I’ll be reading at the Freerange Nonfiction series this May 5th. I’ll be reading from something new: an essay about a particularly horrible event that happened to me when I was much younger: I interrupted a roommate who’d captured another, tied him down, and threatened to saw his head off with a chainsaw.
I dislike overly dramatic memoirs, so I’m going to try to make the piece about something larger: the nature of nonfiction in general. (But I’ll also try to give you the drama.)
Novelist Claire Messud (who was guest-editor at Guernica recently) led a panel discussion on women, diversity, and literature at the 6th annual PEN World Voices Festival of World Literature. I’ll let another Guernica writer Lorraine Adams sum up the event.
Here’s a film of the event, which was held at WNYC’s Greene Space, in lower Manhattan.
I’m slowly rolling this over to a new site, meakinarmstrong.com.
I’m hoping to have most of my clips on that site, including my copywriting and fiction clips.
I wrote a piece on Norman Rush’s debut novel, Mating for Guernica’s blog.
“It took some convincing to get me to read Norman Rush. I expected his first novel, Mating, to be an obvious cross between Saul Bellow and a Victorian romance. It took me a long time to realize this: that’s not such a bad combination.”
In which I bite the bullet (and recommend Jakob Dylan)
But first, I whine a bit about the Jakob juggernaut of years ago:
“Because of a former roommate, I shut the door on Jakob Dylan. While my roommate played Dylan’s hit, “One Headlight” repeatedly, I escaped to my bedroom where I could listen to something else. She sang random bars from his songs all day. She shattered the few quiet moments in the apartment to blather on about Dylan’s “cuteness.” Continue reading
I have a super-short fiction piece in the current issue of Noo Journal.
My work-from-home scheme fell on hard times and we had to move to another place, a property I’d bought as an investment, but had never planned on living in. It smelled of dogs and children. Even after we’d been there for many years, we found rawhide bones and pacifiers behind the refrigerator, under the stove, and in the basement.
For the next few weeks, I’ll be blogging for The Atlantic on environmental issues.
So far, the favorite thing I’ve written about is the “sky farm”–a skyscraper that’s filled with crops, not people. They can grow enough in one of those things to feed 40,000 people. This one is a great gig.
Thursday, 8:00 pm. Happy Ending, at 302 Broome St., between Forsyth and Eldridge.
It’s free. Happy Ending is a great bar with an interesting history: it used to be a “massage” parlor (hence the name). They’ve kept the exterior and some of the gear intact, but otherwise, it’s a fancy place.
Here’s the info on the reading:
It’s been busy at Guernica. I’ve been working on a Claire Messud guest-edited section. It’s fantastic and suggest you read. The comments section is burning up. . .Women make up 80 percent of the fiction reading audience in this country. So why, guest fiction editor Claire Messud asks, are women authors so frequently left off the best-of lists, and left out of prestigious book prizes?
Looks like I’m taking part in Tandem Readings’ monthly reading series at CELL THEATRE on the 17th.
It’ll be with some great people: Irina Reyn, I introduced at a PEN World Voices event that Guernica sponsored a while back, and damn, she’s good.
Jonathan Miles a friend (just last night) was telling me is amazing. supposedly, his book is hilarious. And I’ve heard good things about Jonathan Tel, too.
Israeli novelist Assaf Gavron, acting as Guernica‘s Guest Fiction Editor for the January 1-15 issue, chose to feature the younger generation’s work in Israeli literature.First off, we are defined by who we are not: we are not the established, famous, celebrated older generation of Israeli authors. It would do injustice to them as much as it would to us to group them together and define them as one unit, but I would dare define them as serious authors, makers of stylistic literary fiction that deals with the “big” issues of Israeli society in the last half-century: wars, Arabs, the emergence of the state, the Holocaust aftershock, and so on. Continue reading
I’m so happy to be in elimae! I remember that site from years and years ago, before I even thought of writing anything but screenplays. They’ve since outlasted legions of literary sites by years.
I mean YEARS. (They were founded in 1996.)
I’ll be reading at Old Made in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on November 11th at 441 Metropolitan Avenue, along with Catherine Foulkrod, Meghan Punschke, and Matthew Thorburn. It’s going to be a new short story I’ve finally finished.
