Category: Literary Arts

China Miéville, the critically-acclaimed author of Perdido Street Station and The City & the City and the writer at the forefront of the “new weird” genre, will be in conversation with Associate Professor Joshua Miller at the Helmert Stern Auditorium in UMMA this Thursday at 5:30. With a writer as eclectic as China Miéville, the conversation is certain to be an interesting one. If you want more China Miéville, then there’s a reading Tuesday at 6:00, also in the Helmert Stern Auditorium and a lecture on Wednesday at 5:00 in 1014 Tisch Hall revolving around imagined cityscapes.

Alice McDermott began her reading by, well, telling us why she was reading the passages she was reading. She explained that she liked to wait until the last minute to decide what to read, to be inspired by some fact of the day or something the audience says. As a fiction writer she has an “eternal struggle to surprise [herself];” after all, they’re generally the ones doing the surprising.

The first thing she read was not from one of her published novels but was something “still under-construction.” It was a scene describing the main character’s earliest memory–she mentioned that she was fascinated with earliest memories because they were almost always fictionalized, either mostly or entirety–which was of being a baby pushed in a carriage. Though usually when writers try to write from the POV of young, young children, it becomes rather one-dimensional and dull, McDermott managed to create believable urgency in the mind of this baby. The baby wasn’t just a baby, but a character in his own right; he had a personality. The passage ended with him looking over at another carriage, seeing a baby girl, and thinking “there’s the girl I’ll marry.”

The next two things she read were from her last novel, Someone. The first was another first memory, this time from the main character, Marie waiting for her father to come home and the various rituals of her home life. This included the wonderful line: “I sometimes wonder if all the faith and all the fancy, all the fear, the speculation, all the wild imaginings that go into the study of heaven and hell, don’t shortchange, after all, that other, earlier uncertainty: the darkness before the slow coming to awareness of the first light.” The second passage was much later in Marie’s life and described the birth of her first child and all the horror and pain that went with it. Throughout this section, the most striking thing to me was how well the character’s attitude and identity were maintained. The story didn’t feel like McDermott asked hersled “what would a person do in this situation?”, but “what would Marie do?”

There was a brief Q&A section after the reading. During this, a question was raised about how many critics have described this book as about an “unremarkable life.” As someone who has read the book, this is fair criticism–there is nothing remarkable about Marie, she is nothing more than an ordinary Irish girl growing up in Brooklyn. There is no real plot, no great twists and turns, no excitement boiling underneath the surface, there is only Marie. In response to this question, McDermott talked about how it would be easy to say something like “but is any of us really ordinary” to these critics, but she believes that yes, most of us are just ordinary. And that’s the kind of book she was writing. There are numerous glimpses in the book of lives more interesting than Marie, and according to McDermott, it was tempting to let one of these characters take over, to let things actually happen in the book–but she resisted and the novel remains the story of single, ordinary girl.

If this has sparked your interest, Alice McDermott will be having a conversation with Professor Eileen Pollack, this Thursday at 5:30 in the UMMA auditorium. McDermott says many interesting things about writing and gives advice for young writers, so if that sounds interesting, be sure to be there!

With awesome cheese and bread from White Lotus Farms and 3 spectacular poets, Monday evening’s Poetry Series at Literati was a great start to the week! And a great tribute to the celebration of April as National Poetry Month.

While nibbling on the cheese that Sarah Messer brought from White Lotus Farms (where she works), Messer and Kidder Smith, her co-author, began reading from their book Having Once Paused: Poems of Zen Master Ikkyu (1394-1481). Similar to their collaboration on the book, Smith read the poems first in Chinese and Sarah then read the final poetic English version. Smith explained before reading, in his quiet but resonating voice, that Master Ikkyu was a Japanese monk but that during this period all really well educated Japanese monks wrote poems in Chinese. It was fascinating to hear him read the poem and then immediately to get to hear the English. Even for me, who doesn’t understand the language in which the poem was written, there is something inspiring by hearing it how it was originally meant to be heard.

Sarah Messer then read some of her work on her own. She actually started with a poem that was inspired by her work with Kidder Smith. One night she mistranslated a line they were working on and it inspired her poem “Today.” One of my favorites of the evening, and one she had shared in the poetry class I take with her, is her poem “My life as a Puritan Bedpost.” My favorite lines are in the ending: “Now all the Puritans have died. But their ghosts keep trying/ to lie down again and again inside me.” Read the rest of the poem HERE, from when it was published in the Michigan Quarterly Review.

Suzanne Wise, the other featured reader of the evening, read from her new manuscript. It is a book length love letter to Ray Johnson. Ray Johnson was an artist who worked in mail art. Wise introduced us to some insights as to how he worked and some of his quirks that she used to spark her poems, which was REALLY helpful because I knew nothing about him before Monday. Ray Johnson would often send collages to famous artists (usually friends of his) and have them add to it before sending the work back. He often refused to show his work and made it difficult for admiring collectors to obtain his art. He was the founder of the New York Correspondence School. Wise’s poetry, in this extended letter form, is very sound conscious; her lines are full of assonance, alliteration, and slant rhymes. It was great to listen to and her voice has such a clear quality to it that her reading was very beautiful. Along with its beauty there were also humorous and entertaining moments by her personification of death, lines like “yesterays,” or vivid lines such as “slamming into a wall…we are a wallflower.” I can’t wait to see the whole manuscript!

As April is National Poetry Month, Literati and other local bookstores will be hosting more amazing events that my fellow poets and I don’t want to miss out on. Keep a look out!

Like reading? Are you the friend who decides to stay in on a Friday night, just so you can catch up on your latest book (because, really, who has time for actual reading during the academic week)? Well, Friday night put on your coat and head to Literati, a prime book-lover hangout and a local bookstore that is a must for anyone visiting/living in Ann Arbor. Set out into the night, among whatever weather the state of Michigan has decided to throw at you, and indulge in your love of reading at a party! The Oleander Review is releasing their latest issue in the Espresso Bar (above Literati) Friday night at 7 pm and artists will be reading from the issue.

The Oleander Review is an undergraduate run literary journal that publishes work- writing and art- from both students and established writers. It is a platform in which artists at various points in their careers meet and present their work. For more details about what Oleander is all about visit their website! For a full list of the readers at the Release Party visit their Facebook Event.

This party is FREE; I’ve even heard talk of refreshments. Copies of the journal are $5. You’ll get a chance to meet some of the people that produced the journal and some of artists it features. Hope to see all you book lovers there supporting your peers and celebrating how much we love art!

Thursday evening, Ross Gay met with college writers in the Benzinger Lounge to share his stories and talk about their questions. He was charming, personable, and reflective. His poems are very voice based works of art and it was a wonderful experience to hear them spoken by him.

After being introduced by Laura Thomas, Ross Gay read 3 poems: “The Opening”, “Ode to Sleeping in My Clothes”, and “Ode to Buttoning and Unbuttoning My Shirt”. His most recent work, and also the book he read from, is titled catalog of unabashed gratitude. All of Gay’s poems link beauty and sadness in astonishing images that lead the reader to see not just the problems we face as a society, but also the beauty in the everydayness of our world. One of his elements for achieving this, in conjunction with his vivid imagery, is his titles. As can be seen by the poems he read and as he said himself, “Titles are important”. The can have a profound effect on the tone and perhaps surprisingly the conclusion/outcome of a poem. Just looking at the table of contents to his latest book, where there are titles like “Spoon”, “Armpit”, and “C’Mon!”, and readers know Gay has mastered the art of titling a poem.

In addition to speaking about his love of teaching and working collaboratively with other artists- a really “delightful” activity- Ross Gay spoke about the inspiration/process involved in his individual work. In some ways his poems ask questions more than they answer them. Or at least that’s how they start, often pertaining to the theme of justice or of a personal instance. He uses the image or metaphor of a garden or orchard often because they bring a sense of conversion or change to the poem and the narrator. In that way the poem will often begin to shift from questioning to pondering. These natural growing earthy images are reflective of the emotional state of the narrator as he guides us through the poem in what can sometimes seem as wandering poem but often is all the more powerful for the journey it takes us on. This is also why certain poems play so carefully on the use of end lines, often cut off in seemingly odd places that makes the lines unstable but where new meaning is found in that instability. It is in this instability or wondering association of images that readers and Ross Gay himself says find new meaning, or at the very least a shift in perspective. At the Tea Thursday evening, Gay said that he wrote a poem that through the writing process transformed his relationship with his father, which had been strained.

My favorite poem though in catalog of unabashed gratitude is “Spoon”. It is a beautiful, amazing piece that he wrote for a friend of his that was murdered. Both sad, joyful, political, and natural, I think it captures what a poem can be and the dexterity of Ross Gay’s talents. Listen to him read “Spoon” here.

The student who introduced Angela Flournoy started by reading some of her tweets. Not just random tweets, but a particular set where Flournoy had attempted to describe a group of teenagers in a store. Her suggestions included such quips as “a selfie of teenagers,” “a snapchat of teenagers,” “a whatever of teenagers,” and many more. But the point of these descriptions was not to create some witticism or remark about the age of vain and vapid teenage wasteland we are living in–in fact, the goal was quite the opposite. Flournoy sought to find a term to describe the teenagers that was reflective but not judgmental. She wanted a way to capture what they are without a condemnation or negative connotation. This idea of truth without judgement is present throughout her work.

When Angela Flournoy took the stand, she talked for a few minutes about why she chose Detroit as the setting for her novel. According to her, Detroit is a rare kind of place: a city where everything is changing and falling apart, where the home you grew up in or the store you used to visit is simply not there anymore. And unlike other areas, this isn’t because something replaced it, something new and shiny, something to tender the loss of the old–no, now there is nothing but weeds and cement. Detroit is unique because it is place of vacating and decay where nothing grows anymore. For Flournoy, this particularly interested her as a place of change. For most of us, when things change, they don’t really change completely, there are always elements of the old remaining. When we walk of the old neighborhood changing, we might mean that a new group of people moved in and the old moved out, but we rarely mean that the neighborhood just isn’t there anymore. As Flournoy said, the demographics might change but the physical reality hardly does. And this was the idea that she wanted to explore in her book, The Turner House: how do we cope with memories when there are no physical landmarks.

She read from only one section, a chapter titled “Motor City, Friday Night.” This chapter involved Lelah, the youngest of the Turner family and also currently homeless, visiting a casino she frequents. Lelah has a gambling addiction (part of the reason she’s homeless) and spends part of the night watching a woman win at a roulette table. When the woman wins, she gives Lelah a chip before exiting the casino herself and with this chip, Lelah goes over to her own roulette table and with the skills and knowledge she’s picked up during her addiction, she transforms that $20 dollar chip to $300. She considers walking away and enjoying herself in a hotel room for a week, and she almost manages to, but addiction is a beast not easily beat, and she thinks of what she could do with just a little bit more money, another week off the streets and–she loses most her money in a quick spiral down.

The reading was short, as that was the only section she read. From the beginning of the introduction to the end of Flournoy’s reading, the whole thing was over in half an hour. I didn’t find the reading or perhaps the prose itself particularly engaging, but I thought that Flournoy’s ideas on memory and physical reality had great potential and if The Turner House spends time pondering these things, it might be a really spectacular book. Angela Flounroy will be back on campus for the Voices of the Middle West literary festival on March 12th, so if you’re interested in seeing her speak, check it out.