The YMCA's Downtown Writer's Center

New Space Completed!

2011-10-13T11:12:00.000-07:00

The DWC is delighted to announce that our Next Decade Project has been completed, and we are now in the process of moving into our new space at the Downtown Y! We're pleased with how it all came out, and the reports from our students so far are glowing. Come check us out, if you haven't already.

Future Perfect

2010-12-21T11:59:00.000-08:00

The DWC is currently raising funds for the Next Decade Project, a capital campaign that will result in two new classrooms, new office spaces, and more for the Downtown Writer's Center. And we need your help!

Our total campaign goal is $105,000; to date, we have raised $81,750. In order to begin construction and have the space ready for Fall 2011, we need to complete the campaign by the spring.

Your tax deductible donation to the Next Decade Project will help us continue to grow over the next 10 years. To make a pledge, contact DWC director Phil Memmer at 474-6851 x328, or email pmemmer@syracuseymca.org

Great Deals at ARTSWEEK

2010-07-29T08:46:00.000-07:00

Join us for this weekend's ARTSWEEK festival in downtown Syracuse. We'll have a table right in front of the Downtown YMCA, with several great deals:

All DWC Broadsides will be only $10-$20 for the weekend.
Buy any DWC Broadside or book (not including the $1 bin) and get a coupon for $5 off a Fall 2010 DWC Workshop.
Sign up for a DWC membership (or renew) and get a free DWC messenger bag!

Comstock Review Annual Poetry Contest Deadline July 1st - $1350 in Prizes

2010-06-28T11:59:00.000-07:00

THE COMSTOCK REVIEW ANNUAL POETRY CONTEST

The Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award
ANNUAL POETRY CONTEST 2010

Final Judge: Charles Martin
(See information below)
Initial Screening by Editors

First Prize - $1 ,000
2nd Prize -$250; 3rd Prize - $100;
Honorable Mentions - Subscriptions

DEADLINE: Postmark by July 1, 2010

Here’s how it works- Our Editorial staff chooses approximately fifty-sixty Finalists. The highest scoring Finalists (25 or so) are considered Special Merit Poems. Special Merit Poems go to the Judge. The Judge determines the top three Prize Winners, The entire editorial staff then selects the honorable mentions from the remaining Special Merits.

The Rules:
1. Each poem on a separate 8.5 by 11 page, typed.

2. Poems must be original, unpublished in ANY Medium,print or electronic,
and not under consideration elsewhere.

3. No poem must exceed 40 lines, beginning with the first line of text
below the title. DO NOT count blank lines. Please also consider
our 65 character line width when submitting.

4. Name and ALL contact information on the REVERSE side
of EACH poem entered. If not included, we have to disqualify your entry.

5. Send SASE for results only. No Poems will be returned.

6. All Prize Winners, Honorable Mentions, and Special Merit Poems
are considered accepted work, and will be published in Issue 24.2
(Fall/Winter 2010). Finalists will be queried for permission to use their work.
A non-response is considered a yes. All accepted authors will receive
one contributor’s copy of the issue.

7. An entry fee of $5 per poem is required for each poem submitted. No limit
on the number of poems at $5 each.
Special offer for 2010: Order a one-year subscription with your entry
at the discounted price of $16 (normally priced $20). If outside the US,
add $5 per copy for postage. Make check out to "The Comstock Review."

Send contest submissions, after April 1, 2010 to:
CWG Poetry Contest 2009
4956 St. John Drive
Syracuse, NY 13215

Also click here for Contest Guidelines which offer many further explanations of the rules and editor preferences.

*Red section above highlighted since we often receive poems that fall outside the rules and they will be disqualified unless we can reach the poets and have them resubmitted following the rules. The Editors

Judge for 2010: Charles Martin

Charles Martin

Charles Martin was born in New York City in 1942 and grew up in the Bronx. He is a graduate of Fordham University in New York City and received his Doctorate from SUNY at Buffalo. His most recent book of poems, Starting From Sleep: New and Selected Poems (The Overlook Press, 2002), was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and was chosen as a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award of the Academy of American Poets.

Two of his earlier books of poems, What the Darkness Proposes (1996) and Steal the Bacon (1987), were both nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Hudson Review, Boulevard, and The Threepenny Review, among others.

About his work, the poet X. J. Kennedy has said: "A poet of masterly command, Charles Martin can think fiercely and feel intensely. He can captivate us with a sustained narrative, or dazzle us with a wicked epigram."

Martin is an acclaimed translator of Latin poetry. His verse translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses (W. W. Norton, 2003) received the 2004 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has also published translations of the complete poems of Catullus (Johns Hopkins, 1990) and a critical introduction to Catullus's work which is part of Yale University Press's Hermes Series.

He is the recipient of the Literature award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Bess Hokin Award from Poetry, a 2001 Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

A professor at Queensborough Community College (CUNY), he also teaches poetry at Syracuse University, and has taught workshops at the Sewanee Writers Conference, the West Chester Conference on Form and Narrative in Poetry, and the Unterberg Center of the 92nd Street YMHA. In 2006, he was appointed Cathedral Poet in Residence at The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York City. He lives in Manhattan and Syracuse with his wife, arts journalist Johanna Keller. (With thanks to: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/324)

Speech!

2010-06-23T07:27:00.000-07:00

In case you missed the very first DWC PRO Graduation ceremony on Saturday, June 19th . . . we're reproducing the commencement speech given by our own Georgia Popoff here. It was an inspiring time, and everyone at the DWC is very, very proud of our first class.

I am so honored to celebrate this first class of graduates from the DWC PRO certification program. Their accomplishments in the past 2 years are admirable and substantial. As I have stated on more than one occasion, each of these writers have given him or herself a number of gifts: those of identity, creative passion, commitment, and determination. Mostly, the gift of indulging in something that they have not been able to escape and for which they may have not been fully lauded or understood by others: the life of the active writer.

As an adult, I have always been outside the standard arenas of writers because I did not remain on the path of academia. I also did not last a long time in that other more “street” crew of spoken word artists and performance poets, although I tried. Throughout my life, I have always felt “outside of,” continuing to write because it is part of my DNA. As an adult, I held two identities: first, a poet with a day job. Then, I gave up the hope that poet would be first, resigned to the fact that I would be poet as hobbyist and would somehow find a way for that to be satisfaction enough. I was wrong and, as I left a 10-year quiet time during which I experienced poetic silence and a crisis of faith, once I was again seeing myself as a poet, introducing myself as a poet first among all the jobs and avocations in which I was immersed, I had to find a title to explain myself. I settled upon that of “community poet.” This became more than a line on a business card or self-designed letterhead, this became a role, a mission, my identity.

Each of our graduates today is somehow first of community and then a writer, perhaps because they are working 50+ hours a week, or managing both job and family, or any other number of activities that do not permit days on end to sit with pen in hand or fingers to keyboard, waiting for the Muses to drop pearls and bon mots.

These writers have to do the laundry, attend to family, deal with sick loved ones, parent youngsters, earn livings, etc. Each has a busy life full of obligations, and each has stepped beyond the occasional writing course to feed their passion for language to embrace a demanding course schedule and volume of required writing that has lasted 2 years. Now that we look back to 2008, when this program was in its final stages of being designed, how quickly it all passed.

In the late 1970s and early 80s, I was the masseuse for the Women’s Fitness Center. I was in the YMCA building at least three times a week and there are still people here who worked here then. Robert at the front desk and I discussed this just the other night, how we have known each other close to 35 years. I felt a part of the Y community and I loved my role, although I didn’t make much money. But people always said poets never make money and I was deeply invested in that lie.

In March of 2000, I returned to the YMCA after nearly 16 years of other career attempts. I was setting my sights on leaving the most recent role of secretary; I was finding a way to live my life as poet first and all the other labels afterwards. Through a network of colleagues, I was referred to the Y to work in an afterschool program of the newly established Y Arts branch. Y Arts was a shot in the dark on behalf of the Y but the Metropolitan School of the Arts had folded and there was a community need to be met that ran parallel with the national YMCA objectives to serve the whole being.

I was aware of the Writers Voice program that Jason Shinder brought into prominence and we set about the process of reaching out to Jason to bring our Y into the fold. In that simple suggestion, a seed was planted that germinated with one subsequent conference call upon which I sat in. The rest has become our history, first with Phil Memmer coming to Central NY and being hired to really formulate a comprehensive arts program and to build the Center, the Writer’s Center being something that we all know is dearest to his heart and interests as a writer. What a fine job he has done. Thanks, Phil.

And look at the remarkable fact that we are not only still open and ready to celebrate our first decade but that we have this graduation today. I have been misty-eyed all week. I have also admittedly been mystified that it has all worked. But this afternoon, this party, is the best of what all of those 10 years represent. Not just in the graduates but in the overall community. We have the best of America’s writers here to read for us and share their craft and angle on the mystery of being a writer.

We have award-winning, publishing faculty who share their talents with our students. We have current faculty and likely future faculty who have come through the doors first as students and workshop participants. We have faculty who have joined first as audience members. We are a community of our own, and we draw from and serve the greater community in the process.

The only regret is that more of our neighbors throughout Central NY do not even know that this resource is available but we can continue to grow our reputation and share the good news of the DWC. We can each be an ambassador for the remarkable entity that is the Downtown Writer’s Center.

To Phil, thanks for all you have done in building these programs and keeping the doors open to create a place for artists of all ages, and particularly for writers, much less envisioning this PRO course of study. How valuable it is and how far it reaches beyond the halls of academia or the workshop weeks of a low-residency program. PRO delivers a very personal experience for each who has embarked upon the journey or are so doing now.

To Jennifer Pashley, thank you for your careful and compassionate stewardship of each of these students, as well as for each of those taking any course we offer. We also thank you for your tireless support and advocacy on the behalf of the faculty. You are the hub of the wheel and we are so grateful.

To the faculty that has mentored these students, job well done. You have been generous of spirit and time and the success of these writers is a reflection of your work as teachers. You have been discerning, even tough when necessary, but you have been kind and have amplified the sense of her/his own capacity in each of these writers. How wonderful to be among you as colleagues.

To each of you graduating, thank you for your talents. The thesis readings were spectacular and equal to any of the “PROs” who have stood behind that fabulous bar to read for us. Plus you did not make the corny joke about wanting to serve drinks; you have heard it enough to refrain.

I hope that you will all continue with your efforts to publish. You are all worthy of the investment of print and the audience that is out there for you. This afternoon is a starting point, not an end. It is time to jump off the high board now that you have worked from the lower, diving into that cool water over and over, presenting new work, flawed work, astounding work, all of it. Each of you has developed differently but all of you are so accomplished today. Embrace it fully and then do not rest on your laurels…get going. Find homes for those words and create more. Bring more characters to life, breathe life into stanzas…do it all… because you love it and because language gifts you many times over.

Lastly, I want to commend you on the way you have supported each other. The bonds among you are touching and true. The way you each recognized the other to support the growth you witnessed, to help each other be the best writer you are all capable of is another generosity that is enviable. It is the heart and center of a community writer, a title I gladly share with each of you. Congratulations and best of luck.

Dot the I's, Cross the T's - A Checklist Before Submitting Work

2010-06-08T10:18:00.000-07:00

We are all eager for the validation of seeing our work in print. Fortunately, there are a plethora of journals and reputable on-line literary sites to research in an attempt to identify homes for our words.

Notice that word RESEARCH. It is critical to be aware of the nature of a literary journal or web site. Who are the editors? When do they accept submissions? How are they supposed to be presented to meet the editors' expectations? All of these issues should be foremost in your decision as to whom you want to consider your work. You can get this info from many reliable sources, including the Writer's and/or Poet's Market, Poets & Writers Magazine (in print and on line), the web sites for each of the journals you are considering. Look to see what the editors already have published and how does that equal with your own artistic aesthetic.

Here are some frequent things people overlook in their haste to rush that envelope into the mail:

1) Did you include a professional cover letter with the proper name of the current managing editor? No more than 3-4 paragraphs, listing what you sent, a few publication credits, whether or not this work is being reviewed elsewhere (a whole other issue/debate), and a kind word about the fact that the editors on the other side are giving you a careful review.

2) Did you include a self-addressed, stamped envelope with proper and adequate postage to return your work?

3) Did you carefully proof your work for typos, grammatical errors, extra spaces between words, proper punctuation and capitalization when called for, etc. You would be surprised how many writers send truly sloppy submissions and then want to be considered for publication. Take pride in every word you commit to the page. It is your first impression and a sloppy submission is not a good one. Liken it to showing up on a blind date with your fly down, your hair greasy from not being shampooed, bad breath.

4) This is particularly for poets: do you know how to turn off the automatic capitalization function in your word processing program? Do you get frustrated and/or have you acquiesced to the capital letter at the beginning of each poetic line because you cannot override the function? It used to be the standard to print poems with the first word capitalized. We got away from that a long time ago. Some poets prefer to maintain the tradition but many do it simply because they do not know how to trick the computer into not doing it. Then the editor wonders which it is. Here is what is actually happening: in the autocorrect function (found in the Tools drop-down menu in WORD), the program is recognizing a new sentence every time you hit the hard return for the next line. Why? Because in prose, it will generally be a new paragraph when you hit return, and that is generally also an indication of a new sentence. To stop it, find the autocorrect entry for "Capitalize new sentence" and remove the check mark by clicking on the box so it is empty. It will no longer happen and you have artistic choices at your fingertips.

5) Do you set your margins so you can best use the page? Again, more an issue for poets. But many people do not know that WORD's margin default for left and right is 1.25 inches, 1 inch for top and bottom. Many poets submit a two page poem, second page for just three or four lines, simply because of this simple margin default. Add to it the fact that they may have left too many hard returns between their contact info and the title of the poem, forcing the second page. This simple overlook kills trees, disrupts the flow of the poem, and is easily fixed.

6) Do you have your contact info on every page? What if an editor is reading a pile of work with the window open? A breeze ruffles the pages and scatters them like leaves all over the floor. How will that editor be sure that the manuscripts are in proper order? Set up a template for yourself that you can use time and time again. Create a header with your name, address, phone, and email in the header at 0.5 inch margin. Then leave the margin at 1 inch or whatever for the actual work. This saves a lot of time, adds to consistency of your "look" when you submit, and helps those at the other end.

7) Prose/fiction writers: Did you activate the automatic page numbering in a footer or in your header so that pesky breeze does not get the best of your editor and render your story into a veritable thumb puzzle?

8) Poets: do you give editors an indication in your longer poems as to formatting? When you go to a second page (generally for poems more than approximately 32 lines, the standard that will fit on a single journal page), under your contact info, simply state: Poem title, page number, then indicate stanza break or no stanza break. Remember, you know how it is supposed to fall on the page but your editor may not have been formerly employed by Dionne Warwick's Psychic Hotline.

9) Do each of your pieces look similar and consistent? Are they in the same font, same margins, etc., from one piece to another? It is obvious when you simply recycle pages that have come back from different submissions. Remember, editors want to feel like your blind date; they want to believe you sent your work to them because you respect their work as editors and you have chosen their journal or site due to that respect, that you want the honor of their choice of you for their publication.

And remember that it takes a LOT of work to select new literature for publication. Remember that when you send your new poems or short story, there are hundreds of other passionate, eager writers doing exactly the same thing at the same time. An editor never has time to put feet up with a cup of joe and slowly read and reread your brilliant work to bask in your genius effort. Editors are up against stacks of submissions and insane deadlines. Think of their eyes, their very tired eyes that read your work because they respect writers. Be kind to them...

We hope that this little primer on submissions helps you plan your efforts well. Feel free to ask questions of the DWC faculty if you have them.

On a side note: Peter Orlovsky, Beat poet and long-time companion to Allen Ginsberg, passed away on May 31st in Vermont after a long, private battle with lung cancer. You can read more at the following link:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2010/05/peter-orlovsky-poet-and-partner-to-allen-ginsberg-has-died.html

We hope to see you Friday as three more of the inaugural class of the DWC PRO students present their thesis readings!

Kudos . . . and a Reading

2010-06-08T06:26:00.000-07:00

The DWC is thrilled to offer further congratulations to DWC PRO Grad Catherine Thomas, first on the publication of her story "A Mitzvah" in The Broome Review, but also on the recent news that another story, "And That Too Was Strange," will appear in an upcoming issue of Fourteen Hills.

Catherine participated in the first DWC PRO Graduate Reading Series along with fellow students Peter McShane and Kevin Cahill on Friday June 4th.

This Friday, June 11, please join us at the DWC for the second DWC PRO Graduate Reading, featuring poetry from Jessica Cuello, and fiction from both Tammy Danielewicz and Susannah Loiselle.

A wine and cheese reception kicks things off at 6:30, with the reading at 7:00.

As always, the reading is free and open to the public. Bring a friend!

Summer Workshops at the DWC

2010-05-28T06:26:00.001-07:00

Summer officially kicks off this weekend (although, who are we kidding it has felt like summer all week). Hoping to get some writing in this summer? Let the DWC help.

Here's the list of summer workshops planned . . . including flash fiction, poetry, memoir, script writing and a brand new online class:

Summer of Poetry, with Elizabeth Twiddy, Tuesdays, 6:00 – 8:00. This short course will be fun during your busy summer: we’ll read poems, workshop poems and do exercises in class to generate new work on the spot. Open to a range of experience levels. Four weeks, beginning July 13^th.

The Magic of the Moment, with Georgia Popoff, Wednesdays, 6:00 – 7:30. This workshop is intended to initiate the process of writing a memoir. With the suggestion of several techniques to access memories, specific prompts, and a chance to receive initial feedback, participants will start a series of personal memoir essays that could lead to the greater story. Appropriate for both new and seasoned writers of all levels of craft. Four weeks beginning the week of July 21.

StretchWrite, an online writing workshop with Rebecca Sernett. As summer beckons, so does the urge to flex those writer muscles in new and creative ways. This online class will provide weekly writing exercises for participants to explore the way they approach their craft as well as to strengthen and tone their skills. All genres welcomed. Six weeks, beginning July 14^th.

Write That Script! Hear It Read! Introduction to Script Writing with David Feldman and The Armory Square Playhouse Writers and Performers. Wednesday, July 21, 6 - 9 p.m. Ever wanted to write a play (or screen or television) script? This one-evening intensive workshop will help you develop your skills with an exercise to create interesting characters and provocative dialogue. Everyone will write a brief script and then have it read and discussed by members of Armory Square Playhouse.

A Midsummer Night's Workshop with Chris DelGuercio, thursdays, 6:30 - 8:30 Students will share their flash and short fiction pieces (2,000 words or less) with a group of peers for their generous feedback and scrutiny designed to hasten the next draft in the revision process. Three weeks, beginning August 5^th.

And don't forget about the (almost) August Occasion, taking place at Harding Farm July 23-July 25.

For summer workshop pricing, please contact Philip Memmer at 315.474.6851 ext 328

For all other questions regarding workshops or the August Occasion, please email Workshops Coordinator, Jennifer Pashley: jen.pashley@gmail.com.

Happy Summer!

National Short Story Month

2010-05-19T17:10:00.001-07:00

Do you ever wonder what happens to DWC faculty when they move on to other careers, in other cities?

Dan Wickett, executive director at Dzanc Books and blog guru at Emerging Writers Network* has declared May National Short Story Month.

Nope, it's not as recognized as national poetry month . . . but that won't stop us.

In light of this celebration, the DWC Blog brings you two stories by past DWC instructor, Christopher Boucher, up now at Conjunctions.

Enjoy!

*Check back at EWN often to check out their fantastic efforts in recognizing National Short Story month, including crazy cool features, like watching Matt Bell write a story in real time.

Friday's Three Items: Reminder, Recommendation, & Writing Prompt

2010-05-07T09:20:00.000-07:00

Happy Friday! To those who are mothers, we salute you. To those who are graduating, congratulations. To the rest of you, we hope you had a prolific week with words! We are closing the week with the following:

Reminder: Our last visiting writer of the season, Lynn Levin, will appear this evening, May 7th, at 7 p.m. at the DWC, 340 Montgomery Street, downtown Syracuse. Lynn will share her poetry and take questions about the work so please join us for this season closer. For more information about Lynn's work, Fair Creatures of an Hour (Loonfeather Press, 2009) was recently reviewed on the Comstock Review web site: http://www.comstockreview.org/review/l.html.

Recommendation: If you are an HBO subscriber with digital cable, treat yourself to a series called Master Class, available on HBO On Demand. The episode that particularly speaks to our DWC community is that of the Edward Albee mentorship of four young writers. Fascinating discussion on the elements of writing, craft, and the writer's identity! Make a cup of tea and take a half hour for yourself to sit with this literary master.

Writing Prompt: Two weeks ago, DéLana R.A. Dameron read at the DWC with Jane Springer. We asked DéLana to share a favorite writing exercise with our community and this was her response:

Choose a jazz song without lyrics. Spend as many times as you need listening to it. In the solo part you most resonate with, write the lyrics. If you need, use the title of the song as a guide. Here are some of my favorite jazz songs to get you started.

Robert Glasper: Maiden Voyage/Everything in its right place
Esperanza Spalding: Junjo
Miles Davis: New York Girl

Have fun!

One last thought: watch your email inboxes for announcements regarding the schedule for the DWC PRO Student Readings as our first class of PRO students prepare to graduate. These readings are celebrations of a 2-year course of study by these accomplished writers. We invite you to attend and support these remarkable achievements! If you are not on the DWC mailing/email list, please call Phil Memmer at 315.474.6851, extension 328.

How Famous is Greg Ames?

2010-05-06T14:42:00.000-07:00

Here's something:

A few weeks ago, the DWC hosted Greg Ames as a visiting author, along with Bertha Rogers. Recently, The Believer polled readers on the best works of fiction published in 2009.

Who's at the top of the list?

Greg Ames, that's who.

Scroll down to discover who he beat out: Colum McCann, Lorrie Moore, and Thomas Pynchon, just to name a few.

Now, if you missed Greg's reading, you can officially start kicking yourself.

Visiting Author Lynn Levin Reviewed at Gently Read Lit

2010-05-06T05:57:00.000-07:00

Check out the February issue of Gently Read Lit, in which Michelle Moore offers a fabulous review of Lynn Levin's Fair Creatures of an Hour. If you don't already subscribe to Gently Read Lit, do yourself a favor, and stroll around the grounds a bit.

Between the Ordinary & the Ecstatic: Michelle Moore on Lynn Levin’s Fair Creatures of an Hour

See you tomorrow night for Lynn's reading. 7pm!

Interview with Lynn Levin

2010-05-05T08:17:00.000-07:00

Writer, poet and translator, Lynn Levin, whose third book of poems, Fair Creatures of an Hour was released from Loonfeather Press in 2009, reads at the DWC on Friday, May 7th at 7:00.

Read part one of The Examiner interview with Levin here.

In this part, Levin answers the Keats question, when she became a poet, and who else (besides Keats) has influenced her.

. . . and in part two, confesses her own obsession with poems.

See you downtown!

The (Almost) August Occasion

2010-05-04T06:11:00.000-07:00

The third edition of our popular August Occasion writers’ weekend will feature two days of intense small-group writing workshops in fiction and poetry; readings by faculty, students, and a mystery guest; and plenty of food, drink and comradery. This year, it will all happen at our new location, Harding Farm in Clinton, NY (not quite an hour East of Syracuse).

Our faculty will be familiar to anyone who has taken classes at the DWC: Philip Memmer, Jennifer Pashley, Sarah Freligh, and recent DWC visiting author Jane Springer. What will be different is the overall experience… we’ll have time to be social, enjoy each other’s company, share some great meals together, and more. Plus, we’ll also be joined for a reading on the last day by a special Mystery Guest… because really, who doesn’t like surprises?

Summer can be a busy time, so we have a variety of program options available this year. You can join us for the full weekend, including sleeping quarters and meals, or you can join us for just the day-time activities. And if your schedule is really swamped, you can also take the Saturday-only program. Whichever you choose, we think you’ll have a fun, relaxing, and inspiring time.

Ready to apply? Download the complete brochure and registration form here. For more information email pmemmer@syracuseymca.org or leave us a message at (315) 474-6851 x380.

Martha Collins Reading :: Tonight!

2010-04-30T05:16:00.000-07:00

Join us at 7:00 for a reading by Martha Collins at the Montgomery Street YMCA. In addition to poems, there will also be coffee & people. So these are three amazing reasons to attend. Need more? Read these reviews of Martha's book BLUE FRONT & then talk to me about it later - 7:00. Downtown Y.

Collins has a story to tell, but she makes the reader work for it. She is, at least with regard to syntax, a language poet — she suppresses punctuation and traffics in fragmentary non sequiturs; her shifts in perspective are abrupt. Therefore nothing about the narrative is straight. Her discursive, breathless, self-contradicting, breaking-off-and-circling-back technique makes the book feel like the testimony of a traumatized witness.

NY Times.

Collins forces the reader to enact the work of making meaning from that which is fragmentary, revised, and erased. And it stands in, too, for the brackish flood of connotations pooling up inside the language itself, inside words like track, lynch, cut, and burn, which take on—through Collins’s luminous interspersed riffs on their definitions and colloquial usages.

The Literary Review.

ASSIGNMENT: Martha Collins

2010-04-29T04:31:00.000-07:00

Up today, a writing assignment to keep you limber, courtesy of Martha Collins.

This assignment is an attempt to help you do what interviewer Beth Rogers just asked me about: to create “a fusion of the personal and the historical.” What you write down in response to #’s 1-5 is not intended to be a poem, or even the beginning of a poem: it’s just notes. So write quickly, without thinking too hard; when you’re finished, you can go back and think further about the questions and answers.

1. Write down the names of all the places where you’ve lived a significant part of your life, beginning with where you were born. Leave some white space between them.

2. Now write down, for each place, (a) something of historical significance that happened there, and (b) the name of one or more historical or living persons who have achieved a certain amount of fame or attention, even if only on a local level.

3. Now do the same for your mother, beginning with where she was born.

4. Now do the same for your father.

5. Now ponder your notes (1-4) until something begins to make you want to know more. Write down as much as you know that’s relevant to what you’re wondering about—and then go to the library and/or internet and see what else you can find.

Your notes should be getting longer. When something begins to echo not just as fact but as language, you may be ready to start writing a poem, even if your research is incomplete.

An Interview with Martha Collins

2010-04-28T05:16:00.000-07:00

Did I mention that Martha Collins is reading at the DWC this week (Friday @ 7)? Because she is. Here, Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers talks to Collins about BLUE FRONT, extinction, distinction & discrimination.

INTERVIEW WITH MARTHA COLLINS:

1. Describe your initial inspiration(s) for writing BLUE FRONT. Did you begin this project with a specific goal or intention, or realize, mid-process, what kind of book you were writing?

Several years ago I saw an exhibit of lynching postcards in New York. It was shocking, first because of the often horrendous images of lynching scenes and victims on the postcards, but also because they were postcards, which were sold for souvenirs, or for people to send to relatives and friends. What shocked me most, though, was coming upon a group of cards from Cairo, Illinois, and realizing that the hanging my father had once told me he saw there when he was a kid was not some kind of awful but legal public execution, but rather the lynching of a black man (and later, as a kind of afterthought, a white man) that was witnessed by 10,000 people. My father was no longer living, but I explored what I knew of his life and the town of Cairo at the same time that I was extensively researching the lynching itself. I began writing a year after I saw the exhibit, but long before I finished the research. My first goal was to find out what, most literally, happened; but I was more importantly wondering how such an event would have affected my five-year-old white father. Increasingly, I began to realize that I was even more deeply interested in what all of this had to do with me, a white woman living 100 years later. That last issue is central to the work I’m doing now.

2. In what ways was BLUE FRONT related to or in conversation with your previous work? How is this book different from your others?

My early work, like that of many poets, was often focused on my own perceptions, feelings, and, to a lesser extent, my life. I had always responded, occasionally, to social and political issues; but my third book took a deliberate turn in that direction, even as the work became somewhat more fragmented and experimental. Blue Front continues both of these trends, but in fact utilizes techniques that I’ve used throughout my writing career. I had written long sequences of poems before (my second book is comprised of three of them), but Blue Front of course extends that process.

3.You've described BLUE FRONT as a book-length poem rather than a collection of poems. What reasons do you have for making this distinction?

Partly because I was writing before my research was finished, many of the sections give only partial accounts of what I was thinking, or what I was thinking might have happened (the point of view throughout the book is one of wondering, speculating). Many of the sections were therefore necessarily incomplete from the outset: they made no sense out of context. The more I wrote, though, the more I realized that the whole work was a process, and that I really had no interest in creating poems that would make sense on their own; I was interested in something much more like a fragmented novel—and the process of writing actually reminded me of writing a novel, which is something I once did.

4. BLUE FRONT is a fusion of the historical and the personal. In your work, how do you think that these two modes complement, inform, or struggle with one another?

I like your description of that fusion: it’s really what the book was about, from the moment I held the catalog of lynching postcards in one metaphorical hand and a scrapbook of my father’s childhood in the other. Of course there’s a great deal of tension—struggle, in your word—between the two: the horror of the event on the one hand, the tenderness I felt toward my five-year-old father on the other. But the fusion of the two modes is the book’s reason for being: one would simply not be there without the other.

5.. BLUE FRONT raises difficult questions about discrimination and the silenced, radicalized "other" in US history. As a white woman, what fears (if any) did you have in writing and publishing this work? What have been the outcomes of publishing a book of poems that is so socially charged?

Initially, the voices in my mind that I call the “censors” told me that I simply couldn’t write poetry about a lynching—and that I certainly shouldn’t be doing so as a white person. But I’ve learned to treat those censors as muses in disguise: when they start talking to me, I think I must be on to something. Ever since the book’s publication, I know there have been actual readers (or refusers to read) who echo those voices, though they have only rarely spoken to me. Several white people have asked me what it felt like to be writing African-American history as a white person—and I know their question reflects the doubts and objections of some black people as well. My short answer has been something like this: Okay, if you were to film the lynching part of this book, how many black actors would you have to hire, and how many white actors and extras? The long answer has taken me into the book-length project of untitled poems I’ve just finished, called White Papers. It continues to affect both my work and my life.

Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers is a MFA student at Cornell University. Her poems have appeared in Chautauqua Literary Journal, StorySouth, The Comstock Review, The Asheville Review, on Poetry Daily, and others. She has been a finalist for several chapbook competitions and for Mid-American Review’s James Wright poetry prize.

Small Press Spotlight :: Graywolf Press

2010-04-27T04:04:00.000-07:00

This Friday, April 30th at 7:00, the Downtown Writer's Center hosts a reading by Martha Collins. Her book BLUE FRONT was released by Graywolf Press in 2006 so it seemed appropriate to run this spotlight on her publisher!

Calling Graywolf "small" might seem sort of silly; however, you'll find in this Q&A orchestrated by the DWC's Tammy Danielewicz that it's that independent spirit that fuels them.

***

Graywolf Press is an independent, non-profit publisher located in Minneapolis, MN. Graywolf publishes between 20 and 30 books per year, including the recipient of the Emily Dickinson First Book Award, given to an American Poet over the age of 50 who has yet to publish a first book of poetry, and the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize winner. Graywolf writers have been among finalists and winners of a staggering number of prestigious literary awards. After thirty-five years, Graywolf continues to seek out the creative and adventurous authors of important and overlooked books.

The following questions were answered collaboratively by Katie Dublinski (Managing and Editorial Director), Marisa Atkinson (Marketing Assistant), and Steve Woodward (Editorial Assistant).

Tell me about the history of Graywolf Press. Who was it started by? Where and when did it start?

The following are a few key highlights in Graywolf’s history. A more complete history is available in full of the Graywolf website (www.graywolfpress.org).

Graywolf Press was founded by Scott Walker in Port Townsend, Washington in 1974. He started by working out of a space provided by Copper Canyon Press before moving to a shop of his own (a small outbuilding in Scott’s backyard) that Scott affectionately called the “print shack.” At this time, each book was hand-set and hand-printed on treadle-operated machines. The first full-length poetry book that Scott published in this way was Instructions to the Double by Tess Gallagher, who is still publishing with Graywolf. Tess’s most recent collection of short stories was published in 2009.

Graywolf was incorporated as a 501©3 nonprofit in 1984 and moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1985, thanks to generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and other local philanthropic organizations. In 1994, Scott Walker resigned and Graywolf was run by board president Page Cowles until October of 1994, when Fiona McCrae was named as the new director. In 2002, Graywolf moved its distribution to Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, a prestigious New York publisher. In September 2009 we moved our office to the Traffic Zone Building in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

What was the original objective of the press? How has that objective changed or evolved with the growth of the press?

Graywolf started out as a poetry-only press that produced short-run, limited edition work. Now that original intention—to get poetry that mattered out in the world—has expanded to include fiction and nonfiction, in addition to poetry. And the scale has changed dramatically, so that Graywolf books are available nationally, to many readers, rather than just a limited number of readers in the Pacific Northwest region where Graywolf was founded.

To what do you attribute the growth of the press? Was the growth planned or intentional, or did it happen more organically?

It’s really a combination of a number of things. As Graywolf and its books gained more and more attention, a similar initiative on the part of Scott Walker to continue getting important and overlooked books out into the world helped push Graywolf to grow. The move to St. Paul from Port Townsend was part of a well thought out plan that not only allowed Graywolf to take advantage of a change in federal law that allowed publishing companies to be classified as nonprofit organizations, but also helped Graywolf gain the support of the larger Twin Cities donor base. Since the beginning, the Minnesota funding community, particularly the foundations here, encouraged the move and welcomed the press as part of the nonprofit, literary community. In turn this support has helped Graywolf stay financially solvent and has enabled Graywolf to become the nationally recognized publisher of books that win major awards and capture critical attention.

What is Graywolf able to offer to authors as a mid-size press that other publishers (both smaller and larger) can not?

Graywolf is in a great position as a “mid-size” house. We have a national and international reputation for our outstanding literature, have won several major literary awards in the last few years, and are starting to gain a more mainstream visibility. That said, having a smaller list means that we provide a more personal, hands-on experience for our authors that a larger house with hundreds of books might not be able to provide. We might not be able to complete with some of the larger houses in terms of marketing budgets, for example, but we do have more time to spend pitching books to media, setting up events for our authors, etc.

Advice for someone interested in submitting to Graywolf?

For advice for your readers interested in submitting to our press, I would direct them to carefully read our complete submission guidelines, which are available on our website (http://www.graywolfpress.org). These guidelines should have all of the information they need and should answer all of their questions.

It might be interesting to note that Graywolf has a huge social media network online. No matter what your readers’ favorite social media outlet, Graywolf most likely has presence there:

www.twitter.com/graywolfpress
www.facebook.com/graywolfpress
www.formspring.me/graywolfpress

And we’ve also just started a Graywolf Press Goodreads group at Goodreads.com, where we’ll host the first-ever Graywolf Press Book Club in April. To join the group, visit: http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/31817.Graywolf_Press (Sorry, no easy custom URL for this one!)

The Famous Five - Questions for DeLana Dameron - A Critical Lens, A Meal, and a Hot Tub

2010-04-22T10:11:00.000-07:00

In the fall season 2009, Georgia Popoff taught a lit. class in contemporary and emerging African American poets. One of our guests coming to read for the DWC Spring series this Friday, DeLana Dameron, was one of the writers featured in the syllabus. As we have developed the habit of asking many of our visiting writers, here are DeLana's answers to five questions from the random inquiry generator:

Georgia Popoff: The spiritual aspect of How God Ends Us is so much the spine. Can you speak a bit about your missionary work as well as how the words may focus or open your spiritual self through the work?

DeLana Dameron: I was a freshman in college at the University of North Carolina when I went to Jamaica. That was the first and only missions trip I embarked on. I decided that I couldn’t continue in my own religious/spiritual journey in that way, being that the trip was so rife with racial tensions – the group I traveled with was white, the community in Jamaica we visited was, as you know, mostly black. I already had my ideas about the situation, about who I am as a Christian before I wrote the poems; it just sort of allowed me a space to put them into more concrete terms, a space to explore. I like to think of my poems that engage the Christian God as a space where I can have a conversation, an argument. Kind of like a public prayer. A place where I say: "Look, I believe in you, but here’s my issues."

GP: Place is obviously significant in your poems, as it is to so many poets. What do you feel is the relationship between geography/location and your inspiration?

DD: When people ask me where I write, I like to say: “I write in the world.” I live in a studio in Harlem (I lovingly call it “the Perch”), and even before this small space, I made this one rule for my writing: I will only use my living space for living. So, I’m generally out and engaging and watching the world/landscape I’m living in when I’m writing the poems, and they find their ways in.

GP: Many of us at the DWC are foodies; food is an important aspect in our lives individually as well as in events. For instance, we have a series of dinners as an annual fundraiser. What is your favorite cuisine and what would be your favorite meal?

DD: I’m a foodie as well. I love to cook. I suppose my favorite cuisine is Mediterranean or Middle Eastern. My favorite meal is any Ethiopian dish served over injera.

GP: Now that your first book is birthed, what is next?

DD: I want to increase my prose presence in the world. I’ve drafted a novel; I have some essays. I just need to push them out and let go of them. Also, a second collection, Cartographer, is circulating at some prizes. Let’s keep our fingers crossed!

GP: If you could be in a hot tub for a long chat with five other people, living or dead, who would they be and why?

DD: Aye. A hot tub is such an intimate space. I’d want to invite some long lost family members, but that might be weird. I’d say some of my favorite writers (some living, some dead; though, I’d hope in the hot tub, they’d be alive!): Toni Morrison, Mahmoud Darwish, John Hope Franklin, Jacob Lawrence, Zora Neale Hurston.

Thanks DeLana and we hope that many of our members will mark their calendars for this Friday when DeLana Dameron and Jane Springer share their work. As always, the reading starts at 7:00 p.m. and is FREE! Everybody bring a buddy!

Georgia Popoff, a member of the DWC faculty and frequent contributor to our blog, likes thinking up interview topics and generally questioning the world.

Two Reminders

2010-04-21T05:28:00.001-07:00

Spring classes begin next week with offerings in poetry, fiction, drama and non-fiction -- and there's still room in every workshop. Please check out the schedule and sign up soon!

Wondering where to park when you come to the DWC? You're not alone. Parking is probably our second most asked question. Here's the run down of where and how:

Street parking. There are plenty of meters on Montgomery Street, starting at Washington Street (near City Hall and L'Adour) all the way to where Montgomery ends at Jefferson Street. There are also meters on Jefferson, Warren, and around Columbus Circle -- in front of the Cathedral and the Court House, and down East Onondaga Street. Meters are free after 6:00.

Open paid lots. There are two open lots near the Downtown YMCA. One at the corner of Montgomery and Fayette, across from St. Paul's Cathedral, and one on East Onondaga, across from the Syracuse Diocese Offices.

Parking garages. The parking garage directly behind the YMCA on Warren Street has a walk through entrance to the Y. Please note that this entrance will be closed the first week of classes, and if you choose to park in this garage, you will need to walk around the block to the front entrance of the Y on Montgomery St. After May 2nd, renovations to the back entrance will be complete, and you may use the walk through again. There is also a garage on the corner of Fayette and Montgomery (with an entrance on Fayette).

And one last reminder . . . Please join us Friday April 23rd at 7pm for poets DeLana Dameron and Jane Springer. Now that you know where to park, you can't use that excuse.

See you downtown!

TONIGHT! Novelist Greg Ames and Poet Bertha Rogers!

2010-04-16T05:40:00.000-07:00

Please join us tonight at 7 pm in the GallerY on the 2nd floor of the Downtown YMCA for a reading by award-winning debut novelist Greg Ames and poet, artist and literary guru Bertha Rogers.

Not sure what to expect? Check out this review of Greg's Buffalo Lockjaw, from our own DWC PRO fiction student and CNY Literary reporter extraordinaire, Laura Ryan:

In his debut novel, Buffalo Lockjaw, Greg Ames shows us the unexpected: beauty amid the jags of upstate winter, and grace during a mother’s slide into the maw of dementia. And, astonishingly, humor.

On leave from his job at a greeting card company in New York City, slacker-addict James comes home to Buffalo, to celebrate Thanksgiving and to help his taciturn father pack up the family house. He also makes daily trips to Unit D, where nursing home attendants use a machine to hoist his 56-year-old mother from bed to wheelchair and back again. A former nurse, Ellen Fitzroy spoke out in favor of physician-assisted suicide before Alzheimer’s slowly stole her words. Convinced his mother wouldn’t want to live this way, James brings along a copy of “Suicide for Dummies” and secretly hopes to muster the courage to end her life.

While in town, James falls back into old habits with his loser high school buddies – hilarious in their beer-soaked inertia – and draws weary, here-we-go-again looks from his father and successful sister Kate. His checkered history makes it all too easy for the family to rebuff James’ repeated attempts to discuss euthanasia as a family.

Ames manages to mine both comedy and ache from the inevitable family tension, as when James longs to act like man with his father, “smoking cigars and eating bacon, whatever the hell grown men do together.” But most powerful are James’ bedside visits to Unit D, in which Ames bring the anguish of a diminishing disease to shuddering life.

Minutes slow as frozen syrup. Silent suffering. The crushing loss of dignity. She wrote all about this. She treated people in this condition. She stood by their beds, spoke kindly to them. And now she’s here.

Award-winning journalist Laura T. Ryan covered the Central New York literary community for The Post-Standard daily newspaper in Syracuse for more than 11 years. These days, she toggles between two worlds: freelance journalism and fiction writing.

The Best of AWP

2010-04-15T05:38:00.000-07:00

Drafted at nearly 37,000 feet, Georgia Popoff and Jennifer Pashley bring you the highlights our our three swift days at AWP.

Best poetry reading: Poetry Society of America featuring Gary Young, et al. Why: First to celebrate the organization, then the breadth of poetry represented: B.H. Fairchild, Cyrus Cassals, Joy Harjo, Jean Valentine, etc., so many distinct voices, ending with our friend Gary.

Best mixed-genre reading: Graywolf authors. Why: Proves again why Graywolf is at the top of the indie publishers. These authors are incredibly gifted, sharp, and articulate.

Event we regretted missing: afternoon reading and conversation with Rita Dove.

Two conversation / panels we most appreciated: Revisions of Truth with Marie Ponsot, Phillip Lopate, and Sapphire (another DWC guest from several years ago; discussion on identity and aesthetic by writers of color (with another DWC friend Lyre Van Clief-Stephanon, Sherwin Bitsui, Adrian Matejka, and Matthew Shenoda); Rose Metal guide to writing Flash Fiction.

Best Writers in the Schools Alliance panel: Friday’s discussion on working with students with disabilities. Why: There was so much compassion expressed by the panelists, so much heart; then the poignancy of the work created by students (both adult and youth).

Most packed panel (second year in a row): Flash Fiction. Why: I'm not sure, but this is twice I've been at a flash panel that has roughly 50 more people than there should be in the room. Either people really love flash, or they really want to learn how to do it. Or both.

Best intro: Matthew Shenoda “If I was a dance I'd be a samba because I get down like a mango with feet.”

Best Book Fair Swag: shot glasses, lip balm, nice paperboard cover notebooks. Also, pens got a big upgrade this year. Cookies, lots of chocolate (in fact, Blue Flower pushed corporate colored m&ms on us every time we passed). T-shirts: There were lots of t-shirts at the book fair this year, but the best were the very limited edition Mississippi Review t-shirts individually designed by Frederick Barthelme.

Favorite quotes:

Gary Snyder: “Go get em kids; we need more good writers.”

George Saunders: “It's like all the articulate people are in one place. We're going to start our own nation.”

Best discovery: Poetry: Sherwin Bitsui. His second book is a book-length poem. Catie Rosemurgy, whose poetry is weird, and fictiony and wonderful. Fiction: Owen Egerton, Allyson Hagy

Best Book Discovery: Fishouse Anthology with CD

Best calamari: Crown Plaza Hotel, because it was really crispy with a great pesto aioli.

Best Souvenir Experience: Where the Buffalo Roam Why: loads of off-beat stuff, including several Lebowski t-shirts.

Best Wacky Local Image: giant blue bear looking into convention center. Rivaled only by the red-eyed devil horse outside the airport.

Most Overheard by Non-Locals: “I'm out of breath!” or “Do you have any chapstick?”

Most Spotted AWP Fashion Statements: brightly colored high-heeled shoes, lace tights, nerdy glasses, baby bellies. Also, the return of the literary mustache.

Missed Sightseeing Opportunity Most Regretted: the Dale Chihuly chandelier at the Opera House.

Best Stuff We Learned:

From the flash fiction panel: “Sometimes the smallest things can be the heaviest things” – Lex Williford, on the heft and compression in a good flash piece.

From the identity/aesthetic by poets of color panel: Several things; first, a clear vision of the difference between first and second books (“First book introduces the poet to the the community of poets. The second book introduces the voice of the poet”). Second, the entire conversation brought up so many issues and suppositions to ponder. Thirdly, Matthew Shenoda’s comments on the US being “obsessed with identity.” Still thinking over all of the comments and rereading notes from the discussion.

Random observations: Our hair dries really quickly in Denver (humidity 12% on Friday). [Sidenote: Georgia's hair dries quickly in Denver. Jennifer's hair dries in about 4 minutes regardless of where she is, because she has hair like a baby.] There is a roller derby team in the Denver area. Colorado folks are quite kind and seem happy. Maybe it is the sun? Maybe the altitude? (Maybe they leave it all on the track.)

Our airport may be small but it certainly is manageable, especially during check-in. Special thanks: Benette Whitmore for being so bright and for asking her son Eli to drive the three of us to our hotels when he picked her up at the airport. And leaving, we really thought we left Phil behind in Denver. His making the plane to JFK might have been the miracle of the whole trip.

Bertha Rogers - Inside and Out

2010-04-14T05:00:00.000-07:00

Bertha Rogers is a poetry institution and the pulse of the arts in Delaware County and throughout New York State. An editor, a publisher, internationally published poet of note, visual artist, master teaching artist, gallery curator, and former NYSCA Literature panelist, Bertha has more energy than the sun itself, it seems. We are visiting with Bertha a couple of times this week before we get the pleasure of her reading this coming Friday when she appears with Greg Ames at 7:00 p.m. at the DWC; free, as always.

We asked Bertha to provide a favorite writing prompt and she kindly responded with the following exercise:

Any poem by William Stafford gets everyone in the room, young to old, writing.
I've never seen anything like it! Here's a perfect example:

Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

— William Stafford

-------------------------------
So there you have it! Bertha knows poetry! Sit with this poem and then let your hand go where it wills. Trust yourself and don't overthink it...just respond. Let us know what you come up with and we will also share any work with Bertha to show her the results of her prodding us.

Bertha Rogers - Art, Poetry, Life Itself the Center of Her Spark

2010-04-12T19:29:00.000-07:00

Bertha Rogers probably accomplishes more in a week than most of us do in at least a month. Named the first Poet Laureate of Delaware County in 2005, Bertha is a dynamo of and for the arts. Just look at her book length publications, especially what she has published in this decade:

Even the Hemlock: Poems, Illuminations, Reliquaries (Six Swans Artists Editions, NY, 2005); The Fourth Beast (Snark Press, IL, 2004); A House of Corners (Three Conditions Press); and Sleeper, You Wake (Mellen, 1991). Her translation of Beowulf was published in 2000 (Birch Brook Press, NY), and her translation of the riddle-poems from the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book, Uncommon Creatures, Singing Things, will be published in 2010 (Birch Brook Press, NY). Her newest collection, Heart Turned Back, will also appear in 2010 (Salmon Poetry Publishing, Ireland).

She has more than 250 publication credits for poems and is a noted translator. She has often shown her visual art, which now interlaces her poetic career, in galleries throughout the state. Bertha is a master teaching artist, working in K-12 education throughout the Southern Tier and she frequently also teaches in public schools in New York City through her affiliation with Teachers & Writers Collaborative.

Bertha is also a cultural entrepreneur with the Bright Hill Center in Treadwell, NY, nestled into the hills near Oneonta, where she is the founding director and editor in chief of Bright Hill Press and Word Thursdays, a nonprofit organization in New York's Catskill Mountain Region. As director, she serves as administrator of the NYSCA Literary Curators Web Site, www.nyslittree.org and the New York State Literary Map, www.nyslittree.org/html.map.

She serves on a Catskills Region Arts in Education panel as well as the New York State Council on the Arts Writers in the Schools panel and serves as a panelist for the NYSCA Literature grants from 1999 - 2001.

Bertha runs publication contests and public school poetry competitions. She features artists and writers that she admires in her series and gallery. Bertha is nothing if not passionate about language and image, the word and the art. She is an ardent, outspoken proponent of the pure craft of poetry and teaches young and old alike with an enthusiasm that is hard to match, much less keep up with. As if all these activities were not enough, Bertha is a voracious reader of all literature, all eras, even languages. Bertha Rogers is a true Renaissance artist.

If you want more about Bertha, visit her web site: www.bertharogers.com.

Please make a point of being at the DWC on Friday 4/16/10 at 7:00 p.m. for a free reading by Bertha Rogers, who will also be joined by Greg Ames, a fabulous fiction writer as well.

In the words of the Olympics announcers, we asked Bertha a few questions in order to get "up close and personal." We are pleased to share her comments below:

Georgia Popoff: Bertha, you are highly committed to working in public schools and have been for many years. Can you please share a few words about why this work is so important to you?

Bertha Rogers: It's important because I want the children to understand the joy of working with words, not to get their feelings out particularly, but to see what fun it is to fool around with words, with forms, to see what they can build with not only complex, but simple language. And I love working with the students because they're fun, they're silly, they like jokes, they like to be challenged, they like to be asked to give their very best. And, when they give their very best, what can I do but give my very best to them?

GP: You are also a visual artist. How do the visual arts and writing
arts coexist for you? Is there harmony or do you have to "rob Peter to pay Paul" to create in both media?

BR: I used to have to "rob Peter to pay Paul," but then I learned to combine the two by studying the Asian masters and the great artists of the medieval manuscripts. They learned to appreciate how words can inspire, and how images can expand words' meaning and, in fact, how thinking in pictures inspires the writer to use figurative language. There was a long learning curve for me, but now I don't have a problem with it.

GP: When I was first re-entering the world of poetry after a 10-year
silence, Thom Ward of BOA Editions, Ltd., said to me, "You have to meet Bertha Rogers!" As I have come to recognize, Thom saw that your commitment to community is another driving force in your life. Can you speak of that a bit for our readers?

BR: A long time ago, Gov. Jerry Brown (CA) said that the artist didn't need grants or funding because he/she already had the gift of talent, and that should be enough. While I have often disagreed with Brown about the funding part, I do believe that if a person has a talent he or she should share that with the world.

It is very exciting to me to publish emerging authors, to work with artists, to offer opportunity to others; this kind of community work gives to the giver. I also believe that teaching is a constant learning experience; I learn, every day, from the writers and artists and students with whom I work.

GP: What changes have you witnessed in the literary community from
when you first started?

BR: The obvious change is that money is a terrible problem right now, and it's going to impact all of us in the arts, I believe, for up to a generation. Another change is the proliferation of MFA creative writing programs, and I don't think that's necessarily a good thing: we're getting more MFAs who graduate and then teach in MFA programs; an interesting and, maybe, endless circle. There are also many writing workshops that seem to focus on content/feelings more than technique/ language; I would like to see a return to an emphasis on "tools and their use" in writing. Aside from those things, I see many good writers at our reading series, writers who are always taking a next step, and that's always a good thing.

GP: Bertha! One of my favorite things about seeing you when we have
not been together in awhile is the answer to a question such as this: What color will your hair be when we see you Friday?! Please tell our readers about your reasons for your bold hair color statements.

BR: It's going to be Enchanted Forest green, compliments of Manic Panix colors, which I purchase at Maxwell's in Oneonta. When my hair started going gray, I touched it up with a brown that was close to my natural color, and this worked for a while but, as I got older, I thought it looked really artifical. Conversely, I had always admired the wonderful colors kids used and, one day, I noticed that my real color was white, a perfect non-shade for taking color. That's when I became my true, many-colored self. I expect that I'll grow bored with it eventually, but it works for me now.

That works for me too! Remember, the whirl of energy known as Bertha Rogers spins into town on Friday!

Georgia Popoff is a faculty member at the DWC and has been proud to be a colleague of Bertha Rogers in their work with the NYSCA Writers in the Schools planning committee and as presenters at several statewide conferences.

Steve Almond on AWP

2010-04-12T07:21:00.001-07:00

While you're waiting for the DWC roundup on AWP in Denver last week, please check out visiting author Steve Almond's reflections on Things to Do in Denver When You're Braindead, via The Rumpus.

Bright Hill Press

2010-04-06T08:45:00.000-07:00

The DWC invites you to check out Bright Hill Press and Literary Center's workshops, readings, books and special programs, including their awesome NYS Literary Website and Map:

Bright Hill Press is a not-for-profit literary organization and press in Treadwell dedicated to literary excellence through its programs—Word Thursdays, the Catskill reading series, now in its 13th year; Share the Words High-School Poetry Competition and Mentoring Program, 10 years; Radio by Writers, 11 years; the all-new Bright Hill Library and Internet Wing, featuring literary prose and poetry, art, and children's books.

Please join us next week for a reading by Bertha Rogers -- Bright Hill Press's founder and executive director!

In the meantime, stay tuned for DWC dispatches from this year's AWP conference in Denver, CO!

Fooling around with the Practice of Poetry

2010-04-01T05:51:00.000-07:00

April is National Poetry Month!

Please join the DWC along with The Zen Center of Syracuse and Syracuse University Graduate Student Organization and Student Buddhist Association for a reading by Chase Twichell tomorrow at 7:30 in the Hall of Languages. Here the DWC brings you one of Chase's favorite writing exercises, from her book The Practice of Poetry:

Twenty Little Poetry Projects

by Jim Simmerman

Begin the poem with a metaphor.
Say something specific but utterly preposterous.
Use at least one image for each of the five sense, either in succession or scattered randomly throughout the poem.
Use one example of synesthesia (mixing the senses).
Use the proper name of a person and the proper name of a place.
Contradict something you said earlier in the poem.
Change direction or digress from the last thing you said.
Use a word (slang?) you've never seen in a poem.
Use an example of false cause-effect logic.
Use a piece of "talk" you've actually heard (preferably in dialect and/or which you don't understand).
Create a metaphor using the following construction: "The (adjective) (concrete noun) of (abstract noun) . . . "
Use an image in such a way as to reverse its usual associative qualities.
Make the persona or character in the poem do something he/she could not do in "real life."
Refer to yourself by nickname and in the third person.
Write in the future tense, such that part of the poem seems to be a prediction.
Modify a noun with an unlikely adjective.
Make a declarative assertion that sounds convincing but that finally makes no sense.
Use a phrase from a language other than English.
Make a nonhuman object say or do something human (personification).
Close the poem with a vivid image that makes no statement, but that "echoes" an image from earlier in the poem.

Open the poem with the first project and close it with the last. Otherwise use the projects in whatever order you like, giving each project at least one line. Try to use all twenty projects. Feel free to repeat those you like. Fool around. Enjoy.

The Practice of Poetry, Robin Behn and Chase Twichell, eds. c. 1992. Used by permission of the author.

I Have a Crush on Henry Rollins' Brain

2010-03-30T12:51:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, March 27th, Henry Rollins returned to Syracuse for the first time since he appeared at the newly opened RedHouse in 2004; this time he was at the Westcott Theater. I have been waiting since January for this experience and knew little of what I would encounter other than I am very curious about Henry Rollins. My friends would ask, "Is he with a band or is it just spoken word?" I did not know. I was just going to go find out with little expectation but much anticipation.

Let me back up. I was not heavily into the punk scene when it blew open the music world. I have tragic tales of missing performances by great bands because I was not ready to be open to them. But Henry starting entering my periphery every so often, mostly in dramatic roles on the small and large screen and occasional encounters with Black Flag references. I felt obliged to pay attention.

When I expanded my cable t.v. choices, I found Henry's talk show. I was enthralled. I also found a special broadcast of one of his spoken word performances in Israel a few years back one lazy afternoon. I was held captive by Henry on the little screen.

Then I read a collection of his earlier writings early last year. Henry had me, hook, line, and sinker. I was appalled by the anger and frustration of his younger years. I was empathetic for the tenacity of his human self to withstand much pain and keep going. I was confused often as the writings blurred the boundaries of memoir, stream of consciousness, and fiction. I felt his righteous indignation and was angered by the responses of those around him in his catalog of days, moments, feelings, and beliefs. I was riding the Henry Rollins roller coaster and loving every minute, even those when I really wanted to get off but knew I had no choice but to finish the ride.

So this leads us up to Saturday: the line of folks stretched up the block and around the corner of Dell Street; people of all ages and levels of piercings and tattoos, from none to outlandish. Hair was gray, hair was purple, spiked and GQ. It took awhile to get everyone in the door but once the last person was admitted, the single spot over the one microphone was met with Henry just strolling across the stage, taking his stance, and the words started to flow...for 3 hours without a drop of water, barely a breath. Henry just pontificated on any and all matters of discourse and wonder.

My biggest curiosity has been, "What is Henry like as a middle-aged man?" He is everything a man of this generation should be: righteously indignant, full of questions, a mirror to the rest of us, fully invested in the evolution of rock & roll as well as humanity itself. What did I discover? Henry is a scholar of American History, almost of geek-like proportions. He is funny...very funny, in fact. He is caring. He loves all people equally, even the fools and the bigots, although he does not approve of stupidity and has no problem letting us know how intolerant he may be at times. Henry is a citizen of the world and takes matters very much to heart.

Mostly, I loved how much Henry loves language. He honors the word so fully. The abbreviated world of marketing and texting annoys him dearly. He busts on texters (of which I proclaim I am one) with relish. Henry seemed to be this era's Spaulding Gray, telling the stories of his curious life and constant state of inquiry to whomever will listen. He also expects that his audience is intelligent and can follow his thoughts, understand what he is saying. He couches things in metaphor, he plays with syntax and literary devices. The world of language is his home and he is astoundingly prolific.

Henry is also tremendously generous with his fans, meeting them by his bus, night after night, even though it appears he is not very comfortable in that setting. He stood in the parking lot signing books, album covers, ticket stubs, for nearly an hour in the cold March night.

Henry, we want you back...soon! This poet will be on a mission to find a way to bring you back to Syracuse so we can all swim through the currents of your thought, so we can be reminded that Why is the most important word any of us can employ, but especially those of us who are writers. It is our source and our responsibility to question.

You can follow Henry's dispatches and discover other Rollins-related items and info at: www.henryrollins.com

Georgia Popoff is a member of the DWC community, frequent contributor to this blog, and believes in having a crush on someone just because they are really articulate can be healthy.

What's the Rush?! Random Thoughts on Simultaneous Submission

2010-03-26T08:00:00.000-07:00

In step with the legitimization of internet publication, it seems that the rules for simultaneous submissions of work have grown more lax. The protocol is different for fiction and I am not as familiar with those rules as I am with poetry so I am primarily addressing poetry submissions to journals. But I must state upfront that I am opposed to the practice of simultaneous submissions. I am referring specifically to the submission of a packet of poems for an editor or team of editors to review for publication in a literary journal or other form of print publication. Note also, there is a different protocol for submitting manuscripts or collections of work to potential publishers than that of journal publication.

This practice has become much more prevalent but I find it awkward and rather unseemly. Again, I consider the question, what is my goal as a poet? I want to honor the word and the work first. I want to take enough time to sculpt the words into my intention and the most crafted form I can discover as I go with any individual piece. Actually, I want to revel in that. The mere process of honing a poem is the heart of the purpose and identity of poet to me...my own personal version of "The Zone," to use runners' terms. Then, once I am comfortable with the poem, I want audience. Either a reader or someone to listen is my goal, consider my perspective through verse.

Somehow, there is an urgency in getting published for many. The search for audience drives us to fold our poems into envelopes and send them out into the world to be judged by a stranger. We think this validation will help us. To a certain extent, it does.

But why do we find it necessary to fulfill this need so dearly that we feel we cannot give one editor ample time to sit with the work thoughtfully and then make a decision before notifying the poet of the outcome? Do we not have enough of a body of work to send five poems in one direction and five more in another? Do we really need to send out the same five poems to three or four journals at one time and then do the juggling it takes if the poems are accepted one place before the other magaziness have had a chance to move them fully through their editorial system?

As an editor of a poetry journal, I have witnessed that we have had to pull poems from packets of submissions sent by at least 10 poets this season, all before the deadline for the reading period had even passed. Are these the only poems these writers have to offer?

Perhaps striving for a greater body of mature and well-crafted poetry is more important than a string of publications. Why is it necessary to have immediate response to the submission? There is a huge pressure on editors to turn work around faster and faster to fulfill the demands and expectations of poets offering work for consideration. It seems to directly correlate with this environment of digital immediacy we now experience in the age of 3G technology.

Regarding the awkwardness, a poet must contact the editor (or editors) of the other journals where the work is in rotation for review, asking to have the poem withdrawn from consideration due to acceptance elsewhere. That editor must not only locate the poem among hundreds, maybe even thousands; the editor will likely then spend some time questioning why that person is selecting the other publishing opportunity first. It has become akin to a little bidding war for a piece of property.

What is the rush? Is the need so great to be read that a few weeks for one publication to make a decision either way is too long to wait?

I believe that simultaneous submission of poems is poor practice. I know there are those who do not agree. But please consider that issue of creating a body of well-tended work. Publishing will have its place but patience is a part of the growth of a writer. Is it that difficult to wait 8 - 12 weeks? I think not. We have just grown accustomed to immediacy and now it has become habit. We can survive the wait. I am confident that we all have the ability to slow down and practice deliberate action as well as patience.

Georgia Popoff is a frequent contributor to the DWC blog, an editor, and a teaching poet with a number of poems in journals and anthologies. She once submitted simultaneously by accident and was mortified to have to withdraw her work.

Straight out of My Own Bones: Some Thoughts on The Bell Jar

2010-03-25T08:20:00.000-07:00

by: Jennifer Pashley

A few years ago, I outlived Sylvia Plath. And somehow, despite an aborted attempt at a PhD in American Studies, and a robust American poetry course as an undergrad, I'd read a lot of Plath's poems, but I'd never read The Bell Jar. Until this week. I read the whole thing on Monday. I haven't read an entire book in a day since high school, when I read all of The Great Gatsby in one sitting.

Why didn't I read it before? I think because no one takes it seriously. It's sort of that memoir-disguised-as-novel written specifically for college girls who cut their wrists for attention. Right?

In her introduction to the 1997 edition, Frances McCullough writes that if Sylvia Plath had lived, “it's hard to say whether … the novel would ever have been published in this country.” McCullough goes on to question what might have happened if Plath had written more novels, better novels. Would she have returned to her first novel, The Bell Jar, and thought differently? Would she have self-censored? Told less of the truth? Crafted the truth into something less raw? Something dulled at the edges, or as Wordsworth says, recollected in tranquility?

We'll never know. As McCullough says, “of course Plath did die a tragic death at the age of thirty, and the book's subsequent history has everything to do with that fact.” By which she means that Plath's suicide makes the book a cult favorite, but she also means that if Plath didn't die, the book might never have seen the light of day – because it's not very good. Right?

I was surprised. It's not the best book I've ever read. The plot – maybe because it's so true – feels predictable. The ending feels a little like a a Lifetime Movie. But, as McCullough points out, “her voice has such intensity, such a direct edge to it,” it forgives the structural flaws.

Take the opening lines:

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. I'm stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers – goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive along all your nerves.

And she never lets you go. It's a close, tunnel-vision narrative, right out of the eye-sockets of Esther Greenwood. And that voice never waivers.

It's not The Kite Runner. It's not a globally significant narrative. In fact, it doesn't stray very far from the geography, class or political background that it knows. So why does it matter? Why did it ever matter? Because one college educated white girl from New England was depressed one year and wanted to get it off her chest? Wanted to drag you into the eye of the storm?

This is why: because in her marriage negotiations with Buddy Willard, Esther Greenwood stumbles upon this observation:

I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems anymore. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.

That's why. Because more than anything, this book struggles with the notion of either / or. Esther can be a poet or a mother. She can be an editor or a wife. You can pick one fruit off the fig tree, she says, and once you pick one, the rest of them wither and die.

What makes it so hard? Why are women prone to second guessing? Can't you do both? Be a mother and a writer? Tell the truth, and tell it hard, unfiltered, like a holy scream*, and do it well? I'm asking you. I've second-guessed my own answer.

You can debate Plath's answer – the suicide answer – the answer No, you can't. And if you try, you won't get out alive. But what you can't ignore here are the questions that Plath asks – about agency, about identity, and about telling the truth without apologizing. Or that what she asks has resonance, regardless of her own solution: "Everything she said was like a secret voice speaking straight out of my own bones."

*from the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry – the really old, 1972 version I have, in which Anne Sexton is listed as still living. In the intro to Sylvia Plath, the editors write “Sylvia Plath's poetry is a document of extremity. Her sensitivity is inordinate, but so is her ability to express it. The result is a holy scream, a splendid agony – beyond sex, beyond delicacy, beyond all but art.”

Jennifer Pashley has eaten a lot of figs in her day. She has new work this week at Dark Sky Magazine, as well as PANK.

Dude, Where's My Poem?! Some Musings on Publishing

2010-03-23T18:24:00.000-07:00

The challenge of the writer is to develop a commitment to discovery. The poem or story can become the driving force of the process; the writer must then respond to the direction the work will choose for its full manifestation. The writer and the writing change places in navigation to the final work. This is the beauty and creative opportunity in revision.

The final goal is publication, first in journal form, then book. Inclusion in quality anthologies is also quite important. Each time we see our names in print, our poems or stories on pages with others, we get a thrill. It feels "important." We want to see it often.

When we are new to publishing, there are many questions. The world of publishing for fiction is much different from that of poetry, or so it seems to this poet. These comments will mostly relate to my experience with poetry and publication.

Wherever a writer considers submitting work, it is tremendously important to be familiar with the journal selected for the work. It is also extremely important to read the guidelines for submission very carefully and follow the rules fully.

On-Line Publication

One frequent question is that of on-line publication vs. print. I was asked recently to articulate my thoughts on this subject. I will paraphrase my responses:

A decade ago, on-line publication was less prestigious. That perception persists; therefore; when an editor picks my poem for print, which is expensive, it seems a greater investment in my work. But if someone expresses confidence in my work by posting to a literary web site or even a blog, if it is someone I trust and/or respect, I want to see the poem reach an audience.

To me, connecting with viable readers is my goal. If I have the opportunity of reaching maybe 250 - 300 readers in a print journal or 1,000 readers on line, I may just opt for the greater readership. Although we want to develop a list of publication credits that is respectable, diverse, and reflects print journals that have invested in our work, we also want to get our work to a large and diverse readership.

So my questions to myself include:

**Whose site is it? Someone I respect or a journal that has an on-line presence in addition to print?

**If it is a blog, whose blog? There are blogs with thousands of regular readers, just as Garrison Keillor has millions of listeners to his NPR program on poetry and Prairie Home Companion. Will I have more eyes on my poem here than in the Asheville Poetry Review or the Cincinnati Review, for instance?

**Is this person's market the appropriate one for my work? Will those reading the poem be as interested in what I am offering as much as the editor or blogger?

Many on-line publications are highly respected so there is no longer the stigma that existed earlier in the history of the internet. So each poet must decide for him/herself which direction to go. Either is honorable. There may also be a question of immediate publication rather than dealing with the process of sending work out to a journal, waiting for response, and maybe having to send it out someplace else.

Georgia Popoff teaches at the DWC and has had many poems published both on line and in print.

Small Press Spotlight :: Cinematheque Press

2010-03-19T05:36:00.000-07:00

To wrap up this week of Small Press Spotlights, the DWC's John Lawton chats with Nate Slawson, head minister of the funk at Cinematheque Press. Stay tuned to the DWC blog for more of these revealing glimpses into the vibrant world of today's small presses.

NOTE: O CITY REFERS TO A CHAPBOOK PUBLISHED BY HIS PRESS.

1. What inspired you to start up Cinematheque Press?

Starting my own little deal had been on my radar for a while. When I was in grad school I worked for other publications, and, like the “real world” publishing biz I came from, there were moments—a lot of moments—when it flat-out sucked. No cooperation, no sense of responsibility, no listening. Ever since kindergarten I’ve been labeled as someone who doesn’t get along well with others. But I think that’s bum rap. I get steamed at crappy teamwork. So I work on Cinematheque all by my lonesome. Actually, that’s not true. I work with the writers as much as they want to collaborate on design, layout, fonts, colors, pricing, and more. And that’s a big part of my process and the why-I-do-what-I-do.

2. What future do you see of small presses in our media soaked culture?

Small presses are kicking ass right now. I think the indies, the non-profits, and the super tiny are putting out some, if not most, of the best work. One way I think of it: Who reads books and chapbooks from small presses? People who know all kinds of books and usually enjoy talking about them. Who sells product from small presses? Besides the presses themselves, your favorite independent/co-op bookstore. This is the textual world I like living in. What is a profit margin? What is a business model? I couldn’t care less. Sure, some small presses will fade, and some small presses will grow, but the passion and the work is what we know (if I’m allowed to kinda sorta speak for others, too).

I suppose I should mention something about the Internets, too. Some of the best journals and presses do their thing on the web. The way we use the Internet to deliver content is an evolutionary process. I have some wild ideas, and I’m sure others do, too. And what do we have to lose?

3. What and who inspired the design of O City?

This goes back to the end of my first answer. Wayne found the art. There are a number of references to airplanes and flying in the poems (“A Prayer (O City—)” has the part about the bomber). I came up with everything else. I think what I (and Wayne) like most about the cover are all of the bomber’s cut-away compartments and accompanying tiny labels, which are obviously text but too small to read. Without getting too classroom, the art is like the poems in that you (viewer/reader) want to know all the ins and outs, but, as Yo La Tengo said, you can’t have it all.

4. What is the most engaging/appealing about Mr. Miller's work for you?

I am a sucker for projects, long sequences, book-length poems, those types of things. And while Wayne writes in a style so different from me, I am mesmerized by his faculty to excite, inspire, and confound me. O City is a Wayne Miller book and it is beautiful. His last full-length collection, The Book of Props (Milkweed, 2009), is amazing: a world staring back at writer and reader, a world that’s both real and pantomime. The final section of the book is worth the cover price alone.

Small Press Spotlight :: Lame House Press

2010-03-18T05:24:00.000-07:00

Today, the DWC's Sally Lloyd talks with Gina Myers, the proprietrix of Lame House Press.

Founded in Brooklyn, NY and now based in Saginaw, MI, Lame House Press irregularly publishes chapbooks from emerging poets.

1. What kind of material do you publish: prose, poetry, art, other?

Lame House Press currently publishes poetry only. At one time we were going to publish an artist book, but unfortunately it never came to be.

2. What are your criteria for choosing a collection of poems (or stories) to publish? What genres do you consider?

When the press first launched, I only published work by poets who had not yet previously published any chapbooks or full length collections.

The first few chapbooks were by people who I had gone to school with whose work I really liked and thought should have a wider audience.

As time has gone by, I have opened up to publishing work by previously published authors, though the most recent title, Nathan Hauke's In the Living Room, is his first chapbook. There have been times where I have been at a reading and really liked a particular series I heard read and simply asked the reader afterward if he or she would be willing to have Lame House publish the work, as was the case with Arlo Quint's
Photogenic Memory. Something similar happened after I heard Franklin Bruno read.

My main criteria, as absurd as this sounds, is that it is "good." Most importantly, it has to be work that I like and am excited by. The poetry skews toward experimental work and post-avant poetry (or whatever the kids are calling it these days).

3. How does the selection of your books help fulfill your mission and please share that mission.

I have never written a formal mission for the press, but I guess it would be something like: Lame House Press publishes limited edition hand-bound chapbooks by contemporary poets. Our mission is to support exciting up-and-coming (and established) writers by giving them a venue for their work to help them reach an audience. I think the selection of books helps fulfill this mission because I only publish work I am really excited about and want to promote. I really want my authors to receive positive feedback and hear that their books are getting out there in the world.

4. Choose one of your favorite publications and explain the reason for your selection.

Since the press started in 2005, I have only published 13 titles, so I know each of them very well and it would be hard for me to select a favorite. I do not accept open submissions, so each title I published has been solicited, which means I have seen work by that poet elsewhere that has made me want to ask to see a chapbook manuscript.

I guess how this all got started might be a good story. When I was at the New School, I became very good friends with Gabriella Torres and she had a really wonderful chapbook that I wanted to see published. She had it accepted for publication at a small chapbook publisher, but then the publisher stopped making books and said they were not going to be able to put it out after all. That's when I decided to start Lame House. I didn't have a grand plan--I just wanted to see Gabriella's book, Sister, in print. After that I turned to a couple of people I went to undergrad with, Hazel McClure and Mike Sikkema, with the same idea that they were wonderful poets whose work should be out there.

Small Press Spotlight :: One Story

2010-03-17T05:37:00.000-07:00

One-Story, launched in 2002, is a literary magazine which features short stories written by people like me and you. The 3,000 – 8,000 word stories are published and mailed to the 7,500+ subscribers every three weeks. Subscribers receive their magazine which features only one story that has not been previously published, from one author. The authors who are chosen only get published in One Story once, so readers experience new, fresh, and different voices each issue. Stories can be submitted between September 1st and May 31st, so check out www.One-Story.com for specific guidelines and submit your story today! The magazine is great for those on the go. It’s small and lightweight design makes it easy to carry and read anywhere, whether on your commute to work, on a lunch break or right before you get some beauty rest. One-Story focuses on stories that “leave readers feeling satisfied and are strong enough to stand alone.”

The DWC's Kim DeHaven shot a few questions to Tanya Rey, from the Managing Editor for One Story. She took the time to answer a few questions I had about One Story and the writing world. She has an MFA in fiction from New York University and you can find her work at McSweeney's. (Information taken from www.One-Story.com)

KD: As the Managing Editor, what do you think makes a story an actual story, besides a beginning, middle and an end? In other words, what makes a story a good story? A story that, as your guidelines suggest, leaves the reader "feeling satisfied?"

TR: A "One Story story" is one that is brave enough to stand on its own. Since we only publish the one, our stories have to create their own world, suck the reader into it, and leave the reader thinking about the characters and/or world long after they're done reading. Some stories that we come across are very good stories, and might be good for other magazines where they'd appear between other stories or essays or poems, but would feel too slender on their own.

KD: Who is the general audience of One Story, and if there isn't one, what do you think draws people to read the stories that are published in your literary magazine?
TR: I think people are drawn to the stories in One Story because they know they'll get something new and different every time, since we only publish each author once and really strive to make every issue different from the last. We don't really publish for any one audience, and our subscribers come to us from so many different places that it makes for a very diverse group of readers.

KD: How does One Story advertise itself? Why should aspiring authors want to submit their work to this literary magazine, as opposed to the many others out there?
TR: We don't really advertise, but rely on word of mouth and small-scale promotions for publicity. We also are included in several anthologies each year, which brings us a good amount of new subscribers. Writers should want to be published with us because they get the undivided attention of our 10,000 readers every month, and because they get to work with a team of editors that work closely with them on their story until it's perfected for publication. Once a writer publishes with us, we consider them a part of the One Story family, and promote them on our site and at events.

KD: What advice or suggestions would you give to an aspiring author that might help them get work published, whether in One Story or elsewhere?

TR: Write often, then write well.

KD: If it is not too personal of a question, why do you enjoy working with One Story? Why do you have an interest in literary fiction?

TR: I enjoy working with One Story because I believe in our mission: to save the short story, and to get quality short fiction into the hands of as many readers as possible. I also love that One Story does so much to help out their authors, particularly the emerging authors.

Small Press Spotlight :: Slash Pine Press

2010-03-16T06:12:00.000-07:00

Nate Pritts is the author of The Wonderfull Yeare & teaches at the DWC.

A few weeks ago, I posted about my small press publishing class & introduced a series of Small Press Spotlights. Here's a fascinating entry conducted by Daniel Reinhold (a poet with a new chapbook out called BEYOND METAPHOR) with Joseph Wood, the sparking engine of awesome behind Slash Pine Press:

Interview with Joseph Wood of Slash Pine Press

Slash Pine Press produces limited-run chapbooks of poetry and mixed-genre, and occasionally hosts off-the-beaten-path reading events, including the Slash Pine Poetry Festival held at the end of April.

How are small presses important?

Small presses are important because they allow people to become active in poetry, to start their own conversations about the world in all its manifestations (political, regional, personal, etc)--or continue conversations they've had with other poets, other presses, and other people in general. Having a small press allows one to see the wide swath of visions and interpretations of existance, of forcing you, the publisher, to be curious about other people's lives and their expressions of experience.

What do you see as the future of small presses?

I don't know what the future of small presses are: chapbook presses are a labor of love, often are run on people's own effort and time and money, and so I suppose it depends on if presses can survive the whatever is in store for our economy. I think also it depends if the DIY aesthetic stays alive and strong and necessary (and I think it always will).

What do you see as the advantage of print vs online journals?

Per medium: I like having the tactile presence of book in hand, the numerous envsionments of what a book can be (especially the chapbook)--thus the explosion of book arts. Internet publishing is valid and important, but it also changes the way one reads, and I have to say, as someone who has my own e-chap, I find the act of reading a book on screen distracting and subject to other focii. But I'm also not very tech-savvy, so these are my biases.

What is the mission of your press beyond publishing and community?

The mission of the press: it is community, man, pure and simple. That's why we have so many events, do large events, and involve people of varying aesthetics and reputations. It is so easy to be alone with writing--you write alone, send out alone, etc. And sure, we publish chaps and we love our writers and putting their work out their--to articulate views and experiences that challenge convention and apathy. But that gets lonesome, and I like to think the small presses and the readings allow people who would never come together otherwise to share ideas, to simply be together. We also use undergraduates as interns for us--and not just Creative Writing minors--and we like to think we're giving people an experiential view into what is happening on the ground levels of contemporary lit--if only a small sliver.

What advice would you give to poets new to exploring the world of small press publishing?

Advice for new poets: the typical stuff, I suppose. Read a shitload and without adherence to taxonomy or aesthetic. Look to see who read who, learn to articulate clearly what you dislike as much as you like--and why. But mostly, live life. Be curious.

A Devoted Community of Writers

2010-03-15T12:19:00.000-07:00

by Cathy Gibbons

Jennifer Pashley asked me to write about my experience at the Downtown’s Writer's Center. First, I’d like to say, "Thank you DWC PRO!"

I started the DWC PRO poetry program in the fall of 2008 not knowing quite what expect. I applied to the program because I wanted to be challenged to learn more about writing in ways that would push my work forward. It was a surprise to find a place in my hometown that was affordable, offered classes with highly educated and diverse writers and was not too complicated to weave into my busy schedule of work and family responsibilities. All of those things proved to be true.

What I also found is a devoted community of fellow writers, as well as experienced writer/teachers willing to give their knowledge and time to us. Working with the same group of poets throughout the program in critique and craft classes is especially appreciated. It is a delight to have an informed and trusted group of readers familiar with each other’s work.

At the risk of sounding a little hokey, I’ve had a lot of fun at the DWC. The mix of personalities has created spirited and intersting conversations. That’s my kind of fun. I’ve been challenged to think more deeply and to peel back the layers to find what is true in my poems – and I’ve learned new (to me) approaches and techniques to help me get there.

We are working now on our manuscripts, the crowning project of the 2-year program. It isn’t easy but I’m further along in the process than I might have been on my own. I’m looking forward to seeing what my classmates have put together. We are so different but we’ve been through it together and their poems will be like old friends

Forward Motion: Writing and the Writing Community at DWC PRO

2010-03-12T06:41:00.000-08:00

by Peter McShane

It's true that writing is a solitary pursuit, but ironically you can't do it alone.

When I decided to try my hand at writing a memoir, the words flowed, thousands of them. It read like a confessional. A few family members said it was terrific. They love me; I knew better. I wanted to write something that non-relatives would read.

I decided to take a few courses at the DWC and quickly learned that I didn't know anything about writing. In the words of acclaimed writer and educator John Gardner, the key to writing stories is creating for the reader a vivid and continuous dream. This holds true whether it's creative non-fiction or fiction. It's difficult to pull it off with exposition alone. Adding characters who interact draw the reader into their lives. Successful writers use a combination of exposition and dialog. This helps to create what Gardner calls profluence, or forward motion, drawing the reader in and holding his/her attention.

What's next after you've learned all this procedural stuff, like genre, style, theme, point of view, plotting; the nuts and bolts? It's finding readers to test drive your work; people willing to read through your early drafts and tell you what works and what doesn't. That's what workshops are all about. It's an eye-opening, humbling experience, but your writing will improve. You'll get encouragement from your instructors and peers, and one-on-one tutorials with experienced, published writers who provide valuable insight and suggestions for fine-tuning your work.

All this is what you get in the DWC PRO program: people serious about writing stories and instructors who validate your work. More importantly, it's an introduction to the writer's community. This is how successful writers do it. It's not easy, but the reward is a reader who can't put your story down.

Peter McShane and nine other DWC PRO students will be featured readers this spring, and in June will comprise the very first DWC PRO graduating class.

Sapphire Goes Hollywood Swingin'

2010-03-09T20:51:00.000-08:00

There is a trend with the writers invited to read for the Downtown Writer’s Center: they often receive greater national recognition after they have been booked for us. Take, for example, the fact that both Ted Kooser and Charles Simic were named Poet Laureate. Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon was nominated for the National Book Award. Others have received honors or they were already prize winners before they visited Syracuse to share their work with our crew.

Now it has happened again but this time with the stamp of Hollywood’s approval. Sunday evening, Sapphire was among all the glamor of the Red Carpet. A poet and novelist, Sapphire is experiencing a second wave with her 1994 novel, Push, as adapted for the screen in the movie Precious. Sapphire read at the DWC in 2006. At that time, Push was a bit of an underground novel. Push is a bold, courageous look into one story based on one young woman facing extraordinary, terrible circumstances. The novel depicts both the horror of what a human can inflict or experience as well as the great odds that a human can overcome to achieve personal strength, self-esteem, even salvation.

With this novel, Sapphire opened a discussion about incest and rape at a time when we, as a society, were still silent regarding these “family secrets.” The brutal truth behind the veil is the high percentage of women who are raped, either by a stranger or someone known to them. Some say one in three, others one in four. Either statistic is chilling. Each represents a gash in that life that will never be fully healed, a person who may never be able to trust again. These data do not address the depth of pain associated with multiple occurrences of incest, sometimes for years.

In the late 80s, when this story is set, we were very closed-mouthed about incest and domestic abuse. But Sapphire needed to instigate the conversation. We were closer to exposing the horrors and commonality of these experiences when the book was released. Sapphire chose to be a part of that developing transparency.

Now, in the 21st century, the book has become film and has achieved critical acclaim. Had Lee Daniels, the director, won the Oscar, he would have been the first African American to receive the award. Instead, the first woman won so we can hardly find much fault with the Academy there. Another milestone has challenged the history. The many other nominations and awards that were given to Precious were warranted but also signal a change in America. We are more able to face our demons to tell the truth.

I believe that both the movie and the book are critically important as “herstory.” It is not easy to sit through the film. It is not comfortable to experience the novel. That is not the intention of the tale. But there is a heroic hope, just as there is hope for Haiti, or for our young people in urban schools, as there was for those who survived the Holocaust, or those who cross borders for work. Humans can survive just about anything but it is a confounding mystery as to how we do it.

The release of the film, and the recognition for its achievements, has spurred a challenging discussion over the internet about the depiction of African Americans, and Black men in particular. It has been fascinating to listen to the discourse, which has been quite passionate. There have been heated debates about the aspects of casting (light-skinned vs. dark-skinned actors for key roles), the negative view of men, the potential correlation of that one semi-fictional family to African American families in general. Noted writer and scholar Ishmael Reed has been very forthcoming with his objections and Sapphire has responded in print. There has been a lot of “How dare they?!” attached to the project. Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry have been implicated in the process because they took the film from its premier at Sundance last year as a low-budget indie film to major distribution. How dare they?!

I ask, when is any piece of art speaking for all of a culture? Were the Huxtables speaking for all of Black America? No. But are there upper middle class families like them? Yes, just as there are families much like the Evans family of the situation comedy from back in the day, Good Times. Is Waiting to Exhale, either the book or the movie, a statement of all Black culture? I see horrid stereotypes, particularly of women, in that story. Is the fact that the Hip Hop artist Common is in the trailer of another Hollywood movie as a pretty-faced thug with a gun a statement as well? I think so. Why does he take those roles? When will he be a male lead? A positive image on the big screen? His music breaks the stereotype of Hip Hop expectations but his acting career is sadly typical.

It cannot be escaped that humans have tremendous capacity for hatred and unconscionable deeds. We have to speak of the horrors to overcome them. We can open the discussion one story at a time. Sapphire was able to do that with her fiction and then, by patiently waiting for the right ensemble to bring her words to image, we now have Precious.

The up side is that Sapphire is being rewarded well for her book. The film is honored by many. Push has been reissued for the mass market. Target included it as one of their featured books a few weeks ago. It is on the shelves in Wegmans. I assume the royalty checks are huge. Sapphire deserves recognition and remuneration for the book. It is not perfect. It was a raw piece from an emerging writer. But hers is an important book.

Sunday, Mo’nique won the Best Supporting Actress title. In fact, she has swept the category in all the major awards this season for this brutal character portrayal. She was magnificent and chilling. The film won the Oscar for best screenplay adaptation. Unfortunately, as the Oscar recipients accepted their awards the other evening, neither thanked Sapphire nor her novel, although she was seated in the audience.

I hope all the other glory that has been afforded Sapphire makes up for the criticism and the lack of gratitude for all of her effort to create the work and then get it to print, then the long wait until she found the team she trusted to bring her vision to the screen. I will write to Sapphire and tell her that I am grateful. She changed me as a human and gave me strength to be clear about my truth as well as to maintain hope in spite of any and all adversity. She also gave me clear vision to my own purpose as a writer. We must start from the place of truth, no matter what the reaction may be.

Georgia Popoff teaches at the Downtown Writer's Center and in schools throughout NYS. In Fall 2009, she taught a class on contemporary African American poets for DWC PRO. She is a frequent poster to this blog.

Why Go PRO?

2010-03-09T06:34:00.000-08:00

By Philip Memmer, who, when he's not directing, can be found here.

Since we started DWC PRO two years ago, a number of people have asked “What exactly is a certificate program?”

It’s not a bad question. All of us are well-acquainted with the idea of applying to a college degree program, and we are also familiar with the idea of simply taking a class at a community venue. But DWC PRO is somewhere between the two. It is a two-year time commitment, with a number of requirements (some quite strenuous)… so it is clearly similar in ways to a graduate writing program. On the other hand, PRO does not grant a degree, nor does it provide any kind of accreditation that can be used professionally… in that way, it is similar to a community workshop.

In our view, what DWC PRO provides is a way to take your literary training seriously, without completely rearranging your life. The cost is reasonable, the workshop hours are manageable even with a full-time job, and you don’t have to pack up and move; that’s the easy part. The hard part, of course, is the work itself: you will take 11 classes and 6 tutorials over the course of two years. You will work with six or more different authors, all of whom will make demands of you and your writing. And you will be expected to become part of a community of writers with goals similar to your own.

None of that hard work will earn you a degree. If your end goal is to someday teach at a University, or to earn a Masters degree, then DWC PRO is not for you. But if you are simply interested in learning more about the craft of writing, looking for a way to challenge both yourself and your work, and for a push to complete your first book manuscript, then the PRO program could be exactly what you need.

Stay tuned this week for more on DWC PRO, from our own PRO students.

Philip Memmer is the author of three books of poems: Lucifer: A Hagiography (Lost Horse Press, 2009), which was awarded the 2008 Idaho Prize for Poetry; Sweetheart, Baby, Darling (Word Press, 2004), and Threat of Pleasure (Word Press, 2008). His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry, Mid-American Review and Poetry Northwest, and in several anthologies. He is director of the Arts Branch of the YMCA, and founder of the DWC.

Spring Is Close - Come Celebrate with Poetry This Evening

2010-03-05T06:15:00.000-08:00

The air will be clear and bright this evening, according to the forecast. Are you feeling cabin fever? Then plan on being at the Downtown Writer's Center this evening. Our guests are the DWC's own Nate Pritts and his good friend and educator, Matt Hart, who is traveling in from Ohio to share his work with our community.

Nate Pritts is the author of The Wonderfull Yeare (Cooper Dillon, 2010), Sensational Spectacular (BlazeVOX, 2007) and Honorary Astronaut (Ghost Road Press, 2008). The founder & primary editor of H_NGM_N, on on-line journal of contemporary poetry, Nate currently teaches at the DWC. Now we get a chance to feature Nate not as educator but for the poetry he creates.

Matt Hart is the author of two full length books of poetry, Who’s Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006) and You Are Mist (Moor Books, forthcoming), as well as numerous chapbooks. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety, Matt teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

The Spring calendar of readings will be released soon but you can get a jumpstart on the season with this last of the Winter line-up. The reading starts at 7:00 p.m. and, as always is free. We encourage you to bring a friend as well to share the evening. The Downtown Writer's Center is located off the main lobby of the Downtown YMCA, 340 Montgomery Street, near Syracuse's Columbus Circle. We hope to see you!

The Imaginarium of Matt Hart

2010-03-04T07:48:00.000-08:00

by Georgia Popoff

Reading Matt Hart’s poetry, I find myself negotiating undercurrents of a “normal life:” the job, the baby, the wife, the dog who definitely wants to move faster than her human, the confusion of a morning started too early; all of the elements of a life reaching middle stages, all its trappings but no ordinary observations wending into typical narrative form here.

Matt Hart agrees to let us witness the Venn Diagram of his inner thoughts, where his love of language meets his rock-n-roll heart. Coffee and the paper are not enough. I am reminded that there is a period of rock-n-roll I missed. Matt has archived that era for himself, and the blare of punk seeps through as he wanders an interior landscape, where the topography is constructed of fanciful images and the orchestration of the poet’s daily query to establish place, create meaning, dispel wonder. He is also bold enough to resurrect the poetic “O” and get away with it.

He risks our meddling. His reader has a spyglass of Matt’s specifications to witness the confusion a man feels when suddenly he looks around at his own trappings to see a world he created and, at the same time, stumbled into without realizing. Take, for instance, these lines:

Tonight the sun is shining, and I am joyful,
but why? The world is weird wired
and white as hydrangeas. I am joyful
in my blue plaid mind, even as I think
terrible thoughts against my wife,
my daughter, the leaders of my country.
There is no end to my terrible joy.
I am like a wolf with an egg in its mouth,
the yolk running over its mad lip curling.

The poet is not about to stray from his family’s routine but still there is a dark foreboding. He is at ease in his station as professor yet I hear a challenge in his poems, a slow rumbling of “Why are you listening to ME?” In the midst of this ongoing questioning of the universe, the magic realism never ceases to amaze Matt.

His is a world influenced by the masters who have gone before him, not just the sparse Zen of Philip Whelan or the angst of Johnny Rotten, but the singsong of Dr. Seuss, the acid touch of Lewis Carroll. There is the craft of the finest and the storm of a summer night. The Bootsy bassline and the order of a Wordsworth garden. Every poem gives me reason to stop, read it phrase by phrase, question the song of wind chime in late winter, challenge my own poetry to a duel of fascination.

As I sit in a seeming silence, the timer for the living room light to fool the potential interlopers ticking a frantic pulse, the late winter breeze outside creating a random etude, my coffee growing cold too quickly in my cup, I think maybe, just perhaps, I get it. Matt will let me know on Friday, as he breathes these words into air.

Don't miss Matt Hart and Nate Pritts at the DWC Friday night, 7 pm.

Georgia Popoff is a well-traveled teaching artist, community poet and currently serves as interim managing editor for Comstock Review. She is definitely someone you should know.

Calm Poem

2010-03-03T06:24:00.000-08:00

by visiting author, Matt Hart, who can also be found here.

Several years ago I was in a poetry workshop with Tony Hoagland. During a one-on-one meeting about my work, he noted all the noise and disruption in my poems—all the feedback and chaos—and said “Here’s what I want you to do: write a calm poem and call it “Calm Poem.” Make every line a line of clarity and tranquility.” He said that, or something like it... Anyway, his point was that I was garbling what I wanted/needed to say, clouding the issues in a lot of unnecessary roughness—sabotaging myself with fireworks—which are maybe thrilling for a few minutes, but don’t last very long. Somehow I needed to find a way to keep the lights on in my work, even if what it illuminated was completely weird and chaotic.

Here’s the poem I wrote:

Calm Poem

Of all the calm poems I've written
This calm poem

is definitely my favorite.

It came at the end of a calamitous day—

I couldn’t remember what to say

during a lecture.

I cried while reading

a philosophical preface.

When I looked in the mirror

I saw pieces of a bluejay

and the world turned

my stomach

in the gathering dust.

Forget it, said the poem.

Now you’re safe at home.

Many people love you.

No need to create a scene.
No need to punctuate

the roar of the page.

Go to sleep and dream

you’re a giant paper snowflake.

There is nothing to be afraid of.

2.
What’s interesting to me is that traveling around giving readings and teaching workshops, I often hear people expressing a desire to make their poems wilder, stranger, more surprising and dynamic. Almost never have I heard someone wishing to make their poems calm down and behave. And yet, aren’t there occasions when staying calm is the most surprising and weird thing of all? As a result of this exercise, I have come to believe, even though I’m not always capable of acting on it, that to say a thing plainly and deliberately with clarity—with calm—is among the most poetic (i.e. surprising, strange and depth-charged) ways of saying anything.
With this in mind, I’ve adapted Tony’s assignment to me as one I sometimes use with my own students, especially when they’re being weird for weird’s sake and seem to have more on their minds than mere weirdness. This is how I put it to them:
Write a Calm Poem. In fact, use Calm Poem as the title, so that when we gather round the table next week we can survey the varieties and vagaries of calmness. Is calm merely the opposite of calamity? Is it a warm bath? Is it listening to Coltrane (the early stuff) with the lights down low? Is it chicken soup and sickness and clouds overhead? For some of you it may be soccer, and for others, a Sunday Stroll. For still others, what’s calm is a hardcore band for breakfast. I don’t have any particular designs on calmness (I’m barely calm at all). I’m looking for the truth; I’m looking for a world to kick back in, some place to have myself a bottle of wine, some place with a view of the ocean. Remember, too, that what’s calm in a poem may have nothing to do with its content. Calmness may be the result of purely formal maneuvers—the lengths of your lines, the kinds of stanzas you use, the way you arrange the words (and the white spaces) on the page. Pacing may be everything. What does calmness mean to you and/or how does it go down in language? Be steady, breathe easy, take yourselves away. Nobody panic. Stay as steady and calm as you possibly can. There are a million emergencies to contend with, and someone has to feel at home in them.

TWO MORE CALM EXAMPLES
Here’s one by my friend Nate Pritts that’s incredible for its steadfast attentiveness to the moment and also for the way it manages chaos—that’s what calm is in a sense managing chaos in the moment:
Calm Poem

It’s November 15th, 2009, & I’ve never been

Nate Pritts today. I’m 35 with about two months

tacked on & I’m taking your advice. Early

morning & there’s a halo of helicopters

harrowing the blue, sending word through the

static about the crowded intersections—

all that crosstown traffic—& I stepped

right in front of the car. I knew the speed.

I don’t care if it’s calm. It’s okay if it’s calamity.

Early morning & the buzz is circling my head

like a certainty. Three or four times a day,

I feel like I’m about to get shot out of myself,

like there’s a vibration approaching catastrophe

& I need to run. I’m thinking of language

like it’s something delicate I can hold in my hand.

I’m worried this might break. Early morning

& I don’t care if it’s starless. It’s okay that it’s

endless but full of endings. It’s November 15th,

it’s 2009, it’s me taking your advice because I’m

left without my normal faith in talk, that I could

fill a room with voice & tip the scales.

So hard to get through to you isn’t something

I’m saying but something I feel & the you isn’t

you. I don’t care if it’s indeterminate. It’s okay

that it’s not referential. Early morning & sun

gathers slowly in the clouds. November 15th

& I’m Nate Pritts right now more than ever &

the trees are already empty. It’s not fall

in Syracuse. It’s not fall; it’s fell. It’s exquisitely

dark. It’s this terrible. It’s this fierce destructive.

It’s the end of my favorite season ever & the beginning

of my dark poetry & I don’t care if it’s dark

as long as there’s light. It’s okay that I’m on my knees

to restart the fire as the damp wind whips

tumultuous & elegant. My faith is that more & more

will outweigh the less & less, that an I & a you

accumulates. I’m trying to be calm with the bomb

in my hand because it seems right to pretend

I don’t hear it counting down to one from two.

And this one’s by a former student of mine, Scott Dennis, who of course found a way through the assignment to something marvelously SCOTT DENNIS:
Calm

These are the tricks that make us calm:

The last bits of light

burn images of peace

into my skin.

I dream of dream-catchers

and of things salvaged.

I dream of things primitive

and of communication.

Ritual stimulates

me to my grave,

where the shaman takes me

and helps me survey the wreckage,

where my hands will not reach

my weaponry and my

face melts off my skull.

The only thing you have to lose in an exercise like this is pretense and the chains of expectation, but what you have to gain is something clearly and radiantly yourself.

Matt Hart is the author of two full length books of poetry, Who’s Who Vivid (Slope Editions, 2006) and You Are Mist (Moor Books, forth coming), as well as numerous chapbooks. A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety, Matt teaches at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

This Brand New Treasure: Nate Pritts' Wonderfull Yeare

2010-03-02T06:05:00.000-08:00

by Jack Davis

Yesterday, in an delicate box, perhaps a hundred years old, I found a copy of a book called The Wonderfull Yeare – A Shepherd’s Calendar by Nate Pritts. I may not have given it a second thought, but it was a book of poems.

And, as I thumbed through the leaves, the poet Pritts took me to another place; one of Chaplinesque nimbleness, dusky form and shadowed structures. Mr. Pritts sculpted golems of transitive vision with pinched flesh on bent knees in quiet prayer. And these prayers cast seed of private virtue and personal need to secluded places warm and moist.

He traced the cracks of reason and mercy with a voice as articulate as his perspective. Some poems, like the “Sonnets for the fall,” left lasting impressions in mourning mud. Nate proclaims that even the thinning light finds cricket sounds, but no leaves.

I must say it was a real pleasure to find this brand new treasure in that delicate old box. As the last several years have left us all on the cusp of some dangerously poor poetry, it is a delight that Nate Pritts has saved us a few pages of real art.

The Wonderfull Yeare by Nate Pritts has found print because it had a choice. Nate is going places, but don’t fool yourself, this book is about where he’s been.

Jack Davis is a DWC student, poet, and all around cool guy.

Greg Ames Reading Friday CANCELLED

2010-02-25T13:59:00.001-08:00

DWC Fans,

Have you noticed the snow?

Unfortunately, the heavy snow and wind up and down the east coast has made travel between NYC, Binghamton and Syracuse near impossible. We're sorry to announce that the Greg Ames reading scheduled for Friday, 2/26 at 7 pm has been cancelled.

As we hope to reschedule, we'll keep you posted on any developments.

In the meantime, stay in, stay warm, read a good book. Might we recommend Buffalo Lockjaw?

Let's Get Ekphrastic!

2010-02-25T06:08:00.000-08:00

Suffer from the winter blahs? Time to go ekphrastic!

What's ekphrasis?

It's the interpretation of one art form to another. Ekphrasis is probably most common in music. A composer watches a film and writes the musical score--the story she hears as she watches the film. In Becky Sernett's Ekphrastic Writing workshop that begins Saturday, March 6 (2:00 - 4:00 p.m., and runs for 4 weeks), writers will get the chance to translate the stories they see and hear in visual and musical art into words. The first class will meet at the Downtown Writer's Center, and future classes will make excursions to local art galleries.

There's still room to register, so sign up now!

Rust Wire Interview with Greg Ames

2010-02-24T09:26:00.000-08:00

Please join us Friday, February 26th at 7pm for a reading by award-winning novelist Greg Ames.

And in the meantime, check out this interview with Greg for Rust Wire.

See you downtown!

Small Press Spotlight :: H_NGM_N

2010-02-23T04:25:00.001-08:00

Yesterday (scroll down!) Nate Pritts gave a little background on his History of Small Press Publishing class & the project the students are working on - spotlight interviews with current small presses!

Fitting that today's interview, conducted by DWC student Jack Davis, is with Nate in his capacity as founder & principal editor of H_NGM_N - an online journal found here, with a burgeoning book series, here.

Take it, Jack!

Jack Davis: Besides individuality, what attributes do you think might make a poetic piece stand out more affectively?

Nate Pritts: One of the first things I notice about a poem is its use of a consistent voice - or its consistent misuse of consistency in terms of voice. I'm also drawn to a sense of risk, a sense of recklessness - either in terms of imagery, the utterance itself, the subject being discussed & the speaker's relationship to it. A poem that feels too safe or tidy turns me off immediately.

JD: Could you reveal your feelings, contrasting established writing tempos with oral performance rhythms and perhaps other orchestrations that might shape the sound or silence?

NP: For a long time I never paid much attention to how my poems sounded - I didn't read them out loud very much & worked on the page for the page. Now, I'm very aware - constantly reading my poems out to hear how the meaning is enforced or undermined by the sounds. I think what this means is that I'm thinking of my poetry in both private & public ways & trying to strike a balance between a poetic line that has rhythm & a driven compelling force established both through the meaning & the sounds.

JD: Other than READ, WRITE, and SUBMIT, what might be your best advise for an aspiring poet?

NP: Those are three pretty good words of advice. I was asked the other night for some general advice - not specifically about writing - & I said "I think we should all try really damn hard all the time." So, in addition to reading & writing & submitting - we should care a lot about those things. We should bust our asses.

JD: Whose responsibility to experience is the mystery, shape, or practice of poetry-the poet or the reader?

NP: The word responsibility trips me up a little here but I think, in general, the poet is the one who is writing the poem. I can't walk around & ensure all my readers are "doing it right." I need to do the best job I can to create the poem as an experience in & of itself - not just notation of an experience, but a little circus of its own.

JD: Are we relegating the art of poetry to epitaph?

NP: I don't think we are! But some people might be. I think there are lots of people who think of poetry as one specific thing - & some of these people are poets! It's time to embrace the various possibilities for the lively & dynamic art of poetry making. Poets can't complain that no one reads poetry & sulk. We need to find answers & work hard.

JD: If it’s not prying, could you share some personal favorite poems by form & content?

NP: I have too many poems & poets that I would list as favorites to even mention. I think that should be the point - & my favorites are wide ranging. Though I don't typically write formal verse, some of my favorite poems are in set forms. I don't think we can discount anything.

That Ongoing Conversation

2010-02-22T13:11:00.001-08:00

Nate Pritts teaches at the DWC but can usually be found here - http://www.natepritts.com

This season, the DWC is running a class on “publishing” in the PRO Program & I’m lucky enough to be the one teaching it. Overall, the class details the history of literary publication - both in terms of literary journals & publishing houses, as they are records of literary movements & as they forge sustaining relationships in the lives of our major authors. Of course, we’re also tracking the contemporary landscape, figuring out where in the world our own work fits in.

In pure Marxist fashion, we'll wrest the means of production & dissemination from the vast & faceless & offer up our own work - via online journals or produced chapbooks.

One of our ongoing projects is for each class member to pick one small / literary / independent press as the focus for their special project, asking the head honcho of said press a few questions as a way of illuminating their mission (why they do what they do) & their aesthetic (of the work they publish & of the physical deliverable objects).

So stay tuned. We’ll be posting up the resulting interviews as “small press spotlights” right here on the DWC blog in the near future.

Regrets to Those Who Were Turned Away This Evening...

2010-02-19T18:41:00.000-08:00

Good evening and thanks to those who made the effort to attend the reading this evening. I understand that, due to miscommunication with the front desk, that some of you were told there was no reading at the DWC. This was unfortunate since I arrived to set up just after you left. On such a damp, sloppy night it is hard enough to get out the door but to miss the reading must have been disheartening. I just wanted you to know that I am sorry for the miscue and disappointment that faced each of you who missed the reading.

Thanks to those who were there and thanks to Lyrae for sharing her work. Anyone who would want to purchase either of Lyrae's books can contact Phil when he returns next week. There are more in his office and they are worth the dead presidents!

Georgia
Pinch-hitting DWC Host

] Open Interval [ - Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon and Her New Work

2010-02-19T07:07:00.000-08:00

In 2006, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon read from her first book, Black Swan, which had won the Cave Canem Prize. I was enthralled in the moment as she read and wanted more, so I bought the book to lounge in the language when the busy life around me permitted, with a cup of tea by my side on the table and Anthony Hamilton crooning in the background, much like now on this snowy morning.

Lyrae returns to the DWC this evening at 7 p.m. to read from her new collection ] Open Interval [ and perhaps share even newer work. ] Open Interval [ was a finalist for the National Book Award so this Cornell University Assistant Professor has significantly stepped up her game.

The stars in the sky, the flowers before her in the garden, the divorce and the accepting the life ahead as a sole entity rather than a partner all come to play in this collection.

A sparse sense of phrasing is prevalent in Lyrae's work. It is obvious that she trusts the intelligence of her readers. As she references Harriet Tubman, astronomy, Rilke, her interior world, her ancestors, there is plenty of room for the reader to slow down in the poem. Even her relationship with punctuation serves to slow the eye down and allow the mind to rest in each word. And punctuation becomes a new symbology with this poet. There are personal symbols for breath and timing that give these poems a unique profile.

To experience these poems in breath, in sound, join us in the Downtown Writer's Center at the Greater Syracuse YMCA at 340 Montgomery Street, at 7 p.m. This is still another FREE reading sponsored by the DWC with funding from the NYS Council on the Arts. We hope to see you tonight and to introduce you to Lyrae Van-Clief-Stefanon.

Friday Means FREE READING @ the DWC

2010-02-18T08:30:00.000-08:00

First of all...we know that spring is just 6 or 7 weeks away. This creates an optimism in upstate NY, rumors of robins marking an early return, some hearty growth pushing through snow in the cracks along the basement, all signs that we have survived another winter thus far and the end is in sight.

One of the things that make the season slide on by is the reading series at the DWC. Ah yes, nationally known writers sharing their words and it does not cost a thing beyond parking, if you choose a lot, and the cost of a book so you can get it signed. And the books are always $15 or less. Hey! A bargain in anyone's eyes.

So this week, as we continue our journey through the dark months, we will be hosting Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, in a return visit to read from her new collection, ] Open Interval [, published by the University of Pittsburg Press and recently recognized as a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award for Poetry. Lyrae is also the author of Black Swan, which won the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in African-American Review, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Rattapallax and Shenandoah and several anthologies.

Lyrae lives in Ithaca, NY, where she is an Assistant Professor at Cornell University; Tomorrow will be her second visit to the DWC. Please join us for this evening of marvelous verse. We will post a review of ] Open Interval [ tomorrow.

Do you want a sneak peak of the poems we will be receiving from our guest? Visit Laura Ryan's new blog on Central New York literary news, Syracuse Books Examiner for a video clip.

More on Our Wise Woman

2010-02-17T07:01:00.000-08:00

DWC Friends,

Here's the official press release from our friends at BOA Editions, regarding the passing of Lucille Clifton.

National Book Award-winning Poet Lucille Clifton Dies

Rochester, NY — BOA Editions is sad to mark the passing of poet Lucille Clifton on February 13, 2010. Lucille Clifton (born Thelma Lucille Sayles) was raised in Depew, New York. She attended Howard University from 1953 to 1955 and graduated from the State University of New York at Fredonia in 1955. In 1958 she married Fred James Clifton. She worked as a claims clerk in the New York State Division of Employment, Buffalo (1958–1960), and as literature assistant in the Office of Education in Washington, D.C. (1960–1971). Her first poetry collection Good Times was published in 1969, and listed by The New York Times as one of the year's ten best books.

Lucille Clifton published seven poetry collections with BOA Editions. Her first two BOA collections, Next: New Poems, and, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969-1980, were both published in 1987. In one of her many unprecedented accomplishments, both of those books were named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She was awarded the National Book Award for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000 (BOA, 2000). In 2007, Lucille Clifton became the first African American woman to receive the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, one of the largest literary honors for work in the English language. Her other awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences; the Shelley Memorial Prize; and the Charity Randall Citation. The Poetry Society of America awarded Clifton their Centennial Frost Medal for 2010.

Thom Ward, Clifton’s editor at BOA Editions, said of her poetry, “Lucille Clifton’s poems have their own special ‘signature’ as, say, the work of Elizabeth Bishop and Emily Dickinson. Mixing spare, muscular, visual language, a deft balance of idea and image with powerful silences and taut line-breaks – you always know when you are in the presence of a Clifton poem.”

Longtime BOA poet Naomi Shihab Nye says, of the lasting power of Lucille Clifton’s work, “How many times have her humanizing words helped us in these devastating years of doublespeak, war and doubt? No matter what was going on or where we found ourselves, her words and tone were balance beams, lifting us back into energy and verve. Cleansing the air! All these years, she swept clutter away with a few well-filtered lines. Once, shortly after a grueling hospital stay, she showed up at the Folger Library with students, for a reading by Arab Americans—when we said, "’It's incredible that you made the effort to come!’ she said, ‘Where else would I be?’ She showed up. Always in this life. It's that grace she leaves us.”

Li-Young Lee, BOA poet and friend of Clifton, notes, "If the chief aim of civilization is to provide security for human beings, Lucille was one of its finest builders and architects. Her work sorts meaning from noise, sense from nonsense, good readings of our world from bad readings. She was a friend to me, a mentor, and a mirror of my better self. I loved her and learned to love the world because of her."

Lucille Clifton served as a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary's College in Maryland. She was appointed a Fellow of The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and elected as Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 1999. Memorably, Lucille Clifton dedicated her first BOA collection, Next: New Poems, to her recently deceased husband Fred. The dedication read simply:

to fred

see you later alligator

A Master of the Art of JOY: Remembering Lucille Clifton

2010-02-16T06:20:00.000-08:00

by Georgia Popoff : gappoet.blogspot.com

On Saturday, February 13^th, Lucille Clifton passed away at age 73. A remarkable poet, a woman of grace and strength beyond the ordinary human, and always beaming brighter than the sun itself, a master of the art of JOY.

I received the news from a dear poet friend who knew Ms. Clifton very well. I am grateful for the personal message rather than discovering the loss on line or on the news. But the news traveled faster than the speed of sound and the internet was humming. There were grieving words all over Facebook. I became very quiet in my own sadness.

For years I have been saying that Lucille Clifton is the woman I want to be when I grow up. With the news of her passing, I will strive even harder. Ms. Clifton has been my role model since well before the day I met her in the garden at a posh Rochester home years ago. And more so, since then. But that day was a life-changing experience.

It was a gorgeous June afternoon. "Blessing the Boats" had just been released and I was invited to a reception in her honor before she read and spoke on behalf of an incest survivor organization. Of course, Ms. Clifton was regal, seated among the blossoming vines and shrubs. The light of the late day sun was as soft a gold as her own light.

Coaxing Nectar from Longing, my first book was in print and I brought my "freshman" gift to offer to this wonderful teacher and inspiration. I felt just as I did at the end of the school year in elementary school when I would present fresh cut peonies from our yard to my teacher as my parting gift. My inner kidlet was pushing through and I was shy, tongue-tied.

I was invited to sit by her with a gentle pat of her hand on the seat of the lawn chair beside her. She was sure we knew each other although we had never met before that day. Yet I felt like I was with a cherished auntie and she made me so comfortable as she greeted each who came to shake her hand, extend their admiration. She shared that she was originally to be named "Georgia" but that changed after she was born. She shared so many small things with me that afternoon and in it, I became a better me. There I sat by her side through the cocktail hour until it was time to leave for the venue. It would be the first of several times that she and I would meet, although always briefly, since so many people needed so much from her.

That evening, as she unfolded her story through and around her poems for a standing-room only audience jammed in the hall, we all were transfixed and transported. This would not be the only time I would bear witness to this honesty and power.

At the end of the Q & A, I raised my hand. She called on me with that welcoming smile. My question was simple: "Ms. Clifton, with all that you have experienced, that you have been through, how is it that, like some of us, you choose JOY?" She gave me that pointed, gleaming smile again as she walked from behind the podium to offer her response.

"I choose JOY because I am capable of it...and there are those who are not."

She went on to explain that she felt it her responsibility to be an example of thriving, not just surviving. She said that survivor mode is victim consciousness, which does not take one into true healing.

She said much more, messages that I heard from her at other readings, events, fundraisers for breast cancer support and research, etc., after this first astounding evening. Her words became my mantra. At times her words, as her poetry, have been my lifeline.

Last year, at AWP, I was able to visit with her for a short time in all the fray. I presented my second book as my gift again. I thanked her for all I have become because of her. Then I sat beside Jennifer Pashley during the tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks as Lucille read the poem “A Mother,” one of the most moving pieces of verse I have ever read. She rendered her dear friend’s poem with sensitivity and heart. Jennifer and I were given to hot, salty tears.

There have been whisperings that we would not have Lucille Clifton much longer for a couple of years. She survived multiple face-offs with cancer, kidney failure, other ailments, too much death around her, and the fact that she experienced the damage and violence of incest. She was a warrior in so many ways and one quite capable of righteous indignation. Like me, she never completed her Bachelor’s degree but never let even that stop her from satisfaction and success.

Now, as her soul has soared home, as we bathe ourselves in our own memories for those of us fortunate enough to have met her, as those who have known her through her poems immerse in her presence, we remember that smile, that fearless voice for what is right and true, the majestic simplicity of her craft, and we must remember to be JOY in all ways in order to honor Ms. Lucille Clifton, our beloved elder, way-shower, bright light.

Thank you so very much and blessed be, dear One.

Georgia Popoff is a poet with two published collections of poetry, a teaching artist, arts-in-education professional development specialist, editor of Comstock Review, Downtown Writer’s Center faculty member, and board member of the Association of Teaching Artists. Georgia is Poet-in-Residence in numerous school districts and also teaches adult writing workshops.

Wednesday Writing Prompt

2010-02-10T05:41:00.000-08:00

by Steve Almond : www.stevenalmond.com

Join us Friday at the RedHouse for a reading by Steve Almond, author of, among many others, the brand new This Won't Take But a Minute, Honey, which is composed of 30 very brief stories, and 30 very brief essays on the psychology and practice of writing. Here, the DWC brings you Steve's very own favorite writing prompt:

Write about a moment in your life that still haunts you. Could be something wonderful (first kiss) or something horrible (first great shame). But it should be the sort of memory that you can't shake. Now write about the actual moments of peak emotion. This should be a very short period of time -- no more than a minute. It's good to set up the situation with some context, so we know what's going on. But once we do, try to slow down as much as you can and write about what you were seeing and hearing and thinking and feeling in that moment of peak emotion. The idea is to capture everything that's going on -- emotionally, sensually, intellectually, psychologically -- in those moments that matter most.

As Steve would say, Rock on.

See you Friday at the RedHouse.

Steve Almond is the author the story collections My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B.B. Chow, the novel Which Brings Me to You (with Julianna Baggott), and the non-fiction books Candyfreak and (Not That You Asked). His new book, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, will be out in Spring 2010.

Which Brings Me to Steve: On Reading Steve Almond

2010-02-09T05:50:00.001-08:00

by John Sheedy

I can’t remember where I first encountered Steve Almond’s fiction, but that first taste left me hungering for more. I got my sweaty hands on My Life in Heavy Metal, Mr. Almond’s first story collection and eagerly read it. The book had been criticized for containing too much sex, as if such a thing was possible, but I found it, like Mama Bear’s porridge, to be just right. In short order I read, The Evil B. B. Chow and Other Stories, Mr. Almond’s second collection, and devoured Candyfreak: A Journey through the Chocolate Underbelly of America. “On the Road” for chocoholics, Candyfreak describes Mr. Almond’s travels in search of the offbeat candy makers who toil in the shadow of Mars, Nestle, and Hershey’s.

I admired Mr. Almond’s flamboyant use of language, the way he pushed the boundaries of metaphor, and his relentless refusal to take the world and himself seriously. Reading Steve Almond inspired me to be more adventurous in my own writing and to take myself a little less seriously.

Then I read Which Brings Me to You: A Novel in Confessions written with Julianna Baggott, in which a thirty-something couple recount their former love affairs in a series of letters. It is Mr. Almond’s and Ms. Baggott’s compassion for their protagonists, their warm embrace of each character’s follies and foibles that elevate the letters above mere pillow gossip. Mr. Almond, who has said that he loves writing sex scenes, is particularly adept at elucidating the pungent, viscous, tactile realities of sex, teasing out the underlying comedy inherent in lovemaking, without ever allowing the desperate groping, grasping, and fumbling of his characters to slip over the line into caricature or threaten the frontiers of good taste. I loved it. I wanted to grow up to be just like Steve Almond.

John Sheedy graduated from Syracuse University, and is a current 2nd year DWC PRO student in fiction. He is the rarely published author of short stories and enjoys good fellowship as much as the next man.

No Happiness like Ours: A Note on the LiterarY Dinners

2010-02-06T06:03:00.000-08:00

by Georgia Popoff: gappoet.blogspot.com

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry. -- Mark Strand

Throughout Central New York on Saturday, February 6th, the aromas of fine foods and the words of noted area writers will waft as the 2010 YMCA Arts Branch LiterarY Dinners commence in the early evening. Each year, on the first Saturday in February, Y-Arts friends and Board members host dinners in their homes to support the many programs for youth and community that are provided by the Y-Arts Branch of the Greater Syracuse YMCA. Afterschool programs, arts-based learning experiences for youth, music lessons, and the Downtown Writer’s Center all benefit from this community-driven fundraiser. The cuisines vary from home to home but may include Indian, Tuscan, southern style comfort food, tapas, all dependent on the hosts’ talents and palettes. If you would like to attend next year’s LiterarY Dinner, contact Phil Memmer at 315.474.6851 extension 328. If you care to donate, make your tax-deductible check out to the YMCA and mark Y-Arts in the memo. To those who are dining together Saturday, bon appetit!

5 Ways of Looking at Santee

2010-02-05T06:04:00.000-08:00

by Georgia Popoff : gappoet.blogspot.com

Santee Frazier is the next poet to share words with the DWC community at 7 p.m. tonight, Friday, February 5^th. Santee will be reading from Dark Thirty, released by University of Arizona Press.

Through the miracle of the internet, Santee and I shared a few short exchanges based on random questions of my own design. In spite of the press of both of our busy lives, we had a few moments before our screens for the following:

Georgia Popoff: Because place is such an important element informing the poet, your roots in Oklahoma must be a significant aspect of your voice. So I would like to ask three questions about you from that perspective: First, What is the most common misconception you think people have of your home state?

Santee Frazier: Usually what people associate with Oklahoma is that the people are somehow less intelligent due to their prominent accent. People often associate Oklahoma (southern) hospitality as a simpleton small talk, which it is not.

GP: What would you say to someone who first noticed these two highway signs and were confused: "Correction Facility - Do Not Pick Up Hitchhikers" and "Don't Drive into Smoke?"

SF: Only if the hitchhiker is a relative do you pick them up, which also depends if said relative owes you money, other than that wave and carry on. Smoke in CNY? It would most likely be fog so I would say drive on through. If in California, on a smoky day near Folsom prison, do not pick up the guy in the white D.O.C. jump suit with tears tattooed in his face. Unless of course the fire and smoke were all apart of the escape plan you hatched over a series of collect calls with your self-proclaimed "innocent" cousin, in which case you need no longer worry about driving.

GP: Thanks Santee...as for the road signs...I was referring specifically to those in Oklahoma. They fascinated me.

SF: I have never really seen these signs. It’s been 10 plus years since I spent any real time in Oklahoma. I have lived in New Mexico for more than half my life, and sometimes I feel more New Mexican than Oklahoman. Either way I wrote a response:

Oklahoma is known for becoming very dry in the summer time. The grass dies, and naturally, susceptible to fire. The fires spread fast and are almost uncontrollable and can be very dangerous for highway travelers, hence the signs. No doubt adding the do not pick up hitchhikers element of the sign is there because most of the Oklahoma state prisons are located in rural areas were the fires pop up in the summertime.

GP: What sound do you miss most since you have been living in the Northeast?

SF: The sound of sand splashing against a window.

GP: Other questions: Your blog is all about food. What was the first meal you ever made and how old were you?

SF: I was home alone one night and made this weird version of Hamburger Helper when I was about 10. I browned some ground beef, salt, pepper, cut some potatoes, and splattered a bunch of ketchup into the pan. I added a cup of water to make the sauce. I waited until the potatoes were soft, then I grubbed out in front of the TV and watched Married With Children.

GP: What is your favorite thing to order off of Simon's menu when you have dinner at China Road and how hot do you like your entrees?

SF: I tend to order a variety of dishes when at China Road (the prices are so reasonable). We order the fried dumplings to start. Then the Szechuan beef noodle soup, tea smoked duck, and Shanghai Veggies. I usually like the my dishes (as a former resident of New Mexico) very spicy. Simon usually brings out some of his spicy salsa for me to add to my dinner. Lately we have been ordering the Chicken Chindoo style. We usually like to spy on other tables to see what they order.

For more about Santee, please visit his home page. You can also follow his terrific foodie blog if you love to cook and dine. We hope you will join us at the DWC for Santee’s reading and to meet him yourselves.

Word Replacement

2010-02-04T05:48:00.000-08:00

by Santee Frazier : http://santeefrazier.com

This morning the DWC blog brings you an exclusive writing exercise from visiting author, Santee Frazier. Please join us on Friday for Santee's reading, 7pm at the DWC!

When I find myself not moved by voice, memory, or music, instead of staring at the computer screen, I type out one of my favorite poems. The act of typing accomplishes two things: you get to know the formal considerations of the poet (how they navigated the page), and you gain an intimate relationship with the text. After I have typed the poem I look for artistry, meter, phrasing, etc.... I really don't spend much time deciphering the poem being that interpretation plays little or no role in how this exercise conducts itself. From there I find all of the nouns in the poem, writing out a list, then I pull out my dictionary and begin replacing only the nouns (I usually don't replace the verbs being that I want to keep the structure of the poem).

This exercise will yield varying results depending on how much effort goes in the act of replacing the nouns. I find the best results come when I spend a great deal of time researching then replacing the nouns, rather than using the first word that pops into my head (usually a synonym pops up, boring). For instance using words related to anthropology will drastically change the poem’s meter and tone.

First start out with a short poem, and then slowly build up to something longer (the longest I have tried was Jorie Graham's "What the End is For"). Most of the poems will not be keepers, but the exercise helps build skill set and sharpens your abilities to glean poetry for reasons other than explication.

Rather than becoming frustrated and abandoning your daily writing ritual you can practice this exercise. After a few tries you will notice interesting things happening when the words juxtaposeand begin creating language.

Santee Frazier is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. He holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Syracuse University. His poems have appeared in American Poet, Narrative Magazine, Ontario Review, and other literary journals. His first collection of poems Dark Thirty was released by the University of Arizona Press in the spring of 2009.

A Dark Thirty Review

2010-02-02T08:47:00.000-08:00

Please join us this Friday, Feb. 5th as the Downtown Writer's Center welcomes poet Santee Frazier, who will read from his debut collection Dark Thirty.

Today the DWC blog features a review of Dark Thirty, written by poet Shin Yu, for Southwestern American Literature.

You can access that review via Shin Yu's blog here.

Tune in again tomorrow & Thursday for more features from Santee Frazier, including an exclusive writing prompt & a conversation between Santee & the DWC's own Georgia Popoff.

The Friday Round Up

2010-01-29T05:40:00.000-08:00

by Jennifer Pashley: www.jenniferpashley.com

I was going to post the first Friday Round Up today, including faculty news, latest & greatest publications, etc. But the truth:

I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting. -- J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

Because this happened: J. D. Salinger, Literary Recluse, Dies at 91

And I'm also including here, the link to the piece Rick Moody wrote for NPR.

So I invite you to post your comments & thoughts about Salinger here, or not. Maybe the thing to do is to keep them to yourself. Don't ever tell anybody anything.

Hope to see you all tonight for the Dereks' reading.

5 Questions for Derek Pollard

2010-01-28T10:27:00.000-08:00

by Jennifer Pashley : www.jenniferpashley.com

Another new feature on the DWC blog: writers in conversation with other writers. This week, I asked Derek Pollard some questions about art, about music and collaboration. Derek brings his l'autre to the DWC this Friday, Jan 29th, at 7:00 pm, to read from their collaboratively written, Inconsequentia.

Jennifer Pashley: Tell me your top 3 films. Not necessarily the world's top 3; what's good for Pollard?

Derek Pollard: I can never adequately answer questions having to do with lists, particularly when those lists are culturally orientated. In this case, I simply adore film. My favorites begin with the Lumiere brothers and extend through Chaplin and Keaton to Sofia Coppola and Wes Anderson by way of the various international New Waves and independent experimental cinema. If hard pressed, I would say that Casablanca remains the one film I return to with feverish insistence. Films I have recently watched (in some cases for the umpteenth time): Redland, Divorce Italian Style, The Matador, Something's Gotta Give, The Darjeeling Limited, and Lost in Translation.

JP: What visual art moves you?

DP: I am not sure what you mean by "moves" in this case.

JP: I mean what really hits you in the gut, but maybe that's not what visual art does for you. (It's often what it does for me.)

DP: I am interested in any visual artwork that invites me to reconsider myself (or selves) and the world in which I live in light of that artwork's existence, even if that existence is necessarily limited or deliberately ephemeral. I am most attracted to visual artwork that provokes a sense of dislocation, that confronts the viewer with a potential "newness." I suppose, too, that I look for (or, if I am less generous and more accurate, I attempt to impose) analogues between visual artwork and writing, between the various "artistic" media or forms of creative expression, in order to facilitate such productive dislocation.

JP: Tell me (briefly) about your fascination with Dadaism.

DP: Dada is silly. Dada is serious. Dada is seriously silly and sillily serious. If nothing else, Dada is elusive, illusive, allusive, and the like. I like Dada like Dada likes me. We are silly and serious and silly-serious, it and me. Dada, my dear, is a frilly tree.

JP: What are you listening to these days? How important is sound?

DP: Sound is an integral event, space, object, field. I am listening all the time, guided in different directions at different times by its fascinating multiplicities. As for music and organized sound, I have been listening with great joy to Jonathan Schwartz's Saturday and Sunday shows on WNYC, Garrison Keilor's A Prairie Home Companion, Joe Puleo's Air Power, Regina Specktor's album Begin to Hope, a great deal of Muddy Waters, far too many Smiths albums, My Bloody Valentine's album Loveless (on cassette in my car as I drive along the Jersey Shore to and from work), Sir Alec Guniness reading Eliot's "The Wasteland" (also on cassette, also in my car), and all of Galaxy 500's albums.

JP: You're a proponent of collaboration in a vastly solitary field. Why?

DP: I find collaboration to be an interesting and fecund way to disorient myself, to interrupt and refashion my own compositional (or recording?) strategies. It provides opportunities for interventions that might not arise if I were merely writing individually - if one can ever be said to write "individually," that is. I like the explicit acknowledgment of the confusion between the singular and the plural during the collaborative process, between the "I" and the "we." For instance, I am very much intrigued by the fact that in several cases in the "22 23" section of Inconsequentia, Henderson and I can no longer remember who authored which poem. In those cases, the poem itself has displaced us as individual authors, insisting that we set aside such distinctions in favor of other, perhaps more productive, considerations.

Jennifer Pashley is a fiction instructor and the workshops coordinator for The Downtown Writer's Center. She is the author of the story collection States, and has had stories appear in Mississippi Review, Los Angeles Review and SWINK.

Cento

2010-01-27T05:39:00.001-08:00

This morning, the DWC brings you the first of its Wednesday writing prompts and exercises. Everyone's got their favorites — prompts that produce a surprising piece of writing — and we've asked our instructors, our visiting authors and our students to share what's worked for them, what really gets the pen moving. This week, we're featuring the Cento, a favorite of DWC instructor and visiting author, Derek Pollard.

Over the years and at all levels of teaching — from primary school to advanced creative writing workshops — I have had tremendous success with the cento as a simultaneous reading and writing exercise that helps define and contextualize "authorship," collaboration, and self-reflexive creative praxis. Below is the definition of cento as it appears on The Academy of American Poets website:
From the Latin word for "patchwork," the cento is a poetic form made up of lines from poems by other poets. Though poets often borrow lines from other writers and mix them in with their own, a true cento is composed entirely of lines from other sources. Early examples can be found in the work of Homer and Virgil.
Generally, I will invite a group of students to contribute a single line from a text of their choosing (the texts need not be "literary" nor do they need belong to one particular genre) to add to a line I have selected at random from a text. This new collaborative text expands until all the "authors" agree to end the project. In some cases, no order of contributors is observed; in other cases, no "author" can contribute two consecutive lines. The constraints vary depending on the course and the students. As one example, for a cento begun as part of my DWC course last winter, I myself would add lines only from texts written by female authors. I did not impose this constraint on the other "authors," but I suspect that each of us was bringing one or more of these independently determined constraints to the project. The one rule that must be followed in all cases is this: the "authors" cannot include any writing original to themselves or to their collaborators, and all lines must be documented so that we have a record of the source texts. Lines can be selected at random, based on numerical or mathematical formulae, etc. The texts generated in this way pose many critically productive challenges to the concepts mentioned above ("authorship," collaboration, reading-writing) that we discuss in relation to the text itself.

Derek Pollard's work has appeared in American Book Review, Colorado Review, Pleiades, Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak, and Zoland Poetry. He is Managing Editor of Barrow Street Press, and co-author with Derek Henderson of the poetry collection, Inconsequentia (BlazeVOX 2009).

FISH! On Working with Derek Pollard

2010-01-26T05:49:00.000-08:00

by Daniel Reinhold: www.danielreinhold.com

The DWC's very own Derek Pollard will return for a reading with Derek Henderson this Friday. Derek Pollard received his MFA from the University of Utah, and has twenty-seven muses: a practice common in that state. He is a student of the experimental and has widely diverse influences from John Cage to Lao Tsu from the Italian futurists to Brian Eno. He is interested in random composition. He has been known to throw things out of windows. Cut up pieces of old letters, severed fish heads, and once after a long night of alleged inebriation, his jockey shorts. He later named them Ode to Fruit of the Loom.

Derek’s poetry is clean, poignant, and sparse. It is often accessible. A term he clearly despises.

He has performed experimental readings previously at the DWC, once having three poets read simultaneously. Another time he orchestrated five poets reading randomly from texts. One poet read off book and intermittently shouted the word “fish.” Reportedly the poet was in the throes of a two-week ether binge. Pollard, reeking of chemicals, denied any such allegations.

Derek is returning to Syracuse after having been imprisoned in New Jersey. A condition clearly preferable to living freely in New Jersey. He spends his time hanging out in shopping malls watching girls with big hair, and drinking Orange Julius’s.

His return to Syracuse has raised ardent protest from the Daughters of the American Revolution for undisclosed reasons. The reading is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served. Wine, cheese and fresh severed fish heads.

Daniel Reinhold's work has appeared in several galleries throughout Maryland and New York. He is currently a DWC PRO student in poetry. He lives in Ithaca, NY with his dog Zelda, in a tree-surrounded studio within sight of Cayuga Lake.

Short Bursts of Brilliance: Course Spotlight on Visiting Authors

2010-01-21T05:35:00.000-08:00

by Elizabeth Twiddy : www.elizabethtwiddy.com

I’m thrilled to be teaching the DWC’s first Visiting Authors course this Winter Term. We, the DWC faculty, put our heads together and decided that a course like this, taught each term by a different instructor, would greatly benefit ourselves and our students, alike. So, what is it? Why’s it so great?

The authors that come to read for our DWC series are among the best in the country and the world. We want to maximize what we take from these gems—these short bursts of brilliance that share a room with us once in a while.

We realized that it’s not always easy to grasp what an author is saying when he or she reads aloud: creative works of writing are dense, and they’re not usually 100% accessible the first time around, especially when they’re only heard and not seen. We want to be right there with our Visiting Authors when they come to read their fabulous works at the DWC—we want to get the maximum possible out of those special readings. That’s where the Visiting Authors course comes in: before each reading, our class will meet for an hour to discuss a sampling of that author’s work so that we can all better benefit from the reading.

I’m honored and excited to be teaching the first round of the Visiting Authors course. We have a fabulous line-up this term: poets Derek Pollard and Derek Henderson will read from their co-authored collection; Santee Frazier will read from highly acclaimed his first book of poems; Steve Almond will read from his fiction and nonfiction; Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon will read from her collections of poetry; Greg Ames will read from his new award-winning novel; and poets Nate Pritts and Matt Hart will read together from their various and respective books of poems.

Classes begin next week, and there’s still room left in the course: sign up now!

See you at the DWC!

Elizabeth Twiddy’s first collection of poems is Love-Noise (Standing Stone Books, 2010). She has a chapbook, Zoo Animals in the Rain (Turtle Ink Press, 2009), and her poems have appeared in many journals, including Barrow Street, POOL, The Alembic, Two Rivers Review, and the Australian journal Skive.

1 + 1 = 1: The Consequent Inconsequentia of Derek Henderson & Derek Pollard

2010-01-19T06:16:00.000-08:00

by Nate Pritts :: http://www.natepritts.com

Derek Henderson & Derek Pollard. INCONSEQUENTIA. BlazeVOX Books: 2010.

Through the haze of call & response, the lingering mist of collage / pastiche, of collaborative fusion that leads us forcibly through the stumbling & visibly wrought syntax, Derek Henderson & Derek Pollard have found a way to write one book together, to present single poems with multiple voices, to think themselves into a broken math computation where 1 + 1 = 1 & the only thing divisible is the self from what it loves.

Despite a colossal & buoyant sense of playfulness that runs throughout these poems, the vital strain is one of crumbling sadness, bumbling in the face of loss – a kind of hard-headed certainty in the face of the inevitability that “Things happen. / People die. // […] We balance” (19).

This constant tug of war is the shining kernel at the center of the book – the very fact that the book presents itself as one yowling utterance though written by two people. What saves us? is the question asked over & over again. Implicitly, our buddies. Our friends save us.

The poetry seems jumpy in spots; a kind of focused attention is brought to bear on the presentations piled up though the focus shifts subtly yet quickly. We feel this both through the imagery & the literal narrative / associative blossoming from one line to the next as well as in the way the syntax itself generates the insights & movements of the poem:

Responders. Respond. re spawned.
New governmentalists. spawned.
Returns. Returners. Reason Has Turned.
(11)

This kind of freewheeling jangle serves as a best characterization for the collection over – the collection of poems, of words & lines, & this collection of Dereks – wherein reciprocity is the thing whether between, among, or casually flung.

Nate Pritts is the author of The Wonderfull Yeare (Cooper Dillon), as well as two previous full-length books of poems – Sensational Spectacular (BlazeVOX) & Honorary Astronaut (Ghost Road Press). He is the founder & principal editor of H_NGM_N.

Drenched in Lightning Bugs

2010-01-15T07:38:00.000-08:00

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. ~Mark Twain

Welcome to The Downtown Writer's Center blog . . . our home away from the official YMCA website and your source for news & updates on classes, book reviews of visiting authors, craft essays & writing prompts.

If you're new to the Downtown Writer's Center, click over to party central for the scoop on this season's classes, our Friday Night Reading Series & all the other brouhaha we have in store.

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Thinking of taking a winter workshop? There's still time to register!

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment. ~Hart Crane

Classes begin Jan. 25th, and feature a full range of workshops, from beginning right up to advanced. Be sure to check out our newest classes: Visiting Authors, which meets each Friday night before readings at the DWC, from Jan. 29 thru March 6. And don't miss out on Silence in the Snowy Fields: Writing About Weather & Place with Nate Pritts. We have to live here . . . we might as well write about it.

Stay tuned for more faculty spotlights, book reviews and writing prompts.

Write more. Write better. Write here. Write now.

The YMCA's Downtown Writer's Center

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Drenched in Lightning Bugs