UNM Creative Writing Blog

Paperback Dreams

jsimps0n@unm.edu — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 21:59:04 +0000

–posted by Jennifer

Has anyone seen the documentary Paperback Dreams?

unable to embed the video trailer, but you can check out Paperback Dreams Trailer from abeckstead on Vimeo.

And thanks to Nancy Rutland, owner of Bookworks in Albuquerque’s North Valley for the shout-out for the Creative Writing Program at UNM, for letting me know about this film (she was interviewed today on KUNM radio’s Women’s Focus program), and for all the great work she does in the community connecting books with people.

OH and for helping bring awesome writers like Margaret Atwood to town! DON’T MISS OUT– Monday November 16 at 7pm at Woodward Hall on UNM’s main campus.

Some words from Kurt Vonnegut

jsimps0n@unm.edu — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 21:32:29 +0000

Last week (nov 11) was the birthday of the novelist who said: “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled ’science fiction’ […] and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.”

He also said: “I have long felt that any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.”

The Hero’s Luck

by Lawrence Raab

The History of Forgetting) –>

When something bad happens
we play it back in our minds,
looking for a place to step in
and change things. We should go outside
right now, you might have said. Or:
Let’s not drive anywhere today.

The sea rises, the mountain collapses.
A car swerves toward the crowd
you’ve just led your family into.
We all look for reasons. Luck
isn’t the word you want to hear.
What happened had to,

or it didn’t. Maybe
the exceptional man can change direction
in midair, thread the needle’s eye,
and come out whole. But even the hero
who stands up to chance has to feel
how far the world will bend

until it breaks him. He can see
that day: the unappeasable ocean,
the cascades of stone. A crowd
gathers around his body. He sees that too.
someone is saying: His luck just ran out.
It happens to us all.

“The Hero’s Luck” by Lawrence Raab, from The History of Forgetting. © Penguin Books, 2009. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

It’s the birthday of Mexican novelist and essayist Carlos Fuentes, (books by this author) born in Panama City in 1928. His father was a Mexican diplomat, and growing up, Carlos moved all over the place—to Brazil, the United States, Argentina, Chile—but every summer he spent in Mexico with his grandmothers, and they were both storytellers. He said, “They were the storehouse of these great tales of migrants, revolution, highway robberies, bandits, love affairs, ways of dressing, eating — they had the whole storehouse of the past in their heads and their hearts. So this was, for me, very fascinating, this relationship with my two grannies — the two authors of my books really.” And he has written many books, including The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), Terra Nostra (1975), The Old Gringo (1985), and The Campaign (1990). His most recent book available in this country is Happy Families, which was translated into English last year.

He said, “Don’t classify me, read me. I’m a writer, not a genre.”

It’s the birthday of Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, (books by this author) born on this day in Moscow in 1821. He was one of seven children, and his father was an alcoholic and treated the children roughly. After his mother died, Fyodor was sent off to private school, then to military school, and when he was a teenager his father died. He went to school and trained to become an army engineer, but after he graduated, he decided to devote his life to writing instead. He wrote a novel, Poor Folk (1846), and showed it to his friend, a poet, who showed it to a famous literary critic, and they went to Dostoevsky’s house in the middle of the night and woke him up to tell him that he was a new literary hero.

But his next novel and stories were failures, and he fell out of favor with the Russian literary elite. So he started hanging out with a different crowd, one that had meetings and discussed utopian socialism, and because of that, Dostoevsky was arrested. He spent eight months in solitary confinement, and then he was sentenced to death. He was marched outside to be shot. But as he was waiting for the gun to fire, he was informed that his sentence had been commuted to exile in Siberia. He spent eight years there, four of them doing hard labor, four as a lieutenant. He came back from Siberia with a new commitment to writing, and a new set of religious ideas.

And he went on to write some of the greatest classics of Russian literature, including Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880).

He said, “There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.”

It’s the birthday of the novelist who said: “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled ’science fiction’ […] and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.” That’s Kurt Vonnegut, (books by this author) born

To trust or not to trust Wikipedia

jsimps0n@unm.edu — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:12:36 +0000

–posted by Jennifer

I have a set of encyclopedias, from my grandparents, published in 1957. A lot has changed since then at least on the geopolitical front. And there’s been a few technological advances since then as well… like Wikipedia. It’s one of my favorite sites.

If I were working on a scholarly article, or if I needed to do some fact checking prior to publication I would not use Wikipedia, but still I do believe it has its place– at least in my life. First and foremost, it’s free. I love free. And its fast. Just the other day I was watching a documentary on Amelia Earhart (no, not the movie with Hillary Swank but rather a real-deal documentary on the History channel). The hour-long show centered on Earhart’s aviation career, and of course the sensational disappearance, but I was curious to know more. Where was she born? Kansas. How did she first learn to fly? she worked a lot of jobs to save money for lesson… Is this true? probably. I think for basic information, to satisfy my own curiosity about a thing, Wikipedia is great.

If you’re interested in the history, the story behind Wikipedia, one of the administrators, Andrew Lih has written a book– The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia. (ironic he went the old fashioned, print and buy route rather than distributing this information for free)

I’ve not read the book, though if you’re interested you’ll find an extensive review of both the book and Wikipedia itself at Boston Review:

Edit This Page

Is it the end of Wikipedia?
by Evgeny Morozov

Can you trust Wikipedia? Most of us have stopped asking and simply bookmarked it. That makes sense when you consider the alternatives: you can explore the first dozen or so Google search results, or you can go straight to the occasionally erroneous Wikipedia entry, typically culled from the very same search results. If you are looking for fast, up-to-date information, it is Wikipedia or Google (not Wikipedia or Britannica), and Wikipedia wins on speed.

Wikipedia still has its critics, skeptics who doubt its merits as a reference source. But even they cannot deny the tremendous social innovation unleashed by Wikipedia-the-project. Every professional conference—on topics ranging from entrepreneurship to journalism to philanthropy—now includes the mandatory, impassioned plea for the industry to adopt The Wikipedia Model, as if it were a set of Lego pieces that could be ordered from eBay and assembled in a newsroom or on the trading floor.

CONTINUE READING–>

What are your thoughts? How do you use Wikipedia? and more importantly, what do you tell your students?

Margaret Atwood at UNM

jsimps0n@unm.edu — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 21:56:48 +0000

Margaret Atwood will be reading from her new book, The Year of the Flood

7 pm on Monday, November 16

at Woodward Hall on UNM’s main campus

Atwood is the author of many novels, notably The Handmaid’s Tale, and Oryx and Crake – the novel to which The Year of the Flood is written as a prequel.

She will be accompanied by her partner, Graeme Gibson who will discuss his book The Bedside Book of Birds a collection of writing focused on the connection between humans and the creatures they endeavor to tame.

Tickets for the event will be $10, of which 100% will be donated to the group Wild Earth Guardians.

More info at http://www.bkwrks.com/event/atwood

Don’t miss this! Margaret Atwood is one of the most award winning authors of our time….

James Dickey Poetry Contest

jsimps0n@unm.edu — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:12:56 +0000

Five Points James Dickey Prize for Poetry

Winner receives $1000
and publication in the Volume 14, number one issue

Complete Guidelines:
Send up to three unpublished poems. Poems must be typed and no
longer than 50 lines each.

Include your name and address on each poem.

$20 reading fee includes a one-year subscription to Five Points.

Make checks or money orders payable to GSU/Five Points.

Enclose two sufficiently stamped SASEs if you want to receive receipt of your manuscript and notification of contest results.

All entries must be postmarked by December 1, 009.

We reserve the right to return any entry that does not meet the above guidelines.
Winner will be announced in Spring 2010.

Mail your entry to:

Five Points
James Dickey Prize for Poetry
Georgia State University
P.O. Box 3999
Atlanta, GA 30302-3999.

*Entries for the James Dickey Prize will be accepted between the dates of
September 1, 2009 through December 1, 2009 Visit us at:
www.fivepoints.gsu.edu for more information

The Lion Lounge is seeking submissions

jsimps0n@unm.edu — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:11:09 +0000

From: Leon Terner, founding editor of Lion Lounge Press, an independent publishing company based in Oxford and London, that specialises in creative writing, both short creative fiction and non-fiction, as well as poetry:

I am writing to you as we are currently accepting submissions of the above description for our 2010 publications, and I would like to extend an invitation to you to pass on our details to your Creative Writing students.

In August of this year, Lion Lounge Press published its first anthology of creative writing, ‘The Lounge Companion,’ in which we managed to include previously unpublished authors from various creative writing courses around the world, alongside established and critically acclaimed writers.

Though we do not offer pecuniary compensation for shortlisted submissions, we realise that publication is in itself a form of remuneration, especially for those that are looking to make a name for themselves as writers, and we would also like to stress that in no way do we intend to seize hold of the writers’ copyright. In fact, contracts will be drafted with shortlisted authors in order to protect their interests.

‘The Lounge Companion Vol. 2′ is scheduled for publication in March 2010, and we will continue to accept submissions for it until the 31st December 2009.

We also welcome submissions for our other 2010 publications, including travel writing and other genre fiction. Please have a look at www.thelionlounge.com for more details.

Call for Submissions! Deadline Feb: 5, Theme: Obsession-Aversion

jsimps0n@unm.edu — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:43:01 +0000

We are now seeking submissions for our spring edition of Rio Grande Review. This issue is themed around OBSESSION-AVERSION.

Our idea: Obsessions can be plaguing and oftentimes, dictate the direction and content of our writing. Here are the RGR office we are especially fascinated with the idea that to some degree, all writers are “obsessionists.” What we find even more interesting though, is that at
times we become obsessed with our aversions. With this in mind, we’re asking that texts submitted for our Spring 2010 edition consider this dynamic in some fashion. Whether this means writing about an obsessive aversion, an aversion, obsession, or how the two complement and direct/enhance/or inform one another, that’s up to you.

Deadline: February 5th, 2010.

Us: The Rio Grande Review is a non-profit bilingual publication run by students of the MFA in Creative Writing at The University of Texas at El Paso. ALL genres and visual ART forms are considered for
publication.

Prose: 5000 words, Poetry: 10 pages. We accept works in English and/or Spanish.

To view our complete submissions guidelines, visit our website at www.riograndereview.com

Lori Ostlund reading tonight

jsimps0n@unm.edu — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:01:56 +0000

A reminder that short story writer Lori Ostlund will read from her collection THE BIGNESS OF THE WORLD this evening at 7:00 in the SUB Mirage/Thunderbird Room.

Lori Ostlund received the 2008 Flannery O’Connor award and most recently the Rona Jaffe Award. She teaches fiction writer at The Art Institute of California, San Francisco.

Fellowship Opportunity for Writers

jsimps0n@unm.edu — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 04:19:41 +0000

The deadline is fast approaching for the writing Fellowships here at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA.

No degree is required for a Fellowship, but we have found that students who are about to finish or have recently finished graduate or undergraduate writing programs are often in search of opportunities like the Work Center Fellowship.

Details about the Winter Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA

For the last forty years, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, has run the largest and longest residency Fellowship in the United States for emerging visual artists and writers. Artists who have not had significant recognition for their work and writers who have not yet published a book with significant distribution are welcome to apply. Fellows receive a seven month stay (October 1-May 1) at the Work Center and a $650 monthly stipend. Fellows do not pay or work in exchange for their fellowships in any way. Fellows are chosen based on the strength and promise of their work. Former Visual Arts Fellows include Ellen Gallagher, Jack Pierson, Lisa Yuskavage, Angela Dufresne, Geoffrey Chadsey, and Lamar Peterson. Former Writing Fellows have won every major national award in writing including the National Book Award and six Pulitzer Prizes. The list of former Fellows includes Denis Johnson, Louise Glück, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Yusef Komunyakaa.

The postmark deadline for the 2010-11 Writing Fellowships is December 1, 2009.

2010-2011 Visual Arts Fellowship applicants may apply online beginning December 1, 2009. Online submissions must be received by midnight February 1, 2010. FAWC will accept slide applications for one more year. Applicants submitting slides, must have their applications postmarked by February 1, 2010.

For details, please visit:
http://www.fawc.org/fellowships/

Privileged Little Artiste Writing Something Oh-So-Precious Into His Moleskine Notebook

jsimps0n@unm.edu — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:28:19 +0000

Satire from The Onion

SAN FRANCISCO—After gently unfastening the elastic strap keeping his dearest musings safe from prying eyes, little literary artiste Evan Stansky penned a few more darling thoughts into his clothbound Moleskine notebook Wednesday. “These are much higher quality than the notebooks you find at CVS,” lilted the auteur, who couldn’t be bothered to use—dare it be said—a journal of lesser craftsmanship or pedigree, or one not famously used by such legendary artists as van Gogh and Hemingway. “They’re a little more expensive, but I try to write on both sides so I don’t go through them as quickly.” At press time, the princely scribe was seen finishing his apricot jasmine tea, asking a mere mortal sitting nearby to watch his literary accoutrements, and then prancing off to the Starbucks powder room, light as a feather.