Wordcraft -- Got Lit? SMU hosts new & coming writers

Southern Methodist University’s creative writing director David Haynes is known for bringing a variety of writers to the university’s annual Litfest. His choices for this year’s festival, Thursday through Saturday, are no exceptions, showcasing writers as diverse as an award-winning mystery writer with poets, literary novelists with writers of nonfiction.

Novelist/short story writer Liam Callanan won mystery writing’s Edgar Award for his first novel, followed since then by All Saints and short story collection Listen. He and McKinney, Texas, poet R. Flowers Rivera (Troubling Accents and Heathen), and poet/novelist/short story writer Jeffrey Renard Allen (Song of the Shark) will open the fest with readings at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, March 19, in the Stanley Marcus Reading Room of the university’s DeGolyer Library.

Want to know what it takes to build a life as a writer? The festival’s schedule for Friday, March 20, opens with a 3 p.m. panel discussion by all writers of their journeys to the writing life, in McCord Auditorium, on the third floor of SMU’s Dallas Hall. Readings follow at 6:30 p.m. in McCord Auditorium by fiction/nonfiction writer Peter Turchi (A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery and Magic) and poet Jericho Brown.

The festival concludes Saturday, March 21, with readings at 2 p.m. by Dallas poet/editor/novelist Joe Milazzo (Crepuscule W/Nellie) and a pair of poets, Alan Shapiro (Night of the Republic) and Elizabeth Gray Jr., whose works include translations of classical and contemporary Persian poetry.

All events are free and open to the public. Speaking from experience, parking is easier to find around the SMU campus for weekend events, but there are several parking garages and street side meters available.

For a complete schedule, author information, campus map, and parking information, see http://smulitfest2015.wordpress.com/.

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Also this weekend, the Writers’ Guild of Texas hosts its spring writing workshop Saturday, 9 a.m. - 1 p.m. at the Richardson Civic Center, 411 West Arapaho Road, in Richardson, Texas. Novelist Brian W. Smith (Nina’s Got a Secret) went from self-publishing to sales to commercial publishing houses. He shares his insights on writing, publishing and selling. Workshop fee is $25 for WGT members, $35 for nonmembers. Workshop registration and WGT memberships are available online at
www.writersguildoftexas.org/.

Wordcraft -- Hot off the presses -- live & local in Texas

The 2014 SMU LitFest opened last week to a full room in the DeGolyer Library as five local editors discussed the state of literary publishing in North Texas. The participants were Matthew Limpede, editor of Carve magazine; Will Evans of Deep Vellum, a press publishing English translations of foreign authors; Ronald E. Moore, a poet and composer whose Baskerville Publishers is expanding its repertoire from biographies of opera stars to poetry; Mark Allen Jenkins, editor of the newly renamed Reunion: The Dallas Review, arts and literature magazine of the University of Texas-Dallas; and Joe Milazzo, co-editor of the experimental literary journal (out of nothing).

Dallas Writer’s Garret co-founder Thea Temple opened the discussion with a question to the panel about the role of technology in the future of publishing. The revolutions spawned by the Internet, print on demand technology and electronic publishing, all agreed, have made a wider variety of literature available. But in themselves, these won’t keep small presses running unless they can provide the quality of writing communities of readers expect.

“We started (out of nothing) as an ezine because there was no overhead,” Milazzo said. “But that was not a good enough aesthetic reason.”

“When I took over Carve in 2007,” Limpede said, “I decided to go to a quarterly format,” seeking quality of writing over quantity. And although still publishing online, Carve has taken the retro-seeming step of publishing a paid subscription premium print edition with added content, in the hope of nurturing an emerging literary community. Make that, a twenty-first century print edition also available on iPad.

For Evans, whose Deep Vellum press is sponsored by the Writer’s Garret, being able to communicate with translators over the Internet has been key to his dream of establishing a Dallas-based literary press. “Previously, I would have had to make contacts at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Now, Frankfurt is a place to get together, after signing rights to texts. Independent publishers have much more power than they used to have.”

And what about the logistics of getting volumes printed and in customer’s hands, Temple asked?

Goodbye to the worries of not only publishing thousands of copies, but of finding warehouses to store them and locating distributors to get them into readers’ hands, Moore said, the worries that previously forced his Baskerville Publishers out of the literary fiction market. Now with print on demand publishing, he only needs to order copies he already has distribution orders for, enabling him to broaden his press’s niche.

So what does the future look like, Temple asked. How do small presses, which by definition don’t have larger readerships, expect to grow? And not only grow but engage in the larger issue of restoring reading as a respectable activity?

“We have to think about things like branding, aesthetics as much as text,” Limpede said. “Social media has turned out to be more powerful than I expected. Every press has to make their own definition of what’s okay for them.”

“What’s your definition?” Temple asked.

“For me, doing okay is getting my first book out,” Evans said.

“For us,” Limpede said, “okay (may) mean having a part time job, even a full time job, but it’s about finding your own community. For literature there’s no easy formula.”

“What ‘okay’ means,” Milazzo said, “has everything to do with readership. The reader completes the artistic endeavor.”

For more about reading--and writing--for these publishers, see http://carvezine.com/, www.baskervillepublishers.com/, www.outofnothing.org/, http://deepvellum.org/, and www.utdallas.edu/ah/reunion/.

Will Evans (l) & Matthew Limpede

(Next Monday, Dallas does readership, reaching every high school student--and more--during April’s Dallas Big Reads. But don’t wait until April 1--stay tuned for guerrilla early bird book distributions at local transit stations.)

Wordcraft -- The dark, the deadly & the dead

It was an interesting weekend of panels from genre authors and publisher, sponsored jointly by the Barnes & Noble bookstore at The Parks Mall in Arlington, Texas, and the Rising Phoenix Press small publishing house. In one morning, the audience of writers learned how to kill people from retired chemical engineer and forensics consultant David Ciambrone; how to add realistically ghostly characters to our pages, from North Texas paranormal investigator Brandy Herr; and find publishing outlets for these dark imaginations from C.L. Stegall, JoAnna Grace and Jonathon Black of independent Dark Red Press.

The afternoon lineup included panels on romance writing, Westerns and general fiction from nearly a dozen additional Texas authors.

For mystery writers itching for ways to kill victims quickly, easily and cheaply, Ciambrone gave a lesson on the deadliness of common plants and household chemicals. Many of these, he stressed, don't require access to anything more exotic than a grocery store, plant nursery, or pet store--or even our own kitchens and back yards.  Dr. Ciambrone’s Poisons Handbook for Writers stresses that the information is intended only for use in writing fiction. Don’t try these at home!

For those of us who prefer our fictional characters already dead, Herr’s Haunted Granbury details the surprising number of paranormal events haunting a small North Texas town, and the major ways in which haunting can occur. Poltergeists and other “intelligent” haunting involve entities who are able to interact with observers--in some cases, seem actually to enjoy such interactions. "Residual" hauntings, on the other hand, are simply reenactments of a scene, whose participants are not able to interact with the living. Her book is part of the Haunted America series from The History Press, http://historypress.net/.

And whether we’re dealing with the dead or the merely deadly, C.L. Stegall, JoAnna Grace, and Jonathon Black of independent publisher Dark Red Press offered suggestions for turning these dark secrets into stories in a variety of thrillers.

Stegall’s definition of dark fiction is anything that keeps “the thrills and the chills coming. After the first sentence--not the first paragraph, but the first sentence, the reader can’t put it down.”

How to write like that? The specific methods vary from the loglines and detailed index cards of Black, who writes paranormal suspense and romance under the name John J. Smith to the seat of the pants method of confessed “binge-writer” Grace (“I have to say, index cards put me in the fetal position”).

“If anyone tells you there’s a formula for writing a book, you can tell them they’re a liar,” Stegall said. But no matter what the method, the first thing is writing the story.

“It’s not a matter of finding time to write,” Grace said. “It’s a matter of making time, (even) if that means the laundry doesn’t get done for a few days.”

For more about Dark Red Press, its authors, books and events, see
www.darkredpress.com/.

And for more about Rising Phoenix Press and its author events, see www.prlog.org/.

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Want to learn more about publishing? The 2014 SMU LitFest opens tomorrow, March 18, at 4:30 p.m. with a free panel discussion by representatives of local small publishers Matthew Limpede of Carve magazine, Joe Milazzo of the journals (out of nothing) and Black Clock, Will Evans of Deep Vellum Press, and Ronald Moore of Baskerville Publishers. The panel meets in the DeGolyer Library on the SMU campus.

 

 

The SMU LitFest continues through Saturday, March 22, in various locations on campus. For a complete schedule of events, authors, and a map of the campus, see
http://smulitfest2014.wordpress.com/.

Wordcraft -- SMU's LitFest shines

I got two wonderful surprises at last weekend’s annual Southern Methodist University literary festival. The only bad thing about the SMU LitFest is not being able to clear enough time in my schedule to attend all three days. Still, I was more than pleasantly surprised to learn the university, under director of creative writing David Haynes, now offers courses in speculative fiction -- as in, genre writing.

That was the first nice surprise. The second was to find Saturday’s impeccably literary pair of writers -- a poet and a writer of short stories -- paying homage to one of my favorite genres, historical fiction. And in each case, in book length works.

Okay, maybe Natalie Serber, short listed for Best American Short Stories, didn’t consider her collection of linked stories, Shout Her Lovely Name, to be historical fiction. One listener, in fact, questioned whether a Serber story referencing TV’s Laugh-In, 1960’s talk show host Phil Donohue (note to those under age 30, not Dr. Phil!), and the Rolling Stones song “Ruby Tuesday” was set in the present day or the past.

Just take that as an indication that the mother-daughter relationships in Serber’s work are ageless. (She explained that she intended the continuing story of mom Ruby and daughter Nora, to take place before single parents and latchkey kids became commonplace.)

Poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi, a Los Angeles Time Book finalist, is more overt about the historical grounding of her work, both in her latest book, Apocalyptic Swing, and in her work in progress, a long poem set during the Vietnam War.

Much of Apocalyptic Swing deals with boxing -- a continuing obsession with writers. “I think (the attraction of boxing) is a fascination with form,“ Calvocoressi said, “and with the body’s ability to get up, even if it’s smarter to stay down.”

The sport’s place in American history is also a factor, as she noted in one of Apocalyptic Swing’s longer poems, “Training Camp, Deer Lake, PA,” referring to Muhammad Ali’s former training camp. “You don’t like to see a man get knocked out/ cold?” the poem asks. “Then you’ve never lived in Hartford/ or any town of boarded windows.”

“I think about American history a lot,“ Calvocoressi said. “History is something people living through it don’t understand. I wanted to try something for myself that could fail.”

Why the long story arcs for both writers, listeners asked. Why, for instance, not write a novel instead of a book of linked stories for Serber, and a book length poem for Calvocoressi.

“I love Ruby," a listener said to Serber, “and I’m wondering why you didn’t write a novel instead of short stories.“

“I was afraid of writing a novel,” Serber answered diffidently, to laughter from her audience, admitting, as she warmed to the subject, “but I love the gaps between stories,” the short form affords.
And for Calvocoressi, “Pretty much my hope was that (the poem) would be one long story. I thought of this as a large scale poem.”

Readers earlier in the week at the 2013 SMU LitFest were Matthew Dolman, Debra Spark, Alix Ohlin, Alan Michael Parker, Vievee Francis and Tatjana Soli. For the second consecutive year, Dallas-Fort Worth area high school students opened the LitFest with public readings and presentation of prizes and scholarships. This year’s festival also honored the Dallas Writer’s Garret, co-founded by late SMU faculty member Jack Myers and his wife, Thea Temple.

Wordcraft -- Feast of book fests

While writing round-up posts last year about writing conferences, I also found many conferences geared to readers and fans. And since writers are also readers, I’m dedicating this first Wordcraft post of 2013 to events for readers. Most are in North Texas, but some are further afield within the state. Since this is only a sampling, feel free to add your own favorites.

January 17 - June 4 -- Arts and Letters Live at the Dallas Museum of Art. Presentations by authors, actors, illustrators, musicians and more. Speakers include former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout (Olive Ketteridge), Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood, and scientist Temple Grandin. Locations vary. See http://dallasmuseumofart.org/.

February 15-17 -- ConDFW XII, literary science fiction and fantasy event, Crowne Plaza Dallas, 14315 Midway Road, in Dallas suburb of Addison. Panels, readings and author signings. Also includes short story contest, with entries due January 27. For details, see www.condfw.org/.

February 21 -- Highland Park Literary Festival. At its heart are the workshops for Highland Park High School students, but keynote address by author Markus Zusak (The Book Thief) is free and open to the public. Highland Park High School, 4220 Emerson, University Park. See www.hplitfest.org/.

March 20-23 -- SMU LitFest -- Southern Methodist University’s revived literary festival, on the Dallas campus. A schedule of individual events will be posted later in January at http://smulitfest.wordpress.com.

April -- The Big Read Dallas -- series of events based on the late Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, although the April 19 reading at the Dallas Museum of Art is sold out. For updates on events, see http://bigreaddallas.org/.

August 29-September 2 -- World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon). It’s in Texas this year, at the Henry B. Gonzales Convention Center in San Antonio, 200 East Market St. It’s been in Melbourne, Yokahama, and Glasgow. This year, it’s in our state! Worldcon is where reader-favorite Hugo Awards for best science fiction and fantasy are presented each year. Hugo nominations are open through March 10. See
www.lonestarcon3.org/.

September -- Richardson Reads One Book, Richardson High School, 1250 West Beltline Road, Richardson. Speaker and date TBA. For updates, check www.cor.net/ .

October 4-6 -- FenCon X, a conference for fans of science fiction/fantasy/horror, Crowne Plaza Dallas, 14315 Midway Road (Dallas suburb of Addison). I’ll discuss the writing workshop and short story contest in more detail in next Monday’s roundup of writing conferences. Also see the link on its site for related conferences, including comics, www.fencon.org/.

October 24-26 -- National Black Book Festival, Fallbrook Church, 12512 Walters Rd., Houston. Hundreds of authors, free to the public. See www.nationalblackbookfestival.com/.

October 26-27 -- Texas Book Festival -- the big one! Free to the public, at the Texas state capitol, 1200 Congress, Austin. More than 200 Texas and nationally-known authors, with readings, discussions, book signings, and music. See
www.texasbookfestival.org/.

November 8-10 -- Readers & ‘ritas conference for romance authors and readers. Site TBA. See http://2013readers.eventbrite.com/.