Capsule review for those who missed

episode one of the Third-Annual Lit Fest. The kickoff party?  Rocked.  Thanks to a combination of the funky stylings of The Alltunators, the donated backyard furniture from Jay Kenney, and the Red Rock Ale compliments of Rock Bottom Brewery. Here’s a pic from the Alltunator’s first set. (Just as a flash-forward, lighting not being our forte, everyone who came out to enjoy the music was plunged into darkness by the end of the second set, which could have been dangerous and even awkward, but maybe we all played it off okay. And we do have insurance.)

Was there food? you might wonder. Yes, Virginia, there was food from the delicious and nutritious Parisi’s deli, some of which still resides in the Lighthouse refrigerator (note to selves: we might donate that to the Lighthouse dog).  Much as I tried, I could not get the coveted “bald guys by the beer keg” photo — the aesthetics weren’t right. But rest assured, there was a congregation of guys (who shave their heads for purely stylistic reasons) by the keg.  It was like college in that sense.  Here was my attempt at getting a candid shot of people by the keg.  Act natural! I said.

Smarty pantses.  Anyway, Episode One only worked out thanks to goddess Jennie Dorris (pictured above, middle) our illustrious volunteers Patricia Harris, Rosemary L’Esprit, Jillian Polasky, Scotty and Joy Sawyer, and Meghan Wilson, who I implicitly thanked already by helping her to a generous dose of wine down the front of her shirt. Here she is, left, the Voice of Lighthouse (see our podcasts), before the offending elbow sent the offending wine down the very nice and snazzy shirt.

Is it too late to get caught up in the wreckless literary theatrics of the Lit Fest season?  Indeed it is not. Monday night, June 9, 8 PM, we get Shari Caudron, William Haywood Henderson, and Karen Palmer sharing their “Writing Voodoo” secrets. (Tix are $10 for members.) Come to Forest Room 5, stake out your territory, order some food and wine, and sit back and enjoy the show. See you all there! See a full list of free and cheap events here.

 

Economist’s Tip Sheet

Maybe, because you squandered your stimulus check on a mountain bike or, say, fuel for your voraciously hungry car, you thought you’d sit out the Lit Fest this year, sliding through the next couple of weeks without really dressing, brushing your hair, or joining in the shenanigans. Sorry. No can do! There are free-to-near-free ways to get involved with Lit Fest–all the community goodness at half (or none of) the price. 

 

We consulted a Lighthouse team of economists and various consumer agencies, and they prepared the following tip sheet. These events and happenings are free or $10*. We just want to see your happy mug at Lighthouse! Can you really afford not to show it?

 

The Kickoff Party: Fri, 6/6, 6 to 9 PM (Ferril)……………………..$10
What if we threw a Lit Fest and everyone gathered to toast it? Personally, we think it would be really stunning. Music by the Alltunators, food by Parisi’s, wine by Above the Rim Fine Wine, water compliments of Mother Nature, and beer from Rock Bottom Brewery. You’re not going to find a more economical way to enjoy yourself, or better people to do it with.  Tix here.

 

Faculty Reading: Sat, 6/7, 7 PM (Mercury Cafe)…………………..$0
Opera tickets are $28.  Live theatre is at least $20. And you just spent $9.75 to see Indiana Jones without any popcorn. The Lit Fest offers a night of literary entertainment for absolutely nothing. And our faculty ain’t no scrubs.  Between them, they’ve published twenty-three books, and their work has graced the pages of everything from the Threepenny Review to the New Yorker. We won’t even start tallying the awards. Plus, they’re a hoot to hang out with. It’s like that dream you had where the guy who won the Colorado Book Award was reading you a bedtime story, only it’s not bedtime, and he really is.  (Featuring Robert Root, Nick Arvin, Rebecca Berg, Mike Henry, and Jessica Roeder).

 

Salon: Writing Voodoo. Mon, 6/9, 8 PM (FR5)…………………………$10
Some things are invaluable. Love. Health. Wisdom. And the answers to certain questions, such as: How do you write a book?  What’s the deal with this nightmarish first draft? How do you revise it? How do you know when to, gulp, abandon it? How do you navigate relationships with editors and agents? These questions and many more will be addressed by multi-book veterans William Haywood Henderson, Shari Caudron and Karen Palmer.  We also look forward to your thoughts on the matter. (Note the location: Forest Room 2532 15th St. Come early, order drinks, enjoy an appetizer.) Tix here.

 

Faculty Reading Deux: Tue, 6/10, 8 PM (Mercury Cafe)………….$0
Another fun reading from writers on our faculty–one of whom is currently topping the local bestseller list, and others who have been there or might be soon.  (Featuring Janis Hallowell, Matt Kailey, William Henderson, David Rothman, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, and Jake Adam York).

 

Salon: Mixed Up Arts. Thur, 6/12, 8 PM (FR5)………………………….$10
During lean economic times, we’re often encouraged to scrimp and save. Pinch and moderate. So it’s nice to go hog wild once in a while. In this salon, we’ll celebrate, ponder, and maybe even worry over what we have in abundance: Talent. Musical and visual artists Mario Acevedo, Jennie Dorris, and Rebecca Berg (who also happen to be writers) will discuss and demonstrate the intersection between their many creative modes. Think of it as a mini concert/art show where writers make movies. And argue. And have a heck of a good time. (Note the location: Forest Room 2532 15th St. Come early, order drinks, enjoy an appetizer.) Tix here.

 

Salon: DNC Special: Writing & Politics. Mon, 6/16, 8 PM (FR5)….$10
They always say the pen is mightier than the sword. But does that mean you should write an Ode to Exxon Mobil? Or a story about a superdelegate who falls in love with a regular delegate to the dismay of all involved?  We don’t know.  But after this salon, we might. The esteemed Janis Hallowell (She Was), Nick Arvin (Articles of War), Valerie Ann Leff (Better Homes and Husbands) and David J. Rothman (The Elephant’s Chiropractor) will join you in tackling the sticky subject of politics in writing: can you do it? Should you do it? How? Note: due to possible adverse reactions to partisan clichés, we have banned the following verbal constructions: throwing anything or anyone “under the bus,” “the math,” and “reading from [insert odious name or entity's] playbook.”  Tix here. 

 

Lit Fest Participant Reading: Tue, 6/17, 8 PM (Mercury Cafe)……..$0
Often touted as “the most inspiring night of the entire Festival,” the participant reading features writers who are taking workshops and enjoying the two-week binge that is Lit Fest. This year we feature two writers who signed book deals at (or, more accurately, quickly after) previous Lit Fests, including the PEN/Hemingway award honorable mention Gary Schanbacher (Migration Patterns) and author of the soon-to-be-released Umbrellas or Else, J. Diego Frey. There are 10 slots open for other Lit Festers to read short, 3-minute pieces. Will you be one of them? This opportunity’s pure gold: contact sara@lighthousewriters.org to get on the list, and show up at the Merc to listen and enjoy. (Oh, and arrive early to order food/drink!)

 

Closing Reception: A Gourmand’s Tale: Fri, 6/20, 6-9 PM………..$40
Oh, food. How we love it. We love it just about as much as we love wine and beautiful gardens. So we’ve decided to bring all of these things together in the final Lit Fest shindig, where we’ll toast our visiting agents (including local agents Kate Schafer and Sandra Bond, as well as New Yorker Betsy Lerner of  Dunow, Carlson, and Lerner) and editors (from Fulcrum and Ghost Road), and each other! We’ll hang out with old friends, make new friends, and listen to an appetizing salon talk on writing and food from Denver Poet Laureate Chris Ransick and Lighthouse members Carleen Brice and Tiffany Tyson. If all of this sounds pretty swanky, it is. If it sounds like something you can’t afford, it isn’t. Directions to this private garden party near 9th & Gaylord will be e-mailed to registrants. Please order tix by 6/12 at the latest. (Caterers need the stats!)

 

*Except for one event that’s a farewell kind of fundraiser that we’ve buried at the bottom of the tip sheet (an old trick). It’s still an economical choice!

 

Count up to Lit Fest: 11 Days (Also, an Invite to Meet Your Brood)

Over a decade ago, leaving the cozy, inspiring, crazy-making, inbred culture of our graduate MFA program, Mike Henry and I ventured west to see what we could see. Were there eight writers to every ten strangers you met, as there were in Boston? Would they be interested in finding each other? Really, we all know that writing, per se, cannot be taught—though learning the craft can be accelerated, the learning curve shortened—so why start a nonprofit, independent writing center?  As our brilliant volunteer copywriter J. Chris Rock so eloquently put it: “Sometimes, what a writer needs most is other writers.”

We’re a strange and diverse enough crowd, everyone from apprentices to full-timers working on their fourth novels, ages 10 to 85, all walks of life, probably all political persuasions. So what do we have in common?  A tendency to see things in terms of the story, the poetic line, the image, the scene. We try to be, as someone famous said, people upon whom nothing is lost. That might not go over so well with some of our family and friends. In that way, Lit Fest becomes a time to let it all hang out there—every writerly impulse, every bad draft, every I-love-it-but-I-hate-it attitude toward our strange, shared compulsion. People here will understand… even without your “treatise on why I do this” that you send out every year to your e-mail list.  

So begins the count up to the Third Annual Lighthouse Lit Fest.  Over the last two years, we’ve seen writers immerse themselves in weekend-intensive writing courses like Writing Through Character, Navigating Your Book, Environmental Writing, and Emotion On & Off the Page (not to mention the already waitlisted Novel Bootcamp). Some have gone on to their own wonderful writing careers outside of Colorado, like our friend Sarah Ockler, whose Twenty Boy Summer catapulted her to a 2-book deal with Little, Brown, freedom from a day job, and a return to the city she loves, New York. Others, like Gary Schanbacher (author of Migration Patterns, winner of an honorable mention for the 2008 PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction) and J. Diego Frey (author of the forthcoming Umbrellas or Else, from Ghost Road), continue to take part in Lighthouse events and will make a featured appearance at the Lit Fest participant reading on Tuesday, June 17.  Both Schanbacher and Frey received book deals after meetings at our first- and second-annual Lit Fests. Hear them read (for free, of course) on June 17, 8PM, Forest Room 5, [OOPS! Edited: it's at the Mercury Cafe] along with other scribblers who sign up for the Participant Reading. If you’re participating in Lit Fest and you’d like a 3-to-5 minute slot to read, contact moi: andrea@lighthousewriters.org.

See ya’ll there!

 

Spring, Fully Loaded

Okay, that’s a bad pun (Potential Energy? I need some of that!)

I got a D in Physics 101. Which is my disclaimer for this post.

But seriously, there’s a lotta energy going on these next coupla months. Such as:

The March Writer’s Buzz, where we’ll all chat about slush piles (what’s the coefficient of friction for three poem stuck into a #10 envelope?), the state of lit journals, and such. March 22, 2008, 10 to noon PM at Tattered Cover, LoDo. Free for Lighthousers. The rest need to pony up $10. Or, heck, get a membership.

And a second Buzz: Your Writing Career: Publishing, Marketing, and Honing the Craft in 2008, on Saturday, March 8, 10 AM to 11:15 AM, at the Mayor’s Expo on Building Creative Businesses. Should be fun!

Then, a fantastic performance with lighthouse and Telling Stories—called “Voiceovers”—at the Mercury Café, April 4.Yours truly (Mike Henry), Shari Caudron, Jennie Dorris, and Janine Fritz will be performing original works with musical accompaniment. Starts at 7:00 PM. Patchouli, that person who speaks to you inside your head (classic Freudian voiceover to be sure), tin flutes and/or tubas suggested, but not mandatory.

Crud. That means I have to write a new essay about that.

Last, and hoppy-good not least, our Denver Poet Laureate Chris Ransick is hosting a special night of poetry and brews called Liquid Poetry at the Wynkoop Brewery, Friday, April 11, at 7 p.m. It will feature live music, door prizes, a beer-themed poetry contest, and readings from featured poets Mike Henry, JD Frey, and Joy Sawyer.

Crud. That means I have to write a new poem about beer. Hiccup.

–MJH

 

Somehow this happened, so come to the party!

 

To the Lighthouse on Saturday

Come one, come all, to the Ferril House on Saturday to bid farewell to November, hear some poetry, usher in December, sip some wine, and check out our Serviette Project (there’s really no such thing as a new idea), a collection of original authors’ doodles which go up for auction Dec. 6-13 as part of our year-end appeal. 

http://search.ebay.com:80/_W0QQsassZlighthousewriters

A preview. Sometimes less is more:

(Tobias Wolff’s Serviette: “She gave. He took. She forgot.”)

And sometimes more is more:

(Alexandre Philippe’s Serviette, which cannot be summarized except to say you must witness the dizzying mind of this Swiss-French filmmaker. It’s right thar on the napkin.)

Saturday, December 1, 4-6 PM, Ferril House.  See you there!  Feel free to bring a bottle of something…

 

We knew Gare when…

It may look familiar to some of us, especially if you were in the Thursday short story workshop in the past few years, but let’s just sit back and watch:

When birds start raining from the sky, a vision flashes through Wes’s mind of some biblical prophecy, a plague loosed upon the Earth. He thinks back to his Sunday school days—there were frogs and gnats and locusts, but he remembers nothing about birds.”

This is the opening to “Regaining Flight,” which originally appeared next to Kent Haruf and Mark Spragg in the New Writers of the West issue of Colorado Review. Gary’s one of a kind, and trust me, he’ll be at your signing, so why not come to Lighthouse and raise a glass to his book, Migration Patterns, coming out from Fulcrum this month? Come on Saturday, October 6, 5-7 PM, to the Ferril House. And let us know you’re coming so we have enough cheese-n-wine! info@lighthousewriters.org. Or call 303.297.1185.  Free and open, and Fulcrum will be there selling books!

 

I think we have a collective crush

at Lighthouse on the lovely, the talented Tobias Wolff.  He swept into Denver, blew us away with two great readings (actual gooseflesh was spotted after “Bullet in the Brain”), waxed philosophical in an on-stage chat with Eli Gottlieb (complete with the stroking of the moustache and chin, a few worrisome backleans in his chair), told great stories about his friendship with Raymond Carver, about how parenting cured him of teaching sternly, and how various life events have and haven’t made it into his fiction. Later, he chatted Sopranos, war, and family dogs over dinner on the rooftop terrace at Tamayo, where he also read a new story—this all on Saturday. Then Sr. Wolff wooed another audience at the Tattered Cover LoDo on Sunday. In his packed seminar, “The Truth of Fiction, the Lies of Memoir,” it was impossible to take down all the nuggets of wisdom without getting a hand cramp. His take, which is one that yours truly will tape to the computer, is that in writing the “right choice is the one that trusts the reader the most.” Also, if you’re writing memoir or fiction, opening your eyes to your own nature is a sure path to “truth.” We don’t recommend pursuing this regimen without first consulting your psychotherapist.  (And if you do, please read paragraph 5, line 3 of our Disclaimer.) 

Thanks, all, who came out this weekend.  It was one for the record books.

 

Lit Fest Kickoff

featured the folk vocal stylings of our own literary goddess Jessica Slater and her husband Andy Miller, AKA The Alltunators. Everyone loved them so much that they’ll reprise their act on Friday, 6/22, for our Lit Fest finale. Going along with our “class it up” theme this year, we demanded that attendees wear nametags (designed by Donna Karan) and nosh on the fine and tasty vittles from Parisi. And of course, the keg, compliments of Rock Bottom Brewery, was in the back yard. (Anyone else thinking back to college right now?) We were advised by people who seem to know such things, that the amber brew (Red Rock Ale) would be much more popular among beer aficionados, whereas something lighter or wheatier would be appreciated by the social (read: ignorant) drinkers. Misidentifying our people, we went Red Rock. Next keg will be Pale Ale for sure. Above the Rim Fine Wine steered us in the right direction with a Pinot Grigio that came in a designer bottle. We all felt we should be taking a bath in the stuff, but it was fruity, crisp, and delicious.

Featured moment: When separated-at-birth writers with shaved heads (Mike Henry, Bill Henderson, Joel Albin, and Jake Adam York), spotted each other, froze, pinched themselves, and retired to the perimeter of the keg, shaking their heads. Moment to forget: When novelist Janis Hallowell, having been led by the steeltrap organizational Lighthouse machine, learned that her class on Sunday, instead of being 6 hours long, was going to be a mere 3. (Sorry, Janis!) Note to selves: Uhm, ridiculous.

We’ll be looking for you all at the reading Sunday night, 910 Arts, 7-9 PM, featuring Lighthouse Lit Fest faculty Chris Ransick, Janis Hallowell, Shari Caudron, Aaron Anstett, Rebecca Berg, Jenny Vacchiano, Mike Henry, Jenny Wortman, and Brian Kiteley. I’ll bring some of that Pinot Grigio. The next faculty reading, same place, Tuesday night (6/12): Robert Root, Christina Mengert, William Haywood Henderson, Tyrone Jaeger, Jake Adam York, David J. Rothman, and Kathryn Winograd from 8-9:30 PM. In both cases, we’ll have wine and cheese for everyone’s enjoyment.

See you all there!

–AD

 

Arvin Takes Co Book Award

What’s better than seeing a bunch of writers on that rare occasion when they get to bust out their fancy outfits and take in too many beverages? The night ending with a win for best novel by Nick Arvin (Articles of War), of course. Word from Nick’s wife, Rachel, is that had he not taken the award, she would have been tempted to run off with DeVotchKa lead Nick Urata, who performed soulfully that night. Maybe everyone in the audience felt the same way. Laura Pritchett, also up for the novel category, got a nod nonetheless as she contributed to the anthology that won that night, Comeback Wolves. Poetry finalist Aaron Anstett was in high spirits despite not taking home the award — perhaps because his auction basket, which included his own poetry, a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon, a pack unfiltered pall malls, some pork and beans, and a ripped Pavement CD, took the highest bid?

Those who wagered on the evening may have lost big on memoir, as fave JR Moehringer went home sans award. The guy who wrote The Guiness Book of Me was a perfectly gracious (and surprised?) winner in that category.

Thanks for the good times. See you next year when we’ll expect more faculty finalists.
–AD