Written/Spoken Series to Celebrate Soon-to-Be Graduating Writers Tuesday, April 5

Five soon-to-be graduating writers will headline the April Written/Spoken series reading on Tuesday, April 5 at Pitt-Greensburg. The reading will begin at 7 p.m. in the Village Hall coffeehouse on campus and is free and open to the public.

The line-up will include:

* Rachel Kuskie, a senior English Writing major who specializes in creative nonfiction. Kuskie will be reading from a collection of essays that deal with her experiences as a race-car driver and, especially, her father’s daughter. Kuskie’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pendulum magazine, the Pitt-Greensburg Insider, and in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, as well as on her blog – http://www.girlsagearhead.blogspot.com
Kuskie is also the winner of this year’s Ida B. Wells Prize, the annual Pitt-Greensburg award for the best in student nonfiction and journalism.

* Rin Little, a senior English Writing major and poet. Little will be reading a poetry sequence dealing with the subjects of mental illness and family. A member of the Sigma Tau Delta literary honor society, Little has published work in Pendulum magazine and elsewhere. She also blogs about her experiences with alternative cultures at http://www.thealternativeandtheunderground.blogspot.com.

* Katie Mustovich, a senior English Writing major with an emphasis in creative nonfiction, will read excerpts from her memoir/essay collection, “I Still Hide Behind My Mother.” Mustovich’s work has been published in Pendulum, and she maintains the literary blogsite, LitBurgh (http://www.litburgh.blogspot.com).

* Janelle Sheetz, the winner of the 2011 Joan Didion Creative Nonfiction Award at Pitt-Greensburg and a senior English Writing major. Sheetz will read from her essay collection, “Fayettenam,” a series of place-based pieces based on Sheetz’ Fayette County home. Sheetz writes more about Fayette County daily on her blog, http://www.fayettepa.blogspot.com.

* Natalie Strohm, a senior English Writing major, journalist and creative nonfiction writer. Strohm is currently at work on a manuscript based on the reportage of oral historian and journalistic pioneer Studs Terkel. Strohm will read from her project, “Serving,” a series of interviews with people who serve others.
Strohm, a runner-up for the 2011 Joan Didion Creative Nonfiction award, writes about her other passion, the TV show “Glee,” at http://www.gleekergirl.blogspot.com.

Professor Lori Jakiela will host the Capstone readings. Jakiela, an associate professor of English and widely-published author, teaches the English Writing senior capstone course each spring.

A reception follows the readings. Free copies of the Capstone anthology featuring work by all the readers will be available.

The Written/Spoken series is sponsored by the Academic Villages, The Pitt-Greensburg Writing Program, Pendulum, and the office of Academic Affairs. For more information about the series, or about the writing program at Pitt-Greensburg, call 724-836-7481.

Bill Deasy

Singer/Songwriter Bill Deasy is among the featured speakers at the 10th annual Pitt-Greensburg Writer's Festival, going on this week in the Village Hall coffeehouse on campus. 

On Friday, March 18 at 7 p.m. Deasy will talk on songwriting, followed by a performance and book-signing. 

Here is an excerpt from Bill O'Driscoll's article, "We comment on 50 pages each of four recent local fiction releases."  O'Driscoll reviews "Ghost Tree," Deasy's most recent novel.  

It's a sentimental premise, even corny: A dying man's last words (along with interest from a local independent filmmaker) inspires efforts to reunite a short-lived but semi-legendary rock band whose legacy is limited to one concert in their small Pennsylvania town. The former members, now ensconced in middle age, include a Catholic priest, a college administrator, a coffee-shop manager, and the semi-reclusive but seemingly ageless lead singer. This is the third novel for Deasy (the local singer-songwriter who formerly fronted The Gathering Field), and he makes it work. Sure, his narrative voice tends to be prosaic, and the dialogue too. But if his characters say "or something" a lot, they're an engagingly earnest lot, searching for answers and understanding. And if you've ever harbored a youthful dream, the promise of the band's reunion show makes for a thoughtfully pleasing, generally good-humored page-turner.

Bill O'Driscoll is the Arts & Entertainment Editor at Pittsburgh CityPaper.  Check out the full article here, which includes a review of Dave Newman's book, "Please Don't Shoot Anyone Tonight."

Pearl is accepting submissions

Pearl magazine was founded in 1974 by Joan Jobe Smith while she was an undergraduate at California State University, Long Beach. The first two issues (#1 published May 1974, #2 December 1974) were funded by the CSULB Honors Program and distributed gratis. For want of being typeset and different, those issues featured calligraphy by Smith and women only. Established poets Lyn Lifshin, Ann Menebroker, Linda King, and Rochelle Holt were included, as well as many university women poets, most notably Marilyn Johnson, who was not only published for the first time, but would eventually become a co-editor of Pearl.

 Pearl is a 96–160 page, perfect-bound magazine featuring poetry, short fiction, and black & white artwork. They sponsor the Pearl Poetry Prize, an annual contest for a full-length book, as well as the Pearl Short Story Prize, an annual fiction contest. Their annual poetry issue contains a 12–15 page section featuring the work of a single poet, and their annual fiction issue features the winner of their short story contest, as well prose poems, "short-shorts," and some of the longer stories submitted to their contest. Submissions are accepted January through June only.

"We're probably the nicest editors you'll ever find," says Joan Jobe Smith at her Craft Talk during UPGs Writer's Festival.  So, if you have something, submit it. 

Get more information on Pearl, submission guidelines and contests here.

Also, be sure to check out this interview from Verdad magazine with Marilyn Johnson.

Brad Kessler, 2011 Melanie Brown Lecturer presented by Chatham University's MFA in Creative Writing Program

Author Brad Kessler will be at the James Laughlin Music Hall on March 16 from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m.  This event is free and open to the public.  

Brad Kessler is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Birds in Fall (Scribner 2006) which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His other work includes the novel, Lick Creek (Scribner 2001) and the literary non-fiction Goat Song: A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese (Scribner 2009). He is the recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Whiting Writer’s Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and the Lange-Taylor Prize from Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies.. Kessler’s work has appeared in publications such as The New York Times Magazine, the Nation, Bomb, Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker. He lives and farms in Vermont with the photographer, Dona Ann McAdams.

More info on the event here.  

Lee Gutkind on Robots

I thought it necessary to  pay homage to Pittsburgh native Lee Gutkind, considering this is Lit-Burgh. 

Lee Gutkind is the founding editor of Creative Nonfiction and prize-winning author or editor of more than a dozen books, the most recent of which, Almost Human: Making Robots Think, was featured on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. As founder of the creative nonfiction movement, according to Harper's Magazine, and the "godfather behind creative nonfiction" (Vanity Fair), Gutkind travels widely throughout the world giving workshops and readings, explaining the craft and the mission of the genre.
 
Perhaps Gutkind IS Lit-Burgh.

You can read the chapter, "Groundhog," from Gutkind's most recent book, Almost Human: Making Robots Think, here.

“A wild book—A crazy suspense story—fascinating stuff”—that’s how host Jon Stewart described Lee Gutkind’s new book, Almost Human: Making Robots Think on The Daily Show (Comedy Central Channel) when Gutkind and Stewart squared off in an amusing and enlightening conversation and debate.

 Check out Gutkind on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart here. 

Weave Magazine

Although Weave Magazine is currently closed to all submissions, they will reopen April 15th. That's just around the bend, so check out guidelines here!

The Time Is Now

Poets & Writers Magazine has this cool thing called The Time Is Now.  The Time Is Now offers a weekly writing prompt to help you stay committed to your writing practice throughout the year. They post a poetry prompt on Mondays and a fiction prompt on Thursdays. Get writing here!

Here is one of my favorite Write Now prompts from January 10:

Write an erasure poem: Rip out one or two pages from a magazine or newspaper. Read through them, underlining words and phrases that appeal to you and that relate to each other. Using a marker or White-Out, begin to delete the words around those you underlined, leaving words and phrases that you might want to use. Keep deleting the extra language, working to construct poetic lines with the words you’ve chosen to keep.

Keeping with the baseball and poetry theme from the previous post, I've decided to share my erasure poem. I ripped out two pages from the September 12, 2005 issue of The New Yorker. Ironically, the article was about Rickey Henderson.  This is what I came up with:

Desert Sun Stadium

The desert: a prison that housed outlaws from the Wild West 

Players lounging in their underwear, chewing sunflower seeds

It ain’t Yankee Stadium

A hundred and nine degrees, hard to breathe 

Sign autographs, pose for photographs

I’m the Babe Ruth of independent leagues

Five feet ten, like a Rockette pressing forward

He hides behind wraparound sunglasses

Pants above his hips

Creases on his forehead, around his mouth

Tapped dirt out of his cleats

A cloud of dust

Where’s your fucking wheelchair?    

Time defeated the man of steal

Unceremoniously released him

Three thousand and eighty-one games

Slash at balls as they shot out of a pitching machine

Eighty-five miles an hour

No injuries. No problem with my eyes. Knees are good.

I have a little pain in my hip

Ain’t nothin’ a little ice can’t cure

Sitting on a metal chair with his shirt off

Dad, why are you doing this?

He wanted to make it to the majors

Trying to make it back to the show

They never treat us old guys well

I could go out the way I came in

It’s time to finally let go

I wasn’t getting my bat out right

Into the cage

You’re stepping too far in

The divot in the dirt too deep into his head  

Stealing Home

One night in Fresno, California, 1977

Private eyes reported back

“Your father is dead.”

An unlikely father figure

A pugnacious drinker who slugged one of his own

An in-your-face approach to the game, a  manic style of play

The catalyst, the creator of chaos

Wreak havoc on the defense

Each hitter has a strike zone uncommonly small

The size of Hitler’s heart

Collapsing his shoulders to his knees

Get on base

Three-run homers and big innings

Be a nuisance, a pest

Steal second. Steal third. Stole home four times.

It’s Rickey Henderson Night

I hear he never lifts weights—he only does pushups and situps

A yellow Volkswagen Beetle

A pair of rodent-like ears attached to its roof

A curly tail sticking out of its trunk

It’s time to exterminate the competition

Truly Nolen Pest Control—We get the bugs out for you

On the bench, soaked with sweat

Cheerleaders danced on the dugout roof

See if you can answer tonight’s trivia question

Why won’t he quit and come home?

He began to run

Fireworks explode

You got to be fearless

They’re coming for you

Everyone in the stadium knows

I don’t give a dang

Bounce violently, brutally pounding his body

Everyone knows you’re going

I’m gone

Start out low

The final touch

Feet first

Head first

Find that one part of the body that tells you he’s home

Feel free to post your erasure poems.

Joan Jobe Smith reads "Steve Bilko Taught Me How To Spit"

This anthology continues the long and distinguished relationship between poetry and baseball. Michael C Ford has scoured the sandlots of Southern California to compile a stellar lineup of heavy-hitting and rubber-armed literary figures, eager to take their swings and toss some metaphors for the newest team on the sporting scene, the Los Angeles Bards.

Listen to more of the anthology "The Los Angeles Bards - Live In Pasadena" here.