The esteemed poet Natasha Tretheway will be reading at the Hopwood Awards Ceremony tomorrow Jan 30 from 6-8:30 PM in the Rackham Auditorium. Her work has won many accolades from the Pulitzer Prize to longlistings for the National Book Award. Tretheway seamlessly merges traditional and non-conventional styles in her poetry and powerfully comments on history as a contemporary poet. The even will also announce and celebrate its student writers who won the 2019 Hopwood Awards. I look forward to a delightful evening of literature with the creative writing community on campus. This event is free.
Tag: reading
PREVIEW: Zell Visiting Writers Series: Sigrid Nunez & Aracelis Girmay
For the second installment of the Helen Zell Visiting Writers Series, we will be joined by Sigrid Nunez and Aracelis Girmay. Nunez is a novelist who has published seven books, the most recent of which is The Friend. She is interested in writing about language, memory, and writing itself in her work. Girmay is a poet whose work, according to the Poetry Foundation, “trace[s] the connections of transformation and loss across cities and bodies.” These poets have powerful messages about the subtleties of human nature. Join Michigan’s literary scene on Thursday, September 27 5:30-6:30 p.m at the UMMA’s Helmut Stern Auditorium.
REVIEW: Fiction At Literati: Akil Kumarasamy
I am discovering a litany of South Asian female writers, from the much-loved Jhumpa Lahiri and her Pulitzer-Prize winning collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, and recently, the Fatima Farheen Mirza’s brilliant debut novel, A Place For Us. Being Indian myself, it is refreshing to see the emergence of these writers documenting their stories in gorgeous, intelligent prose. I am thrilled to announce Akil Kumarasamy with her debut collection of ten short stories entitled Half Gods among their ranks.
Kumarasamy’s ten stories tell the loosely interconnected lives of immigrants, people displaced by the civil war in Sri Lanka, a Chinese neighbor, and many others. Myriad viewpoints in character and perspective– bouncing between first, second, and third person– and an interesting cast of characters elucidates Kumarasamy’s deep wisdom in exploring the lives of many different kinds of people. You feel as though she knows more than she ought to know about subtle suffering, disorder, displacement– but there is a viscerality to the characters that makes them all real.
This is how I felt at Literati while Kumarasamy read a short story from her collection. The story she’d read was written in the second person, which gave it a sense of being fragmented; it felt like we knew a whole lot about the main character without ever learning their gender or name. It was a skilled use of the second person, as her character was an actor and the perspective amplified the effect of him in a mask. Kumarasamy’s language hones in on the physical details and nuances of the world around her, and looks at the world with almost godly eyes– as though consequences and actions are rendered as one. Her work is lyric– poetic– rich. Divinely so.
And yet, I felt occasionally that there were aesthetic niceties that strained the story. This is perhaps a matter of personal preference, and I have not read but two stories in the collection. At least during the reading, I felt sometimes disconnected from the character and story. I think this may be because I didn’t have the text of the story in front of me and I had to rely solely on oration– sometimes that can be tricky with stories rich in language and content.
Kumarasamy read one story at the reading. I wish she could have read more. I wanted to compare a second person story to one of her other stories, as I feel like a second person story is a category of its own.
When Akil Kumarasamy releases her next book, I await to read it– I’m interested in the projection of this writer’s career and the literary feats she will accomplish. She’s released a stunning debut, acclaimed by the New York Times, the New Yorker, USA Today, and I’m sure anything she has yet to make will stir the literary community.
PREVIEW: Zell Visiting Writers Series: Esmé Wang & Danielle Lazarin
Kicking off the first installment of the Zell Visiting Writer’s Series for fall 2018 is novelist and essayist Esme Wang and short-story writer Danielle Lazarin. The Zell Visiting Writers Series invites one or two distinguished writers for a reading of their literary work. These authors have critically acclaimed reception for their fiction, and engaging in their work and this event is a great way to be involved in the literary scene on campus and beyond.
Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, Esme Wang is the author of the Border of Paradise, which is her debut novel. It is set in a post-war America and centers around the secrets and the haunting mental illness of family members affecting generations to come. A graduate of the University of Michigan’s MFA program, Danielle Lazarin has recently published her debut collection of short stories which has been called a brilliant look into the inner lives of middle-class women. Both these writers have much to say about womanhood, complex mental lives, and the truth of being human. Attend the reading Thursday September 20th, 2018 from 5:30-6:30 at UMMA’s Helmut Stern auditorium.
REVIEW: An Evening with David Sedaris
I’ve been told that evenings with David Sedaris are memorable and hilarious, and I’m excited to say that it’s true.
A woman from Michigan Radio introduced him with an anecdote about him calling into the station to make a donation, leaving everyone on the other line starstruck. It seemed that the same starstruck feeling echoed in the almost-full auditorium of Michigan Theater as he walked out in a long dress shirt, untucked and down to his calves, beneath a jacket that had seen some scissors. He modeled for us as a start to the evening before his anecdotal debut: a quick mention of a time when he called into another radio station, who told him that he sounded like Piglet.
His timing there must have been on purpose, because I and several others afterwards discussed not being able to get that out of our minds as he spoke for the next two hours. Nothing that he brought was content that I’ve read before, so it was nice to hear something new to me.
Sedaris brought a couple of short stories to read, sprinkling in small anecdotes and some selections of his latest diary collection, Theft by Finding — along with some from his upcoming second selection of diaries. After reading an essay simultaneously about mysterious dental pain and traveling to Japan, he brought up something that I’ve been wondering since first reading Me Talk Pretty One Day: he never wants to write about just one thing at a time. He has a way of associating seemingly very separate things in order to avoid writing about just one thing. “I wanted to write this essay about my tooth, but I also was thinking about my visit to Japan, and it just had to fit.” And in some magical Sedarisian way, it worked. He seems to have the life experience to associate anything.
Another story that he read was called “Active Shooter,” about him and his sister going to a shooting range because they’d never done it before. His sister was interested in learning how to handle a gun, specifically just in case she was about to be killed and her killer dropped his gun — much of the story hinged on his sister’s oddly particular foresight and thinking of the most specific instances. It followed their journey through a long class about how to handle guns and ended with the sister being praised for her skills, while the teacher consistently called David by the name of Mike. Both siblings left without feeling the need to shoot again.
My favorite diary entry that he read — which made me and several cry laughing — was one about trying to translate the English idiom about the pot calling the kettle black into French (directed toward his French teacher who called him a sadist), which turned out something like “That is like a pan…saying to a dark pan…’you are a pan.'” I instantly thought of all my foreign language experience trying to translate what was in my head directly, and how often it just doesn’t work.
One of the final bits that he read was “And While You’re Up There, Check My Prostate.” This essay explored international methods of dealing with road rage, many sayings translating clunkily but funnily to English from various European languages and dialects. I liked the general theme of translation-based disconnects that evening, and also appreciated their delivery. They were hilarious enough to make anybody laugh no matter their translation experience.
Following the reading and before the signing, he requested to bring the lights up for a Q&A session with the large audience. I loved seeing how appreciated he was to locals here, and figured it made sense with his wit and attention to social culture. The question I best remember was somebody asking him whether he still picked up garbage (mostly as a gesture to preserving the environment) — to which he responded, yes. I couldn’t help but wonder whether he was the only one in the room who did that.
What I love about Sedaris’s writing is that it’s largely about the human condition, but also is so full of rich comedic timing and phrasing. It’s honest and fun, rarely distant, and always makes me wonder how much of it he’s actually experienced. Following the reading, I braved the long line to have him sign my copy of When You Are Engulfed in Flames and was delighted to find that he was just as funny and surprising on a conversational whim. I left Michigan Theater feeling ecstatic, especially after getting to meet him.
He’s returning in June to Ann Arbor, and I highly recommend going to see him read and speak! You’ll laugh and learn so much.
REVIEW: Nell David & Franny Choi
On Friday night, the Helmut Stern Auditorium of UMMA was a small and cozy literary haven away from the museum’s After Hours event beginning upstairs. Though I attended alone, several Zell MFA friend groups and writer-enthusiasts (and probably writers themselves) around me gathered and giggled while we all waited for fiction writer Nell David* and poet Franny Choi to take the stage. The atmosphere was excited and comfortable.
In the tenth installment of its kind, two current MFA students emceed this year’s Webster Reading series. David was the first to read, and one of the emcees read her introduction: at an AWP conference in Washington, DC, the two strolled from table to table finding magazines in which David’s work was published. In each, her last name was different – a detail that interested me from the get-go of the evening. “At age 25, she was writing better fiction than people five years out of their MFA programs and didn’t give a damn about the name she put on it,” the emcee joked.
David, or [redacted] as they had also earlier joked, took the stage with the first few pages of a short story called “Joyce is Better Now.” The story was about a single mother whose son had just moved out for his first year of college, and how she fell in love with a doctor she had been seeing. While I’ve been paying more attention to poetry than fiction these days, I was still struck by her characters and how she moved through the piece. Characters, notably Joyce herself, were relatable yet given realistic and unique voices. I was reminded of life itself as they focused on small desires in a big world: two themes I noticed were those desires of finding honesty in already friendly relationships and being candid yet kind. Her reading style was confident and reserved, and I appreciated that she laughed at a funny line of her own. The excerpt she read gave us just enough information that we didn’t get the entire story, but wanted to know what happened next and how Joyce’s endeavors turned out.
Next was Choi, introduced by a different student (I think – or peer). He introduced her personality as a poet and commended her talents: “Saying that you’re a famous poet is like saying you’re a famous mushroom. Franny is the morel of poets.”
I’ve seen videos of Choi doing slam poetry a few years before, but this was a new experience. Slam poetry usually consists of some storytelling with sounds written to be heard on stage alongside movement, and I could sense those sounds echoing in her work within wordplay and patterns that I wouldn’t have expected. Sound aside, the images evoked were abundant and worked into one another while working together and alongside one another – stunning. She spoke with her hands and read so confidently, too, which also made me think of spoken word and slam poetry trends. Again, I was struck by the writing, especially as a poet myself.
Her first work that she read was from a collection about conducting a Turing Test on herself to see whether she’s actually a robot, though she read different poems thereafter (including one I’ve seen recently, “On the Night of the Election”). Before reading “You’re So Paranoid,” she noted that she’d never read it aloud before, and took a short pause before starting. That small moment was so beautiful, and I wondered whether she was considering the best way to read it, or whether she was capturing the moment for herself and the poem. Another intriguing piece she read was partially in response to the conversation about allowing neo-nazis speak on campus and a video wherein Richard Spencer used an image of her face, “The Cyborg Watches a Video of a Neo-Nazi Saying Her Name.” I liked how she bookended her reading, ending with a piece called (and reading the title in a voice that reminded me of an AI voice) “So, How Do You Like Working with Humans?”
Something that I appreciated about her reading lineup was that she interspersed poems about the aforementioned collection with others unrelated to it, but still managed to flow from one to the next cohesively. It was well-rounded and full of incredible work.
There was lots of writer’s confidence in the auditorium that evening, which extended to me, and for which I was grateful. I encourage y’all to read and support these talented writers as well as those who share the community here in Ann Arbor and beyond – or at least attend an MFA reading at some point.
*I wanted to include links to Nell David’s work in this review, but had some trouble finding her online and would appreciate any located links in the comments!
