Tattered Cover to begin selling used books

Here’s something interesting: Tattered Cover is going to begin buying and selling used books.

Kind of gives their name a new, and perhaps more nuanced, meaning. I just hope it doesn’t hurt other local used bookstore sales (like Capitol Hill Books and West Side Books).

Of course, as a poet, I wish they would stock a better poetry section, like they used to, in the old days. (No one can be the Grolier, but a poet can still dream, can’t he?)

–mjh

 

Memo to the Lighthouse Fundraising Committee

Poetry: one of the oldest journals in the country from whom we steal our raison d'etre.

My new strategy is this: channel our inner Christian Wiman (inspiration for this diatribe a couple years back by yours truly), who wrote such a moving letter for Poetry’s “subscribe now” campaign that I nearly choked on my morning coffee.  “Dear Reader,” he wrote: 

These days it can seem that life consists mostly of being overwhelmed by life. The whirlwind of information, the economic shocks, the constant pressures on our time and minds–amid all this, it can become easy to ignore the call of our inner lives; so easy, in fact, that we hardly notice when that call goes quiet. The paradox is that when you stop engaging with your deepest being, you stop fully engaging with the world.

Poetry can be an antitode to this. It can cut through all the distraction and busyness, can help you seize your life and be more completely in it. Indeed, with its compression, concision, and intensity, poetry may be one of the best tonics for our times.

–from Christian Wiman’s “subscribe to Poetry” letter.

What he said! That’s the same thing with Lighthouse. (Check your mailboxes soon for our “What He Said” campaign.)Only I guess we have to come up with our own language for it. The transformative act of writing: one of the best tonics for our times!

–aed

 

I Have Been to Oprah’s Web Site and Have Lived to Tell the Tale….

Pushing that boulder up the hill.

On Oprah’s site, there’s a great essay on writing and stubbornness from Junot Diaz.

I remember reading his short story collection Drown years ago, and learning that he got a huge book deal to write a novel. And then: nothing. Not a word. Nary a peep. Not even some rumorish buzz.

Until I heard that he was incredibly blocked. Stuck. Seems as if that huge book deal kind of made the writing process a bit heavy.

The link: http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/200911-omag-junot-diaz-writing. Hope you enjoy.

 

Further evidence of a short storycentric universe?

…or at least that reports of the demise of the short story are greatly exaggerated: the National Book Awards are going all democratic in chosing the “best NBA winner of all time.” You can vote on the expert-whittled list here, but take note: four of the six choices are story collections.  Which of the six did you vote for? 

 

I love all of these writers, but I have to confess that after a bone-chilling, absorbing, fanfreakingtastic reading of “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by actress Lauren Klein this weekend at Stories on Stage, I have Flannery O’Connor on the brain. And if it’s on my brain, I vote it. I wouldn’t be disappointed if any of these writers or books won, though I might arch an eyebrow at Gravity’s Rainbow (love love love Pynchon, but really?).

–AED

 

Poet Heather McHugh Wins a Genius Grant

Heather McHugh–a poet I must admit I am not all that familiar with–just received a MacArthur Fellowship, which, for a poet, is winning PowerBall. The sum total: $500,000. (I wonder what the taxes are on that payout?)

Anyway, listen here for an engaging interview with Ms. McHugh on NPR.

And here’s a link to her Web site, where she’s got a few poems: http://www.spondee.com/poems.html.

Once, when I got a grant, I went right out and bought a mountain bike. Wonder if she’s going to splurge on anything?

–MJH

 

With a name like this, she had to be a writer

Kendal Muse, winner of the Lighthouse-Stories on Stage contest

News Alert! 

Kendal Muse, a dazzling member of Jessica Roeder’s dazzling Online Fiction Workshop, recently learned that her story, “A Message from the Sarge,” was selected by Stories on Stage to win our collaborative contest.  Kendal lives and muses, we assume, in Colorado with her husband and son.  Along with the rest of us, she will get to see actress Elgin Kelley (photo below) read her work on stage at Nobody Likes a Smartass, performed at the Jones Theater  (Denver Center for the Performing Arts) on Saturday, Sept. 26.

Writers—and, well, people in general—may not agree with the premise “Nobody Likes a Smartass,” but Kendal and 38 other members of the August Lighthouse short story workshops were invited to submit a story that touched in some way on that theme. At the deadline for submission, September 5, I had in my e-mail inbox 25 great short stories written by our members.  Our partners for this experiment, the nationally recognized Stories on Stage, were given the unenviable task of deciding which story would be performed along with a lineup of virtuosic pieces from Tobias Wolff, Lorrie Moore, and Flannery O’Connor. SOS Artistic Director Norma Moore ultimately fell for Kendal’s “vibrant personal voice.”

You’ll see what she means with this little preview of “A Message from the Sarge”:

We shouldn’t have been there that night. Henry was only ten, still too young for a role in the Christmas pageant, and I had sworn to never be in it again. I had been cast every year since we’d moved to town, once as a bearded wise man and last year as Mary. Mary was the worst. The church leaders didn’t leave you alone when you were Mary, everybody going on about how a Mary was chosen for her beauty and grace, and wasn’t I just thrilled with myself? As if I were the kind of girl who gave a crap about beauty and grace. For such an important role you barely had any lines; you attended rehearsals so you could practice gazing lovingly from your baby to your husband. There is nothing like trying to portray godly love for a plastic baby doll and a kid with pimples and wandering hands that really puts your life into perspective.

Kendal wouldn’t have written the story were it not for the contest. “When asked to consider writing a story based around the idea ‘nobody likes a smartass,’ this story slowly started to piece itself together,” she says. “Having an opportunity to workshop it with other writers and then having a place for it to be heard has been a great experience. “

Her instructor, Jessica Roeder, engaged with Kendal’s original take on the topic:

“A Message from Sarge” was the first story submitted for workshop this session, alongside the week’s reading of O’Connor and Wolff. Kendal’s story looks at the smartass the other way around, leaving him where we’d often like to leave him in life, on the periphery. The narrator’s voice combines her father’s toughness with a teenager’s understatement, and she proves herself much smarter than her smartass rival.    

Elgin Kelley will read Lighthouser Kendal Muse's winning story.

Come hear the rest of Kendal’s story, along with Lorrie Moore’s “You’re Ugly, Too,” Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain,” and Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” on the September 26, either the 5 or 8 PM shows. For a limited time, $15 discount-rate tickets are available to Lighthouse members by clicking here and entering “lighthouse” as the discount code, or by calling 303.494.0523.

 

Raves accumulate for Lorrie Moore’s new book

If you’re an author and Amazon reviews get you down, the best revenge is winning over Michiko Kakutani, who has the following to say about A Gate at the Stairs, Moore’s soon-to-be released novel:

Ms. Moore has written her most powerful book yet, a book that gives us an indelible portrait of a young woman coming of age in the Midwest in the year after 9/11 and her initiation into the adult world of loss and grief. It is a novel that illustrates just how far Ms. Moore has come in the last two and half decades from her keenly observed but jokey 1985 collection of stories, “Self-Help,” which showcased her gifts as a writer but also underscored her — and her characters’ — emotional reticence, their reluctance to open themselves to deeply felt experiences.

The rest is here.

And did we mention (I’m sure we didn’t) that she’s our next weekend residency guest at Lighthouse? More details here.

 

Blood on our hands: Literary Death Match Denver

First let me explain something about what we do at Lighthouse. You would think, with the name and all, that we spent long days and nights showing the light to writers who are lost in a sea of confusion and solitude and other metaphorical stuff like that.  No.  We actually spend most of our time ducking into the refracted light that already shines on our members.  More accurately, we should call ourselves “house of refracted light.”

Literary Death Match's Todd Zuniga and Jody Reale "work the crowd" (picture compliments of Stephanie Hight)

Like so many in the Thursday night short story workshop, Nick Franciose is one of the members who’s graced with a natural talent for the short story. His verbal acuity is ferocious.  So this is what we did: we sent Nick Franciose out to represent Lighthouse at Denver’s second Literary Death Match.

For those of you unfamiliar with the LDM, it’s an international sensation, led by the tireless and satellitically haired Todd Zuniga, who manages both air travel and witty repartee on a daily basis. A regular diet of either would exhaust yours truly, but not this guy. He does it, he tweets it, he moves on.  So, after he promised us laughs and ribaldry, many Lighthousers and other literary types packed into Forest Room 5 on Wednesday night, hungry for a showdown.

The evening did not disappoint. Battling it out were two fiction writers—Nick for Lighthouse and Sharon McGill for Opium Magazine, and two poets—Jessy Randall (A Day in Boyland) for Ghost Road and Nicky Beer for Copper Nickel magazine. All, it should be noted, were cute as buttons.  That they also oozed talent was a bonus.

The short summary is that Sharon McGill wowed the crowd with mention of mediocre sex in the kitchen, an image that haunted the judges  (poet Chris Ransick, nf writer Curtis Pesman, and the dynamite Tara Anderson) for the entire night ; Franciose floored them with his tale of a law school dropout who wakes up in drag in the back of a police cruiser; Randall had us all in fits of giggles with various poems about the haplessly lovestruck and men-as-dawgs and whatnot, finishing with the swashbuckling “Unt Not Invent System.”  Nicky Beer had us at “perineum” but continued to bewitch us with her rollicking, smart poetry.

The two finalists were Randall and our own Franciose.  Because there’s no video of Nick’s performance, let me just give you this taste, from his opening:

Coming out of blackout is like emerging from a fugue state; one second you’re hunched over staring unperceivingly at your crotch, your head lolling with the movements of the police cruiser, and the next, consciousness returns to you and an ocean of worldly particulars rushes at your senses.  On TV you once saw a team of marine researchers attach weights to a life-sized Styrofoam head and lower it on a cable into an ocean trench.  When they pulled the head back up the tremendous pressures had squeezed it, preserving the proportions perfectly, to the size of a plum.  That’s what your head feels like, like ocean tonnage and compacted Styrofoam—and like a plum, the flesh gray and sweet with bruise. 

–From Nick Franciose’s “Foreclosure”

Franciose Wins! Accompanied by Lighthouse Scream Team MVP Stephanie Hight

‘Nuff said about our guy.  He killed the crowd. (Thanks also to the Lighthouse Scream Team—we are not above it, though such premeditated hollering is annoying/offensive/cruel at graduations, it’s required at duels-to-the-death.)  We had already guessed this wouldn’t be a typical reading when the young woman with the hula hoop showed up, and you can hear a great summary of the Franciose siblings’ virtuosity in the writing and hula hooping world here (scroll down the comments to see Papa Franciose’s wry, off-the-wall and allusion-studded note—it explains a lot about the Francoise talent pool).

As they often say, it’s not who wins or loses, but how strong the drinks are during the performance. What a fun night, all, and looking forward to the November Literary Death Match. More to come on that.

 

Moore, Please!

I do not claim to be an expert on either Lorrie Moore or the short story. But I am a huge fan of both, so when I heard that we’d be bringing Moore to Denver for this fall’s Writer’s Studio, I was thrilled. Lorrie Moore is, in this young writer’s humble opinion, one of the best living contemporary short story writers out there. I was first introduced to her work in the pages of the Best American Short Stories series (every volume of which, from 1978 to the present, colorfully lines my bookshelf). This was before, of course, I discovered the joys of reading the actual magazines and reviews from which the annual collection is culled—I was in high school when I began collecting them, give me a break—but I still go back to them again and again, and Lorrie Moore has been well represented among their pages.

It’s no surprise, then, that in 2004 Moore was asked to be the annual guest editor of the series. Aside from choosing a remarkable selection of stories to include in that year’s anthology, she wrote an introduction that gets me excited about the short story all over again every time I read her words. It is my intent to dissect one Moore story at a time, discussing in these illustrious blog postings precisely why I admire her so. And I’d like to begin with just the introduction to BASS 2004, (Houghton Mifflin, 2004) as it reminds me why I so love not just short stories as a genre, but specifically her stories: she’s smart, she’s funny, and she has as complete a grasp of the short story form as anyone ever may.

In describing the futility of strictly defining the short story, Moore says “no matter what one says about…short stories and novels, a hundred exceptions support the opposite case.” (pg. xiv) Yet I defy anyone to argue with the metaphors she gives as examples: “A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage. A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film” (xv), and my favorite: “If a story is not always, therapeutically, an axe for the frozen sea within us, then it is at least a pair of brutally sharpened ice skates.” (xvii) Even (and maybe especially) when she’s contradicting herself, Moore does so with intelligence and grace.  She talks about the “interest in beautiful pain” (xv) that the short story takes. The phrase beautiful pain perfectly  what is so good about her writing. This is not to say that she is painful to read—quite the opposite—she is a master of finding the beauty in pain.

In discussing her criteria for selecting the stories that she did, Moore questions her “own visceral responses,” asking herself, “was I riveted? Did a story haunt me for days?” (xvii), reactions I’ve had to nearly every story of hers I’ve ever read. (Beg pardon if this is turning into one big gushfest; I do confess to feeling a bit like a Spiderman fan must feel at a Stan Lee signing.)  As she says herself, stories “are interested in the value, beauty, and malarkey of words that people utter to themselves or others” (xvi), and what are stories if not that: beautiful, valuable b.s. we put down on the page.

But it’s Moore’s dry wit that, for me, makes her prose complete. Whether it’s comparing the short story to Napolean, “with its narrative version of a short man’s complex” (xviii), or parenthetically deprecating herself and other writers who are “asked to speak publicly of their art (oh, dear) or …their craft (that alarmingly nautical phrase)” (xiv), the intimacy of her sharp tongue at once brings the reader into a close camaraderie while keeping her at arm’s length through the deflective nature of humor.  She refers to her introduction and others like it as the result of what “may be simply the desperate, improvised creative-writing yack of good people uncomfortably far from their desks” (xiv), but if this is uncomfortable territory for her, just wait and see what she can do when she really settles in.

 

Intern’s Report: Young Writers’ Camp

Ed. note: Our trusty intern Laurel Smith is back, reporting on the events of last week’s camp, run by the supersonic Amanda Rea. Here’s what Laurel had to say.

One of our young writers on the town

For five days young writers sailed the seas of creativity. They wrote their way through brainstorms of poetry and survived the resulting flash fiction. On Friday the Lighthouse guided them to the shores of the Platte River where they disembarked their crazy adventure at the Tattered Cover, reunited with their parents and stood up to tell a packed room of curious onlookers about their voyage. But before they could tell us about the fruits of the Sea of Creativity they had a bit more writing to do.

            Around forty kids went out into the heart of Downtown Denver looking for what inspires them. I was lucky enough to be taken aboard by the fifth and six graders. They watched people walking their dogs, noted the alarming amount of black spots on the sidewalk from chewing gum, and investigated the simmering smell of hotdogs. They turned these observations into poetry and stories, most of which I swear are better than the stuff I’ve read in intro to creative writing classes that I took in college. 

The inspiration for Laurel's nautical metaphors?

            They wrote and read their stories to each other. They even begged for more when a writer stopped short of the end. They would huddle around as she scribbled a few more words on a page, taking note of every waft of the hand and scrunch of the nose, like they were watching a sporting event.

            When their time to speak came, they took the microphone and the room came to a hush as everyone tried to grasp onto every word of their thrilling stories. Parents looked at their children proudly and instructors beamed with satisfaction and I realized the tables had turned. They were the ones teaching us. They showed us the endless possibility of young minds and what it means to be inspired. Shari Caudron, who worked with the high school students, even sent along a message that her students restored her faith in teenagers.

At the end of the event, they beamed with pride holding onto their writing framed and behind glass and left with their parents.

Young writers read at Tattered Cover in front of an audience of over 100

 Do all good things have to come to an end? I asked myself. I saw students clutching onto notebooks packed with blank pages waiting to be filled. Students lined up to hug their instructors and say goodbye. I saw a fifth-grader give cheeky wink followed by a wave. “See you next year,” she said.

End? No, this is only the beginning. I bet in a few years we will even see some of our high students back to sail the seas of creativity and teach young writers just like them what it means to love writing.

 

Cheers,
Laurel Janeen Smith