You will soon be surrounded by lovely ladies and laughter.

Coworker: Who are your favorite authors?
Me: Easy. Steinbeck, Chekhov, Vonnegut, Updike…
Coworker: Okay but who are your favorite living authors?
Me: Oh, no problem. Saunders, Eggers, Moffett, Bradbury…
Coworker: What about female authors?
Me: Oh snap. Well there’s Woolf, Wharton, Austen… errrrr… Wait, you mean current female authors? Jhumpa Lahiri… uhm… Ann Beattie… Uhhhh… J.K. Rowling?
Coworker: What about … no I guess vampire novels don’t count.
Me: Not unless they’re zombie vampires.

This was me, less than six months ago, attempting to wrangle some female authors from my wrinkled brain matter. I found myself sounding pretty sheepish, and by sheepish I mean curly, smelly, big-toothed. I’ve since taken a few more graduate courses at UNT in which female authors moonlighted, showing their faces once or twice a month before vanishing amongst the stars. Still, I’ve yet to read many stellar female authors, mostly due to my own gross incompetence. All that’s about to change.

I pestered Dr. Barbara Rodman until she agreed to guide me via a summer course on this very topic. I then bribed a few fellow classmates to join forces with me and hatch a plan to take over the world, which of course, will be secondary to our plan to read some lovely ladies of fiction. The preliminary list and tentative dates for meeting are below. If you’d like to join us, add some sweet comments to the post or just find me hanging out in outer space eating some delicious science nuggets.

Saturday 11 June Friday 17 June, 6pm - Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

Saturday 25 June - Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Saturday 9 July - Amanda Davis, Circling the Drain

Saturday 23 July - Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen

Meetings at Banter – high noon.

Current participants include: Laura Miller, Adam Kullberg, Hillary Stringer, Matt Davis, Zach VandeZande, and Zach Coleman. Stay tuned for meaty posts chronicling the mind children of our meetings.

My year in the rough

Well, the end is here.  Perhaps, if billboards are to be believed, the end of all things.  The good news about going to grad school in Texas is you’re never too far from a gun show, so a couple of us are popping over to Frisco tomorrow morning to see about equipping ourselves for whatever may come.  I am thinking of something semi-auto with some kind of bitchin’ under-barrel grenade launcher.  Gotta spend that scholarship money on something. 

Mostly, though, I’m concerned about stepping out of the job of assistant fiction editor and into the job of production editor.  Today I took home the last of the fiction submissions and finished up paring down the stack of second reads to something manageable for Miro and Barb.  My good friend Matt Davis is taking over, so I’m not really worried (in fact, I’m sure he’ll do a much better job).  The talented and charming Laura Miller has already taken over the blogging, so I’m not really worried there, either (in fact, I’m sure she’ll do a much better job, and I’ll still be doing a little piece here and there).  I’m a little worried about my new job, which basically consists of making sure the issue exists twice a year.  That I’m able to gain that kind of trust from smart people seems like silliness.  Time will tell.

I’m going to miss getting to read all the stories we get, even the bad or ridiculous ones.  I’m going to miss finding those gems and getting to shepherd them into print.  I’m going to miss seeming a little haggard and weighed-down all the time (having to read a few dozen submissions a week is a great excuse for why your grading isn’t finished).  I’m also going to miss, in a small, weird way, the heartbreak of knowing that a story isn’t quite enough, that the writer on the other end of my rejection letter is a lot like me, and that even though I wasn’t able to do what they wanted me to do, we still share the same doubts, fears, and dreams.  Maybe it’s not a real or profound connection we share, and maybe I’m just kidding myself to think that we’re all part of a community here, but being on this side of the fence has given me a new perspective on how important storytelling is.    

So.  That’s that.

Booty Calls, Stiffed Waitresses, and 33 Blackbirds – Final ALR Reading of Spring

The booty don’t quit, but the semester do. We had our last ALR-sponsored reading of the spring semester on Friday the 13th – despite our collective friggatriskaidekaphobia, the microphones behaved sublimely and the axe-wielders kept their distance. Check out photos and excerpts below, and thanks to the ALR staff for the raucous good times!

Poetry by Nate Logan

"Booty Call Sonnet #14"

How much booty is too much booty?
Philosophers debating this question
say the unexamined booty is not
worth tapping. Poets either get
no booty, or say booty is a metaphor
for a beautiful man or woman
who has zero interest in poets.
In a world where booty, etc.
Can we know booty w/out its opposite, etc.
A good booty is hard to find, etc.
I'm looking for a feather-haired woman
with a knowledge of Chat Roulette.
Even on the Internet I'm sure--
the booty, it don't stop girl.

Fiction by Jessica Tomblin

from The Hostess, "The Painter" chapter

The man smiled at her as if he had a secret, and walked out the front door. Kate ran back to the table and picked up the black checkbook from it first, in order to begin busing and cleaning it for the next couple. As she lifted the book toward her, something fell out. At first she thought it was the check, but then she saw the tent of green. Lainey watched the color go out of Kate’s face, and Kate didn’t have much color to begin with; her white blond hair, in this moment, made her look somewhat like an albino. She threw the book back on the table and walked toward the door with a force that made her appear ghost-like, as if she were floating along at a rapid pace across the concrete floors toward the sidewalk. She held the door open with one arm so that the couple sitting next to the entrance, in the place we called the nook, could clearly see her.

The man, still on the street and walking steadily towards the maroon-colored Lincoln parked at the end of the block, turned with a slight jump at the sound of Kate’s voice.

“Excuse me, is there a problem?” She yelled after him.

“He stood there speechless for a moment before responding by shaking his head side to side as if to indicate that, no there was no problem, and then, not being able to help himself, felt the sides of his mouth turn up slightly on each side so that he was now silently standing there smirking at this ghostly figure standing in the door way.

“A dollar?” she said with no inflection so it sounded more a statement than a question, and so, the man stood again in silence until Kate grew tired of their staring contest and realizing the man had not, as she had hoped in the back of her mind, accidentally forgotten a bill or placed a dollar down, confusing it for a twenty, or even a ten, but had purposefully left her only the dollar tip, on his ninety-dollar tab.

Kate slammed the door and walked back to the table where the dollar lay on the floor beside the chair, still pushed out from where the man had been sitting. She picked it up and headed for the back bar, where Rocky sat drinking Jack and Cokes, oblivious to the scene that has just occurred at the front of house.

“This" she said, "is bullshit."

Poetry by Chris Beard

from "Love Abstract with Flood and Secrets"

There are thirty three holes in the sky
flying west, thirty three blackbirds
I see through to the source of rain,
and she wants birds to just be birds,
the sky to remain intact,
a pocket sealed with sun.

There are twenty five jars
where she keeps my hair,
where the curls wrap around
the bending light forever.

There are numberless hours spent damaging
the asphalt, our whole lives lived in a car,
enduring summer’s drag, drinking
like it is medicine to cure our heavy blood.

There are three years of storms back home
waited out in the basement with a bucket and oar,
water filling the window wells as we pretended to sleep
through the swell, burst, and flood, the disaster growing beneath us
as we floated up through the swampy mud.

ALR Reading Series

Yet another successful graduate-student reading at Jupiter House. Despite the lack of electronic voice-magnifying machinery (otherwise known as a microphone), our readers expertly delivered stimulating stories and poems that captured the attention of even the non-students in attendance. Check out excerpts below, and stay tuned for details on our next (and final) reading of the semester. 

"Hibernation" by Adam Kullberg

“You see what I mean? Just look at this thing,” his father said, kneeling down onto one knee beside it. He stroked the beast’s large, bowling-ball sized head as if the bear was some pet he had picked up the day before. The bear’s paws were as big as the boy’s lower back.

“Where did it come from?” the boy asked.

“Ranger found it a few years back, up near a campground. Biggest one they’ve ever seen around here, I hear.”

The boy leaned down and put a hand into the bear’s mouth, feeling the sharp, gleaming teeth with the ends of his fingertips. They felt warm to the touch. “How did they kill it?” the boy asked.

His father laughed and shook his head. “Kill it? No. This one died of starvation probably, maybe ate something it shouldn’t have. Rangers aren’t allowed to kill anything. Well, unless it’s in self-defense, of course.” He turned to the boy. “But the main rule of being a ranger is you protect the park. You defend it if you have to, you keep it clean, you make sure that no one hurts it. Like it were your child.”

The boy worked his fingers over the bear’s paws, comparing them to his own narrow, short fingers. He had never thought of nature as defenseless before, as something that needed helping. “Is that what you do then?” he asked, “defend it?”

“Of course. With my life, if I have to,” his father said matter-of-factly, “That’s the ranger’s code.”

“Would you ever leave it, though? The park?” the boy asked.

He thought about this for while. “No. I don’t think so.” He said. He leaned down and ran his hand over the fur, and a glazed look, much like bear’s own glossy black stare, came over his face. “It’s your duty to stay.”

"Toadkill" by Karen Kadura

The enemy oozed from the flowerpot and landed with a slick plop, quivering there like Jell-O and still wet from his recent watering. He was a dull, unremarkable grayish-green, and he lay unmoving on the sparse grass, smooth and glistening and immense. He must have been at least the size of both my father's fists together, and overweight besides. Although I knew one wasn't supposed to name anything that one was soon to part with, in that moment I christened him Fatty.

Fatty had a mutinous gleam in the beady little eye that peered out at me from beneath folds of fat, ignoring the dogs as they barked and whined behind the fence. His unwillingness to move struck me as disrespectful, although it may have just been that he lacked the strength in his legs to move his considerable bulk. I wondered how he had even managed to get into the flowerpot in the first place, and as I was thinking this he looked straight at me and blinked, slowly. He was surely mocking me; he had even managed to land with his entire left side facing me--the perfect shot. He seemed lazy, almost uncaring, and his apathy towards the danger he was in angered me. It seemed that he was in control of the situation, and I hated him for that. I raised the gun. "Where should I aim?" I asked Dad.

Poetry by Aubree Blomgren

from "How it Was, and Was Not"

You plus me was hardly larger than you without me, which made it easy for us to share the sleeping bag. / It was musty, / heavy, thick, big enough to hold a lumber jack and his ax. Its fabric was a forest of wild pheasants / in all stages of flight. / Printed to excite and to prepare the young men for sleep, so dreams become a hunt and a hunter / satisfying the instinct / to take home what's shot from the sky. Funny, at first, how we laid as if we'd been shot, and stacked, / in a hunter's bag, / one on top of the other. How I looked from the zipper to the quail, still alive in the quilted sky, / and didn't know / that the boy's sleeping bag tells him what life wants from him. 

Our awe-struck audience. 

American Literary Review, Reviewed

This is solid, satisfying reading from accomplished and serious writers and artists cleverly attuned to the world of ideas, emotions, and rich imagery.

 Read the full review here.