Editions Bibliotekos

FRONT-PAGE NEWS

2011-11-19T10:30:00.000-08:00

Being Human: Call of the Wild

in the works

Preparing Another Book Launch

2011-11-19T07:15:00.001-08:00

The human factor. What is that? The phrase is used by one of the many people who answered our call for fiction for a nature-themed anthology. While our call was quite specific, we knew that writers would probably not sit down and write anything fresh for us; we knew that we’d get (as we did with the first three anthologies) all kinds of different, interesting items. But we cannot, ultimately, accept everything.

For this book, we did not want poetry, but that came in. We asked for fiction only, but we received a number of personal narratives. We even received a theological thesis on the garden of Eden. You would have heard from us sooner, but when we made our final selections, someone withdrew (perfectly normal) and someone else has disappeared (unexpected). We decided, after much debate, not to replace those chapters. While we favor longer pieces, we received many short pieces. In fact, if we published everything we received, we’d have a massive volume, since well over 1,000 pages of text came through the transom. That’s a lot of reading. And re-reading. And consulting with each other (since there are two of us). And differences of opinion and then compromises. So we appreciate your patience. We are now ready to begin the process of layout and copy-editing for this, our fourth anthology, entitled, Being Human: Call of the Wild.

The human factor. As it turns out, the stories we decided to keep were those closest to the call, and those which seemed, somehow to point to what it means to be human in a natural world. More than a few of the pieces we selected fit the subtitle we have chosen: call of the wild. The fact(or) of being human means recognizing that there is in each of us a call of the wild, however subtle. Who hears the call? Who answers the call? We are in nature; we are part of nature; we are in conflict with aspects of our own nature.

Our human history is such that we are social creatures who have evolved very complex emotions of sympathy and empathy. So the call of the wild does not mean running off into the woods and hunting fish with one’s teeth; it means acknowledging our deeper connection to the earth beyond the concrete and buildings. There are birds and raccoons out there. There are plants and bees. Though we are by nature social creatures, at times we can commit acts of aggression.

As with any anthology, some readers might complain of unevenness. We do not mean this in a negative way – it is just a fact that we are putting between covers many voices and many styles, not least of all our idiosyncratic preferences. We believe, however, that we have chosen the best pieces on this topic – and some of the writing is truly beautiful, magical, poetic, and memorable. There is also a good dose of humor in the book, always welcome.

About fifteen percent of the total submissions will appear in the finished volume – a book similar in word count to Common Boundary but shorter than Battle Runes. We are not interested in publishing hefty tomes (as we are petit), and certainly Being Human will be in line with that goal. Updates will appear on this site.

We thank everyone who submitted to the call, and we congratulate those who were selected. We want support, and we want to be supportive; simply by submitting to us, having the confidence that we will make the best decisions we can, is a show of support; likewise, we trust that everyone sees that each of these book projects and the site are signs of our support to the artistic community.

The writers to be included in Being Human: Call of the Wild are (in no particular order): Lawrence Van Eby; Stephen Poleskie; Rivka Keren; Lisa Sita; Arthur Powers; Andrea Vojtko; Jeff Vande Zande; James K. Zimmerman; Anne Whitehouse; Janyce Stefan-Cole; Patty Somlo.

The Foreword to Being Human: Call of the Wild will be written by Professor Ian Maloney (St. Francis College, English Dept. and Director of the Honors Program). We gratefully appreciate the assistance of Meagan Meehan (editorial assistant who has worked with us on Battle Runes) and Sharon Dittus (our new proofreader). We hope to see the book published by the end of January 2012, with a Kindle edition to follow at some point thereafter.

Rite of Passage: Poet, Playwright, and Performer Vivienne Glance

2011-09-27T07:45:00.000-07:00

Vivienne Glance is a poet, playwright and performer. Her poetry has appeared in journals, anthologies and online publications, and she has won places and commendations in competitions. Her poetry collection, The Softness of Water, was published by Sunline Press in 2009, and her work is featured in the anthology Amber Contains the Sun, published through A Few New Words, an initiative of the Government of Western Australia’s Department of Culture and the Arts. Vivienne has been a guest at Sydney’s Night Words, Perth, Big Sky, Sprung and writing WA’s Apropos Writers Festivals. Her full-length and short plays have been produced in London, Edinburgh, Seattle, Sydney and Perth. She runs poetry and playwriting workshops for children and adults, including performance poetry techniques. As an act of cross-cultural dialogue, Vivienne works with Afeif Ismail co-transcreating his poems and plays into English. One of their co-transcreated works The African Magician has been nominated for an Australian Writers Guild AWGIE. Following is the transcript of our email interview with Vivienne, which we are quite happy to share with our community.

~♦~

~Upon first realizing oneself as a writer.

I was sixteen sitting an English exam, looking at the last question on the paper. There was a black and white photograph of a beach with calm seas, a rock pool and a rusty bicycle discarded on its side. We had to write a response to the image, and as I was rehearsing a stage version of Under Milk Wood in the school production, I found myself channeling a teenage girl’s version of Dylan Thomas. It was the best fun I’ve ever had in an exam and that’s when I thought not only that I wanted to write but that I enjoyed it too. Unfortunately we were not allowed to keep a copy of our answers, so that story has disappeared. But sometimes I wonder if my writing life since that time has been a futile attempt to rewrite that story: to recreate the flow of words and the joy of creation I felt then.

As to when I first considered myself a writer, well, that’s harder to pinpoint. I have always enjoyed writing and turned to words to help me make sense of the world as well as record its absurdities and delights. But was I a Writer? The question seems to imply a rite of passage, an acknowledgement from others that I was worthy of this moniker. I remember calling myself an actor after I’d had my first professional job, which for me was straight after Drama School, so I never had a time of uncertainty there. Writing was not so straightforward. I learnt about how to write from school, from life, from reading others, from attending ad hoc classes and workshops. That is, I designed my own apprenticeship. But public recognition for a piece of writing came when I wrote a play that was performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1986, which incidentally also received a good review. As for calling myself a poet, that was probably when I was awarded second prize in a national poetry competition in 2003, although I still feel poetry has much more to teach me before I can truly call myself a poet as opposed to someone who tries to write poetically.

~Early Inspirations.

Apart from the sheer pleasure of forming words on a page, my initial inspirations came from trying to make sense of the world. I grew up in a pragmatic family; we were concerned with functioning, with providing food and shelter. As such there was little time for conversation or debates about issues, ideas, literature, science, and so on. I was constantly asking myself questions without getting answers, and writing was a way of mapping out responses to many things. From that grew the idea that characters with different points of view can contest these in a story or a play, or that a poem can open up perspectives and illuminate insights.

~On the Source of Ideas.

I visit as many places as I can and try to meet people from different walks of life. I enjoy representing diversity in all its forms. Sometimes newspaper articles can present an unusual story that can spark a series of connecting thoughts that will lead to a new theme or narrative. If there is a blank page in front of me and no inspiration, I will kick start an idea by noting down two or three “triggers” and find a way to connect them.

~On the Making of a Good Story.

Without meaning to be facetious – a beginning, a middle, and an end. A story in any form has to have a structure that enables it to have momentum, something that keeps the reader/audience/viewer engaged both intellectually and emotionally and wanting to know “what happens next?” This doesn’t mean it has to be fast-paced or a complex guessing game, rather that it provokes curiosity. I try to create drama by presenting opposing viewpoints or personality types through characters in the narrative.

~On Realistic Creative Writing.

Sometimes my writing is realistic, sometimes not. I like absurdist theatre and expressionistic, experiential poetry as well as realism in both poems and plays. Also in my writing I include male characters and people older than myself, and although I know both men and seniors, I don’t “write” these individuals per se. I look for traits, physical characteristics, language use, etc. and mould a composite character from several sources. Although I have to admit, I sometimes put in one or two of my own personal observations about life and attribute these to one of my characters – not telling which though.

~Any Surprises in Writing?

How much I love the joy of editing and redrafting! There is something about crafting a piece of writing that thrills me. The initial inspiration often happens in an unstructured almost trance-like state and in an intense burst of energy, often sustained over a few hours, which can be exhausting. However, the process that follows where ideas are teased out, words rehearsed and rearranged, when characters become “friends” or antagonists, and the writing is shaped on the page, for me this moment is perhaps similar to when a sculptor sees the statue emerging from the raw marble rock.

~What is Your Favorite Writing?

I wrote a performance poem about going to bed with a poem. I love performing this because it makes people laugh even though the writing is not particularly sophisticated. As for my favorite writing of all – I can’t say, that’s too hard.

I’ve never regretted writing anything, or hated anything as I see all writing as a process towards better writing. However, I have cringed at some of my earlier works when through experience I can see their mistakes and shortcomings.

~On the Writer’s Life.

My habit is to write for three hours in the morning if it is new work. Editing and redrafting can happen throughout the day. I prefer to write in blocks of days or weeks rather than a little each day. For longer works I need to hold it in my mind, so an extended time where there are no (or limited) meetings, social engagements etc. works best for me.

~Influential Books and Authors Include.

I read a lot of non-fiction, especially books about the natural world and the environment or current ideas in philosophy (for a general reader, that is). I buy and read books by many local West Australian (WA) poets, such as John Kinsella, Shane McCauley, Dennis Haskell, Kevin Gillam, Lucy Dougan, and many more. I enjoy the plays of Samuel Beckett, Sarah Kane, Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn, John Patrick Shanley, along with Shakespeare and some Jacobean drama. My guide and the touchstone I keep returning to is Shakespeare, even if this may be considered a cliché. He combines both poetry and drama, writes fascinating characters with complex interior lives, tells a good story and uses language imaginatively and beautifully.

~Now Reading?

I’m re-reading Gogol’s play The Government Inspector, reading Dennis Haskell’s latest poetry collection Acts of Defiance, and the non-fiction book by Guy Brown The Living End: the future of death aging and immortality. Two poets have recently caught my interest: T. Zachary Cotler who recently visited Perth and read an amazing poem titled Supplice, and local WA poet Mags Webster whose first collection is titled The Weather of Tongues published by Sunline Press.

~Long-term and Current projects.

I have had a long-standing interest with science (I have a Bachelor of Science degree), but in particular, with how science intersects with public discourse through the arts. I’m developing several ideas around aspects of science and technology at present and will bring my fascination with science and its achievements, and the place of science and the scientist in society, into both my playwriting and poetry. I’ve completed a play titled Staring at the Sun that fictionalizes and explores the ethics around the research of bio-medically-induced immortality and I’m looking for production opportunities. I’m slowly adding to and crafting poems for my second collection, which I anticipate will be ready for publication soon, alongside responding to a collection of photographs of the Athabasca glacier for an art and text publication.

Next year I’m hoping to collaborate on a script about the life of an important nineteenth century female natural historian.

~On getting started in drama.

I love standing up in front of a group of people and pretending to be someone else. I first performed in my friend’s garage at the age of five in front of our parents, and that was it – I was hooked! From then I embraced any opportunity to perform and joined a youth theatre group in Canterbury, England as a teenager. At university I joined the Drama Society, but being an actor was seen as too risky a profession by my family. So I “got a proper job” and rehearsed to perform in fringe shows in London during evenings and weekends. After a few years I decided I had to become a professional performer and re-trained as an actor. Since then I’ve been working in theatre, film, TV, radio, voiceover, etc. as well as directing and writing plays.

~Inspirational Drama Texts.

AS I mentioned before, Under Milk Wood was a magical play to be part of as a teenager with its rich cast of characters and poetic language. I enjoyed the story-telling in works like She Stoops to Conquer and The Importance of Being Earnest, which we performed at school. It was only after I had matured as a person and performed in some of his plays, that I really began to appreciate Shakespeare.

~Motivation to Act.

The love of performing will always be there. However, the roles for women, especially those over forty, are diminishing, both in number and in complexity and interest. My focus has been more on writing for performance, but I hope there will be opportunities to continue practicing my craft as a performer. Like any arts practice it must be engaged with regularly to keep skills fresh and the mind and body in shape.

~Honing Acting Skills.

Performance poetry is a small way to keep my skills honed. If there is no production opportunity, I try to challenge myself through participating in workshops. I recently attended a Magdelena Festival workshop in Perth with the amazing Australian performer, Margaret Cameron. I also perform in play readings when I can, which means I can “perform” several characters in a short time – a little like an acting boot-camp, I suppose. Reading lots of plays informs both my understanding of current trends in drama and my playwriting.

~Acting and Roles.

I’m told my voice and the way I speak text are good qualities, plus I’m also told I have a “good stage presence.” Both of these are hard for me to judge as I live with my voice every day, and I can’t see myself perform. The last character is usually the all-time favourite! In this case it was the role of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova in John Aitken’s play The Ships Pass Quietly. This character wonderfully blended drama with poetry, and she stretched my emotional range. Akhmatova’s story is one of courage and resilience in the face of excruciating oppression.

Conscience of an Artist - Vaneshran Arumugam

2011-08-08T06:37:00.000-07:00

At the Fourth International Conference on Consciousness, Literature and the Arts (University of Lincoln, UK), Bibliotekos general editor Gregory F. Tague had the pleasure of seeing Vaneshran Arumugam perform Not an Angry Ape: Shakespeare’s Vision of Consciousness. The piece was co-written by Kriben Pillay, an associate professor in the Leadership Centre, University of KwaZulu-Natal, and Vaneshran. To quote from the program brochure: “. . . the major clue to Shakespeare’s vision is the performance event itself; a compelling story stills the thinking mind to foreground mindful awareness, the what is of the here-and-now, where the perceiver and perceived, unobstructed by any false duality, collapse into the simplicity of seeing. This seeing is the ultimate consciousness.”

Vaneshran Arumugam has been a professional actor on stage and screen for nearly fourteen years, having completed his undergraduate studies at Wits University in Dramatic Art and Social Anthropology where he received the Marcella Pisanello prize for acting for his portrayal of Shakespeare’s Othello. He is much loved for his roles on TV, in particular that of Kash, in the longest running comedy series South Africa has to date – SOS. His highest award so far must be considered to be the International Fellowship from the Ford Foundation, which afforded him his postgraduate study at both Columbia University (New York) and the University of Cape Town, where he concentrated the experiences of his career into understanding Performance as a natural effect of Consciousness. These experiences included performing in local and international film and TV, but most notably on stages around the world, including the title role of Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-Upon-Avon, in 2006. He appeared int the 2006 BBC arts programme Imagine Being Hamlet, which documented his RSC performance.

After his Profile, you will also find “Coming to the Point,” a manifesto of sorts by Vanesharan. We have also had the privilege of reading Vaneshran’s poetry and are happy to announce that some will be published soon – a link to the journal will be added when available.

~ * ~

I grew up with the legend of my grandmother’s amateur acting in East London, a small town on the southeast coast of South Africa. My grandmother had acted in both Tamil and English in her hometown of Durban as well as with an amateur group of dramatists in East London, whom I came to know much later as family friends and grandparents of some of my own friends in the Seventies and Eighties. It was inspiring for me to feel what respect and love my grandmother’s onstage and offstage storytelling inspired among her family, friends and in our community. This might be considered my beginning as an actor, for as the first grandchild I stage-managed/directed and starred in many a concert or play that we siblings or cousins mounted for the family or visitors.

But, it wasn’t until much later that I would give up the study of Physical Science and Biology, and commit myself to the study and practice of Performing in earnest with a penchant for classical texts, since already in primary school I had won the admiration of my principal by putting on a version of Oedipus Rex. (I was struck then by the protagonist’s crisis of having blessings and tragedies visit at once and how it was that none of us were familiar with this apparently famous story that had so much to teach about Fate.) With classmates in high school we made school history by mounting the first official school production to be directed by students. I also played King Henry in a production of Henry IV Part One. I think I had even then intuited the power that acting was able to wield, to change people’s minds or rally them around an idea. When I did eventually decide to follow acting as a study, and by implication, a career choice, I also intuited the science in acting, that there was more to it than entertaining a crowd with funny voices and that my dreams of being a scientist would not totally be going to waste by becoming an actor – at that time these ideas were viewed as diametrically opposed to each other.

Being an actor seemed, after a while, the only choice for me, to capture the interest I was developing in science, social science, poetry and spirituality. As an undergraduate I completed a drama degree with a Social (cultural) Anthropology degree, which made even more obvious to me that the science of performing was by no means confined to the stage.

In the beginning of my career, while my intellect was enchanted with the possibilities that seemed to be “locked” within the practice of performing, I was becoming a very popular TV actor, changing the way black actors, particularly of minority descent, were being cast, written for and enjoyed. I was resolute that I could not do my characters the injustice of being portrayed as one dimensional or stereotyped for only one viewpoint’s pleasure. So the personas of those early TV characters were driven by this sense of responsibility, while my theatre characters enjoyed more freedom from the political milieu of the Nineties – I was able to play roles far further from myself such as a corrupt Cuban government official in Michael Frayn’s Clouds, or a nineteenth century British Army kiddyfiddler in Churchills’s Cloud 9 – and was able to stretch myself in ways that weren’t dictated to purely from the environment’s political lens.

A good role is one that starts working on me even as I read it for the first time. I am still not certain how this works, but a good role always seems to be written for me and that there is no alternative but to play. There are many factors surrounding the role itself that will either contribute or detract from this initial feeling, such as the other people I am working with and so on. Perhaps all roles, once you have committed to making them yours, have the potential to become “good.” Having said that, there are some roles in television, particularly, that seem to have escaped this pattern.

A good story is one that has space enough to contain what is being related, but also what is actually happening between people performing and those watching. Sometimes it’s the skill of the writing that brings this about, sometimes the direction or the acting, or design, but there seems to be a golden ratio of balance unique to each story, or even the story of the particular production. The object is to release the imagination – my own, my fellow actors, the audience – and for these energies to commingle. For me there are various ways to achieving this, by embodying something familiar in a character, a trait, a habit, or by forcefully inciting a scene vocally, with power or poetic virtuosity and so on. But all are enticing the audience, other players, the moment into the act of imagining, co-creating even.

So for me, I do my best to stay imaginative, even around everyday things from cooking to exercising my body, to raising my daughter or holding conversation. I am conscious, as much as I can be, of acting a role, of participating in a performance, observing as a student the nature of people and situations and even the energy of things. In some ways I am always preparing for another role, even if I’ve not yet been cast in any particular role.

As I become familiar with a role, I begin to formulate a habit around what is required from me, whether it is spending time with the words, reading other texts, exercise (sometimes particular kinds of exercises, like tai chi or singing exercises). By the time it comes to performance, I “know” what the day needs before I can perform – how much I must eat, rest, train or even speak. So, the habit transforms each time, and has the ability even to change within a role when things arise that challenge or require attention. I learn about myself and others I am working with in this time; what my possible strengths and weaknesses might be in relation to this role, or even in my life. Some roles, like Hamlet, or Othello bring a lot to the table, while a comic role in a film might demand more from me than it “offers.”

Each role seems to have its own life, and in turn offers me a life, and usually this has resulted in a life that an audience gets a real feeling of, so it’s extremely difficult to pick out any one role that has been a favourite. There are, however, several that have brought with them immense change or realisations such as playing Angel in Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Jesus Hopped the A Train or Othello, or an unnamed host of characters in my one person play titled You Expected Something Else. Each piece has been customised to fit into my life, carving part of my story and shaping something of my future – this may sound somewhat trite, but I’ll try to illustrate. My great love and mother of my daughter played Osric opposite me in Shakepeare’s Hamlet when I was twenty three and at the height of my university career, which led to our wonderful relationship and parenthood of our child etc. When we separated some seven years later and I thought my existence had lost all meaning, I was cast as Hamlet on a far more epic scale – I would be performing at the Swan theatre at Stratford upon Avon for the Royal Shakespeare Company under the direction of “Dame” Janet Suzman, no less. I had the keen sense that my life was arranged in concentric circles and the play was marking the coincidence of the closing and opening of a few great circles in my life – and that’s just following one simple narrative trail! That play took me to London, and while I may not have visited the queen, I did end up in a long conversation with Sting about Shakespeare and performing at his home around the corner from Buckingham Palace – of course, we also spoke about his favourite role…Hamlet. It was in the performance of this role (the second time round) under the expert guidance of Ms. Suzman, that I experienced a sustained manifestation of the full power of theatre, of my own potential as a storyteller, of the potency of ensemble, and the pervasive influence of Shakespeare. Things I had felt before, touched on, seen in glimpses, were here full blown and supported by an eager audience and production mechanism. I have not been the same since and neither has my acting.

I returned to study after that role and was awarded the Ford Foundation’s prestigious International Fellowship Programme award, investigating my own experiences of the overlap between Performing and Consciousness – drawing on my martial arts knowledge, to begin with, and other eastern philosophies and beginning research in neuroscience and modern physics to try to understand what it is that happens when we perform, or when a performance is “succeeding.” This took me to New York City where I studied under the generous wing of Kristin Linklater, one time teacher of Janet Suzman, at Columbia University. She seemed an adept of all the concepts I was trying to articulate and my six months with her revealed more to me about Performance and the Art of Not Knowing than I could have imagined – this is a master and I felt akin to a Shaolin monk learning a rare and potent form of Kung Fu at a faraway hilltop monastery.

And now my mission is to relate this “Kung Fu” in every performance I give, whether on stage, or on film, but also in the classes I teach, and if I’m really disciplined, the meals I cook and the conversations I hold. I believe it is this approach to performing that will incite the necessary cultural revolution that South Africa needs (perhaps the world too) – a revolution of the minds of people that brings about self- government through realising the power of your story and the stories you tell.

So, my project has been to bring this kind of storytelling to people here in South Africa and everywhere I can with the collaboration of as many as possible. I have, for instance, a project to bring A Midsummer Night’s Dream to a public garden in Cape Town at minimal or no cost to the audience that brings people together to enjoy, debate, and witness a different function of performance than they’re used to…one that has far more to do with their everyday lives than a lot of funny voices in costume, but hopefully we’ll have some of that too. I hope to bring another project called Not an Angry Ape, conceived and co-written with Prof. Kriben Pillay, which is a piece about Shakespeare’s precocious vision of human consciousness, into the world conversation around Being, how the mind works, what we humans actually are.

I write poetry, among plays and screenplays and whatever else brings ink to paper, but it is my idea that performing consciously is to being alive – what poetry is to the act of writing. Both these forms, intertwined as they are, ask everything of me to make my contribution to the world.

~ * ~

“Coming to the Point”

by Vaneshran Arumugam

As inhabitants of this earth with at least a few hundred thousand years of evolution supporting our story, it seems we still have much to learn with many of our latest and most necessary lesson plans coming from an older, wizened form of ourselves. It would seem that especially in the all but forgotten wisdoms of Harmony and Creative Discretion - generated from the Self and expressed through the self - that our ancient consciousness knows more.

This idea cannot be more apparent than with the way the Performing Arts have been subjugated to cede to the dominant systems of thinking and practice, to the extent that even new ideas with the potential of creating change, only very briefly are able to do, and usually to minimal effect, before being assimilated into a system of money-making proliferation and replication, dilution and deployment to the ends of the self-same system. Perhaps we can trace the development of the idea of Government itself, as a kind of performing art and see how much abstraction from its intended purpose it has suffered to serve, not just the people, but more and more its own need to exist and become ever more powerful (usually over the people).

If we take a philosophical or karmic perspective we may see that our evolution, and the evolution of these forms of performance and the very idea of Performing Art has come to this point, and does indeed have a point to prove! It is through the performance of these forms, based on the intrinsic nature of reality – interactive relationship – that the individual can begin to express toward or against any idea or even create new ones, which necessitates the participation of an audience, a social environment. Consider another example – the development of performance forms under various manners of slavery and oppression which became potent means of binding people, protecting the individual, as well as re-interpreting harsh conditions of Life toward joy, freedom and salvation.

Art is the obscured throne to which we are all heir, not merely a product of the Capitalist machine. Great artists will never be machined out of reality shows, or franchised musical theatre productions. And so great commentary, observation and inspired guidance and re-interpreting of our very evolution will not come from these sources. These machines may, and likely will, always be there, just like the people who pretend to be artists couched in their denial (another powerful story form) but the Source must be reclaimed by Real artists, who are always people conscientized and awake in their communities, in their silence, even – in their world, in themselves.

We, the people, must realise the need to claim the Arts back, elevated to its proper concept – an infinite source able to generate ideas, change, perceptions and work for producers, theatres, broadcasters etc. and not be in their service. Art is to reality, what a hammer and chisel are to a lump of rock – a technology with which to shape things. While we leave our Art, our storytelling abilities, enslaved to “the system” we feel oppressed under, we will simply keep generating the very oppression and denaturation we see the world over today – the story of our world today…the point we have come to.

We must empower our real artists by liberating the forms from the machinery, equipped largely to court profit, so that rather than a glimmer of light through the most restricted of cracks, our Performing Arts can radiate like a disinfectant torch, illuminating our surrounding so that we can see for ourselves instead of believing what we’re told (by those who believe what they’re told)! Then we can begin to do our thousands of centuries of evolution justice.

War Remembered - John Guzlowski

2011-08-08T06:30:00.000-07:00

JOHN GUZLOWSKI

Lightning and Ashes:

Two Lives Shaped by World War II

Reading, Book Signing, Discussion

~*~

11 October 2011 – St. Francis College,

Founders Hall Theater / Callahan Center

180 Remsen St., Brooklyn Heights, NY

4:00pm – 6:00pm

Free and Open to the Public – Refreshments

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A Video of Dr. Guzlowski's Reading is HERE

~*~

Editions Bibliotekos is pleased to announce that John Guzlowski will become part of a series sponsored by the English Department of St. Francis College. John’s reading and discussion will be the third such event initiated by us and hosted by St. Francis. The first event featured author Mitch Levenberg and poets Ruth Sabath Rosenthal, Lynne Shapiro, Anique Taylor, and Anne Whitehouse as a panel. The second event featured Nahid Rachlin who read from her acclaimed memoir Persian Girls. All of these authors are contributors to various Bibliotekos anthologies.

~*~

Born in a refugee camp after World War II, John Guzlowski came with his family to the United States as a Displaced Person in 1951. His parents had been slave laborers in Nazi Germany. Growing up in the immigrant and refugee neighborhoods around Humboldt Park in Chicago, he met hardware store clerks with Auschwitz tattoos on their wrists, Polish cavalry officers who still mourned for their dead comrades, and women who had walked from Siberia to Iran to escape the Russians. His poetry, fiction, and essays try to remember them and their voices.

His poems also remember his parents, who survived their slave labor experiences in Nazi Germany. A number of these poems appear in his books Language of Mules, Lightning and Ashes, and Third Winter of War: Buchenwald.

Winner of the Illinois Arts Award for Poetry, short-listed for the Bakeless Award, and nominated for four Pushcart Prizes, his poems and stories have appeared in such national journals as Ontario Review, Chattahoochee Review, Atlanta Review, Nimrod, Crab Orchard Review, Marge, Poetry East, Vocabula Review and in the anthology Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust. He was the featured poet in the 2007 edition of Spoon River Poetry Review. Garrison Keillor read Guzlowski’s poem “What My Father Believed” on his program, The Writers Almanac.

Dr. Guzlowski’s critical essays on contemporary American, Polish, and Jewish authors can be the found in such journals as Modern Fiction Studies, Polish Review, Shofar, Polish American Studies, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, and Studies in Jewish American Literature.

Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, reviewing the Polish translation of Language of Mules, for the journal Tygodnik Powszechny, said, “This volume astonished me.”

A Professor Emeritus at Eastern Illinois University, John Guzlowski currently lives in Danville, Virginia, where he recently completed a novel about the German soldiers who murdered his mother’s family during the Second World War.

He keeps a blog about his parents’ experiences as Polish slave laborers and DPs at http://lightning-and-ashes.blogspot.com/ .

Reality of Fiction: Novelist George Rabasa

2011-03-26T06:25:00.000-07:00

Photo: Keri Pickett

George Rabasa is a novelist and short story writer whose latest book is Miss Entropia and the Adam Bomb (Unbridled Books); he is also the author of a short story collection (Glass Houses: Stories) and three other novels (Floating Kingdom, The Cleansing, The Wonder Singer). Glass Houses received The Writer’s Voice Capricorn Award for Excellence in Fiction and the Minnesota Book Award for Short Stories. His novel, Floating Kingdom received the Minnesota Book Award for Fiction. Another novel, The Cleansing, was named a Book Sense Notable. His short fiction has appeared in various literary magazines, such as Story Quarterly, Glimmer Train, The MacGuffin, South Carolina Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry, American Literary Review, and in several anthologies. George Rabasa was born in Maine, lived many years in Mexico City, and now resides and writes in Minnesota. George came to us when we issued our Call for Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration, and he sent us the wonderful (sensitive, touching, humorous) duo of stories (with truly memorable characters) that appear in that volume.

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The Escape Artist

Among our expectations of good fiction is the implicit promise that it will cut the bonds that tie us to life’s conventions. I’m not referring to the relief that stories can offer from the numbing commute, the office, the news of the day. The escape that fine fiction promises is of a more revolutionary nature, delivering freedom from the conventional thinking and automatic responses that cloud our sense of our greater-than-human condition. In this way, the writer is a literary Houdini that shakes off his own chains and in the process frees his readers so that together they can enjoy a ride into parallel and unsuspected universes of mind, heart and soul. The fiction that does this is not buried treasure. It’s the work of a million writers throughout the ages whose works are free in libraries, or for a reasonable price at a favorite bookstore.

Liar Liar Brain on Fire

I was eight or so when I started inventing stories. I told them to neighborhood children who promptly repeated them to their parents and to their teachers. My tall tales got around: The Hansens down the street keep their children in cages. Miss Norris, the sixth grade teacher, was once in prison for bank robbery. Señora Larios likes to sunbathe in the nude with her gardener. Having got wind of these stories, my parents decided I was a problem liar, not a budding artist.

I was regularly sent to apologize and confess my untruths to the victims of my fantasies. The idea was to shame me out my compulsive lying disorder, technically, and more evocatively, known as pseudologia fantastica.

The stories kept on coming, whether I told them to others or kept them to myself. My mind bubbled over with overheard voices and remembered faces. I imagined the secret lives of family friends. Chance encounters with bus drivers, clerks, school staff all gave rise to visions of mayhem and adventure.

Unlocking the Writer

I was not a good student in high school. I was too busy reading for fun – Spillane, Salgari, Steinbeck, Hemingway – to crack textbooks. And I was a master at spinning assignments, from history to biology, into fanciful narratives of inspired bullshit, good enough for a laugh and a C-.

I went to Clemson University and soon gravitated from an engineering major to the cigarette-smoking, beer-drinking, easy-loving crew that edited the Chronicle literary magazine. My first short story was about a homeless man panhandling the fashionable denizens of the upper West Side of New York. Then I wrote one about a bullfighter. I had never begged or fought bulls, yet I was not writing about these exotics; I was living them. I heard their voices and smelled their fear and humiliation. The stories were published in the magazine and I knew I had found my calling; I could make up stuff and be recognized for it.

More than that, fiction helped me reconcile the imagined world with the world I lived; the story fixes a moment so that it can be relived by anyone opening the page. Piggy will always lose his glasses in Lord of the Flies. Fiction’s concrete world is no less tangible than the moving flow of reality. And the voices I heard were as alive as any outside my head.

I had a slow apprenticeship. My first stories came slow and hard, to the point that I thought I was not really going to be the writer I had hoped to become. I was unhappy trying to write and I was unhappy failing at it. The muse had deserted me. But I kept reading, this time moving on to the Latin American boom – García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes, Cortázar. Then, Nabokov, Woolf, Conrad, Kafka, T.S. Eliot, Whitman. I read above my head: Don Quijote, Under the Volcano, Madame Bovary, Crime and Punishment. I realized that I would never be more than a midget next to these giants, but I felt I had an obligation to honor the small gift of the imagination with which I had been blessed. I would have preferred to be a rock musician, a movie star, Mother Teresa. I accepted I was a one-trick pony and became a writer of fiction.

Process, what process?

I like to think that somewhere a writer has discovered a systematic approach to the composition of a novel – a step by step approach from ruminating to note-taking to drafting and revising. The result would be the seamless web of a novel with all the harmony and grandeur of a cathedral. No angst, no uncertainty, no fear. I haven’t met such a person. For most of us the process of writing is disordered, with much hesitation, exploration, improvisation. In the end, however, I generally feel by the time a piece is published that I’ve accomplished what I set out to do. If I have illuminated some of the mystery of being human through stories and characters that grip and engage and move the reader, then the winding road has proven to be as direct as a bullet. I believe in the power of story to satisfy a basic human need. To fulfill this promise, I rely on basic technique – vivid characterization, a strong sense of place, the telling detail, the pursuit of a timeless sort of truth. I don’t have pet themes; my fiction carries my core beliefs without an explicit agenda.

In the process I have plumbed depths of compassion and understanding that I didn’t know I had. In my villains, I find that their evil is part of the human condition, and therefore integral to my own humanity.

I learn about myself through writers who tell stories in ways that I might never attempt. In the process I’m reminded that one can do anything in a novel, to escape strictures of logic and form and plunge into the unknown. This takes artistic courage. I recently read Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, a marvelously compelling shape-shifting narrative with mythic resonance. Before that, Bolaño’s 2666 with its hypnotic patterns of violence and uncertainty. And, some years ago, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. How do they do it?

I have also discovered new works and kindred spirits through my publisher Unbridled Books: Mark Estrin’s Insect Dreams, Peter Geye’s Safe from the Sea, Frederick Reuss’s A Geography of Secrets.

Good writing pushes me to write. To this end, I have a gentle work schedule that slowly but slowly has allowed me to produce four novels (and a couple of unpublished ones) plus a bunch of short stories in a collection and in magazines. I have a studio a couple of blocks from my home and I spend weekdays writing for about four hours divided in morning and afternoon. Some time is also spent reading, researching and indulging in various forms of idleness with the help of the internet.

Punching in at the Fiction Factory

As a reader I’m interested in the work habits and writing spaces of writers. When one of my readers asked about these things, I thought of a recent, typical morning:

I’m late, I’m late! It’s 9:13 and the brain is humming but the author is not writing. Not a good situation for the novel that has been in progress for several months. Still, I just can’t dive in. Like a good athlete I need a little warm-up – might strain a brain cell or two otherwise. So, I check e-mail (nothing much), calendar (nothing much), news headlines (way too much).

I take a look around the Fiction Factory, and I’m energized by the red walls (“cayenne,” says the paint can), the Mexican rug with the Huichol designs depicting the symbols for eagle, corn, flowers, peyote. Packed bookshelves hold a lifetime of reading, and learning. This is where my masters live – García Márquez, Updike, Lowry, Borges, Nabokov, Cervantes – it’s a long list. There are pictures on the walls, some created by friends. On the i-pod player, Perla Batalla sings Leonard Cohen.

Before I know it, I’m staring at the screen, cursor blinking, words waiting to be arranged and rearranged. Commas achieve the importance of subatomic particles; take one out or put one in and the order of the universe has been altered. The new novel is about fifty pages long so far, and all I think about for the next hour or so is a sentence, a paragraph, a scene. I take one step at a time, without thinking too much about the finish line. Then I move on to the next sentence. And so on…

Finally, it’s lunch time! Work at the Fiction Factory specifies a decent time for lunch and reading and nap, followed by a couple of hours of the afternoon shift. Then, it’s time for meditation, exercise, wine, dinner, chocolate. Ah, a happy routine! While I’ve been told I should get a life, I can’t think of a better one.

Thirty-five years after publishing my early stories in college, my first book, Glass Houses: Stories came out to a few good reviews. Since then I’ve continued to listen to the voices in my head. I know myself to be my characters just as Flaubert did. When asked where Madame Bovary came from he answered, “Madame Bovary c’est moi.”

I’ve published novels about an immigrant smuggler (Floating Kingdom, Coffee House Press) and a torturing physician (The Cleansing, The Permanent Press). More recently, I wrote in the first-person voice of a legendary opera diva in The Wonder Singer (Unbridled Books).

My latest novel Miss Entropia and the Adam Bomb (Spring 2011 from Unbridled Books) is a story of young love gone mad. Told in the voice of adolescent Adam Webb, he narrates his obsession and eventual tragic unfolding with Francine Haggard, aka “Miss Entropia.” More about my work can be found at www.georgerabasa.com and at www.unbridledbooks.com.

Author Nahid Rachlin Self-Reflects at St. Francis College

2011-03-24T06:04:00.000-07:00

By: Chandra Persaud

On March 17, 2011, a small crowd of students, faculty, and members of the community gathered in the Maroney Forum for Arts, Culture & Education at St. Francis College for Nahid Rachlin’s reading from Persian Girls: A Memoir, followed by a Question & Answer session and a reception in the theater’s lobby. The intimate setting was appropriate for a reading that delved deep into the author’s personal life.

Professor Gregory Tague of the English Department at St. Francis provided the opening remarks, explaining that he first came into contact with Rachlin when Editions Bibliotekos, his small family-owned literary publishing company, was searching for pieces to be placed in two anthologies: Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration, published in 2010, and Battle Runes: Writings on War, published in 2011. Stories by Rachlin were published in each anthology, but her work left a lasting impression on Professor Tague and he was more than delighted when she agreed to the reading. Professor Tague then proceeded to give a brief biography of Rachlin including her education at Columbia University and then at Stanford University on a Stegner Fellowship as well as her notable recognitions. He shared reviews from prominent literary publications, such as The New York Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Publishers Weekly, testifying to the value and richness of Rachlin’s work. Persian Girls: A Memoir was chosen by Christopher Merrill, Director of Iowa International Writing Program, as one of the best four books of 2006.

When Rachlin took the spotlight, she gave the audience some background information on her writing style. For many years, she wrote only fiction as a way to understand the world; she was able to escape any harsh reality through her writing. Even though her characters or plots stemmed from her imagination, her writing was always personal and somehow related to her life. For example, Foreigner, published in 1978, was composed at a time when Rachlin was questioning her own identity. While she always wished to write a memoir, she was rather surprised at how difficult the process turned out to be. The sole purpose for writing a memoir is telling the truth, the essence of the writer’s being, which meant that Rachlin could not make up any events or characters as she was accustomed to. It also meant that she had to embrace memories that took quite some time to come to terms with.

Excerpts from Rachlin’s memoir revealed an individual who is multilayered, whose life has been filled with emotions and experiences that continuously shape her writing, her perspectives of the world, and her being.

The first few excerpts Rachlin shared revolved around her childhood and early teenage years in Iran. She recalled the time when she was forcibly taken back by her father, who was a well-educated judge in Iran, from her aunt who did not legally adopt her. Rachlin was given to her aunt, Maryam (her mother’s sister), as a baby after Maryam repeatedly pleaded with Rachlin’s biological mother, Mohtaram, to adopt one of her children. Maryam was a widow with no children of her own, while Mohtaram gave birth to ten children. Mohtaram promised Maryam that she could adopt her next child and Rachlin was that next child. When her father came to take her back at the age of nine to live with her biological family, Rachlin was reluctant to be separated from Maryam, the woman she still considers to be her mother. In an interview for The Writer’s Chronicle in 2008, Rachlin explained that at the age of nine, her father viewed her as “a woman…and he felt I [Rachlin] needed his supervision.” To help readers understand why her father must have felt this way, Rachlin explains in her memoir that, “Islam required women to begin wearing chadors, or head scarves, around the age of nine. Nine was also the age when Iranian girls could legally marry” (6).

Rachlin also spoke about her upbringing in the home of her biological parents. She described her parents as being “half-Westernized” because they were not devoutly observant of Muslim customs such as praying, following the hejab, or fasting. Yet, they upheld many traditional standards of Iranian/Muslim life, such as believing girls and boys should not mingle together until marriage, marriages should be arranged by parents, education was for boys, and girls should tie the knot as soon as a suitable match was found. Rachlin shared a very close, loving relationship with her older sister, Pari, who like Rachlin, did not settle for the prescribed roles for Iranian girls and women. She yearned to be an actress and Rachlin a writer and, as Rachlin explains, both “wanted to use the arts to escape what we felt deeply as the oppression of our beings” (Interview for The Writer’s Chronicle, 2008).

Rachlin also read an excerpt detailing the arranged marriage Pari reluctantly agreed to, despite being in love with someone else. Their parents did not find Pari’s love interest suitable for their eldest daughter and so repeatedly turned down marriage proposals from this suitor. The man whom they accepted as their future son-in-law was very wealthy and educated, but Rachlin later revealed he was also abusive and her sister’s marriage ended in a divorce. Pari passed away as the result of accidentally falling down a stairway while Rachlin was in America, but Rachlin still fears that her sister’s death may have been self-inflicted since Pari was dissatisfied with her life and not being able to live out her dreams.

Rachlin then shared an excerpt describing her initial experiences and feelings in America. After her two older sisters were married, she knew it was her turn next. To escape a life of domesticity, Rachlin convinced her father to send her to the U.S. to study at the age of 17 and he finally agreed, but on one condition: she must attend an all-women’s college in close proximity to her brother who could “keep an eye” on her. Rachlin spoke of the cultural changes she observed in America, particularly the freedom of women to dress, socialize, and go as they please. Yet, she also recalled the mixed emotions she experienced in those days, feeling relieved to be “out of the prison of her home” but simultaneously feeling alienated and insecure. She read about the time when the Dean of her college insisted she wear her “native costume,” or chador, on Parent’s Day. Rachlin never wore a head scarf in Iran and associated it with “a kind of bondage,” but the Dean never inquired about her feelings or preference for the covering.

Rachlin valued the freedom to write and express herself here in America with a sense of ease that she did not experience in her homeland, but her fear of being “discovered” still lingered during those initial days in her new environment.

The reading was followed by a Question & Answer session where Rachlin revealed further details about why her father allowed her to come to America. While in Iran, Rachlin was in the habit of reading censored books, many of which were written by American authors, that she managed to get from a bookstore’s owner whom she befriended. Rachlin’s father feared that her reading list as well as her writing could be interpreted as anti-government and to protect his family from the Shah’s secret police, he decided to send her to America.

When asked why she chose to refer to her mother and aunt by their names when Iranian/Muslim tradition deems such an act almost sacrilegious, Rachlin explained that, for the sake of clarity, she used names to distinguish the two women who played motherly roles in her life, but she considers her aunt, Maryam, as her true mother.

She also revealed that her book, Persian Girls: A Memoir, is not published in Iran and while many of her books have been translated into other languages, such as Portuguese and Dutch, none have been published in her native tongue, Farsi. Her decision to write in English and not in Farsi is emotional—she associates her native language with “taboo and fears.” Rachlin also answered questions about her homeland, explaining that customs, values, and laws vary by villages in Iran so while acts such as stoning a woman is accepted in one region, it may not be the case in another.

A small reception followed in the theater’s lobby where Rachlin signed books and enjoyed small talk with guests.

Nahid Rachlin’s Persian Girls: A Memoir is more than just a story about a woman who escaped a life of convention, giving her the freedom to accomplish her dreams. It also awakens readers to the values and traditions of a culture that many do not have a firsthand account of. Readers are given the chance to enter a world where Rachlin pulls back her many layers, revealing her core, her beginnings, her fondest memories and deepest pains.

For more information about Nahid Rachlin, including a complete biography, interviews, and upcoming readings, visit www.nahidrachlin.com.

Call of the Wild

2011-03-19T08:10:00.000-07:00

We are ready to work on another anthology, which would be our fourth. The theme is “nature’s world.” (The book’s main title will be Human / Nature). The full Call and additional Guidelines can be found by clicking on the Guidelines button at the top of this page: if you are interested in submitting, please refer to the Guidelines and Call. SORRY, SUBMISSIONS CLOSED.

The so-called nature’s world anthology will be our most challenging: there have been many such anthologies – how do we make ours different? As in the past, we rely on the creative ingenuity of our contributors: we are not looking to duplicate what has already been done regarding the natural world; we are not looking for science fiction writing; we are not looking for apocalyptic writing. As with our first three anthologies, we are concerned with the human factor. So with this anthology, what does it mean to be a human being, individually and socially, in the natural world? How does the natural world affect us – how do we shape the natural world – what are the connections and consequences? We are alive in a natural world and cannot deny that fact, and simultaneously the natural world cannot escape our touch.

As we say in the Call: There is a fine line to be drawn here: we do not need Emerson or Thoreau redux. We are not interested in so-called nature writing per se – that has been done and re-done. We are primarily interested in stories that deal with the changing climate in terms of how these changes affect people, families, communities (environmentally, ecologically, politically, historically, socially). We can imagine a story about a farmer: in Nebraska, in Vermont, in China, in South Africa. What’s happening to that farmer who sees her sheep starving, dying of thirst, or suffering from interminable illnesses? Climate is as much a metaphor as a social condition: what is the temperature in the atmosphere of our natural humanity? Some current terms that might set off ideas: Deep ecology; Evolution; Waste; Biosphere; Sustainability. We are looking for writing that goes beyond pollution reports, beyond news-writing about the ravages of mining – focus on the changing character of humankind (internally and externally) in relation to the environment.

The deadline (subject to change) is 1 September 2011, and of course, whether or not we complete an anthology on this theme depends on the quality of the material we receive. To complicate matters more: we want fiction only. Query us first: publisher@ebibliotekos.com - a few lines about you and your idea, and if we are interested, then we will ask you to send in the story. (Please refer to the Call and Guidlines - click on Guidelines tab on the right-hand side of this screen.)

The Story Teller: Ruth Knafo Setton

2011-03-17T08:04:00.000-07:00

Ruth Knafo Setton is the author of the critically-acclaimed novel The Road to Fez. Born in Safi Morocco, she is the recipient of literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and PEN. Her poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction have appeared in many journals and anthologies. Ruth is the Writer-in-Residence for the Berman Center for Jewish Studies at Lehigh University. She is working on a new novel and a collection of poetry. Ruth’s story “Living Between Question Marks” and poem “My Father Eats Figs” appear in the Bibliotekos collection, Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration.

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Every night for the past thousand years, under moon and stars in the Djma el Fnaa, the fabled square of Marrakech, a man tells a story. Wearing a white turban and djellabah, he stands in the center of a circle of people. Wide-eyed and rapt, they lean forward to catch his every word and see his every gesture. He is competing with the human circus in all its barbaric grandeur. Crowds stream past, drums pound, people dance, steam rises from food stalls, beggars wail, the snake charmer lures his six-foot python from a basket, the Berber pharmacist spreads his cures on a blanket, the henna woman tries to embroider your arms and hands with henna scrolls. Surrounding the magic circle of the storyteller are voices, a multitude of voices—beggars, vendors, the muezzin, singers, musicians, snake charmer, the crowd—yet his voice stands out.

I have watched the storyteller for hours as he weaves a web of magic around his audience. You don’t have to understand the language he is speaking to understand the power of story. All you have to do is listen to his voice, watch his eloquent gestures and you find yourself responding to the rhythm of his words, the dramatic pauses, the sense of tension and suspense he creates. Story is the answer and it is also the question.

Who are we? Why are we? What are we? Why do we want what we want? What is truth? What is true?

Story is you and me. Story connects us to each other and to the world.

I am a storyteller. I tell stories to my students, I tell them to my children, I tell them with my pen—and in my daily life. When I write poetry I tell a story that pulses with images. At night I dream in story. When I see strangers I imagine stories. For me, always and forever, it comes down to our most ancient, necessary need: story.

For my ninth birthday I received my first diary. The first words I wrote: “I want to be a writer.” This was the first time I articulated what I must have always known. It was always about words—and story—for me.

When I was three, we left Morocco, where I was born, and crossed the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. In America I received a hand-made gift: a picture book of the alphabet with an object illustrating each letter. A = Apple. B = Boat. C = Cat. That was the beginning of my love affair with English, a passionate love that has never waned.

At age four, I sat on my mother’s lap as we puzzled through the first American picture book I brought home from the school library. We trembled as we opened the book to the first page. Flicka, Ricka and Dicka, pretty blonde triplets, smiled back at us, beckoning us into their black-bordered world where nothing evil could enter, no djnoun or rampaging mobs, no shrieking nightmare figures or serpents with human heads. For the moment, we were safe. What my mother didn’t know, what I already kept secret, was that I was not simply pointing out words, I was pressing and digging my index finger into the illustration, trying to penetrate the black borders of the story world and find the doorway that led from this world to the other world.

That desire has never changed. Okay, so my finger wasn’t powerful enough to transport me from one world into another, but my imagination did the job with ease. I’ve always tried to bridge the world in which I live and the world in which I dream—with my reading and my writing.

As I grew up, books were my food and air, their authors my earthly and spiritual guides. I read indiscriminately, haunting old book fairs, cracking open dusty volumes with inscriptions that offered glimpses into other lives—and connected me with people of other times and places. My fourteenth summer, in particular, was an orgy of passionate encounters. By day I flirted with neighborhood boys as I rode my bike, swam in the local pool, sneaked cigarettes in the evening and chased fireflies. By night I huddled under the cover with a flashlight (not to wake my sister) and let Colette, Isak Dinesen, Dostoevsky, D.H. Lawrence, W. Somerset Maugham, Edgar Allan Poe, Richard Halliburton and the Brothers Grimm wrap their winged arms around me and fly me to lands that made me tremble and cry. Afterwards I collapsed in bed, shut my eyes and dreamed. My dreams were mini-series (the budding novelist) and cliff-hangers, sagas of adventure, mystery and romance. In the morning I awoke, dazed, reddened and exhausted. Like the twelve dancing princesses, I felt like I’d danced all night in an otherworldly kingdom. I already knew I wanted to be a writer, but that summer I decided I wanted to create magic with my pen. I wanted to transport my readers to a dream-land they never wanted to leave.

I read constantly, hundreds of books a year. Words are still my sustenance. This past year I’ve discovered the gorgeous world of contemporary young adult fiction. I’ve been on a reading binge … loving the dark bittersweet chocolate of The Hunger Games trilogy; the tart lemon of Incarceron, and the even tarter, almost sour sequel Sapphique; the gorgeously imagined Graceling and Fire; the spicy cider of Jellicoe Road; the lush Hush, Hush; the coolly frightening worlds of Matched and Across the Universe, and so many more…. It’s a cornucopia of riches, a feast. Reading them, I am fourteen again, dreaming of a world of infinite possibility, enchanted gardens of unimaginable beauty and horror, love so passionate it transcends death. I’m also teaching a young adult literature course this spring, which allows me to read more.

And yes, I’m writing a new novel that can be called young adult. It explores the power of myth in modern-day life, particularly myths of female power, through the eyes of a sixteen year-old girl. This new novel is profoundly inspired by a recent Mediterranean voyage during which I sailed and taught on a ship that stopped in Athens, Rome, Naples, Istanbul and Casablanca, among other ports. The experience of wandering through ancient-new cities while feeling the weight and timeless presence of history and myth was very moving on many levels. I was returning to my roots, retracing the voyage my parents made when they sailed from Tangiers through the Strait of Gibraltar, and across the Atlantic to New York City. This new book is set in contemporary America, but it goes back to our most ancient stories, myths, rituals, human dreams and yearnings.

I’m also working on a collection of poetry, several memoir-like essays, and the revision of my novel, Darktown Blues.

While raising three children and working fulltime, I trained myself to write while changing diapers, packing lunches, helping with homework, doing private tutoring, and teaching in elementary schools and universities. Like Hamlet, I learned to find “eternity in a nutshell.” When people ask me, ‘How could you write with three children?” I tell them, “I couldn’t have written without them.” My children—and my family—taught me not only to be disciplined in the pursuit of my goal, but also to discern between what is important in my life, and what can fall by the wayside.

It took me nearly seventeen years to write and publish my first novel, The Road to Fez. A coming-of-age novel that explores the interweaving lives of two Moroccan-Jewish girls, one fictional and the other, the legendary Suleika. A beautiful seventeen year-old Moroccan-Jewish martyr, Suleika refused to renounce her faith and was beheaded in Fez in 1834. In over 300 versions of her story, Suleika represents the shifting mirror of the Jew, particularly the Jewish woman, in the imagination of Muslims in pre-colonial Morocco and European Romantics. Spaniards and Frenchmen wrote plays about her tragic, mysterious life. Jews and Arabs prayed side by side at her tomb in the Jewish cemetery of Fez. As I pieced together the puzzle of her life, I realized she was a figurehead who stood on the border between Africa and Europe, Judaism and Islam, tradition and modernity, women and men, sacred and profane. Who was this girl who bridged so many worlds? And why would a young girl choose death over life? To me the subject was profoundly fascinating and disturbing with no easy answers, exactly what one hopes for from literature.

I rewrote the novel at least five times, trying to squeeze Suleika’s life into a semi-coherent narrative, the way I tried to squeeze mine, eliminating the hyphens and inconsistencies in my own identity, immigrant memories, dreams and longings that made no rational sense, the search for a home that didn’t seem to exist in daylight, the key that unlocked my grandparents’ house in Morocco, and even earlier, the house we had abandoned in Spain during the Inquisition. In my search for Suleika I discovered my own family: rabbis, Kabbalists and philosophers—and a grandfather who composed poetry in Classical Arabic and played his oud on a roof terrace against the sea wind. I faced constant discouragement and received enough rejection letters to wallpaper my room, including one so painful it was almost funny—yet it paralyzed me for several years: “You write well. Next time try writing about the real Jews.”

But I picked up my pen and notebook and soldiered on. There was no other way.

I write every morning, a cup of coffee in one hand, pen in the other. I write by hand in sketch books—no lined pages, no computer screen—nothing but my pen painting the white pages. The act of writing is intensely physical and sensual, and deeply personal as well. I hug this private world I’ve created between the covers of my notebook and keep it intimate and mine for as long as I can—until the story threatens to burst from the notebook. Then I type it up. That’s the movement from personal to public. That’s when I can edit, see clearly (at least more clearly), and share it with the world.

I write poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction. Poetry has taught me the importance of each word and how to speak in the language of images: a wreath of yellow butterflies, a killer jewel, a sunken stone library, a block of ice colliding with the Old World…. Fiction, on the other hand, knows that the image, no matter how breathtaking, is never enough: we need the story. We crave narrative momentum, suspense, desire. When I write, my poetic and fictional impulses collide, struggle, interweave. My nonfiction attempts to see the pattern, to discern the method in the madness.

As I write I am like a detective searching for clues. I don’t know the solution, I don’t even know exactly what the mystery is about, but I do recognize a clue when I stumble over it. I pick it up and examine it in the light. And that leads me to the next clue. A detective groping in the dark, bumbling and blind, yet given moments of grace: a door blows open, light shines on a hidden path, a whispered word lures me around the corner. I have no idea where it will lead but I’m up for the adventure.

Every morning you can find me, pen in hand, working on a story or poem or essay. The shadows of palm trees sway over the pages of my notebook, even though I may be writing in wintry Pennsylvania. I hear the storyteller’s resonant voice, see his gestures and watch the enchanted faces of the audience. With the power of his story he has drawn a black border that guards and protects: the magic circle Scheherazade drew night after night for a thousand and one nights. The sounds, smells, sights of the frenzied, chaotic Djma el Fna’a recede. Time holds still.

Once upon a time … and they lived happily ever after. What a story lies between those words! Listen.

Text and Images Copyright c. 2011 by Ruth Knafo Setton

“Stitching and Unstitching” - The Life of a Writer: Anne Whitehouse

2011-03-16T09:04:00.000-07:00

We are quite pleased to share an extended Interview with poet, fiction writer, and author ANNE WHITEHOUSE. Anne has been writing in multiple genres for her entire life - has been developing her craft for a lifetime - and if you are familiar with her work (if not, read some of her books), what she says here will offer insights into her origins as a writer. We are impressed with how Anne continues to challenge herself as a writer and mature as a poet. The life of a writer, as W.B. Yeats describes work in “Adam's Curse,” is one of stitching and unstitching, penciling and erasing - the toils of the writer are for the benefit of the reader.

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When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer? As soon as I learned to write, when I was about five or six, I used to create illustrated stories with ballpoint pen or pencil and sometimes with crayon. When I was about nine years old, I wrote longer stories in installments that were read by my younger sisters and my friends. At the age of 16, I read Wallace Stevens’ poem, “The Snow Man.” The triple use of the word “nothing” in the last stanza made me want to write poetry.

Why do you write? Writing begins in desire and need. I write because I feel incomplete without writing. I write out of a love for literature, reading, language. I write to convey what is authentically mine. I write because of a wish to create something durable and permanent from evanescent experience.

Is being a writer/poet anything like you imagined it would be? It never gets any easier to face the blank page or the blank screen. I thought it might get easier over time, but it really doesn’t. That said, I also write because I love to play with words. For me, writing is rewriting.

What do you think makes a good story? I find it satisfying when the story coheres and comes together on the immediate narrative level and on deeper, symbolic and thematic levels. I am more of a character than plot-driven writer; character is what interests me. I am a student of human nature and a close observer. I try to understand what motivates people. I look for the context. My undergraduate major was Social Studies, an interdisciplinary major in the social sciences. I am interested in psychology, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology. I have also loved myths from a very young age. I was raised on the Bible and Greek and Roman myths. As I grow older, they seem ever more mysterious and inexhaustible. I love literature that incorporates these elements in different ways. For example, James Joyce’s Ulysses has been a favorite of mine for many years for the ways in which he recreates and retells a myth for modern times. His mind is so fertile and his ear is so musical that I continue to delight in his writing, no matter how often I reread it. I also love and revere Kafka, whose writing is more profound in the sense that he creates his own myths. His writing is mythical, allegorical, endlessly suggestive and allusive. I love the major novels and especially I love the stories and tales about small animals and freaks. I admire the way in Kafka that nothing is quite what it seems, and yet his prose is so tactile, so focused and pared down on the sequence of events he is depicting. It develops logically, one thing leading to the next, yet the result is anything but conventionally logical.

What's your favorite genre to read? I have eclectic and catholic tastes. I will read anything that is printed, including cereal boxes when nothing else is available. I love literary fiction, memoir, poetry, history, and biography. I love art and photography. I love books on natural history. I have worked as a book reviewer for many publications; my bibliography is available on my website.

Who is your favorite author or poet? There are so many I love. I feel a little bit like Roberto Bolaño (another writer I love) as I start to compile a long list of beloved writers. In addition to Joyce and Kafka, mentioned above, I would add Shakespeare (of course), Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Baudelaire, William Butler Yeats, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, John Donne, William Blake, John Keats, Lord Byron, Stendhal, Horace, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Marquez, Albert Camus, Yasunari Kawabata, Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Leo Tolstoy, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anton Chekhov, Marcel Proust, T.S.Eliot, Oscar Wilde. I love Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë (I like Jane Eyre better than Wuthering Heights), Elizabeth Bishop, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Katherine Mansfield, Shirley Hazzard, Bruce Chatwin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Isak Dinesen, Vladimir Nabokov, Oscar Wilde, Machado de Assis, Marianne Moore, Jack Kerouac, Mark Twain, Pablo Neruda. Writers I love that are somewhat forgotten and deserve to be better known include Iris Origo, Katharine Butler Hathaway, Isabel Bolton, Virginia Hamilton Adair.

I was a tremendous reader as a child; children’s literature is still very important to me. Children’s writers I love (from my own childhood and my daughter’s) are Robert Louis Stevenson, Laura Ingalls Wilder, J.K. Rowling, Louise Fitzhugh, George MacDonald, Noel Streatfield, Rosemary Wells, E.B. White, A.A. Milne, Andrew Lang, Maira Kalman, Louisa May Alcott, Lewis Carroll, Hugh Loftis, L.M. Montgomery, L. Frank Baum, Frances Hodgson Burnett.

There are lots of writers I love selectively (in other words, I love some of their works)—Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Eugene O’Neill, Graham Greene, Susan Sontag, Truman Capote, Robert Lowell, Gustave Flaubert, D.H. Lawrence are a but a few.

There are writers whom I once loved but have not read in decades, and I need to rediscover them again. That includes Fyodor Dostoevsky, Herman Melville—these are writers one has to feel willing to grapple with. I hope to once again, but I am not ready quite yet.

There are some writers I love for one book: Harper Lee for To Kill a Mockingbird, Ralph Ellison for Invisible Man, Anne Frank for her Diary, Tobias Schneebaum for Keep the River on Your Right, Louise Erdrich’s Shadow Tag.

I think the generation of poets born in the 1920s and early 1930s was an extraordinary generation—better than my generation. To name a few: James Merrill, William Merwin, A.R. Ammons, Galway Kinnell, James Wright, Robert Bly, Jane Cooper, Philip Levine, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Anne Sexton.

Some contemporary writers I’ve read in the past year or so with great pleasure include Donna Tartt, Roxana Robinson, David Moolten, Lewis Hyde, David Castronovo, Alexander Chee, Valerie Martin, A.E Stallings, Ben Macintyre, David Benioff, Alison Light, Garry Wills, Erika Dreifus, Bob Zellner, Joseph O’Neill. I am riveted by Malcolm McDonagh’s plays.

What books or stories have most influenced you the most as a writer? Virginia Woolf’s novel, The Waves inspired my novel Fall Love. I already mentioned the effect Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Snow Man” had on me. I think that writers aren’t aware of their influences at the time that they are being influenced. I think that if one is aware of the influence, then it’s not really an influence. It might be a model. But influences are more mysterious and unconscious. One only knows in retrospect.

What books or stories have most influenced you as a person? As a child, I had The Golden Book of Greek Myths. I vividly recall my shock when I first read the story of Oedipus. And the truth is, every time I read it, I still feel the shock. What a story! Writing doesn’t go any deeper than that. The Biblical story of Joseph is another one. The family is the basic human social structure, and our deepest conflicts and yearnings; our desire, terrors, and taboos, go back to it.

In a larger context, The Iliad has never been surpassed as the great story of war and society and capricious fate. As Simone Weil wrote in her wonderful essay, “Its bitterness is the only justifiable bitterness, for it springs from the subjections of the human spirit to force. This subjection is the common lot, although each spirit will bear it differently, in proportion to its own virtue. No one in the Iliad is spared by it, as no one on earth is.”

Where/how do you find the most inspiration? I find inspiration wherever I can. One cannot will inspiration to come, but one must allow oneself to be receptive enough to recognize it. It’s a certain kind of attention, a readiness. I think it gets harder and harder every day as our attentions are fragmented and scattered. We’re supposed to pay attention to so many things at once. We’re in touch with everything and everyone but ourselves. It’s hard to go deep, to concentrate. I’m as guilty of the above as anyone else. Some days my mind can’t seem to settle on anything. Yoga and meditation help me to create a welcoming space, a willingness to receive inspiration with a proper sense of awe.

When I am trying to work out something in my writing, and I feel stuck, I try to focus my mind on it before falling asleep. Sometimes it works. When I was taking calculus in high school, I used to figure out math problems this way. I’d have the answer when I woke up. I don’t always have the answer now, but sometimes it helps.

What does your family think of your writing? My husband Stephen Whitehouse says, “I am very proud of my wife’s writing.” My 18-year-old daughter Claire says, “I like my mom’s writing, and I am proud of it.”

What is your work schedule like when you're writing? I start each day reading over what I worked on the previous day or previous few days, in order to get me back into the right mindset. Sometimes I move back and forth between several things I am working on; some days I put all the effort into one thing I am working on. It all depends where I have an insight. I take notes for everything I do, and I refer to them. I prefer to write in long, uninterrupted blocks of time. I am a social person but not when I am writing. I have found talking antithetical to writing. If I have to talk when I am writing, it breaks my flow of concentration, and it’s hard for me to get it back. This is hard on my family. I need solitude to write. Solitude can be found in a café full of strangers, but it’s not the family living room with everyone sitting around and the television on.

Do you have any writing quirks or rituals? I don’t do my creative writing sitting at a desk. I sit at a desk at my job, and I sit at a desk at home when I am paying bills and the like, but when I am writing poetry or fiction or anything creative, I usually sit on a comfortable seat. Or I like to sit on the floor. Often I like to spread my legs out in front of me or tuck my legs under me. I like to be physically relaxed and comfortable when I am writing.

Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing? Sometimes, in fiction more than in poetry, I write myself down a wrong direction, and I have to discard writing that has taken me weeks or even a couple of months. It can be hard to let go of it, but it is absolutely necessary. You’ve got to be ruthless. In order to write fiction, I have to be able to visualize my characters clearly. It sounds easy, but for me it’s not. I begin with ideas about my characters, but it takes a while before I know them. Knowing my characters, working out their stories, is what keeps me going and what I care about in writing. If I know everything in advance, I can’t write the story. If there is nothing for me to discover in the process of writing, then the writing will be dead; it will lack suspense.

I read in amazement of writers who are able to plot their stories out completely and then go back and write them. They make it sound like filling in the blanks, so much easier than my struggles. I know some very good novels have been written this way, and I’ve tried to do it, but my mind draws a blank. Maybe one day I’ll figure it out. I’m still trying. Sometimes I wish I were a different kind of writer, but I have to use the gifts I have and be grateful for what I’ve got.

Many writers, I among them, take comfort from Henry James: “We work in the dark, we do what we can, we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

What are your current projects? I’ve recently completed the first volume of a two-volume novel about a Southern Jewish family in Birmingham, Alabama, called Rosalind’s Ring. It’s set in the 1950s and early 1960s. The first chapter can be read on the Santa Fe Writers Project Journal. I’ve completed a new volume of poems, The Refrain, almost all of which have appeared in literary magazines (linked on my website).

What are you planning for future projects? About a half-dozen of my short stories have recently appeared or will be appearing in literary magazines or anthologies, and I am planning to put together a book-length collection. I am also working on a new collection of poems. I am beginning the novel that will follow Rosalind’s Ring. And I have a couple of other irons in the fire that I am not ready to talk about yet.

Do you have any advice for other writers? Whatever subject you choose to write about, be sure that it interests you enough and you care enough about it to devote yourself to it the way that you’re going to have to. There’s no doubt about it, the practice of any art requires a great deal of sacrifice. It’s hard for people who don’t feel that need and passion to understand why anyone would give so much effort and love and time—at the expense, often, of one’s family and friends—to what seems to offer back so little, certainly in terms of a financial reward. In the end you’ve got to please yourself, or it’s not worth doing. It’s too hard, and it’s too demanding.

Don’t expect other people to understand why you write, not even people you love. For example, one of my closest friends invariably comments when my poetry is published, “I hope you made money on that, Anne.” I know she loves me and she means well; deep down, she wants me to make money on my poetry, because she doesn’t understand why else I would write it. Yet I can’t quell a sense of despair at her familiar comment. To demand of poetry that it be profitable is to burden a frail, delicate creature with such a weight that it can’t take off, much less fly. I thank G-d that I don’t have to make a living from poetry; otherwise I couldn’t write it.

My fiction, alas, has proved to be as much a labor of love as my poetry. That’s the way it is, and I accept it. Society doesn’t value literature, not really. Or else, there’s no telling if society will value it. If society does value it, it’s probably for a reason other than a literary one. As Yeats wrote in one of my favorite poems of his, “Adam’s Curse:”

A line may take us hours maybe

Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

Better go down upon your marrow bones

And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones

Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather,

For to articulate sweet sounds together

Is to work harder than all these, and yet

Be thought an idler by the noisy set

Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen

The martyrs call the world.

I often reflect that the literature that has been passed down to us is what has survived arbitrarily. There may well have been other, greater works that we will never know about, because they were destroyed and their authors forgotten. Think about the tales of Kafka, or Anne Frank’s diary--how easily they might not have survived. One might indeed invent a hypothetical catalogue of destroyed literature. Perhaps this is something Borges wrote about. It sounds like a Borgesian idea. I hope I’ve written something that will survive in some way, but I feel properly humble. As I wrote of my character Althea, an artist, in Fall Love: “...if the thought of leaving a couple of items to a catalogue of thousands didn't daunt her, then perhaps she deserved to have something survive.”

My last bit of advice is practical. Make sure you get enough sleep and are well rested. Writing is a huge mental effort. Some of it is frustrating. You are creating something that was not there and has never existed. You have to stick with it day after day, abiding with it. When my writing has gone well, my mind feels great afterwards, as if it’s gotten a lot of exercise. Some days, on the other hand, it’s hard to accomplish anything. Yet I’ve also come to realize that the frustration is part of the writing process and often precedes the insight. I try to be patient with myself and give myself permission to follow my instincts and inclinations. And if it’s not working, I don’t force it. I do something else, anything else, even dusting the bookshelves.

Something to add: Like Stephen Sondheim in his wonderful book about creating musical theater, Finishing the Hat, I regard teaching as a sacred activity. I was a dedicated and determined student, and I taught for many years, both adults and children. I feel fortunate in having had some wonderful teachers who helped me, inside and outside of the classroom. I am grateful to them all. At its best, education shapes who we are and helps us to live. Once we have it, it can’t be taken away. I’ve written about two wonderful teachers outside of school who influenced me as a child, Miss Don and Miss Praytor. I had some excellent teachers at Mt. Brook High School. Harvard was a revelation and a transformative experience for me. At Columbia’s graduate writing program, I came into contact with some amazing writers and began to think of myself as a writer as well. As an adult, I would like to credit the remarkable Eleanor Worthen, to whom Fall Love is dedicated, for teaching me how to edit fiction.

Where can we find your work? Please go to my website, www.annewhitehouse.com

Here I would like to credit the publishers I’ve worked with recently: Poetic Matrix Press, Finishing Line Press, Editions Bibliotekos, Modernist Press, Atticus Books online, and the many literary magazines that have been so supportive of my work. Links are on my website. And thanks to Anzelina Okarmus Coodey, who designed my website, and Ginger Nagy, who keeps up the website and designed my last two book covers. I’m also grateful to Joe Milford for his labor of love on his poetry show, which featured me: The Joe Milford Show and all of those who love literature and labor for it.

My novel FALL LOVE can be downloaded as an ebook free of charge from Feedbooks and Smashwords or for Purchase or as KINDLE edition.

Some other, recent titles, include:

Bear in Mind (Finishing Line Press, 2010), poetry chapbook.

Blessings and Curses (Poetic Matrix Press, 2009), full-length book of poetry.

Poems in the anthology, Pain and Memory: Reflections on the Strength of the Human Spirit in Suffering (2009).

Kindle me Softly

2011-02-21T07:58:00.000-08:00

No doubt you have heard of dedicated readers? We are dedicated readers. Peggy here is a dedicated reader. But there is also the Kindle device - not a book, but a dedicated reader. We have moved beyond the texture of printed paper and have kindled Pain and Memory. And we expect that by the end of Spring we will have kindled Common Boundary. (We will work on Battle Runes over the summer.) So if you have not yet read Pain and Memory, but if you are a dedicated reader with a dedicated reader, then here is yet another opportunity to read with dedication.

Battle Runes - Writings on War

2011-02-17T12:36:00.000-08:00

BATTLE RUNES: Writings on War is now available. (28% off list price - Barnes & Noble online! - ask about our discounts!) The book consists of twenty-one authors – thirty-seven works (short stories and poems) from all over the world – writing about the physical and psychological ravages of war on individuals and families. Parts of the book are shocking and horrifying, but in the end there is hope.

In the PREFACE, publisher Fredericka Jacks writes: “Battle Runes opens in a child’s voice and ends with a child’s concern; the book begins in horror and terror and ends with care and hope; the collection starts in darkness and ends in color. The stories and poems – while focused on war – include private and public spaces, often addressing family relationships, such as those between husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, or parents and children. While there is blood in these pages, the emphasis is on the complex psychological dimensions of war.”

In her FOREWORD, Professor Wendy Galgan, Ph.D. (English Dept., St. Francis College, NY), says: “These authors possess the remarkable ability to allow the reader to see what they see, to take an unsentimental and painfully clear look at what war – fighting it, witnessing it, surviving it – does to human beings. We experience war and its aftermath through the eyes of victor and vanquished, infantry and insurgent, parent and child. . . . . We are there, witnesses to each battle, observing not from the safety of the sidelines but from the very middle of the action. We watch as soldiers return home to struggle with both the physical and emotional aftereffects of warfare. And we experience the fear of civilians watching their world crumble beneath the machines of war.”

Contributors:

Muhammad Ashfaq; Thom Brucie; John Gifford; John Guzlowski; Alamgir Hashmi; Margaret Kingsbury; Geoffrey A. Landis; Mitch Levenberg; Hunter Liguore; Mira Martin-Parker; Rebecca Newth; Norah Piehl; Nahid Rachlin; C.R. Resetarits; Nancy Riecken; Dawn Sandahl; Lisa L. Siedlarz; Lisa M. Sita; Patty Somlo; Marko Vešović; Jenny D. Williams.

Contributor Awards and Honors:

Nominations: Pulitzer; Georgia Author of the Year; Bakeless Award (Bread Loaf); Pushcart Prize; Best New Poets Anthology. Won: Illinois Arts Award for Poetry; Hugo and Nebula Awards; Rhysling Award; Honorable Mention Award; IFWG Story Contest; NEA Grant; Arkansas Arts Council; Doubleday-Columbia Fellowship; Wallace Stegner Fellowship (Stanford); Bennet Cerf Award; PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award; Leo Connellan Award; Ross Feld Award; StorySouth’s Million Writer’s Award; Solas Award; Rockefeller Fellowship; The Roberto Cellini Memorial Award

ISBN: 978-0982481943. 186 pages, paperback. January 2011. $15.95US. Amazon/B&N online – Ask your local Bookstore (Distributed by Ingram). Google e-Bookstore (future).

Site Status Report

2010-11-28T08:56:00.000-08:00

There have been some changes to this site over the past week or so, and we are still in the process of making alterations.

While we had planned on posting a year-end Newsletter towards the end of December, we decided to create the Newsletter live, online, in the Further News section. Go there to see what some of our authors and friends have been doing during 2010. If you have a newsworthy item, send it to us and we will add you to the roster.

We added an Authors Awards button, in recognition of the accomplishments of the many fine writers who have worked with us. (This information still remains in our Catalogue section.)

We will have other, more exciting news in the days to come. This past year, our first, has been a developmental one for us, and we are beginning to see the direction in which we are headed. Be sure to follow us and see where we are going.

We Are Not Sheepish About Our New Look

2010-11-20T12:25:00.000-08:00

As you might have noticed, we have a new face to Editions Bibliotekos. Since you are here, you'll be glad to know we are hard at work on Battle Runes: Writings on War (and still expect publication by the end of January 2011). We also expect to have more contributor Profiles, including another Interview.

Finding One's Muse: Ruth Sabath Rosenthal

2010-11-17T07:08:00.000-08:00

In our effort to give you the face behind the author and the person behind the author, let us introduce you to Ruth Sabath Rosenthal. We had a chance to get some quick answers from poet Ruth about her work. This is not a full-fledged interview, but rather a sketch of a poet in motion. Ruth has had many poems published widely over the past decade, and her first chapbook, “Facing Home” has just been published by Finishing Line Press.

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* On Beginning.

I first considered myself a writer when I purchased my first computer and learned the basics of Microsoft Word, followed by my signing up for a poetry class at the 92nd Street Y in NYC and the rest is history. This was in the year 2000.

* On Inspiration.

I think my true inspiration came from the fact that, although my mother was not a lover of poetry to the point of reading it or keeping it around the house, she did however make it known that she loved one poem “Abou Ben Adhem” by Leigh Hunt. I must have heard her recite it or she showed it to me. That was the only connection to poetry either she or I had, and that was 40 years or so before I started writing and studying poetry. [Ruth also tells us that she gets inspiration from her dog, Sweetie-Pie, pictured here.]

* On Ideas.

My ideas come from life experience—mine and those around me and those in the world at large—the joy, the suffering, the humor and optimism.

* Where a Good Poem Comes From.

I believe that a good poem comes from truth, whatever that truth is—ugly or pretty, sad or happy, serious or funny, and even if that truth is bent to protect someone.

* Concerning Messages in Writing.

I’d like my readers to come away with, after reading my poems, a feeling of being familiar with me, of having shared in an experience that touches them and feels like what they’ve also at one time or another, on some level, experienced. I’d like them to laugh, shed a tear or two, maybe even read one of my poems more than once.

* Realism in Poetry.

My writing is truly rooted in realism, although I bend the truth and often project myself into a situation, as opposed to me revealing my own personal experience and view point. In other words, I’ll write as if I’m someone else—perceiving things as they do or would.

* Surprises in One’s Own Writing.

I surprise myself all the time. I’m often in awe of a poem I’ve finished working on. I don’t mean that to sound immodest, but I often feel that someone’s words are being channeled through me—someone with something profound to say. And I’ve heard other poets say the same thing. It’s a fantastic experience when it happens. And usually the poem comes fast and needs very little revision.

* Personal Favorites.

I have so many favorite poems I’ve written, but among them are those I regret having not kept to myself. I always worry about hurting someone’s feeling or besmirching the memory of someone who’s passed. I’m cognizant of this when I write, and may hold back because of it.

* Working Schedule.

I am blessed that I have a husband who is both supportive financially and who I can bounce poems off of. He has a good ear although he’s not a poet or writer. Being so fortunate, I write whenever I feel like it and seem to go through spurts of productiveness.

* Types of Poems.

Some would call them “confessional” but I don’t like that term. I write some formal poems such a Sestinas, Villanelles, Sonnets, but mostly I write poems that, though in stanzas, are not in form, and their rhymes run throughout the poems, as opposed to end-rhymes.

* Great Influences.

First, I have to say that I don’t read enough. I need to be in a quiet place, both physically and mentally to do that. And when I do read, it’s always out loud, as hearing the words is essential to me. I love the masters like Yeats, Frost, Whitman, Stevens, Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, May Swenson, but then again, I do read today’s poetry from time to time.

* Reading Now.

At present, I’m not reading. But when I start up again, you can be sure I’ll be writing, because I can’t seem to read for more than an hour or so, when suddenly I am compelled to write. I guess I’m easily inspired and quite impressionable.

* Upcoming Projects.

I plan to publish a series of chapbooks and I’m currently finalizing a full-length manuscript, working with a publisher.

* Current Work.

My current work is much like the poems in my chapbook just recently published by Finishing Line Press, titled “Facing Home.” The subject matter of my current poems is not much different than that of the poems I wrote at the beginning of my writing career, back in 2000. What’s changed is my crafting of poems—I’ve learned so much over the years and have honed my craft to the point of having a strong voice and style.

Not pussyfooting around

2010-11-14T13:35:00.000-08:00

To Celebrate the one-year anniversary of Editions Bibliotekos, we offer DISCOUNTS :

1. ANTHOLOGIES

Our standard discount is 30% on any anthology. See the descriptions in our Catalogue. That means you pay only $11.17 for a book, we pay shipping (US address only).

We can also offer a 45% discount on anthologies, but this must be for an order of at least two copies of our books shipped to one address (in one shipment - continental US only). With the 45% discount you pay only $8.78 per book, so that's a total of $17.56 for two books (but you must order at least two books). (You can do the math for more.) We pay shipping. Make sure to tell us which books you want (e.g., 2 of Pain and Memory, 2 of Common Boundary, or one of each, etc.)

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2. JANE AUSTEN BOOKS (SENSE AND SENSIBILITY / PRIDE AND PREJUDICE)

22% discount on any title. You pay $12.45 for a fully-loaded, nicely printed book (see description in our Catalogue). We pay shipping (US address only).

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These discounts will of course take a bit longer to process than an online order you initiate (i.e., Amazon or B&N), and they will probably take longer than an order at your local bookstore, but this is quite a savings. Again: the offer is only for mailing to a continental U.S. address (and if more than one book, it can be only one shipment since we pay postage).

All sales are final; no returns. (Use Amazon *Look Inside* feature to browse books and see covers.) Such purchases fund future projects (such as Battle Runes: Writings on War, upcoming), so thank you for your support.

If you are interested, send us an email and we will tell you where to send your order/check. EBibliotekos@gmail.com

Battle Runes - falling into place

2010-11-07T12:25:00.001-08:00

WE have finished layout, sequencing, and preliminary proofreading of Battle Runes: Writings on War. We are pleased with the book and thank all of our contributors. (Our original posting about the book with the list of contributors is here.) This coming week we will: 1. give a proof copy to Wendy Galgan, Ph.D., a professor of English, who has agreed to write the Foreword; and 2., give a copy to Meagan Meehan, an academically outstanding college student (and English major) who will act as proofreader. If we stay on track, we expect publication at some point in January 2011.

Garden of Verses: Rebecca Newth

2010-11-02T07:06:00.000-07:00

Rebecca Newth is a poet (five books of poetry) and fiction writer. She has also written Milk Horses: A Memoir as well as a play. She has just finished a new book about time travel and friendship during the Civil War for third and fourth graders. Her favorite subjects for writing are our current predicament, nature, and people. She has been awarded an NEA prize and a Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council to work on a novel. Born and raised near a lake in Michigan, Rebecca lived for many years in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Rebecca now lives near two lakes, and she writes about fluid things, redemption, grief, and cherished places. We recently sent Rebecca some questions, and what follows are her responses – with some insightfully poetic lines included. Rebecca’s latest book (Fall 2010) is The Pass-Key (Will Hall Books)

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When I was eleven, I began looking at A Child’s Garden of Verses to find out how poems are made. It was hard to convince my parents, even when little poems started to get published, that I would be a poet. My mother was practical, getting rid of needless things, and didn’t give me a middle name because it would be extra when I got married. She was proud of me but not a writer in her heart and my father was a saxophone player. My husband’s brother is writer Jim Harrison, and when I got a poem published he said, “Well!” as if he were pleased and that was nice. We were all at Michigan State. My husband was not a writer but rather a facilitator, a librarian, which fits. I think being sad and uncomfortable caused me to write. Also I think seeing the lake where we went on weekends, so beautiful, made me write.

I do not know any rich people, was that one of your questions? – No, it wasn’t, but in the sixties I once knew that Dan Gerber thought my poems were written by an eccentric lady in Cambridge with beads around her neck. He had wondered what kind of person wrote them and was almost the first person to accept my work for publication in a journal called Sumac, printed in Michigan.

In the seventies we lived in Connecticut and met James Laughlin of New Directions Publishing. He gave us one sheep, which we put in our VW bus and brought home. I can barely believe any of that happened. My husband called him “boss” and offered to write the bibliography. Last year I finished it – a massive list of all the books published. Would that be four decades late? At least I finished. But of course meeting the man who established New Directions and published Tennessee Williams and Dylan Thomas and brought to our country those books from other countries in the black and white covers – books like Pablo Neruda, Garcia Lorca and Rainer Maria Rilke – was an incredible jolt. We went into his “basement” where the copies were housed. We tiptoed.

In the eighties we moved to Northwest Arkansas thinking it was out in the country, but Sam Walton beat us to it. Because of Wal-Mart we have direct flight to Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago and D.C. My husband was eager to start to work in a new, smaller college library, and I got snarled up in all sorts of endeavors such as going back to school (at first in Geology), working as a secretary in a law school, conducting interviews with authors on local NPR, and doing scholarly work on Marianne Moore and H.D.’s The Gift. When the college part of my life was over I felt lost, and I promised my mind I would take care of it. “I will find you things to read and to delight you,” I promised it.

My poetry has always been inspired by some unbelievably interesting or beautiful event. I have a rather odd mind, however, people tell me, and sometimes my poetry is oblique. I do not have trouble thinking up ideas although not all of them are good, or rather, I cannot handle them well. Often, also, a think I have a finished product when what I have is incomprehensible to others or merely notes.

My favorite story is one called “Milk Horses” from a memoir by that name. I am comfortable in my writing using the focus of being age eleven or so. That seems the optimum time to observe the world as a poet. I am sure that is not true about the writing of essays.

When I had young children I used to write at night in the kitchen under a hanging lamp. Later, when they were in school I wrote in the morning at a desk that overlooked an orchard. I usually keep another book near me for inspiration, and I read from it and that gets me going. I very much believe we learn from other writings. There is no way to progress without the writings that have come before us. I was very fond of a book by Merwin called The Lice. I am excited by words and sometimes as I am reading another author I let my eyes blur and I see one word for another and then I start to write with the odd word stuck in there to see what happens. I am interested in taking a poem and going all over it trying to start it in different places with different syllable counts and sometimes going from bottom to top. All this is to establish an immediacy and freshness.

Sometimes I wake up in the night thinking scary thoughts when I could be thinking glorious ones. I want to write about people in daily life in Crete – the shepherds, the bandits, the librarians, the heads of villages, the way to make raki. We went to Crete on sabbatical. All these details are the glorious things. I want to write a play about a church breakfast where the priest is excitable, the chef has a dark cloud over his head, and the choir drinks spiked mimosas and then goes out to sing the anthem.

I think poets are modern day prophets giving us the best they can of truth and beauty, sense and nonsense, requiems and evening prayers, prose. Poets (writers) need to be persons of enormous appetites and curiosity, and generous because we are asked to give. Even some tiny shred may mean a world to someone.

My latest book, published this fall, by Will Hall Books, 2010, is The Pass-Key, a book for younger readers. My models were Sounder and Huck Finn. I am working now on a book about the village in Crete.

Story Weaver: Patty Somlo

2010-10-21T09:58:00.000-07:00

Patty Somlo tells here her story about becoming a story writer – and what a story. We are awakened emotionally and intellectually by what we read in these Profiles. Learning about a writer’s background, values, and beliefs really adds to an appreciation and better understanding of her stories. Patty has a book coming out 15 November: From Here to There and Other Stories (Paraguas Books). Be sure to support writers like Patty and small publishers by getting your copy!

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In my early twenties, I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico with my boyfriend, Marshall, who was working on a documentary film, and I started to weave. I had been drawing and painting for years but reached a point where I felt I had nothing to say in those media. The Navajo weaving I saw in New Mexico dazzled me, along with the light and amazing skies and landscape, and I attempted to capture that in some very rough, beginning work.

I was also teaching art at an alternative elementary school in Albuquerque and helping my boyfriend on two documentary films. The second of those films, Warpath Against the Devil, focused on Native American Pentecostal ministers. I traveled with Marshall and the rest of the crew to camp meetings on the Navajo reservation near Monument Valley, where Navajo and Jicarilla Apache ministers preached sermons to the beat of rock music that built to such a pitch that people – mostly Navajo women in their velvet shirts and long skirts – would get up and dance and speak in tongues, eventually falling on the ground and sometimes even fainting. I was so amazed by those experiences, I decided to write an article about it. I never got anything published but that experience led me to want to write more.

I thought the way to write was in a writing-related job, so I gradually worked my way into public relations, and eventually doing PR for a nonprofit organization. My work for The Institute for Food and Development Policy (also known as Food First), got me interested in issues surrounding world hunger and inequality, development and poverty. The organization published books and one in particular – about the dumping of banned pesticides in the developing world – got me interested in doing investigative journalism. I left the organization and started writing freelance articles, mostly investigative pieces, which led to a job as news editor for a weekly newspaper. A number of years later, after a pretty stressful year of researching and writing an investigative piece about the harassment of refugees from El Salvador by the FBI and the possible connections between the FBI and Death Squads in El Salvador, I went back to school and started studying poetry. A year later, I entered a creative writing program and started writing fiction.

Many of the ideas for my stories come from things I read in the news, or rather, my feelings about what is happening in the world, as reflected in the news. The craziness surrounding the debates over health care reform inspired me to write, “Emergency Room,” a story about a group of injured people waiting for medical attention that never comes. Political campaigns were the inspiration for my story, “Candidate of the Third Eye,” about a Gandhi-inspired, Indian-American candidate for governor, whose Policy on Right Living transforms him from a virtual unknown to the frontrunner.

I also get ideas from my own life – mostly from past memories. Having lived in Central America and fallen in love with the people, the landscapes and the culture, I often return there through stories. The landscape in my story, “Bird Women,” which was nominated for the Pushcart Prize, is the mountainous, coffee-growing region of Nicaragua. One of the closest stories I’ve written to my real life, “Even with a Stack of Dollars,” was inspired by my former Nicaraguan landlady’s walking outside on unpaved dusty sidewalks in her backless, gold lamé high heels. My father, who commanded an Air Evac squadron in Vietnam, was the inspiration for my story, “Neither Sweet Nor Sour,” which will appear in the forthcoming anthology, Battle Runes: Writings on War.

I am drawn to stories about people I don’t normally meet in life and places I may never go. The best stories, to me, are ones that take a surprising – and sometimes magical – turn, in which ordinary people, especially the excluded, find unusual ways to cope and survive. Humor is an especially attractive part of good stories, in my view.

Part of what draws me to write is a need to find some hopeful solutions through art to the terrible problems I see in this country and throughout the world. Having grown up in a military family – moving every year or two and living in places from Hawaii to Frankfurt, Germany – I have an odd sense that I don’t really fit anywhere but that I have a connection to all types of people throughout the world. I don’t actually have a message I want to convey in my writing, other than having readers see some of the issues that get so distorted by politicians and the media in a more truthful and compassionate light. I wrote a series of stories, one of which appeared in Common Boundary, that focus on an undocumented Mexican immigrant. As the granddaughter of Hungarian immigrants who were once as denigrated as Latinos immigrants are today, I have a great respect and empathy for immigrants and write many stories about them.

My stories are almost always completely fictional. Some of the settings, as in “The Island,” are mythical places. I rarely am a character in my stories but my views do come through in how the stories play out. In my story, “A Nightly Interruption,” about an unlikely relationship between a Jewish and an Arab man, my view that people can get past stereotypes that cause hatred if they get to know one another comes through. I occasionally base characters – their looks or mannerisms – on people I know. In that story, the Jewish character’s looks are based on a friend and the Arab character’s mannerisms are based on my Turkish hairdresser.

I get up every weekday morning at 5:00 and write. Before I met my husband, I used to make my coffee and write in bed. Now, I make the coffee and write in our finished basement. For some reason, I like to have the light very low when I’m writing. I adore that first cup of coffee (dark French Roast) and love the little cave I feel like I enter when I write, so this is just about the happiest part of my day. After the initial session, I shower and have breakfast, and then go back and either revise a story, continue working on one, or look for places to submit. I’m usually working on several stories at once, and I jot down ideas all the time that I keep in a messy pile on my desk. When I run out of ideas, I pull something from the pile.

I don’t really have any favorite stories, but there are stories I continue to like, no matter how many times I read them. Mostly, I continue to like the stories in which I feel connected to the characters. That is the case for the main character, Hari Shiva, in “Candidate of the Third Eye.” I also like the two women characters in “The Island.” I especially like the characters of mine who have an innocence about themselves.

When I first started writing short stories, the characters and plots were pretty depressing. I suffered from undiagnosed depression for many years and I see now that my own despair came out in the writing. After years of therapy, meditation and yoga, the depression has eased, and my stories, while frequently focusing on serious subjects, have lightened up, many now including a great deal of humor.

My favorite short story writer and the writer who I think has most influenced me is the late Julio Cortázar. Cortázar loved jazz, and his stories feel like improvisations to me. He had his own style of magical realism, in which he looked at life almost as a child and took situations to their not so obvious conclusions. I feel like I see the world in the same way Cortázar might have seen it, and that might be why I like his work so much.

I tend to gravitate toward foreign writers more than American writers. I went through a long love affair with Latin American writers and now am enamored of many Indian writers. Salman Rushdie and Aravind Adiga are two of my favorites.

My other favorites are the Victorians – Charles Dickens, all three Bronte sisters, and Thomas Hardy. I keep saying I’m going to spend a summer re-reading all of Dickens, but never seem to find the time.

My first collection of short stories, From Here to There and Other Stories, will be published by Paraguas Books on November 15, 2010. So, I’m deep into the least fun part of writing – preparing to market the book. I am also working on new stories for a possible second collection. I am hoping to work on a series of creative nonfiction pieces about my relationship to beaches and how growing up as a military brat and continuing to move around as an adult, beaches have been a strange sort of home place for me.

The Peripatetic Author: Janice Eidus

2010-10-19T11:25:00.000-07:00

Do you know about Janice Eidus? You should – and if you don’t, here’s your chance to read about her. Janice has just published a new novel, The Last Jewish Virgin (Red Hen Press). What follows is a guest biographical Profile written by Janice, covering her early years in the Bronx, her literary influences, her themes, and what she's reading now.

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Although my Jewish atheist parents prided themselves on their rationality and secular beliefs, ours was nevertheless an irrational, volatile, secretive, and at times quite violent household. From a very young age, writing provided me with escape, not only from my unhappy family, but also from the Bronx public schools I attended in which indifferent, unprepared teachers did their best to stifle students' creativity and originality.

As an emotionally and intellectually hungry kid, my childhood reading and writing was all over the map. Louisa May Alcott showed me how to look deeply at the inner lives of female characters. I adored Noel Coward, who lived in a sophisticated, glamorous world so unlike mine, and I was influenced by him to write short, witty plays with dark undertones.

The Beats taught me how to rant and opine, and dig the rhythm of language, and I wrote free-form poems, emulating in particular Ginsberg's Kaddish and Howl. I felt I knew Ginsberg, the archetypal Jewish outsider from a dysfunctional family.

Patrick Dennis (author of Auntie Mame and Genius, among other books) inspired me to write manic-edged fiction featuring grande dames who were nothing like the often bedraggled, mah-jongg playing Bronx moms I knew.

Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Sinclair Lewis -- my parents' literary idols, and also major influences on me -- integrated their fiercely progressive values into compelling and imaginative -- sometimes risk-taking and innovative -- stories about decent, hard-working people, and I tried to do the same. (I still try to do this; if I have one concrete, unchanging goal as an author, this is it.)

My youthful writings, diverse as they were, reflected the writer I became -- a writer who prefers not to feel bound to one style or theme or message, a writer compelled to keep seeking new challenges, to try to "make it new."

So I wrote and wrote and wrote throughout my childhood and adolescence, never thinking much about getting published or earning money from my writing. Such goals seemed entirely unlikely from my vantage point as a kid in a Bronx housing project. I couldn't imagine becoming a "success" by any mainstream standards. I had a ferocious "me" versus "them" mentality, with them being anyone in authority. My rebellious, anti-authority streak influenced all aspects of my life -- creative, emotional, physical. (Of course, nowadays, as a mom and writer, I've become "one of them" myself, as Joyce Carol Oates says.)

Wild child or not, my drive and passion for writing didn't go away, and eventually I realized I wanted to be a "real" writer who reached readers beyond my own circle of rebellious, like-minded friends. So I applied to and was accepted by the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. It was there that I began calling myself a writer. For the first time, I was socializing with others also new to the writing world and forming writing identities. For the first time, I learned about literary magazines, literary agents, and prizes. I began submitting my work, and sometimes -- miraculously, it seemed to me then and seems to me still -- getting published.

Certain obsessions have always fed my work: a desire for social justice; the tragi-comic complexity of love in its many forms, including familial, romantic, and amongst friends; and the intersection and collision of classic myth and popular culture. I also love writing about the places I've lived: Manhattan, upstate New York, the Virgin Islands, the Midwest, California, Brooklyn, Mexico … I love traveling to new places, meeting new people, trying to make sense of cultures and customs that are at first unfamiliar. I'm drawn to understand that which feels different to me, and my reading choices reflect this: I read across landscapes, genres, gender, etc. And I'm always urging my writing students to do the same, to routinely expand their reading choices to include the works of writers much older and much younger than they are, writers of other races and religions, of the opposite gender, living in other parts of the world, writing in styles and with messages to impart that seem wholly unlike their own, although reading carefully and deeply will often reveal unexpected commonalities.

My two most recent novels are The War of the Rosens and The Last Jewish Virgin. The War of the Rosens is realistic, rooted in the autobiographical truth of my life, although not literally autobiographical. It takes place in a Bronx housing project and "stars" a left wing, Jewish family much like my own. It's told from multiple points of view: the Rosen father, mother, 13-year-old daughter and 10-year-old daughter. While writing The War of the Rosens, I found that I needed to become each of my characters so that I could inhabit and express each character's particular voice and worldview. I also had to find a way to learn to love them all, as well as to forgive their imperfections, foibles, weaknesses, and even their cruelty.

My new novel, The Last Jewish Virgin (which I call my "Feminist Fashionista Jewish Vampire Novel") is rooted in contemporary New York City. It plays with reality and myth, and my intention is to subvert, honor, and tweak the traditions and tropes of the vampire myth, which I've long been fascinated by. The main character in The Last Jewish Virgin is Lilith Zeremba, a young woman determined to become a mega-successful fashion designer. Completely dismissive of love, lust, romance, and sex, she feels they all must wait until her career goal is met. Despite herself, she finds her true love in a totally unexpected way, replete with vampires, the supernatural, feminism, and a seriously funny exploration of contemporary Judaism.

I feel especially close right now to those two novels, as well as to the other writing I've done since becoming an adoptive mother of my beautiful daughter from Guatemala. Much of my recent work explores mother/daughter relationships, and the nature of adoptive, transracial families. (This includes my essay, "The Color of Cinnamon," which appears in Editions Bibliotekos' Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration.) Motherhood -- the complexity and the generosity of spirit it requires -- has helped me as a writer to merge the fiercely progressive and earnest side of myself with the playful, risk-taking side.

I wish I had a regular schedule, but mine is erratic: days devoted entirely to family, or doctors, or errands … or the business side of writing, or teaching … But throughout I burn with the desire to write. By nature, I'm very peripatetic, and so I love to write in cafes, hotel bars, diners, etc. I love being out in the world while at the same time feeling entirely alone and connected to my own work.

I used to do much of my best writing away from home at artists colonies such as Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I'm forever indebted to those colonies for providing me with the time and space to separate from the "real world," and to write uninterrupted and (almost) stress free.

In the writing I love to read most, I feel the author's passion -- for character, place, message … I love to see unbridled passion balanced by attention to detail; imagination balanced by keen logic; an original way of saying a universal and great truth. None of these are easy to do, and yet there are always new writers who figure out ways to "make it new."

I recently read a short story collection called Simpaticas: San Miguel Stories by Elva Treviño Hart, a child of migrant Mexican farm workers who's now a fiction writer and memoirist. I very much admire the way she tackles major issues of race and class in a deceptively simple style that's not simple at all. The stories all take place in the town of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where I own a home and live part time. It's a place I love deeply -- it's imbued with a complicated history and a thriving contemporary cultural scene. Not to mention that it's in the mountains and has spring-like weather all year round. While in San Miguel, I love writing the old-fashioned way, with notepad and pen, in the large, sunny sala of my house, while my husband takes long walks on the sun-splashed cobblestone streets, and my daughter attends a bilingual school where she sings songs about Tia Monica and learns to make tortillas from scratch.

At the moment, I’m reading Model Home, a novel by Eric Puchner, that takes place in the 80's and is set in the affluent world of Southern California, not so very far away geographically from San Miguel, and yet worlds away. It portrays one family's rude awakening from the American Dream. It reminds me a lot of Neal LaBute's dark, compelling film, The Joneses, in which characters played by Demi Moore and David Duchovny are nearly destroyed by their own materialism and greed.

I also recently finished A&R by Bill Flanagan, a novel about the music business. It's the third novel of Flanagan's I've read this year, so I guess I qualify as a bona-fide fan. I enjoy his wit, keen eye, and cynical-yet-ultimately-sweet insider's view of the world of pop culture, which he knows inside-out as someone who's been a top dog at both MTV and VH-1.

I've read some other wonderful books this year, including Bettina Aptheker's brave memoir, Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought For Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel, an amazingly honest and insightful tale of growing up during the 60's in a family that was considered U.S. Communist Party "royalty."

Finally, inspired by The Last Jewish Virgin, I've been revisting lots of my most beloved vampire literature, including Bram Stoker's Dracula, a tale that for me never grows old. I've also reread Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, written in 1872, an extremely sensual tale of an irresistible lesbian vampire. And Keats' Lamia, about another vampire enchantress, this one heterosexual. And The Vampire Tapestry by Suzy McKee Charnas, a terrific reinvention of the vampire genre about an intellectual anthropology professor/vampire seeking to understand his own nature.

And films, too -- Frank Langella in John Badham's sensual and intelligent Dracula … And The Hunger, a film in the tradition of Carmilla, with Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon. And Near Dark, the best (perhaps the only!) vampire/Western horror film ever made. And The Lost Boys, the teen comedy/horror film that speaks as much to adults as teens.

As for outsider Jewish vampires pre-dating mine in The Last Jewish Virgin, there's Roman Polanski's comic The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck. Whatever Roman Polanski and I may not have in common, and clearly there's a lot we don't share, we apparently both take pleasure in creating fictional Jewish vampires.

Currently, I'm working on a number of things: a young adult novel that I like to describe as "Romeo and Juliet in Brooklyn -- with a Jewish twist," and an anthology related to living with and healing from illness, and stories and essays as they come to me, all surely drawn from one or another of the obsessions I harbor so lovingly.

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Copyright©2010 by Janice Eidus

The Certainty of Uncertainty: Short Story writer Mitch Levenberg

2010-10-16T06:12:00.000-07:00

Interview conducted and written by Chandra Persaud

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Levenberg is "A combination of Woody Allen and Franz Kafka." (Gregory F. Tague)

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The journey begins when the cover is pulled back and you land upon a page with a title that leaves you eager for more. Then, in just a few sentences you find yourself captured in a world of dilemmas, secrets, and tales as though these characters opened their doors and allowed you into their homes. “Welcome to the strange world of Mitch Levenberg.” The mixture of humor and surrealism, all compacted in a few pages, will either leave readers speechless but with a smile upon their lips or puzzled about the underlying meaning of the work.

Even before the tender age of 10, Mitch knew he wanted to be a writer. Enamored with George Washington, Mitch’s earliest memory of his writing was a biographical piece he wrote about this founding father. It’s not surprising that Washington was this author’s first subject given the fact that his father was, what Mitch calls, “an amateur historian.” His father loved to read and while he never read aloud, he would share his new discoveries with Mitch. “I remember my father being so focused upon what he was reading that he would block everything else out…I always thought he should have been a history professor and not a podiatrist,” laughs Mitch.

Growing up, Mitch kept much of his writing exclusively for his eyes. Perhaps, it was because “I was a little shy or embarrassed and so I never really showed my parents my work,” says Mitch. He also explains that conventions at that time did not consider writing as a career. “When I was growing up writing was viewed more as a hobby and an emphasis was placed on finding a real ‘job.’” While Mitch was very secretive about his writing in his youth, he did allow one person to enter the realm of his thoughts. Mr. Piorkowski was Mitch’s 9th grade English teacher and “was the most encouraging and supportive” individual of his writing at that time. It was in his class that Mitch wrote his first official poem, verses describing what the world would be like 10 years down the road. The assignment sparked a deep interest in poetry and soon Mitch went out and purchased a composition notebook, jotted down about twenty titles, and then created a poem for each title. It was here, at the age of 14, that Mitch realized he “wanted to be a writer more than anything.”

Mitch says, “Writers usually start out imitating other writers” and he was no exception. At the age of 10, Mitch found Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” riveting. In fact, Mitch engaged in a “reading race” with a fellow fifth grader, each reporting to the other how many pages of the book he completed each day. Although he cannot remember who won that race, Mitch was extremely impressed with “To Kill a Mockingbird” and was amazed that it was possible to configure such a plot. “That is perhaps my earliest memory of being inspired,” he says. In college, Mitch drew inspiration from writers such as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Anthony Burgess, Franz Kafka, and Ernest Hemingway. While all these writers had a significant impact on him, Mitch identifies deeply with Kafka’s style of writing as well as his personal life. “I felt connected to him [Kafka] especially as a very young man from a Jewish family living in a big city, feeling alienated, having a dark vision of the world, a sense of foreboding, and yet personally [being] a prankster, a self-anointed comic, always maintaining a sense of humor, a sense of the absurd.”

Writing soon became much more than a hobby for Mitch. As he matured, Mitch realized that writing satisfied a deep yearning for expression, for human connection, for escape. Mitch describes his writing as an act of “submersion,” drowning in a world of characters that often experience circumstances that he knows all too well but who can sometimes take him to places he has never been. “Sometimes new emotions come up through my characters without me really knowing they are going to,” says Mitch. While he may know the ending of a story or have a good opening line, the journey before or after those points (respectively) is quite unknown to Mitch until he actually sits down to write. This unknown, this mystery waiting to be solved, is perhaps one of the most thrilling (and potentially frustrating) experiences for a writer.

In 1988, Mitch became a published author for the very first time. “The Cruller,” a short story surrounding a coffee shop whose balance is maintained by this pastry forever staying under a glass bowl, was published in Fiction. “The Cruller” conveys the message that change can sometimes be an upsetting factor in our lives; we are more comfortable, happier, with the known. While we may yearn for some kind of excitement, when our routines remain the same they bring a sense of serenity into our lives. His first published work gave Mitch a sense of joy and pride so much that he decided to drop out of graduate school (he would later return). “Whether or not it [his decision] was a mistake, I don’t know,” laughs Mitch, “but I always believed I would write the great American novel and who knows… it’s still not too late.”

Of all he’s written, Mitch’s favorite work is “The Cruller.” This may be so because it is the first work he’s written that was published and so he has a special fondness for it. Yet, another reason he feels connected to “The Cruller” is the fact that the short story is a reflection of a phase in his life. “In just a few pages it sums up what I thought about life up until that point,” Mitch explains. “The Cruller” is not the only story that made his favorite list. “Some stories I’ve grown to like” says Mitch. One of these stories is “Dyspnea,” a short story that has become much more meaningful to Mitch over time. The story follows a young woman, Dyspnea, who suffers from a breathing difficulty. However, Dyspnea’s life is about much more than just slow speech and gaps of silence. Her shocking past is revealed to her new love interest, the narrator, when he and Dyspnea attend Thanksgiving dinner at her parents’ home. “I love that story because it has become more profound to me as I’ve gotten older. I used to think of it as dark humor and while it is that partly, it has really become much more than that. Now, I always tend to get choked up towards the end,” Mitch reflects. Another story that hits home for Mitch is “Vigo,” a tale based on an actual bus trip Mitch and his wife took from Portugal to Vigo, Spain. These stories and others appear in Mitch’s anthology of short stories Principles of Uncertainty and Other Constants.

Mitch is also proud of the work he’s done where the subject is his father. A World War II veteran and voracious reader, Mitch’s father has been a source of inspiration for some of his non-fiction work. Originally named “My Father’s Stains,” but renamed “At My Father’s Table” for publication in the Common Review, Mitch says that the short story derives from him observing his father read at the dinner table. With a glow in his eyes and occasional laughs, Mitch recalls how his father would eat and read simultaneously, leading to his books being forever scarred with food stains. “When my father passed away a few years ago, I inherited all of his books. It was comforting to go through them and see the collection of food stains, mostly from meat sauces, he left among the pages.”

When he is writing, Mitch does not have a specific routine or habit. In fact, the author works best with positive stimuli or noise. “I find it difficult to sit down at a desk in a quiet room and write.” Some of his best work was produced sitting in the main office of a departmental division at NYU, surrounded by students, faculty, and conferences. Mitch likes to have music playing in the background when he is writing, and his favorite lyrics come from Bob Dylan. “He has been a tremendous influence on my writing, especially my poetry while I was in college.” Mitch even does some “BlackBerry writing.” While walking his dog, Mitch will spontaneously jot down some ideas or lines for a story on this gadget, occasionally “making sure my dog is not jumping on any joggers.” Mitch sums himself up as “the kind of writer who likes to close the shades while writing and only see the beautiful view behind the shades when I’m finished writing.”

Although Mitch does not know what genre his work falls under, he knows that his writing style differs vastly from a New York writer. “I don’t write very realistic stories with a lot of description and really complex relationships. I try to write sudden or flash relationships…I try to conflate life as much as possible…I try to create a unique world” explains Mitch. “I would say my writing fits under the quirky genre, if there is such a thing,” he laughs. Mitch also believes that his voice is an important vehicle that gives meaning to his work and which ultimately affects the way his work is interpreted. That is why Mitch loves every opportunity he gets to read his work to an audience.

Mitch hopes to share some humor with his readers and listeners. He believes that is it very important for each of us to accept and appreciate the humor and absurdity in the world. He thinks that a sense of humor makes living in this world much easier. “If we want to live and survive in this world, we have to know how to laugh,” says Mitch.

The author is currently working on a play that he started this past summer. Entitled Ellipsis, the play is based on “a series of interviews with a woman of power who becomes involved in an ‘elliptical’ relationship with her interviewer,” explains Mitch. While he finds writing a play to be more difficult than writing a short story, he is enjoying the challenges and rewards of the process.

When he is not writing for his blog, mlevenberg.blogspot.com, Mitch is rewriting or revising work that he has put aside. When he is not writing, Mitch says he is “agonizing about not writing” and when he is not agonizing, he enjoys reading and playing with his dogs. Mitch says he would have loved to be an actor or stand-up comedian, but he is more than satisfied with life as he knows it. He currently serves as Director of the Academic Enhancement Center at St. Francis College and teaches writing there as well. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, whom he calls one of his biggest fans and “loving” critic, and his daughter who at this point seems “more interested in math and science than writing.”

As for his advice to future writers, Mitch says “keep writing. Don’t ever give up, don’t ever get discouraged....be true to yourself and be honest about what you write…and always bring a pencil and pad or BlackBerry wherever you go,” smiles Mitch.

We Americans . . .

2010-10-07T13:45:00.000-07:00

Do you know such a book: one that represents not one but many traditions; one that translates (from Latin, to carry over) different languages and idioms; one that contributes, in its multi-vocal multi-nationalism, to the concept of what it means to be an American; one that is essentially involved in the never-ending process of discovering what it means to be an American?

We know a book like that: Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration – a modest book from a modest publisher. Does the book make any contribution to *American literature*? We’d like to think so.

We’ve gone ahead and submitted Common Boundary to be considered for an American Book Award (granted by the Before Columbus Foundation). Bold, yes. Daring, perhaps. Presumptuous, maybe. But we believe in what we are doing – and believe sincerely in the literary merit of our contributors. We have faith in the enduring power of the written word.

If you have read Common Boundary, then you know that the Foundation’s characterization of an American Book Award sums up and defines our book. If you haven’t read Common Boundary, well, then, what are you waiting for?

Book Bargain

2010-10-01T07:26:00.000-07:00

If you do not yet have your copy of Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration, please note that it is now being offered at a 28% discount on Amazon.com. A pretty good deal. (We too offer discounts - ask.) For more information about the book, click on the Catalogue button found on this page (to your right).

Make 'em Laugh, Make 'em Cry: Meet Daniel Cartaina

2010-09-28T10:56:00.001-07:00

We recently had an informal, virtual chat with Danny Cartaina – writer, playwright, and comic. We finally met Danny when he stopped by to visit us at the Brooklyn Book Festival – and we are very happy we had a chance to meet him. Danny’s story in Pain and Memory is quite powerful – about the death of his father, gripping in its detail and wide-ranging in its emotional import – it makes us laugh and cry. As with many of the other writers we have had the pleasure to come in contact with through Bibliotekos, we found that Daniel Cartaina, too, is multi-talented: the evolution of a writer from multiple disciplines. (See, just for instance, Rivka Keren and Muriel Nelson, whose Profiles also appeared on this blog.) Thanks for chatting with us, Danny.

On First Becoming a Writer.

I don’t think I ever thought at one particular moment that I wanted to be writer, like some epiphany that changed the course of my life, a sort of “Where were you when JFK was shot?” moment. I started out in the visual arts as a photographer and later a print-maker. But I think over time I felt that I could not communicate (whatever that would be) with photography. With writing I could create multiple images and landscapes that weave in and out across a story. So, I slowly found myself transitioning into writing over time.

On Initial Writing Inspiration.

I’ve always been a curious person, especially about life and the human experience which sometimes puts me in interesting places both emotionally and physically. This, combined with an early aspiration to do stand-up comedy inspired me to start writing down my observations on life, usually with a comic twist. Intelligent comedy I guess it would be called, which doesn’t always fly in a comedy club environment.

Where Ideas Come From.

Ideas come from everywhere. But typically if I’m moved by a story or personal experience I find myself wanting to give my observation on it. Other times, when I thought I had nothing in the tank creatively, someone challenged me to write. It could be workshop teacher or a call for submissions might provoke me to investigate. Some of my best ideas come to me at 4am, out of nowhere. This is when I get up immediately and jot down everything that comes out of my head.

On the Elements of a Good Story.

There are many things that make a good story: a strong narrative, character development, but in the end I want readers to be captivated and moved in a way that makes them want to read the next page, and the page after that. I try to be efficient with my sentences, more so if I am writing a play.

Does Creative Work Have (or Need) a Message?

Doing mostly comedy I don’t think I have anything deep that I often want to say. Many times my stories are born from some adversity, or a difficult time, and I often try pull out the absurdity in these moments, something that the reader can relate to so they know at least someone in the world “gets it.” Life is not easy, and if I can bring some laughter to some one’s life that makes me very happy. It is my gift to the world. In Italian they call it a touch of “alegria.”

Do You Write True to Life (Your Own or Someone Else’s)?

Much of my writing is realistic, creative non-fiction. And sometimes it’s fiction that is based on a true story. The theater work I’ve done goes way out there sometimes. In the play “Prosciutto, Mortadella and Ricotta; A Love Triangle” I basically gave Italian meats and cheese their own personality and placed them in a romantic Shakespearean type setting. It was produced in San Francisco two years ago and went over quite well. But to bring this answer back down to earth, the common mantra is, “write what you know”, and I know ethnic, urban neighborhoods, especially Italians. I’ve started characters that I thought were me, but then they blossomed into something beyond my boring life and I enjoyed being them for a while. It makes you want to return to them each day at your desk.

Surprises (From Writing).

That they were accepted and published, first off. Actually I’m a little surprised at my ability in dialogue when doing plays. It must come from many Italian Sunday dinners.

Favorites (of Your Writing).

I can’t say I have a favorite. But I should say that I have regretted doing a reading of something that was not finished. This happens because I am impatient and I want to get audience response and see how it reads. Sometimes it’s good to do this, but sometimes not. You have to feel it out.

How Do You Work as a Writer?

When I was in Europe I typically got up and wrote between 9am and 12 noon each day. Then I had to take care of other things like teaching, running errands and cooking, etc. If I was lucky I would return to it later that day. That was wonderful! In the United States, it is more difficult, my writing is streaky, due to more demands on time. I don’t like it. I also find that my approach to writing changes slightly depending on whether I’m in New York or Italy. Because you are obviously exposed to a different culture and if your “antennas” are up, paying attention, you will process differently. Lastly, your immediate environment around you is key, whether it be a desk by the window, or on a porch. You have to feel comfortable.

Talk About Your Genre.

I write short stories mostly, both fiction and creative non-fiction. Just started a little poetry. I also write short plays, essays and even flash fiction (under 500 words). The short plays I sort of stumbled on to and I’ve had a lot of fun doing them because you get to see the work evolve in rehearsals. Plus you get to hear the audience’s reaction live. It’s thrilling!

Reading – Favorite Authors?

Very often I am reading informational, non-fiction work like Michael Pollen’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma” or “In Praise of Slowness” by Carl Honore. Yes, I am a gardener and foodie to some degree. I am also a news junkie and pay close attention to current events. This is what feeds my writing, my observations on the crazy world out there. It possibly goes back to my early interests in stand-up. Comics are all over current events for their work. David Sedaris is a writer that I like a lot. Spaulding Gray also. Sarcasm is a beautiful thing. When I laugh out loud at something I’m reading and I whisper the word “brilliant,” that is a high compliment from me, because to do intelligent comedy well, the writer really needs to be brilliant.

Reading Now.

I recently finished “Brooklyn” by Colm Toibin, a wonderful writer, who really gets into one’s feelings at the moment. Again, a story of Irish emigration from Europe to Brooklyn.

In the Works.

I have some short stories that I’d like to expand further into book length and I’m also getting more involved in playwriting, like short play “festivals,” stuff that has more dialogue in it.

WAR Anthology - in the works

2010-09-23T13:27:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce the authors who will be represented in Battle Runes: Writings on War. The prose writers are (in no particular order): Jenny D. Williams; Hunter Liguore; Mitch Levenberg; John Guzlowski; Lisa M. Sita; Cheryl R. Resetarits; John Gifford; Thom Brucie; Norah Piehl; Margaret Kingsbury; Dawn Sandahl; Patty Somlo; Geoffrey A. Landis; Muhammad Ashfaq; Mira Martin-Parker; Nahid Rachlin; Nancy J. Riecken; Rebecca Newth.

The poets are (in no particular order): Marko Vešović; Lisa L. Siedlarz; Alamgir Hashmi.

The writings we have chosen are all subtle and complex, dealing with the human side (and in many cases the inhumanity) of war. There’s a story about the American Civil War, a few that deal with WWII, and many that touch on the psychological dimensions of the current wars.

We sincerely thank all who submitted – that truly is a sign of support, and we are deeply appreciative. Soon we will begin work to put together Battle Runes, and we are hoping for publication by the end of January 2011.

Rain and Shine

2010-09-14T12:38:00.000-07:00

Our first Brooklyn Book Festival went well; though the weather was not very cooperative: rainy and on the cool side. We met many people: readers, writers, and librarians. We met some friends. We sold some books. We made some new friends. We shared a table with author Mitch Levenberg (in the photo you see Mitch, on the left, with Bibliotekos editor Gregory F. Tague). See Mitch's Blog Post about the Festival. In terms of our next book, Battle Runes: Writings on War, we have winnowed down the submissions pile quite a bit, so we are getting closer to final decisions. If you have not yet heard from us, you will, soon. Thank you everyone for submitting. And we hope to have more author Profiles on the blog over the course of the next few months – but you’ll have to wait to find out who.

Stars are shining

2010-09-11T07:17:00.000-07:00

The Midwest Book Review gives Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration a 5-star rating on Amazon and says that the literary anthology is "a thoughtful look into immigration and what it means to be a new person in America. With differing tones and much in the way of thought for the country, Common Boundary is an intriguing look at immigration and provides an entertaining and thoughtful read." Thank you again to our talented contributors and devoted readers.

Brooklyn Book Festival - Sunday - 12 September

2010-09-09T05:36:00.000-07:00

We will be at the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday, 12 September 2010. We are sharing a table with writer Mitch Levenberg (and others). Click here for a Map - we are at table 3 at the foot of the stairs to the old Brooklyn Borough Hall. Be sure to stop by and look for us. We will be selling our two anthologies - Pain and Memory and Common Boundary - at the table (37% discount) and will have mail-in coupons for a 30% discount. (You may also query us, by email, at any time about discounts on the anthologies.)

We thank St. Francis College for generously supporting our presence at this event.

Here’s what the official Brooklyn Book Festival site says, in part:
“The Brooklyn Book Festival is a huge, free public event presenting an array of literary stars and emerging authors who represent the exciting world of literature today. One of America’s premier literary and literacy events, this hip, smart, diverse gathering attracts thousands of book lovers of all ages. The festival is organized around themed readings and devoted to timely and lively panel discussions. The inclusion of top national and international authors and new partners has expanded the festival’s reach while continuing to celebrate and enhance Brooklyn’s contemporary and historic literary reputation.”

Not Horsing Around

2010-09-02T13:45:00.000-07:00

As the deadline was posted on our Guidelines page, no surprise that we have closed submissions to Battle Runes: Writings on War. Thank you everyone who submitted - we received quite a bit of material. And we've been busy. Since we have been reading for some weeks now, some of you have already heard from us; many more have yet to hear, so be patient.

Bon Voyage

2010-09-01T14:32:00.000-07:00

In its September 2010 issue (v.9 no. 9), the Midwest Book Review says that Common Boundary "is an intriguing look at immigration and provides an entertaining and thoughtful read." Truly, it is a fantastic anthology, and again we thank our contributors. We've heard that at least one contributor is using it as a class text (for a college course). Considering the high quality of the collection, we are not surprised.

Pile Driver

2010-08-27T08:21:00.000-07:00

We have begun the process of reviewing submissions for Battle Runes: Writings on War. Already we can see that any preconceived notions we had were off base: you never really know what's in the pile until you start reading, really reading. Deadline for submissions is still 1 September - we will make decisions as we move into the Fall. Everyone will (eventually) hear from us.

Battle of the Books

2010-08-23T06:56:00.000-07:00

We expect to be at the Brooklyn Book Festival at some point on Sunday, 12 September 2010. Be sure to stop by and look for us. We will most likely be somewhere on the campus of St. Francis College. (We will have more specific information closer to the date of the event.) Here’s what the official Brooklyn Book Festival site says, in part:

“The Brooklyn Book Festival is a huge, free public event presenting an array of literary stars and emerging authors who represent the exciting world of literature today. One of America’s premier literary and literacy events, this hip, smart, diverse gathering attracts thousands of book lovers of all ages. The festival is organized around themed readings and devoted to timely and lively panel discussions. The inclusion of top national and international authors and new partners has expanded the festival’s reach while continuing to celebrate and enhance Brooklyn’s contemporary and historic literary reputation.”

Speaking of the battle of the books, we want to out-sell Barnes & Noble, which is still offering Common Boundary for $11.48, a 28% discount. We can do much better. For a short time we are willing to offer a 45% discount per title (Pain and Memory or Common Boundary) – but you must purchase two titles; we pay shipping. Entire offer only for continental U.S. Such purchases fund future projects, so thank you for your support. Contact us for details: EBibliotekos@gmail.com

Gone But Not Forgotten

2010-08-20T09:09:00.001-07:00

We know this really has nothing to do with publishing; but it has everything to do with us and who we are. MAX: Rest in Peace. 20 August 2010.

Truth Teller - John Guzlowski

2010-08-14T11:07:00.001-07:00

Some people have a story to tell; some people have a talent for telling a story; few have both. Poet and writer John Z. Guzlowski has both. When we were calling for submissions to Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration, Dr. Guzlowski (Professor Emeritus Eastern Illinois University) sent in an amazing tale about a trunk his father had built in the concentration camp in Buchenwald, and the subsequent journey of that trunk and the family connected to it. Since then, we have come to know John as honest, courageous, and modest in his writing. He gets to the truth of things.

Please note that this Profile (in John Guzlowski’s own words) is subject to copyright and cannot be used without his permission; likewise, the image pictured here is the work of Vojtek Luka, is subject to copyright, and cannot be used without permission from the artist. After you read John’s Profile, you might want to visit his wonderful blogs: 1. Lightning and Ashes or 2. Everything’s Jake.

Finally, Thomas Napierkowski, in his review of Lightning and Ashes, (Polish American Studies 65.1 [2008]), says that “John Guzlowski is arguably the most accomplished Polish-American poet on the contemporary scene, a writer who will figure prominently in any history of Polish-American literature. . .” Having experienced Lightning and Ashes (it is not merely a book one reads), we can tell you that John Guzlowski’s unforgettable images, metaphors, and voice reverberate deeply and profoundly. Find out for yourself, here, since John has provided three poems along with this Profile. And as an added bonus, if you click on the title of the poem “What My Father Believed,” you will hear it read by Garrison Keillor!

*~*~*~*
For the last thirty years, I’ve been writing about my parents and their experiences during World War II. I’ve written about how my dad spent four years in Buchenwald, a concentration camp in Germany, and how my mother survived the day the Nazis raped and killed her mother and her sister but was taken to a slave labor camp in Germany. I’ve written about this and so many other things that happened to my mother and father first in Poland when the Nazis invaded, then in Germany where my parents were imprisoned, and finally in America after the war.

But growing up, I never thought I would. In fact, my parents’ story was one that I wanted to get as far away from as possible. Not only didn’t I want to write about it, I didn’t even want to hear about their experiences. I didn’t even want to tell people that I was born in a refugee camp, a Displaced Persons camp in Germany.

When I was growing up in Chicago during the 1950s, I didn’t want anything to do with my parents’ lives as slave laborers during the war and as Displaced Persons, refugees, after the war. I felt there was something shameful about who we were and where we had come from and why we were in the US.
Part of this feeling of course came from where we settled in Chicago. It was a neighborhood that mixed working class Americans with Polish refugees, survivors, and immigrants; and there was frequent tension between the Americans and the non-Americans. In the eyes of many of our neighbors, we weren’t Poles or Polish Americans. We were Polacks, dirty Polacks, dumb Polacks.

We were Displaced Person, DPs, the people who nobody wanted to rent a room to or hire or help. We were the poor, the huddled masses, the wretched refuse of Europe's shore – like in Emma Lazarus’s poem on the Statue of Liberty – and our neighbors didn’t much want anything to do with people who reminded them of what poverty and dirt and need were like. Or at least this was the way we saw it.

People looked at DPs like we were vermin. I remember being four years old and walking around with my father looking for rooms on Milwaukee Avenue that we could rent, and having people turn us away when they heard we were DPs. DPs were dirty, unreliable. We were drunkards, wife beaters, bar fighters, thieves, and murderers. We were the garbage of somebody else’s shore, dumped now on the shore of Lake Michigan; and most people we came across in America wished we’d go back to where we came from. And that we’d take the rest of the dirty Polacks with us.

If anyone ever asked me when I was a kid, whether I wanted to be a Polish-American writer or teacher or doctor, I would have told him take a hike but not in words so gentle.

When I first started writing, I didn’t want anything to do with what my mother used to call “that camp shit.” I loved comic books as a child, and that’s what I wanted to write and draw, stories about super-heroes and monsters and aliens from other planets. As I moved into my teens, I started writing science-fiction and fantasy stories about desolate planets and heroes beset by weird creatures. When I look back on all those stories now, I sometimes think that writing about those aliens and their lost worlds probably was a way of dealing with my parents’ past and what was happening to them in America. But back then, those stories were just something that had nothing to do with my father’s hunger in the concentration camps or the grief my mother felt for years because of what she had seen done to her mother and her sister and her sister’s baby.

Then, college jarred me loose from all of that science fiction. I discovered I had a gift for reading American literature and writing academic prose about it. Leaving behind my comic books and my science fiction novels, I earned a BA in English literature and later a Ph.D. in American Literature, specifically focusing on Postmodern American fiction. I was reading novels by John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, and John Hawkes, and these novels were supposedly not about anything except their own artificiality. Reading these novels, I could concentrate on technique and nothing else. I probably was as far as possible away from my Polack past and my miserable parents and their miserable lives in the concentration camps and refugee camps.

And that’s when I started writing about my parents.

First, I wrote one poem, “Dreams of Warsaw, Sept. 1939.” It wasn’t anything I planned. I was almost at the end of writing my dissertation, deep into one of Thomas Pynchon’s cathedral-like novels, probably Gravity’s Rainbow, when I paused and started thinking about my parents. It was a hot day, August, and I was sitting at my desk in my office wondering what they were thinking about. It suddenly came to me that they were probably thinking about the war and what I had not wanted to think about for so long. All of that went into the poem, the heat and their postwar lives and the memories that would always be with them. And my fear of writing about them. That went into the poem too.

DREAMS OF WARSAW, SEPTEMBER 1939

Too many fears
for a summer day
I regulate my thoughts
and my breathing
regard the humidity
and dream

Somewhere my parents
are still survivors
living unhurried lives
of unhurried memories:
the unclean sweep of a bayonet
through a young girl’s breast,
a body drooping over a rail fence,
the charred lips of the captain of lancers
whispering and steaming
“Where are the horses
where are the horses?”

Death in Warsaw
like death nowhere else –
cool, gray, breathless

~*~
And here are two more poems:
~*~

WHAT THE WAR TAUGHT HER

My mother learned that sex is bad,
Men are worthless, it is always cold
And there is never enough to eat.

She learned that if you are stupid
With your hands you will not survive
The winter even if you survive the fall.

She learned that only the young survive
The camps. The old are left in piles
Like worthless paper, and babies
Are scarce like chickens and bread.

She learned that the world is a broken place
Where no birds sing, and even angels
Cannot bear the sorrows God gives them.

She learned that you don’t pray
Your enemies will not torment you.
You only pray that they will not kill you

WHAT MY FATHER BELIEVED

He didn’t know about the Rock of Ages
or bringing in the sheaves or Jacob’s ladder
or gathering at the beautiful river
that flows beneath the throne of God.
He’d never heard of the Baltimore Catechism
either, and didn’t know the purpose of life
was to love and honor and serve God.

He’d been to the village church as a boy
in Poland, and knew he was Catholic
because his mother and father were buried
in a cemetery under wooden crosses.
His sister Catherine was buried there too.

The day their mother died Catherine took
to the kitchen corner where the stove sat,
and cried. She wouldn’t eat or drink, just cried
until she died there, died of a broken heart.
She was three or four years old, he was five.

What he knew about the nature of God
and religion came from the sermons
the priests told at mass, and this got mixed up
with his own life. He knew living was hard,
and that even children are meant to suffer.
Sometimes, when he was drinking he’d ask,
“Didn’t God send his own son here to suffer?”

My father believed we are here to lift logs
that can’t be lifted, to hammer steel nails
so bent they crack when we hit them.
In the slave labor camps in Germany,
He’d seen men try the impossible and fail.

He believed life is hard, and we should
help each other. If you see someone
on a cross, his weight pulling him down
and breaking his muscles, you should try
to lift him, even if only for a minute,
even though you know lifting won’t save him.

I wish I could say that after writing that single poem (“Dreams of Warsaw”) I gave up academic writing and devoted myself to writing about my parents, but that’s not what happened. I went on to finish my dissertation, and I found a job teaching American Literature at Eastern Illinois University, and I moved there with my wife Linda and our daughter Lillian, and I started my 25 year career as a Professor of English. I did the kinds of writing that a career like that calls for: I wrote essays about postmodernism, psychology and literature, magic realism, and reams of committee minutes and such.

But during all this time, I was also writing poems about my parents. Not many, maybe one or two a year, sometimes three. But they added up. If I’ve learned anything about writing, it’s that writing’s an incremental art. You write one line one day, and the next you write another, and the day after that you write a third, and a decade or two later (if you’re lucky) you’re sitting at a desk copy-editing a manuscript of ninety pages about something you were afraid to write about, ashamed to write about, but finally needed to write about.

Now when I look back on all that writing, the academic writing and the writing about my parents, the former seems inconsequential, pointless, work done for a paycheck or a promotion. For instance, I look at an essay about William Burroughs that I struggled to compose and publish, and I feel nothing. I hear nothing. The academic prose I wrote doesn’t speak to me the way my poems and prose about my parents speak to me. I do a lot of presentations about my parents. I address students and church groups and historians and general audiences, and invariably during those presentations I read some of the things I’ve written about my parents, and when I do, I hear my parents’ voices again, the way they told me their stories, and for me that’s the value of the poems and the personal essays I’ve written about them – hearing their voices that for so long I didn’t want to hear. And finally, it’s all about those voices, my parents’ voices and the voices of all those people who didn’t survive or who did survive but couldn’t speak about what happened.

Toward the end of my mom’s life, I gave my mom a call and told her that I was going to be giving a presentation about her experiences and my dad’s experiences as slave laborers in Nazi Germany. My mother didn’t pause at all. It was as if she knew what she wanted to tell me. She said, “Tell them we weren’t the only ones.”

She was afraid that people hearing my poems and my prose about my parents might think that they were the only ones who were put into the concentration camps. She wanted to make sure that I told people that that wasn’t the case. She wanted me to tell people that there were many, many, many people who suffered and died there, and that my writing was about them as much as it was about her and my dad and me.

I’ve never forgotten what she said to me and what it is that I’m supposed to be writing.

Review Notes

2010-08-07T06:43:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to report that the Midwest Book Review (vol. 9 no. 8, August 2010) has given Pain and Memory: Reflections on the Strength of the Human Spirit in Suffering (Bibliotekos 2009) a 5-star review on Amazon and, importantly, notes the book as "a choice and recommended pick." The book is offered at a 10% discount on Amazon right now.

Motion of Poetry - Muriel Nelson

2010-08-05T13:13:00.000-07:00

We came across Muriel Nelson as we have everyone else - via a Call for writings. A meeting of strangers; papers crossing desks. The wonderful part of our work is reading submissions - what great surprises we find, and Muriel Nelson is such a one, without question. We were taken by her poetry immediately - by its movement, only later absorbing sounds and ideas. We like how Muriel blends the here - with the far; the familiar - with the distant; the known - with the unknown; the present - with the past. Continuing our series of background information on Bibliotekos contributors, we offer below (in her own words), Muriel’s Profile. Delight in it - and read her poetry. Check out Muriel’s publisher, Bear Star Press - and order some of their books (for yourself or your local/college library). Please note that the Profile is the copyrighted work of Muriel Nelson. You can find a little on Muriel here, at Verse Daily, including some of her online poems. And here, at the Beloit Poetry Forum blog.

~*~

My favorite way to get to know a poet is to find out what the poet loves. I’m fond of Miroslav Holub’s playful little “Conversation with a poet” in which Holub writes:

Are you a poet?
Yes, I am.
How do you know?
I’ve written poems.
If you’ve written poems it means you were a poet. But now?
I’ll write a poem again one day.

In that case maybe you’ll be a poet again one day. . .

Holub’s sharp logic draws my admiration, but what attracts me more is his keen awareness of boundaries, especially the one between the way he made his living as scientist and the living he made as poet. Most of all, I share his doubt of being privileged to cross that border again and again for more poems.

In my childhood home, also dominated by science, thinking meant linear logic which was regarded as a strength far superior to emotion. Creating meant carrying out a plan to make something tangible and useful (with the exception of music). Such patterns of thought were as firmly etched into my brain as the syntax of the sentences I learned to speak. Discovering poetry later meant exploring unplanned and mysterious territory beyond the limits of human logic and its tight controls, territory which could suddenly become vividly present, and then disappear.

About twenty years ago, when I was intensely involved in community volunteer work, a magazine on my lunch table fell open to an interview with Joseph Brodsky. I couldn’t stop reading after a paragraph or two, as was my habit at the time, so I bought Brodsky’s A Part of Speech. I bought it for a friend, mind you, because I thought she needed it, but when I read the first few poems to see if they would suit her, a childish voice in my head said, “She can’t have this. It’s mine!” She filed her gift with her old grammar books. A second copy became the beginning of my new life in poetry.

Imagine studying and practicing your way through two music degrees and many recitals, poking your nose into out-of-the way places in Europe to learn languages and research ’cello music, teaching, raising children, caring for dying relatives, and starting community programs, all the while losing the habit of reading, and then picking up a book from a culture foreign to you. There you find that the author has made his poems out of your diary—which you’ve never shown anyone—which, in fact, you’ve never written. After stealing a memory of yours, your image for it with its exact date, the way you once coped with the worst of life, your leaps beyond logic to points where no language would go naturally, and even your very words to describe this theft; he quietly points out that none of this was ever true, not in the way you had believed.

I hadn’t read Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” nor did I realize yet that this Russian “primer,” or maybe that hurried lunch, would be a new beginning for me. Music, not poetry, was my art, and reading Brodsky’s poems made me angry. How could that Russian, writing from some prison or Gulag, know details about my inner life: my words in the English translations he had made himself, my figures of speech, and my patterns of thought?

Angry and mystified, too, I read everything I could of his to find out how he did that, attempted my own poems, and made a list of questions I couldn’t answer by reading, which he later graciously answered for me. I was a beginner, and he was trailing all possible honors in this field—the McArthur Genius Award, the Nobel, US Poet Laureate, etc. He was also in precarious health, so you can imagine what a generous act those answers were on his part, and what daunting and exhilarating conversations those were for me.

I went home, wrote, and studied with the silly goal of learning to write one poem which some day he might read and say, “Now there’s a poem.” Two weeks after I finished my second master’s degree, from the Warren Wilson MFA Program For Writers, and before I had published much of anything, the evening news carried a bulletin that at the age of 55, Joseph Brodsky had died.

I’m not sure it is possible to explain this or any other inspiration or influence, but I think patterns of thought are more apparent and audible in poetry than in prose writing. When these patterns collide or coincide with a reader’s at a particular moment, something like the lift which makes an airplane fly can occur. The poems I love to read to lift my consciousness convey their most profound meanings in sound. After all, when I begged to learn to read, my mother taught me to read music hoping that I wouldn’t be a misfit in first grade. I must have thought that everything in a book made sounds. Since sound is the most difficult aspect to translate, I am still in awe of the following two examples: In Marbles: A Play in Three Acts, Brodsky plays with Russian/English cognates (by way of Latin) and with near rhymes to work his way out of boredom, coming up with, “Medium, tedium, Te Deum, Per Diem.” In “The Fountain,” his meters, liquid (voiced) consonants, and obsession with negatives join to produce this: “For no loneliness is deeper than the memory of miracles.”

As you can tell, the project of Common Boundary is closely related to what fascinates me and inspires my writing: those profound walls and gaps between individuals and groups of many kinds, breaks and breakthroughs, untranslatables and correspondences, and the high energy which can suddenly forge new bonds—in humans and whizzing particles alike. It’s that energy which I hope moves my poems. My poems are made of things over- and underheard, stolen, mis-taken, transferred from music, and sometimes spelled by ear—disparate bits and odd God-thoughts; i.e., my imperfect observations, fascinations, concerns, and shortcomings along with some I’ve borrowed. In my notebook are fleeting ideas and moves harvested from poems which have struck me as fresh, odd, funny, wise, and promising. My poems in Common Boundary draw on the few memories passed down to me of my Russian-German grandmother widowed on her homestead in Washington State, whispers of a distant relative whose branch of the family was sent to Siberia, writings of a student whose parents survived the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, news of refugees from Kosovo, and a loving “breakthrough” gesture I learned while attempting to teach music to deaf children.

I guess my method is like playing with Legos. Our sons used to say they needed “a red four-bump piece” or a black propeller, which they would take from something else—ideally from what the brother was making. For me, line breaks pull ideas apart enough to allow alternative meanings to break through and enrich. Sound often provides my “Lego bumps” to snap unmatched words and ideas together.

Perhaps you are a lover of a good story. I am, too. The lyrical compression which I admire in poems where every word is both necessary and rich can be exhausting, and as W. H. Auden writes in “The Composer,” “the poet fetches / The images out that hurt and connect.” To relax and enlarge my world, I’ve most recently enjoyed the fiction of Louise Erdrich for its ecstatic moments, the young writer Jonathan Safran Foer for delightful collage effects and high emotion, Zora Neale Hurston for gorgeous descriptions and those voices, Flannery O’Connor for relentless irony, and Toni Morrison for complexity, wisdom, and hilarious names.

I’m not a narrative writer, but when I’ve put poems together into book-length manuscripts, I’ve discovered some main or recurring concerns. My MFA thesis attempted to bring the various parts of my life into a sort of coherent whole or, at least, coherent relationships—an attempt which many current thinkers argue is futile. Artistically, I was fascinated with music/poetry correspondences and sound/sight images such as Czeslaw Milosz’s “ringing, rolling sun,” so like a baby’s ball. My first published book, Part Song (Bear Star Press, 1999), and a later collection, Sightsinger, continue to play with sound and sight, the latter riffing on Emily Dickinson’s question, “Why — do they shut Me out of Heaven?” My chapbook, Most Wanted (ByLine Press, 2003), was inspired by Osip Mandelstam’s idea of the distant addressee, and I’m still haunted by a conversation with my former musicology professor Alexander Ringer, a survivor of the camps, who told me near the end of his life that he was struggling to write a book in German because “the Europeans are the only ones who understand me.” Later, I wrote a collection, Daylights, which is unified, I hope, by the many meanings of the title word. Now I’m working on the ancient idea “to know in one’s heart.”

I must qualify that last sentence. I want to be writing poems to follow one called “To Wit, To Dote” (published in Beloit Poetry Journal). I try to start poems by reading—most recently, the brilliant young poet Ben Lerner for his inventions, my former mentor Heather McHugh for her intensive language and generous heart, my friend and wonderful critic Martha Zweig for her word play and light hand, and Anne Carson for what she will come up with next. Often, though, life—family, teaching, care for the garden’s fruit, rehearsals, news, illness, and the drudgery that accompanies it all—interferes, and then opens the way to the kind of doting that leads to poems.

Limited-time offer

2010-07-31T04:56:00.001-07:00

Right now (and for a limited time) Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration is on sale at Barnes & Noble (online) for $11.48 (that's a 28% discount). Tell your friends!

Virtual Notes Marks Common Boundary

2010-07-29T10:27:00.000-07:00

Have you seen Dorothee Lang's virtual notes on Common Boundary? Take a look here - she gets right to the heart of the book. And no wonder, as Dorothee is a writer, essayist, editor, and translator. When you go to her virtual notes, you can find out more about her. Check it out.

Got $50 Grand?

2010-07-28T09:36:00.000-07:00

St. Francis College is pleased to announce the opening of submissions for the second, biannual St. Francis College Literary Prize which offers encouragement and significant financial support in the form of $50,000 to a mid-career writer, one of the richest prizes in the United States.

“We received several dozen submissions last time and feel we really spoke to a part of the writing community that greatly needed the attention and support the St. Francis Prize offers,” said Vice President for Academic Affairs and Academic Dean Tim Houlihan. “Writers on their third to fifth book sit at a delicate crossroads where they can choose to continue to pursue their craft or head in different directions. We want to be the reason why a talented writer will continue to share their work with the world.”

The 2011 Prize will be awarded for an outstanding third to fifth book of published fiction. The jury will consider books published from July 2009 to May 2011. Self-published books will be considered for award consideration as will English translations. A short list will be announced in mid-August 2011. The winner will be announced at the Brooklyn Book Festival in September 2011.

The first St. Francis College Literary Prize went to Aleksandar Hemon for his book, Love and Obstacles (Riverhead Books). Hemon, raised in Sarajevo and now residing in Chicago wrote his first work in English in 1995. “I was going to quit after this book now it turns out I'm mid-career,” said Hemon in his short, modest and humorous acceptance speech. “Thank you all for… exposing me to this embarrassing pleasure. I will keep writing, I guess I have no other choice.”

The first jury which selected Hemon’s work included Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction winner Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn), author and co-editor of The Believer magazine Heidi Julavits (The Uses of Enchantment: A Novel), author and professor at the MFA writing program at Columbia University Ben Marcus (Notable American Women) and New York Times bestselling author Ayelet Waldman (Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace). The new jury is currently being recruited.

The deadline for entries is May 1, 2011.

Inquiries can be made via email to Ian Maloney to:
imaloney@stfranciscollege.edu

Submissions (6 copies) should be mailed to:

Professor Ian Maloney
Department of English
St. Francis College
180 Remsen Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Two Bits Today

2010-07-13T07:31:00.000-07:00

1. Daily s-Press has given Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration a 5 star rating on Goodreads. 2. We'd like to get more fiction (short stories) for Battle Runes: Writings on War. 3. We expect to have more profiles on writers in the near future. You'll have to check in to see. Did we say two bits? Okay, well here's a fourth: John Guzlowski has given Common Boundary a 5 star rating on Amazon.com.

Architect of a Good Story - Tim Nees

2010-06-29T11:09:00.000-07:00

WHEN WE started Bibliotekos one of our friends said that we are crazy; maybe we are, starting a very small literary press these days. But the process of calling for writing, receiving and vetting creative work, and best of all, communicating with and getting to know the writers has been a rewarding experience. We've published two stories by Tim Nees ("Cartography" in Pain and Memory and "Blue Painted Field" in Common Boundary), and, as with all of the writers but one, we did not know anything about him previously. We have since learned that Tim, in addition to being quite attentive to the form as well as to the content of his work, is, no surprise (though it was to us), an accomplished architect. His characters are real enough that we've talked about them after reading his stories. Read more about Tim Nees and his story about becoming a writer, in his own words, right here. You won't be disappointed.

It sounds strange, being called a writer. It’s a concept I’m still getting comfortable with. In 2008 I was a finalist for a sonnet competition. I went to the prize-giving ceremony and there was a nametag waiting for me at the door. It read: Tim Nees Writer. It was the first time I’d seen those words placed together. Although I’m well known in New Zealand for other professional achievements [click to see Tim’s architectural work], I’m not known as a ‘writer’. I kept the nametag and peek at it from time to time to remind myself that yes, I am a writer. Other people have said I am.

I started writing at high school, like many teenagers. Mainly poetry. I was encouraged by two excellent English teachers, friends, and slightly older poets now well known in New Zealand who recited poems at rock concerts and handed out free broadsheets. Then, my friends and I published our own creative writing magazine, Blueprint, but also I submitted work to ‘real’ literary journals some of which, to my amazement, actually published a couple of poems. At university I continued writing but when I made the decision to switch to a Degree in Architecture, writing got shut away in the bottom drawer. Establishing a family, a successful business, and a second career as an art gallery director meant that drawer remained shut for many years.

In 2007 I was prompted to open it and start writing again, writing fiction as well as poetry. I completed a number of part-time creative writing courses, entered some competitions and published a few pieces and now, after three years of writing regularly, I don’t wince when I am described as a writer.

I’m not sure what inspired me to re-open the drawer. Perhaps it was a feeling niggling away inside reminding me I used to write, that I could write well, that I should try again; writing is part of my creativity, part of the jigsaw puzzle that is me, and can complement my other creative practices and not compete with them. It was a time of change in my life, which gave me the opportunity to use the extra time I had in new ways. But once I started, I discovered I really enjoyed the writing process, sitting in front of the computer, letting my mind work its way into different worlds and personalities.

It has never been difficult finding things to write about. Ideas come from everywhere, from observations, interactions, from reading and from movies, from going to an art gallery and thinking about a painting or video piece and the infinite number of social circumstances that may have occurred to enable that work of art to exist, and how that work now affects other people and the stories they take from it. Anything can be stimulating. Stories come from observing people reacting with people, and things, in time now and time past, in reality and memory and fantasy, so that if a diagram were drawn between all these interactions back and forth, even if only two agents were involved it would very quickly become a dense web of possibility. Imagine the interactions of a dozen players and the scenarios would quickly spiral into a mind-boggling mess. A writer’s most difficult task is to decide, choose and edit, to shape possibility, to make something understandable (but not necessarily evident), to make something readable. To know what to conceal and what to reveal. Editing is where the hard work gets done, not coming up with the ideas.

Obviously a writer needs to be able to judge a good idea from a poor one to invest the time in writing, even if it is only a kernel that imparts the feeling ‘I can do something with this’. Then I write and explore and hope it develops into something I can work with or, if momentum fails to build, put it aside and start afresh. The only way I can be sure a story is a good one is if I enjoy reading it, and still enjoy reading it even after the fifth re-write. Then I give it to my partner to read, assimilate her feedback, then let others read it and take heed of their comments. I belong to two writers groups and other viewpoints and understandings (or misunderstandings) can be enlightening. Not that I always agree, of course. My own judgment shapes the final draft.

It is easier to appreciate the skill and craft in other writers’ work, and I read a lot. What I expect most is for the writing to carry me from start to finish and to keep me thinking or smiling or worrying after the last page. It is not ‘the story’, ‘the plot’, ‘the structure’, ‘the characters’, ‘the setting’; it is the writing. It is all of those things set in the writing. Sometimes the writing, the writer’s style, is more or less visible, more or less audible, but it is still there word by word and can either provide the greatest pleasures, the profoundest insights, or the most insufferable irritations. Not that a story need provide insight or expound themes with a capital T. But I hope a story might provoke a genuine reaction from readers; that’s goal enough. And that they may enjoy the language in the process.

Language is what sets a story apart from reality. A story is an imagined or reported series of events presented in words, a constructed convention distanced from reality or concrete experience by the history of words. A story is an elaborate artifice. Elements found in my stories may be based on my experience, or my knowledge, or on hearsay or research, but they are only fragments scattered through the whole. Writers write about what they don’t know as well as what they know. Invention, and convincing invention, is the challenge and the reward. Reportage wouldn’t hold my interest for long. One of the greatest challenges of invention is to construct another person, a character, to sit inside their head and see what they do, to predict what they think, what they say, what they don’t say. I suspect this is achieved more through empathy than insight. And acting. Convincing acting. In my story ‘Cartography’ for instance, I had to imagine myself as two quite different female characters, two distinct voices, and how they might interact with each other.

The act of writing fiction is, therefore, all engrossing and whatever current work is in the document file is the one I favor most. I haven’t had time to reassess earlier work, or rate one against the other. Perhaps the ones that have been published should rate higher, but then those editors haven’t read all my other stuff, maybe I should send all my stories in for assessment. But no, I want to finish the one I’m working on; it’s going well, it might be the breakthrough piece to inspire a publisher to invite me to assemble my first collection. Vanity, the driver.

So perhaps vanity, the promise of pleasure and an overactive mind encourage me to sit down and write. I fit it in where I can, around my other personal and professional commitments. I don’t have a schedule, but a mobile MacBook helps. I’m currently in Europe sharing my partner’s sabbatical leave and in three months I’ve written only a few poems. Starting a story seems impossible, too many distractions and fresh experiences to assimilate. But I’ve been reading, and re-reading, some novels, which is unusual for me. John Banville, Paul Auster, Ian McEwan, Don DeLillo. The DeLillo is wonderful, his short novel The Body Artist extraordinarily beautiful to read. So much of his characters' lives inferred within so few pages with nothing really being revealed, precisely.

When I get back home I’m looking forward to reading and writing, but on what project I haven’t decided. Mostly I want to see my kids, go back to work and earn some money. I have an 80-page novella that needs a lot of re-writing, a dozen short stories that could be brought together with some shaping, but probably a new idea will pop into my head demanding to be written down. I’d like to get something substantial published within the next five years, and continue to publish shorter pieces and poetry two or three times a year. My real goal is to keep the drawer open, to continue writing, so I can confidently call myself a writer.

Common Boundary - Daily sPress Notice

2010-06-25T06:07:00.000-07:00

Dorothee Lang, a writer and editor based in Germany, has posted a nice notice about Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration on her most interesting small press blog, Daily sPress.

Writing in Hebrew, Dreaming in Hungarian: Duality as Destiny - Rivka Keren

2010-06-22T06:27:00.000-07:00

When we decided to venture into the realm of book publishing, we were alone; now, we are fortunate to count among our friends thirty-three extraordinary individuals – writers of exceptional merit whose work is good - worth reading and thinking about. In fact, we find ourselves talking about the characters of these writers, especially Rivka's characters. Rivka Keren is one of those authors, and we asked her to write a profile about herself so that we could all get to know her a little better – where she came from as a person and a writer, and where she is headed. Among other things in this profile, Rivka comments on the contributions she made to Pain and Memory ("Aisha" and "Kiribiri") and Common Boundary ("Islamorada" and "They Set Sail in Springtime"). Note: the profile and associated images are the copyrighted work of Rivka Keren and cannot be used without her express, written permission: first painting is entitled Girl with Owls; second is entitled Via Dlororosa; third is entitled Painter and His Family Arrive at Jerusalem. We are sure you will enjoy Rivka’s story of herself as much as we have.

“I am a Hungarian born Israeli writer, currently residing in the United States” – people raise an eyebrow when they hear that. This is over the top for them. For me, this is simply an inevitable way of existence. Hungarian is my native language. Hebrew is my adopted native language in which I write. English is a huge bonus. Hence, my life-long duality is being Hungarian and Israeli at the same time, which is a source of constant tension and spiritual wealth.

My world has been always divided. I was torn between two identities, two beloved languages, two landscapes, two different sets of memories. Writing in Hebrew and still dreaming in Hungarian became an unequivocal reality. “Am I different?” This question couldn’t be answered easily. Naturally, like many other immigrants, I was living in both worlds. Additional pain came from my desperate attachment to the subtleties of the Hungarian language and the fact that I was cut off, at the age of ten, from the literature I adored, before being able to read in my new language.

Identity, duality, memory, belonging, moral conflicts and dilemmas, as well as the puzzle of human nature, became the main issues of my writing. I was born into a complicated, intensive reality and felt an obligation to commemorate it.

In one of my first memories I am about five and I am alone in the Greatwood (Nagyerdő) at the outskirts of my hometown Debrecen. Mom and Dad are out of sight. The bush seems dangerous and threatening, the nearby lake murky and bottomless. I feel abandoned, terrified, yet curious and high-spirited; an inspirational moment. At home, I make a series of drawings about a little girl standing on a bench, surrounded by huge trees and flowers while her parents are moving away from her. This is my first story in pictures and many others will follow it because painting would become an essential part of my life. Many years later, I am embedding this scene as a dream into one of my novels, and paint it once again.

Thus, a sense of loneliness and insecurity mark my early life. I witness a silent agony at home. I hear whispers about the horrors of the Holocaust, the death of my baby brother from starvation in the Ghetto, the miraculous survival of my father who returned from the camps thin as skeleton and all the relatives who perished. When I enter school, my “otherness” becomes obvious; I am a Jew in an intolerant communist society, bullied and looked upon as part of an undesired, inferior minority. I experience open anti-Semitism on a daily basis.

It is no wonder that I find solace in painting and literature. I spend a lot of time daydreaming, making up stories and reading obsessively; my first favorites are Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, The Jungle Book and all the novels of Jules Verne available in Hungarian. Since my Dad is also fond of Verne, we share long talks about the wonderful adventures and discoveries in the golden titled books of the French writer. We live in a cage, and we are eager to fly away.

When I am seven, I know exactly what I want; to be a writer, to have a sibling and to immigrate to Israel where, hopefully, I will be accepted and loved. By the time we leave Hungary and embark the ship in Genoa, I am crazy with joy; my suitcase is full of stories and sketchbooks, I have a sweet little brother and I am on my way to the Promised Land.

The following years are a mixture of financial and existential struggle, assimilation, anxiety, hard work and self fulfillment. The Mighty Duality enters my life. We live in a tiny apartment, have almost no money, yet feel free and believe in a better future. At home, I speak only Hungarian, but slowly I work myself through the many layers of Hebrew and sleep with the dictionary under my pillow, until I am comfortable enough to start writing. Since I set up a very high standard regarding the literary use of the language, I start publishing for children and adolescents when I am twenty, and write my first novel for adults only at the age of thirty-nine. The Taste of Honey (or “Bitter Honey”), Mortal Love and Anatomy of a Revenge are all set against the black hole of the Holocaust, examining the moral choices and integrity of the protagonists in radical circumstances. Texts in my native language and the landscapes of Europe become organic components of the novels. There are plenty of raw emotions, hidden, personal aspects, some torturous and heartbreaking, some funny and magical. The last book I am working on is always my favorite. It has to be an object of dedication and love to keep the fire alive.

Soon I find out that writing is a demanding, mysterious process. No instant reinforcement, no sharing. It is a lonesome affair and it teaches me so much about myself – mostly my need for discipline and concentration, the ultimate self-demand to dive into the souls of the characters, be Them as long as needed, and then be able to emerge and let go. Also, I learn how much I cherish inspiration and how depressing a long silent period can be. The most surprising thing I discover is the flexibility of my memory – the way I store, adjust, repress, reinvent, twist and alter certain characters and events only to be able to write about them with a fearless, open mind. In my case, the story has to be a blend of personal and collective memories, real-life experiences, dreams and imagination, combined with endless subconscious material and put into words in the manner an alchemist might prepare his secret concoction.

The story “Aisha”, for instance, is inspired by a Bedouin woman I met while working as a clinical psychologist at a gynecological ward in a big hospital. “Kiribiri” was born out of a tiny newspaper article about an old woman being abandoned by her relatives at the airport – this sad story made me ponder deeply about old age, belonging, human relations and the unknown dimensions of life and death. “Islamorada” is based on two separate events; witnessing a failed landing of Cuban immigrants on my way to Key West, and an incredible story from an old Cuban man about his relative, a former opera singer and famous Lector of the tobacco factories at Tampa, who fancied mostly Cervantes. (You can read “Islamorada” now, published recently online in Words Without Borders.) “They Set Sail in Springtime,” a self-contained chapter from Mortal Love, is a story inside a story, studded with many well concealed autobiographical details, as it is throughout the whole novel and my other books. Am I there? Of course. Me, my family, and people I knew or imagined, dead and alive, we are all there in a giant group portrait, reshaped, rebuilt, as a genuine example of metamorphosis. All in all, my motto as an author is simple: “Write only what is interesting, compelling, essential to you. If you are indifferent and bored, the reader will probably react the same way.”

There are some authors that had a great influence on me and had shown me the nature of thorough observation. These exceptional thinkers and writers taught me to be sharp and attentive, yet humble while facing the unknown. Based on my interest in the riddles of the human psyche and moral dilemmas, I have my favorites: Aristotle, Nietzsche, Jensen, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Melville, Proust, Babits, Thomas Mann, Neruda, Wilder, Kafka, Camus, to mention only a few. Remembrance of Things Past of Proust, The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice of Mann and The Stranger and The Plague of Camus are my lighthouses. Also, I was captivated by the stream of consciousness in the works of Faulkner and Joyce as well as the magical realism and the reoccurring theme of solitude in the novels of Márquez. And I love Scandinavian literature. All those lonely, snowy winters, the endless dark evenings and coffees and merciless insights! They probably remind me of my distant childhood.

Usually, authors can’t read while writing, but I have the privilege of multiple choices, so when I write Hebrew I still can read Hungarian and English. My forthcoming novel, Outrage, is about Mari, a young Yugoslavian woman of Hungarian origin. She is a victim of the atrocities of the recent Balkan war, trying to find new love while fighting uncertainty, betrayal, lies and family secrets. Through her story and the research done for the novel, I became very involved in the history of the Balkan States. So, right now I am reading in English the breathtaking, monumental, 1150 pages long masterpiece of Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, capturing her journeys through Yugoslavia on the eve of WWII. The second book I am reading on and off is The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the 14th Century. Imagine being on the remotest roads of the East in the Middle Ages for thirty years! In addition, I am rereading the last, utopist novel of Mihály Babits, Elza the Pilot, which I am planning to translate from Hungarian to Hebrew.

The new novel I am working on now, goes back and forth between the present and Rome of the first century. It is a metaphysical story, involving enigmatic powers, visions, past life memories and journeys to enchanting places. I made several trips to Italy, accompanied by the Letters of Pliny the Younger, to explore all the sites I am writing about.

My working habits are usually the same; from morning till noon and from five to midnight. Sometimes, I work all night long and whenever possible, I write in bed, while sipping Turkish coffee. It is not very respectful, but so comforting. Fortunately, the Muse is still on my side and I am full of excitement and positive energies. After all, who knows how many ancient spirits are carefully watching the developing story. I must stay the course!

Whitman's Brooklyn Eagle

2010-06-20T09:48:00.000-07:00

Brooklyn Daily Eagle picks up press release for Common Boundary. Fitting, given that Walt Whitman anticipated America's immigrants in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." Read here.

College Lit.

2010-06-16T12:11:00.001-07:00

St. Francis College has issued a nice press release concerning Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration (a great course text!).

Door of Opportunity?

2010-06-16T06:06:00.000-07:00

WE are now seeking submissions for our anticipated third book, an anthology on the theme of War. Guidelines button is on this blog, to your right. We have already collected a number of submissions (but have not yet begun the vetting process) and would like more. Deadline is September 2010. We expect to publish by June 2011. (To help fund our efforts, and to see our work, purchase Pain and Memory or Common Boundary).

Some Honors and Awards Won by Bibliotekos authors include: The O. Henry Prize, Bennet Cerf Award, PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award, James Wright Poetry Prize, Pushcart Prize nominations, NEA Grants and Fellowships, New Millenium Writings, Million Writer Award nominations, Best of the Net Anthology. We are fortunate to have such accomplished contributors and once again thank all of them.

The mission of Bibliotekos: “To produce books of literary merit that address important issues, complex ideas, and enduring themes. To publish in book form contemporary voices that might not otherwise be heard; each author's work will appear in print among good company. That's the best we can do, but we think it is enough.”

New Book - Immigration Stories

2010-06-03T09:05:00.000-07:00

We are pleased to announce the publication of our second book, Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration. There are twenty-nine works (from nineteen contributors) that treat the theme of immigration (including international adoption) with candor, humor, and insight. Without question, this is a book that will touch you in many ways as it hits home for virtually all of us, whoever we are, wherever we are.

The original idea for an immigration anthology goes back to (at least) 2003, mostly because of our connection to the international adoption community. But we did not want to do an adoption book. At that time, we envisioned getting together college students from eastern Europe – Russia, Baltic states, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Ukraine, Balkans, etc. In fact, we did get together many such students, and they were all interested in sharing their experiences of coming to America to study (while using the perspective of their home countries to create such narrations). We had several meetings and many discussions, and we contacted a university press which seemed interested in the concept; but the project never got off the ground.

So, we came back to the idea – and it seemed timely. Important, however, is that when you read these stories you will experience what we did as we vetted submissions: rather than creating a timely book our authors have given us stories that are timeless. We really did seek to make a book that would last, that would stand the test of time, that would be an anthology but would read cumulatively as a whole, and our authors – all of us together – have succeeded in reaching our goal.

Just take for instance, the work by Rivka Keren, “They Set Sail in Springtime,” or Ruth Sabath Rosenthal’s, “Into the Light: Safe Haven 1944,” or John Guzlowski’s, “Wooden Trunk from Buchenwald” – all so-called immigration stories of another generation that have transcended time by touching on war, identity, and home. These stories might be timely because of what you read in the newspaper today, but these stories are timeless since they continually intrigue us, constantly pull us back to take another look at origins and major questions. In another instance, read Nahid Rachlin’s “What We Call Home,” a subtle and masterfully-told story of a mother’s difficult decision, after she had come to America to be with her son and daughter, to return to Iran and be with her sister. Ruth Knafo Setton’s “Living Between Question Marks” is one of the most lyrical, honest, and yet metaphorical pieces, touching on past and present, here and there, self and other.

Many of the pieces, of course, deal with language. To that end, we’ve included some excellent poetry by Roy Jacobstein and Muriel Nelson, who in some poems capture the essence of crossing over (figuratively, birthing) – coming into which world, whose world? Even some of the prose pieces are close to poetic, such as the play extract (a monologue) by Cassandra Lewis or the very creative dictionary entry, “Fig,” that weaves into it a personal narrative, by Eva Konstantopoulos.

The volume is not without humor – seriously. Dagmara J. Kurcz has fun with “Cheekago”; George Rabasa tackles issues of the immigrant fitting in with “The Unmasking of El Santo” (a diminutive superhero) and “La Santa Papa” (a giant potato); Mitch Levenberg, in his inimitable style conjures both the wit of Woody Allen and absurdity of Franz Kafka simultaneously in “The Plain Brown Envelopes.”

There are some pieces closer to creative non-fiction, memoirs, that candidly explore what it means to be an immigrant – those for instance by Omer Hadžiselimović, M. Neelika Jayawardane, Azarin A. Sadegh, and Rewa Zeinati. These stories in particular, timely since they are personal narratives of people among us, address in a big way the questions of immigration in terms of national identity. These are the immigrant stories of today – but not the ones you see on national television. The personal reflection by Janice Eidus is particularly special, since it addresses not only the theme of immigration but the sub-topic in which we were interested, international adoption and how the child and parents’ lives both become part of the immigrant experience.

The collection begins with “How He Made It Across,” by Patty Somlo – a classic tale (a mini epic) of odyssey, and ends with “Blue Painted Field” by Tim Nees – a somewhat abstract story if read on its own but one that aptly concludes (in fact finishes) the book by bringing together all of the operative metaphors about immigration – loneliness, alienation, self-questioning, doubt, and uncertainty about the past and future.
~ ~ ~ ~
From the Foreword by Jason Dubow, MFA: “. . . this book is really an anthology of anthologies: a collection of stories in which the old inextricably blends with the new, in which the tensions between what has been lost and what can be gained are grappled with (but, inevitably, not resolved), and in which the human capacity to imagine a future and make it real (more or less) is explored from a variety of different perspectives. Here’s the essential question: now that I am no longer there but here, Who am I? The answers, the stories – various, contingent, authentic – have made me, in a Whitman-esque sense, ‘larger,’ and they will you too. And so, when you’re done reading, ask yourself: Who now am I?”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
From the Preface by Publisher Fredericka A. Jacks: “Common Boundary includes many varieties of immigration stories. A culture is a country’s language, its customs, and the collective thinking or attitude of the people . . . The shifting attitude . . . experienced over . . . English acquisition . . . represents a paradox: on the one hand, there is an attempt to accommodate someone from another country; on the other hand, the immigrant person is always perceived as something foreign. There’s a common boundary – being part of and yet being apart from others.”

♦ ≈ ~ ≈ ~ ≈ ~ ≈ ~ ≈ ~ ≈ ♦
Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration consists of twenty-nine creative works by nineteen authors on the theme of immigration – what it means to be an immigrant – with candor, humor, and insight. Edited by Scholar, Professor, and Pushcart Prize nominee, Gregory F. Tague, Ph.D.

Some Honors and Awards Won by these Authors Include: O. Henry Prize, Bennet Cerf Award, PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Award, James Wright Poetry Prize, Pushcart Prize Nominations, NEA Grants and Fellowships, New Millenium Writings.

Contributors: Janice Eidus, Omer Hadžiselimović, John Guzlowski, Roy Jacobstein, M. Neelika Jayawardane, Rivka Keren, Eva Konstantopoulos, Dagmara J. Kurcz, Mitch Levenberg, Cassandra Lewis, Tim Nees, Muriel Nelson, George Rabasa, Nahid Rachlin, Ruth Sabath Rosenthal, Azarin A. Sadegh, Ruth Knafo Setton, Patty Somlo, Rewa Zeinati.

Available immediately via Amazon.com. By late July ask your Bookseller, or shop Barnes & Noble online (or other online retailers). [COMMON BOUNDARY: Stories of Immigration. 198 pages; paperback; ISBN: 978-0982481936; $15.95US]

Healing Muse

2010-06-03T06:03:00.000-07:00

The Healing Muse, a literary journal publised yearly from the Center for Bioethics and Humanities, SUNY Upstate Medical Center, has a guest blog by the editor of Pain and Memory. If you are interested, read the blog entry here.

Almost there

2010-05-22T07:33:00.000-07:00

It’s coming. COMMON BOUNDARY is almost here. Yes, that’s the cover. Yes, the interior is done. Yes, some on our team tend to be obsessive, so be patient, we’re almost there. Worth the wait. We’ll be good and let it go, soon. Can’t hold on too long, too much – tinkering is like a domino effect: touch one thing, and then another moves and needs attention . . . . Near the end of many, many months of work. Again and again, grateful thanks to our terrific authors. (See the 9 May post below for full list of contributors.) We’ve read this book many times through and have been consistently impressed with its sophistication – language, imagery, story-telling, scope, and cumulative effect.

Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration

2010-05-09T07:44:00.000-07:00

We are finished proofreading and copy editing Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration (but for some technical details we want to double-check). The next step is finalizing the cover and getting everything to the printer (perhaps in the next few weeks).

We are excited about this book, for many reasons: the rich and enduring theme (how it touches virtually everyone); the extraordinary beauty of the writing – much of it is quite moving; the humor, candor, and insight. The truth of the book is vibrating with color. As you might imagine, language comes up quite often, as does food. These are essential, fundamental stories that really hit home, that really get to some basic, core issues about all of us.

We could go on, but let’s all just wait a little longer until the book is out. One of our readers said that he was “impressed with the quality and variety of the writing.” That is true, but when you read the book through (as we have done many times over the course of the past weeks), the coherence of the sequence is such that we all have made more than an anthology – this is a real, solid book that has shape, that moves and builds to a conclusion.

We love our writers, and all of them should take pride in their work and their accomplishments. Just to give you a peek, here is the sequence of contributors/contents:

- Fredericka A. Jacks, Preface; - Jason Dubow, Foreword; - Patty Somlo, “How He Made It Across”; - Cassandra Lewis, “Pedro’s Monologue from Migrations”; - George Rabasa, “The Unmasking of El Santo” and “La Santa Papa”; - Rivka Keren, “Islamorada”; - Janice Eidus, “The Color of Cinnamon”; - Mitch Levenberg, “The Plain Brown Envelopes”; - Ruth Sabath Rosenthal, “Into the Light: Safe Haven 1944”; - Rivka Keren, “They Set Sail in Springtime”; - John Guzlowski, “Wooden Trunk from Buchenwald”; - Dagmara J. Kurcz, “Cheekago”; - Rewa Zeinati, “Beginning in the Midwest”; - Roy Jacobstein, “Emigrées,” “Ceremony,” “Passover,” and “Beyond the Gauze Curtain”; - Ruth Knafo Setton, “Living Between Question Marks” and “My Father Eats Figs”; - Eva Konstantopoulos, “Fig”; - Nahid Rachlin, “What We Call Home”; - M. Neelika Jayawardane, “Pass”; - Omer Hadžiselimović, “An Immigrant’s Deal: Two Lives for the Price of One”; - Muriel Nelson, “Exodus,” “The Widow Kramer,” “Emotional,” “Uneasy Space,” and from Pieces; - Azarin A. Sadegh, “Being a Foreigner”; - Tim Nees, “Blue Painted Field.”

Back to work . . . and nearing completion . . .

Report on First Bibliotekos Reading - With Photos

2010-05-04T06:03:00.000-07:00

The first Bibliotekos Reading (22 April 2010 at St. Francis College, Brooklyn) was a smashing success! Some of the contributors to the anthology Pain and Memory gathered to read their selections and talk about the process of writing – whether one writes longhand or on computer, the necessity of having a notebook at hand, the demands on one's time and yet the call to write. The open panel session after the reading was quite stimulating. The audience was alive with comments and queries. There were questions about influences and favorite authors (many cited W.B. Yeats); a discussion about the idea of truth – the importance of truth – in remembering and writing accurately; the concern about engaging readers in otherwise morbid subjects; the difficulty of reaching an interested audience who might, simply, not realize their own desire and need to read literary writing. There was ample opportunity to meet with the writers in the theater lobby, both before and after the reading; books were signed and sold; lots of connections and new literary friends were made. We hope to have a similar reading, next year, for Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration (expected June 2010).

The Program ran as follows (not counting some preliminaries by Brother Edward Wesley, Ph.D., chair of the English Department at St. Francis College, Fredericka A. Jacks, publisher, and Gregory F. Tague, Ph.D., general editor):

MITCH LEVENBERG, “Butterflies and Lepers.”

RUTH SABATH ROSENTHAL, “A Good Stiff Breeze,” “I Ate My Mother’s Hair,” “Logan Square East.”

ANNE WHITEHOUSE, “Rose’s Dream,” “After the Accident.”

LYNNE SHAPIRO, “Souvenir,” “Your Dead Mother.”

ANIQUE TAYLOR, “The Strangeness of April 1969.”

~ Here are some photographs (taken during the Q&A session):

~ Mitch Levenberg and Anne Whitehouse

~ Lynne Shapiro

~ Anique Taylor
(and her poodle, Nesha, if you look closely)

~ Ruth Sabath Rosenthal

Meet Mitch Levenberg

2010-04-13T05:57:00.000-07:00

On 22 April 2010 St. Francis College, Brooklyn Heights (NY - 4pm to 6pm), will host in its Maroney Theater (7th floor) readings by some of the contributors to the book Pain and Memory (currently discounted on Amazon). Mitch Levenberg, a writer of existentially absurd stories with a voice that is ironically humorous, is one of those readers. Come to the reading and meet Mitch – start by reading about him here. Scroll down for blog/bios. on the other readers (Lynne Shapiro, Ruth Sabath Rosenthal, Anique Taylor, and Anne Whitehouse).

Writer, essayist, and teacher Mitch Levenberg has published essays and short fiction in such journals as The Common Review, Fiction, The New Delta Review, Fine Madness, The Saint Ann’s Review, Confluence, The Assisi Journal, and others. His collection of stories, Principles of Uncertainty and Other Constants was published in March 2006. He has won two Honorable Mention Awards (2004, 2009) for his essays on his father’s experiences in the Philippines during the Second World War. One of these essays, “Butterflies and Lepers,” was published in the anthology Pain and Memory (2009). He is currently working on a book of poetry entitled, Transformational Love.

Mitch Levenberg has read many of his stories on WNYE-91.5 in New York City and has performed readings at many venues around New York City including the 63rd Street Y, KGB, Hudson View Gardens, Jimmy’s 43, The Brooklyn Heights Public Library, the N.Y.U. Torch Club and others.

The critic Alfred Kazin has said of Mitch Levenberg that he “has the sharp, merciless eye for the hazards that can intervene in the seemingly most innocuous situation. He is utterly fearless in describing the human situation as it is.”

Mitch teaches creative writing and literature at St. Francis College and New York University and lives in Brooklyn with his wife, daughter, and four dogs.

Meet Lynne Shapiro

2010-04-10T06:46:00.000-07:00

On 22 April 2010 St. Francis College, Brooklyn Heights (NY - 4pm to 6pm), will host in its Maroney Theater (7th floor) readings by some of the contributors to the book Pain and Memory (currently discounted on Amazon). Lynne Shapiro has but one poem, “Souvenir,” in the anthology, but this tiny gem of a story epitomizes best what the book seeks to explore – the complex nexus between momentary, physical experience and the long stretch of human recall. Come to the reading and meet Lynne – start by reading the history of her writing life here, in her own words. Scroll down for blog/bios. on some other readers (Anique Taylor, Anne Whitehouse, and Ruth Sabath Rosenthal); there is one more blog/bio. yet to come in the next few days.

Poet and essayist Lynne Shapiro has had work published in Apparatus Magazine, BluePrintReview, Centrifugal Eye, FragLit: An Online Magazine of Fragmentary Writing, Hiss Quarterly, The Mom Egg, Mslexia, Ozone Park, Qarrtsiluni, Quay, Soundzine, Switchback, Terrain.org, Trespass, Umbrella, and included in the following anthologies: Decomposition: Fungi-inspired Poems (Lost Horse Press), Eating Her Wedding Dress, A Collection of Clothing Poems, (Ragged Sky Press), and Mourning Sickness – Stories and Poems About Miscarriage, Stillbirth and Infant Loss, (Omni Arts Press). This year Lynne was a featured poet in East-West Magazine of Bicoastal Verse and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

If I didn’t have my family, I don’t think I would write. They give me love and security, keep me from other pre-occupations. Not so long ago, I was driven to the brink of madness by the handsome, smiling men you see in the photo. At the same time, I felt my world and my position in it had shriveled. I told myself to “get a life,” walked down to a local writing group and, after decades of promising myself I would one day write, I did just that. I started with children’s books. Ever practical, I wanted my writing to be useful - but then the poetry began to flow. After years of teaching and talking about poetry and art, I finally allowed myself to become an artist.

Poetry has enabled me to connect and collect all of myself in one place, I’ve written poems about where I’ve lived (Ozone Park, Queens; Culver City, California; Waltham, Massachusetts; Santa Fe, New Mexico; Hoboken, New Jersey), where I’ve worked (as a teacher, museum educator, editor) and about what I’ve studied (passiflora, shade gardening, ornithology, 20th Century art, Dada and Surrealist literature, cinema, photography).

In a way, when I write, I curate. For me, each poem is a tiny exhibition.

Meet Ruth Sabath Rosenthal

2010-04-08T06:29:00.000-07:00

On 22 April 2010 St. Francis College, Brooklyn Heights (NY - 4pm to 6pm), will host in its Maroney Theater (7th floor) readings by some of the contributors to the book Pain and Memory (currently discounted 28% on Amazon). Ruth Sabath Rosenthal, a poet of astonishing breadth and depth who writes on many subjects (and at times, not without humor), is one of those contributors. Come to the reading and meet Ruth – start by reading about her here. Scroll down for blog/bios. on some other readers (Anique Taylor and Anne Whitehouse), and there are a few more blog/bios. coming in the next week or so.

Ruth Sabath Rosenthal is a New York poet, residing in Manhattan and Long Beach, Long Island with her husband Alfred and their dog Sweetie-Pie. Ruth began writing poetry in her golden years, in 2000, after becoming disinterested in occasional painting. It’s then she got her first computer and signed up for her very first poetry class. She quickly became hooked on poetry, and continued taking classes and workshops in New York City, mostly at the 92nd Street Y, famous for their fine courses and roster of renowned instructors. Ruth also studied privately with some of her teachers, including Rahel Wetzsteon and Sarah Hannah, both of whom have since passed; their poetry, though, lives on, inspiring Ruth’s work.

That body of work includes dozens and dozens of poems published in numerous poetry journals and anthologies throughout the U.S., and internationally, including the U.K., India, Israel and Canada. Ruth gives readings locally and her first Chapbook, titled Facing Home, published by Finishing Line Press is due this summer; her first full-length book is in the works. Attesting to her talent and very wide appeal, here are poetry journals and anthologies in which Ruth’s poems have appeared:

Journals: Adagio; Aurorean; Birmingham Review; Breadcrumb Scabs; California; Quarterly’s Poetry Letter & Literary Review; Canopic Jar; Chronogram Magazine; Connecticut Review; Creations Magazine; Cyclamens & Swords (Israel); Ibbetson Street; Jabberwock; Juke Jar; Lilith; Magnapoets; Message in a Bottle (U.K.); MungBeing; Mobius-The Poetry Magazine; The Long Island Quarterly-Poetry Bay; Pacific Review; Poetica; Poetry Depth Quarterly; Quill & Parchment; Sarasvati (U.K.); Taj Mahal Review (India); Vallum (Canada).

Anthologies: Empty Shoes (Popcorn Press); Harvest of the New Millennium (Cyberwit.net); Home (Eden Waters Press); The Long Island Sound: 2008, 2009 (North Sea Poetry Scene Press); Mizmor L'David Anthology: Volume I - Holocaust (Poetica Press); Pain and Memory (Editions Bibliotekos); primal sanities! -- a Tribute to Walt Whitman (Allbooks Books); Songs of Seasoned Women (Quadrasoul, Inc.); The Book of Ten (Zebra Publishing) (U.K.); Voices Israel: 2007, 2008, 2009.

Ruth’s poem “on yet another birthday,” was nominated for a Pushcart prize in October 2006.

For more on Ruth, visit websites: Here, Here, or Here (last includes video).

Meet Anique Taylor

2010-04-05T06:22:00.000-07:00

Artist, poet, clown, life coach, Anique Taylor lives in her sweet mountain hamlet (with her 5lb black rescue poodle) where she works full time making art and writing poetry, creative memoir, and personal essays.

Anique Taylor ran away to Paris where she studied literature (Sorbonne, Diplome); afterward she graduated high school (Greenwich), studied literature (Antioch College), and then taught creative writing to Jr. High Students on a co-op job, Angeles Crest Mountains.

Anique studied art – Silvermine College (AFA) Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, (BFA Highest Honors), and Pratt Graduate School (MFA ). Anique also studied at St. Mark’s Poetry Project with Alice Notely, Bernadette Mayer, and Susie Timmons; subsequently she gave featured readings at St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Dixon Place, Speakeasy, ABC No Rio, Cedar Tavern, and performed regularly with Eve Packer’s What Happens Next, in group readings at St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Tompkin’s Square Arts Festival, New Romantics, Charas, Knitting Factory, Bergen County Literary Salon, Ridgewood Library, and Phoenicia Phirst Phriday.

With Etan Ben-Ami Anique edited the much acclaimed (& short lived) poetry magazine, The Cheap Review of Poetry, publishing several wonderful poets, such as Alice Notley, Bill Kushner, Elinor Nauen, Sheila Alson, Norman MacAfee, Peter Bushyeager, Tom Savage, and Bernadette Mayer.

Anique created a children’s show, performing as Pirouette-the-Clown in & around NYC, Bergen County. Her chapbook Poems is published by Unimproved Editions Press. Additionally, her poems have been published in The World, Sing O Heavenly Muse, Cheap Review, Big Fish, Southern Review, Cover Magazine, Pome, What Happens Next, and The National Poetry Magazine of the Lower East Side.

As well as literary writing, Anqiue has many co-authored books such as the Computer Joke Book, (Hayden), What to Do When You’re Bored, (Simon & Schuster), Snakes!, Bears! (EMC), How Many Nerds Does It Take to Screw in a Light Bulb?, Book of Silly Quizzes, (Scholastic), Nightmare Nina (Bowmar/Noble), and the filmstrips, Arachne & Athena, Atalanta, Prometheus & Pandora, (January Productions).

Anique also co-authored ABZ’s of Sex & Love (HBO), Bless Me Father for I Have Sinned, produced by Playwright’s Horizons, Phoenix Theatre, Williamstown Playhouse. She has also performed with the comedy group Raw Guts & American Know How.

In her sweet mountain hamlet, Anique continues to write & make art.

Meet Anne Whitehouse

2010-04-01T06:21:00.000-07:00

On 22 April 2010 St. Francis College, Brooklyn Heights (NY - 4pm to 6pm), will host in its Maroney Theater (7th floor) readings by some of the contributors to Pain and Memory (currently discounted on Amazon). Anne Whitehouse, a gifted poet and novelist, is one of those contributors. Come to the reading and meet Anne - read about her here, in her own words. Over the course of approximately the next two weeks, we will roll out short blog-bios. of our other four remarkable writers who will be reading at St. Francis College.

Poet, fiction writer, journalist, and critic Anne Whitehouse’s books include poetry collections The Surveyor’s Hand, Blessings and Curses, Bear in Mind (forthcoming) and Fall Love (novel). Her second novel, Rosalind’s Ring, is set in her native Birmingham. Visit Anne's homepage: http://www.annewhitehouse.com/

EARLY LITERARY INFLUENCES
My grandmothers were early literary influences. My mother’s mother Dora Landau Roth was a strong personality and natural storyteller who mesmerized my sisters and me with her tales about her cat and dog when she was growing up. Princie and L.C. (for Landau’s cat) were delightfully mischievous creatures invariably up to no good, who cleverly outsmarted their owners to achieve their ends. How we loved Grandma’s stories! She was a dramatic, thrilling narrator; while I have forgotten many of the details, I vividly remember the effective use of repetition and skillful pacing that combined expectation and surprise.

My father’s mother Rachel Spivak Cherner was the opposite—a shy immigrant who never learned how to speak English without an accent. Yet, when I was not more than three years old, she and I would escape the rest of the family, and she would read aloud the fairy tales I selected for her. As soon as I could read, she encouraged my desire to learn with weekly gifts of The Books of Knowledge, a series for children that I adored, which she bought at the grocery store.

My father’s mother died when I was only nine, leaving the memory of her love as a comfort. As my interest in writing developed, my other grandmother put herself at my service. An expert typist, she typed my class play in the sixth grade. When I began to compose poetry, she was my first family reader. That she accepted this role so willingly boosted my confidence and helped to inspire me. She died when I was 25 years old and engaged to be married. Folded in her wallet was a copy of the poem I had written about her brother, Reply to My Uncle Joseph, that she carried with her everywhere.

Meet the Authors

2010-03-20T06:39:00.000-07:00

Get together with us to meet some of the authors who have had their work published in Pain and Memory: Reflections on the Strength of the Human Spirit in Suffering. The reading will take place at St. Francis College, 180 Remsen Street, Brooklyn Heights, N.Y., on 22 April 2010, from approximately 4:00pm - 6:00pm. The college is located in downtown Brooklyn, easily accessible by public transportation (e.g., the Court St./Borough Hall train stations). The reading itself is in the Maroney Theater (7th Floor, Room 7402). The event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served. Books will be available for signings. Come to meet and hear: Mitch Levenberg; Ruth Sabath Rosenthal; Lynne Shapiro; Anique Taylor; Anne Whitehouse. More information about each of these authors will be forthcoming over the course of the next few weeks on this blog.

Stories of Immigration

2010-03-16T06:46:00.000-07:00

WE ARE pleased to announce the contributors to Common Boundary: Stories of Immigration. In alphabetical order (not the eventual sequence of the book) they are: Janice Eidus; John Guzlowski; Omer Hadžiselimović; M. Neelika Jayawardane; Roy Jacobstein; Rivka Keren; Eva Konstantopoulos; Dagmara J. Kurcz; Mitch Levenberg; Cassandra Lewis; Tim Nees; Muriel Nelson; George Rabasa; Nahid Rachlin; Ruth Sabath Rosenthal; Azarin Sadegh; Ruth Knafo Setton; Patty Somlo; Rewa Zeinati. In all, there are twenty-nine different pieces of creative work on the theme of immigration by nineteen authors.

In addition to some relatively new voices, the list includes more than a few award-winning and highly-accomplished authors. We have immigration stories from current and previous generations; there are escapes and doubtful migrations; we have a story that involves a potato, and two that involve figs; we have a dramatic monologue; we have a few adoption stories; and there is a trunk that traveled all the way from a concentration camp. Some contributors you might recognize from Pain and Memory. We thank everyone who submitted – these were not easy decisions (considering how much material we received and how much of it was quite good). We will now begin the process of assembling the book, working on format and layout, proofreading, and then the writing of the Preface (by the publisher) and Foreword (by Jason Dubow). Updates forthcoming in due course.

SUBMISSIONS CLOSED

2010-03-10T06:16:00.000-08:00

We have closed submissions for COMMON BOUNDARY, having received more than enough stories, poems, and memoirs to consider. Many of you have already heard from us - more will hear from us in the weeks to come. Once we have finished contacting everyone, we will announce the contributors to Common Boundary and begin working on the book. Thank you all for your support and patience. As with Pain and Memory, we are confident that Common Boundary will prove to be an important anthology of vital voices in contemporay literature.

Vetting

2010-02-28T12:32:00.000-08:00

Since we have received many more stories, memoirs, and poems than we anticipated, please note that we will most likely Close Submissions to the Common Boundary anthology very soon. If you have something to submit, please do so very soon. Many authors have already been notified, and we expect to make remaining, final decisions over the course of the next few weeks (at most).

Slow Thaw

2010-02-18T06:51:00.000-08:00

Quietly we work as the snow falls, freezes, and then in sunshine drips into puddles that cluster into ice overnight. We have already contacted a number of contributors to COMMON BOUNDARY, and we hope to make more decisions in the upcoming weeks. Thereafter, we will need a little time to work on format and layout, but we are on schedule (even somewhat ahead). Patience in these winter months, as slowing the days get longer and we leave temperatures in the teens and move above freezing.

Rivka Redux - in case you missed the story

2010-01-31T13:40:00.000-08:00

Acclaimed author Rivka Keren contributed two stories to Pain and Memory, and if you missed the article about her and her beautiful and haunting story "Aisha" (the lead story in the book), here it is, from Ynet News (Israel - with link at end of this post):

Israeli author up for Pushcart Prize: Rivka Keren's short story nominated for prestigious US award for small presses. A short story by Israeli author Rivka Keren has been nominated for this year's Pushcart Prize in the United States. The prestigious prize has been awarded annually since 1976 and winning pieces are gathered into a yearly anthology. The nominated story, Aisha, has been published as part of Pain and Memory, a short story collection by Editions Bibliotekos."It feels great to be nominated, especially as it was translated by my daughter," Keren told Ynetnews Saturday. "I don't know what the odds of winning are, especially as the story is translated, but I have great faith in it." Keren, who writes in Hebrew, said she is saddened that "Aisha" was first published in English, after no Israeli publishers or journals were interested in running it." I have been trying unsuccessfully to publish the story in Hebrew for long months," she said. "It is strange for it to appear first in English." The Hungarian-born Keren immigrated to Israel in 1957 and has published 14 books so far. Her most acclaimed work, Taste of Honey, was a bestseller in Israel. Originally a children's book author, one of her earlier books became part of the local elementary school curriculum. Keren's work has been translated into several languages, including English, German, and Spanish. A second generation to Holocaust survivors, she has explored the Shoah in her writing, as well as themes such destiny and memory.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3818771,00.html

Made in Brooklyn

2010-01-28T07:06:00.000-08:00

The Brooklyn Eagle has posted a story about Pain and Memory (apparently gleaned - in part - from an announcement on the St. Francis College homepage).

More News on PAIN AND MEMORY

2010-01-13T05:49:00.000-08:00

Read the press release (Regarding Pain and Memory) from St. Francis College, here. And Dr. Michele Hirsch (psychologist) writes: "From a psychological perspective, we understand that pain and memory are unique, subjective experiences across individuals. However, by successfully enveloping their readers in their compelling narratives, the writers' pain and memory actually become palpable, so much so, their words and prose mobilize our deepest emotions. This memorable collection of stories and poems will move you and haunt you, and more than all else, they will remain a testimony to the power of words and art, which help us communicate the powerful, internal experiences that others cannot see." Pain and Memory, the book.

Slowly . . . but surely

2010-01-09T13:58:00.000-08:00

We have received a number of submissions for the immigration volume, COMMON BOUNDARY, and have begun our review process. Most likely we will be making some early decisions. At any rate, we will accept submissions up to the end of March, so spread the word. REPEAT: We Would Like More Submissions to the immigration volume, COMMON BOUNDARY. Guidelines are on this page, to the right. We look forward to working with our writers, and clearly - from initial dips in - we have some very good material in this pool. Additionally, we are pleased to announce that Jason Dubow, MFA, will be writing the Foreword to COMMON BOUNDARY.

Finally, if you have not yet bought your copy of Pain and Memory, our first anthology, please do so now through amazon.com. We expect that after 15 January, Pain and Memory (and all titles thereafter) will be available on more online bookstores and through the Ingram Book Co., which means that you can request a copy of one of our books from your local bookstore.

Pain and Memory - Testimonial

2009-12-23T13:59:00.000-08:00

From Timothy Houlihan, Ph.D., Academic Dean, St. Francis College: Pain and Memory: Reflections on the Strength of the Human Spirit in Suffering . . . "is a remarkable volume filled with small and large treasures. I especially enjoyed Anne Whitehouse’s Rose’s Dream. It captures the unreal nature of sadness after the death of a longtime companion, the enormous will we have to muster in order to bring ourselves through the suffering, and our surprise at finding we have the ability to go on. And Kathie Giorgio brilliantly sums up the way in which a loved one’s death changes our perspective, not just on ourselves, but on size and color and the place in which we live."

Read All About It! Extra!

2009-12-13T13:37:00.000-08:00

Poet ANNE WHITEHOUSE has published (in addition to poems in Pain and Memory) a collection of poetry: Blessings and Curses. Read a Review of her book from the Santa Fe Writers Project Journal.

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Novelist and short story writer RIVKA KEREN has had an article published about her (and her story "Aisha" from Pain and Memory) in Ynet, the online version of Yedioth Achronot, one of Israel's biggest newspapers. In fact, the story will also be part of a Spanish anthology about Arab-Israeli relationships.

Little Giant Gets a Boost

2009-12-07T09:45:00.000-08:00

We are happy to report that by virtue of our alliance with Amazon.com (and consequently with strategic allegiances to their affiliate printers and companies), Editions Bibliotekos titles (from Pain and Memory forward) will soon be available to the trade (U.S. bookstores and retailers) through Ingram. The Ingram Book Co. is one of the largest wholesale distributors of books – virtually all bookstores order from them. This is not an instant change, and we will need to market our titles to such retailers and bookstores – but, as a publisher, having our books available through Ingram is a big boost. Ultimately, all of this should bode very well for Bibliotekos authors.

Pushcart Nominations

2009-11-30T09:40:00.000-08:00

After very careful deliberation, much discussion, and some agonizing (with input from our four primary readers – publisher, general editor, advisory editor, and proofreader), we have decided to nominate each of the following selections from PAIN AND MEMORY for a Pushcart Prize:

1. “Aisha,” a short story by Rivka Keren, translated from the Hebrew by Maayan Keren (appears on page 1 of the book).
2. “Cartography,” a short story by Tim Nees (appears on page 95 of the book).
3. “Breakfast Mourning,” a poem by Jennifer Clark (appears on page 164 of the book).

Congratulations to the nominees – and many thanks to all of the contributors: we love our authors! Daniel Cartaina, Jennifer Clark, Kathie Giorgio, Howie Good, Jomar Daniel Isip, Rivka Keren, Mitch Levenberg, Robert P. McParland, Tim Nees, Ryan C. Neighbors, Rebecca Newth, Elizabeth Primamore, Ruth Sabath Rosenthal, Lynne Shapiro, Anique Taylor, Cynthia Trenshaw, Anne Whitehouse, Elizabeth Yokas. Amazon link.

PAIN AND MEMORY - Published

2009-11-24T13:22:00.000-08:00

PAIN AND MEMORY is published. After tinkering (a bit too much) with the cover (although we had decided on another cover some weeks ago), we have agreed to use what you see here - this is the front. The back cover lists alphabetically all of the contributors who have made the book possible. If you scroll down this blog, you can see their names here. The volume is available on Amazon - get there by clicking in this post on the book cover or the title. Once we get our shipment of contributor copies from the printer, those will be mailed from our office. ~ Shortly we will begin collecting work for COMMON BOUNDARY, the immigration and international adoption volume - you can link to the guidelines from this blog. Consider submitting - spread the word - invite others to submit.

Close to Publication of PAIN AND MEMORY

2009-11-12T16:25:00.000-08:00

We have received a proof copy of PAIN AND MEMORY from the printer and are very happy. There are some minor changes we’d like to make to the text, and we are re-considering the cover, but we expect to have a finished book within the next few weeks.

Still Working . . . Nearly Done

2009-10-05T10:40:00.001-07:00

The content for our first petit book, Pain and Memory: Reflections on the Strength of the Human Spirit in Suffering, is done.

Many thanks to all of our accepted contributors: Daniel Cartaina; Jennifer Clark; Kathie Giorgio; Howie Good; Jomar Daniel Isip; Rivka Keren; Mitch Levenberg; Robert P. McParland; Tim Nees; Ryan C. Neighbors; Rebecca Newth; Elizabeth Primamore; Ruth Sabath Rosenthal; Lynne Shapiro; Anique Taylor; Cynthia Trenshaw; Anne Whitehouse; Elizabeth Yokas. In all, there are twenty-one selections in the volume.

All of these wonderful writers are widely published in both book and journal formats. Some have won awards such as New Millennium Writings; one was a finalist for the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award; many have been nominated for prizes such as the Million Writer Award, Best of the Net Anthology, and the Pushcart Prize.

We are now in the process of doing layout (as well as proofreading the text and penning brief introductory words from our publisher and advisory editor for this volume).