through the eyes of a four-year-old child. Go on an adventure.
Revisit one of your favorite poems by another poet. What appeals to you about this particular poem—the structure, the sound, the imagery, the subject matter? Write a poem dedicated to this poet and poem. Show your appreciation by instilling those same respected qualities in your own writing.
After a week of longlist announcements in the categories of poetry, nonfiction, and young people’s literature, the National Book Foundation wrapped up its announcements late last week with the much-anticipated longlist for the foundation’s fiction prize.
The finalists are Tom Drury, Pacific (Grove Press), Elizabeth Graver, The End of the Point (Harper), Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers (Scribner), Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (Knopf), Anthony Marra, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (Hogarth), James McBride, The Good Lord Bird (Riverhead Books), Alice McDermott, Someone (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (The Penguin Press), George Saunders, Tenth of December (Random House), and Joan Silber, Fools (Norton).
As the foundation notes, the list includes “four [previous] National Book Award winners and finalists, a Pulitzer Prize winner and finalist, recipients of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship and a Guggenheim fellowship, and a debut novelist.” Among a list of favorites like Pynchon and Saunders, Anthony Marra’s debut, published this past May, has received much praise, and Lahiri has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Charles Baxter, Gish Jen, Charles McGrath, Rick Simonson, René Steinke judged.
Frank Bidart’s Metaphysical Dog (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Lucie Brock-Broido’s Stay, Illusion (Knopf), and Brenda Hillman’s Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire (Wesleyan University Press) topped a poetry longlist marked by debut poets. The lists in each category, including nonfiction and young people’s literature, were announced on the Daily Beast.
The foundation also recently named its annual 5 Under 35, and announced that E. L. Doctorow will receive the 2013 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and Maya Angelou will receive the 2013 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.
The National Book Award shortlists in each category will be announced October 16, and the winners will be named at the foundation's annual awards ceremony in New York City on November 20.
If you attend poetry events in California with any regularity, you are likely to see Joyce Jenkins, who—with her long, wavy hair and graceful demeanor—is unmistakable in a crowd. Jenkins is the editor and executive director of Poetry Flash, Literary Review & Calendar for the West and chair of Northern California Book Reviewers. She is also the author of Portal and Joy Road, a limited edition chapbook. Her poems have appeared in Parthenon West Review, Ambush Review, ZYZZYVA, Addison Street Anthology: Berkeley's Poetry Walk, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems of the San Francisco Watershed, and elsewhere.
Jenkins received an American Book Award in 1994 and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006, among other honors. Poetry Flash received Litquake's 2012 Barbary Coast Award. For many years, P&W has provided support to the Poetry Flash Reading Series and Watershed Poetry Festival in Berkeley. We were thrilled to be able to ask Jenkins a few questions about her 40 years at the helm of the "Flash."
What makes Poetry Flash and its programs unique?
Publishing Poetry Flash: Literary Review & Calendar for the West for over 40 years has been an unparalleled journey for myself and associate editor Richard Silberg. We’ve documented poetry and changes in writing over an incredibly turbulent and transformative time, and acted as both a forum and catalyst for the development of literary communities up and down the West Coast. Thoughout the years we've always remained open to all styles and poetics.
Poetry Flash evolved from its 1972 origins as a single sheet to a monthly tabloid to its current incarnation as an online magazine. Today, Poetry Flash publishes a literary events calendar for all of California, poetry and fiction book reviews, poems, interviews, tributes, essays, memoir, calls for submissions, news, and online archives. Other publications offer book reviews, interviews, and poems, but lack the same historical perspective and that certain Poetry Flash attention to detail. Also, everything we publish is entwined with our involvement in events and outreach (a legacy from years of distributing the Flash as a free paper).
We have published 302 print issues of Poetry Flash that will continue to echo and provide future generations with essential literary documents that detail the history of poetry on the West Coast. We have that deep well to draw from in our efforts to further our collective understanding of the present.
Our other projects include the Poetry Flash Reading Series at bookstore venues in Berkeley and Oakland, and the annual presentation of the Northern California Book Awards in San Francisco—now in its 33rd year. Also, there is the annual Watershed Poetry Festival, directed by Mark Baldridge and supported in part by Poets & Writers, which will celebrate its 18th year on September 28, 2013, in Berkeley.
What recen
t project have you been especially proud of?
I am proud of Watershed. It is a real statement to be there, to take part, and “stand up for the earth” as a poet, through poetry. I’m proud of the gorgeous hand-printed broadsides that commemorate and support the festival, the annual “Creek Poem” installation on the grounds of the festival, and the event for high school students at Berkeley High, which is held the day before the festival.
I’m also gratified and humbled by the number of incredible poets we have hosted in our reading series, from Czeslaw Milosz to Louise Glück. Furthermore, we have had the honor of recognizing amazing poets and writers through the book awards—talented writers from Al Young, Kay Ryan, and Adrienne Rich to Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Maxine Hong Kingston.
What’s the craziest (or funniest or most moving or most memorable) thing that’s happened at an event you’ve hosted?
There are too many to choose from! My favorite was when Kenneth Rexroth escaped from the hospital, or said he did, to read at the San Francisco International Poetry Festival in 1980—an event that I directed and Poetry Flash co-sponsored. I had an image of him ripping tubes out of himself! Anyway, he arrived in a great flourish and gave me the critical once over. Then he extended his arm, and we promenaded about the lobby of the Palace of Fine Arts.
Other moments include a choral reading of “The State of the Planet” at Watershed by Robert Hass. There was Joy Harjo’s saxophone and “Eagle Poem” wafting across the park at another Watershed. And the time that Wanda Coleman read so fiercely and beautifully that she... well, she didn’t levitate, but it was close. We are talking a higher vibration. And maybe for just a moment there was a kind of translucence—her movements and language were so concentrated she almost became pure energy for a moment there.
How has literary presenting informed your own writing and/or life?
Literary presenting, whether through live events or through publishing Poetry Flash, either online or in print, is my life. I have learned so much—I’ve felt like I’ve been in graduate school for 40 years.
What do you consider to be the value of literary programs for your community?
Poetry Flash’s mission is to build community through literature, and that’s exactly what readings do—event by event. They give poets especially the sense that someone is listening, someone cares, and they are appreciated. It feeds back into better work and more awareness. We learn so much about other poets and writers whose work we may not have delved into. At the Poetry Flash Reading Series, we present many fine younger or emerging poets whose names may not yet be widely known. Our audiences hopefully will trust our curatorial instincts and try our readings, even if they don’t yet recognize the names. Our readers are excellent!
What are you most excited about in today’s changing literary landscape?
I’m most excited about the fact that—whatever changes technology or society brings us, whatever new forms poetry and writing take on—creative writing and reading willl continue to flourish in an amazing variety of ways. The explosion of readings, access to evolving modes of publication, and writing “springboards” and shelters provided by universities have all contributed to the preservation and continued growth of the literary arts. No matter what, poetry and writing will always remain central to human consciousness and our culture.
Photo 1: Joyce Jenkins. Credit: Mark Baldridge. Photo 2: Jenkins (at right) with Jane Hirshfield at the 2011 Watershed Poetry Festival. Credit: Sharon Coleman.
Major support for Readings/Workshops in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.
Attics are often the most compelling rooms in our homes. Attics are where we store important parts of the past that are only tenuously connected to the immediate present. Visit your attic, rummage around the dusty boxes, and find something that belonged to one of your parents. Bring it to your writing desk. Start writing.
The Durham, North Carolina–based Carolina Wren Press has launched the new Lee Smith Novel Prize, which will include $1,000 and publication for a novel by a Southern writer, or about the American South. The deadline is October 15.
Novels by an author originally from, currently living in, or writing about the South are eligible. Original and previously unpublished works of at least 50,000 words, written in English, may be submitted via Submittable by October 15.
The prize was established in honor of award-winning Southern writer Lee Smith, the author of ten novels and four story collections, whose forthcoming novel, Guests on Earth, will be published in October by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
“It is our hope to find and promote novelists from the South and their novels,” the Carolina Wren Press editors write on the website, “and, in the process, to explore and expand the definition of Southern literature.”
Founded in 1976 in Chapel Hill by poet Judy Hogan, Carolina Wren Press is an independent nonprofit press whose mission is, simply, “new authors, new audiences.” The press publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature, and sponsors two other annual contests, the Doris Bakwin Award for books by women writers, and the Carolina Wren Press Poetry Series, given for a poetry collection. Visit the website to read an essay by Hogan on the history of the press.
In the video below from Algonquin Books, Lee Smith discusses the inspiration for and creation of her forthcoming novel, which is based in part on historical events that occurred North Carolina.
People are complex. So are believable characters. Much of what comprises our characters stems from the writer’s knowledge of the universe and writing’s miraculous universality. Think of Don Quixote de la Mancha, Jane Eyre, and Oscar de León—or your own favorite characters. What about these notable literary figures gives them life and humanity? Write a paragraph that defines the complexities of each character you are developing. Tack these paragraphs to the wall beside your desk, and use them as guidelines for your characters whenever their voices are muted by the harsh winds of creativity.
People come in and out of our lives like passengers on a train. Some stay for much of our journey. Others get on and off, quickly disappearing into their own travels. Write a poem about someone who became part of your life, but left the train. Who were they? Why do you miss them? What happened? Focus on tone, voice, and imagery.
