Ah, the arrival of May. How much do we love this month? This very merry literary month? We’ll give you five reasons at the upcoming Sunday Salon. Hint: four will read from their new books/work, and one (really four in one) will perform from a new EP. Come join us! At Jimmys 43. 7pm.

Catherine Chung is the author of Forgotten Country. She is a Granta New Voice, and her work has appeared in Epoch Magazine, The Journal, and Quarterly West, among others. She is a member of the birdsong collective, and is on the advisory board of Paris Press. A fellow of The MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, and Yaddo, she has taught creative writing at The University of Leipzig and Cornell University, where she received her MFA.

Roxane Gay’s writing appears or is forthcoming in Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, Oxford American, NOON, American Short Fiction, Salon, The Rumpus and others. She lives in the Midwest.

Megan Mayhew Bergman’s collection, Birds of a Lesser Paradise, was published by Scribner in March 2012. She lives on a small farm in Vermont with her veterinarian husband and two daughters. She is a justice of the peace and teaches literature at Bennington College. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Best American Short Stories 2011, New Stories from the South, Ploughshares, Oxford American, One Story, and elsewhere.

Matthew Salesses is the author of a novella, The Last Repatriate (Nouvella), and two chapbooks, Our Island of Epidemics (PANK) and We Will Take What We Can Get (Publishing Genius). His stories have or will appear in Glimmer Train, Witness, American Short Fiction, West Branch, and others. He is the Fiction Editor for the Good Men Project, an online men’s magazine for which he also writes a biweekly column about his wife, new baby, and two cats. More about his current projects can be found at: http://matthewsalesses.com.

MUSICAL GUEST:

Karen & the Sorrows are camped out in a vinyl booth, saving all their quarters for the saddest country songs on the diner jukebox. The band has been a constant fixture at the honky tonks of Brooklyn for the last year and a half. They also co-produce the Gay Ole Opry—Brooklyn’s first ever queer country music festival—and host Branded Saloon’s Queer Country Monthly. Their first EP, Ocean-Born Mary, will be released this June. If there’s a tear in your beer, Karen & the Sorrows is the band for you.

Spring is in the air, but no April showers here! It’s going to be thunderbolt and lightning of the literary kind. Join us in welcoming to the stage five remarkable writers whose powers defy Doppler radar. At Jimmys 43. 7pm. Bring your thirsty selves. Leave the umbrellas at home.

Jürgen Fauth is a writer, film critic, translator, and co-founder of the literary community Fictionaut. He was born in Wiesbaden, Germany, and received his doctorate from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. He lives with his wife, writer Marcy Dermansky, and their daughter Nina. Kino is his first novel. Follow him on Twitter at @muckster.

Myfanwy Collins lives in Massachusetts with her husband and son. Her work has been published in The Kenyon Review, AGNI, Cream City Review, Quick Fiction, and Potomac Review. Echolocation is her debut novel. A collection of her short fiction is forthcoming from PANK Little Books.

Robb Todd, author of the collection Steal Me for Your Stories, is a recovering journalist. He studied his trade at an unremarkable university in the South and, as a person paid to write words, won a few awards that are even less remarkable. More importantly, he has never seen a pigeon walk backwards. Less importantly, he has lived all over the country. He was lucky enough to live in Hawaii twice. He also lived in Texas twice. And North Carolina twice. Actually, this is his second stop in New York City, too. He does not do things right the first time. www.robbtodd.com

Julie Innis is the author of Three Squares a Day with Occasional Torture. Her stories have appeared in Post Road, Pindeldyboz, Gargoyle, and Women’s Arts Quarterly, among others. She holds a Master’s degree in English Literature from Ohio University and is currently on staff at One Story as a reader.

Len Kuntz is a writer from Washington State. His poetry and fiction appear widely in print and online. His story, “Missing Chance” was named one of the 200 best stories of 2009 by Wigleaf Magazine, and Wigleaf also named his story, “Mockingbird” one of the 50 best stories of 2010. In addition to writing, Len is an editor at the online literary journal Metazen.

Achy Obejas is the author of the critically acclaimed novels

Q. I heard you speak once about how you never intended to work for a newspaper, that that was sort of an accident. And you ended up working for the Tribune for years. How did that happen?

A. Well, I was a journalism student at Indiana University. A lot of my connections to journalism still come from that period. I very much enjoyed my time at the Indiana Daily Student. I was the arts editor. But I never intended to be at a conservative newspaper; that was never my plan. I was going to do something groovy.

When I got to Chicago, I initially worked for the Sun-Times. Politically, the Sun-Times was much more in line with my thinking, at the time. This was when it was a Field newspaper. I left way before Murdoch. I bummed around and  did a lot of freelancing for the Reader, which I loved, and at Windy City Times, which I loved. At Chicago magazine, I had some very good editors: Pat Clinton and Richard Babcock. I was happily freelancing for all the alternative newspapers; it was a great surprise to me that the Tribune had any interest in me whatsoever.

Q. So they sought you out?

A. I kept winding up on public affairs programming at 3 o’clock in the morning with Tribune reporters. One of them was Manny Galvin, and at one point he said to me, “Why don’t you freelance for us?” and I said, “What are you, out of your mind?” But Gary Dretzka, whom I adored, hired me to freelance, and eventually he made the case for me as a full-time person. I actually ended up being very grateful to the Tribune. When they hired me, they had a very clear idea that I had no intention of making a career at the Tribune. I never fooled anybody about that. There was never any pretense. And they were immensely supportive. When I said, “I need a six-month leave to work on a novel,” nobody blinked. I got it. And when I came back a little later and said, “I need a three-month leave to go on a tour,” I got super-great support. It really felt like they not only were supportive of my career, but invested in my career.

I know that’s not the story anybody wants to hear about the Tribune, but everybody — I shouldn’t say everybody; there were a couple of dicks there — there were just some really good people there. I recently was honored as a Chicago Original at AWP, and I ended up talking a lot about the Tribune. One of the crazy things is that I don’t know that I could have actually written my novels, at least when I wrote them, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the Tribune gave me that kind of space.

Q. Speaking of space and time, how has parenthood affected your writing?

A. Right now it’s a gigantic struggle to write.

Q. I don’t know how much of a routine person you are …

A. I am very much a routine person.

(At this point, the interview is interrupted by Megan and Ilan, who have returned from a car ride — an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to get him to nap. Megan takes him to try to nap in his room.)

Buddy, please, for the love of all that is good in the world …

Right now, we’re just struggling with trying to figure it out. We’re terribly happy with him. He’s a delightful, wonderful, and greatly well-behaved baby. He’s come to my readings and he very rarely makes a fuss. In San Francisco, he squawked once. He’s been on seven planes in four months. But his needs have been so urgent that we have not quite figured things out. Right now, I’m barely keeping up with my commitments to prior projects, never mind actually trying to delve into the novel that I’m working on. It’s just very, very difficult.

Q. This novel that you’re working on, that you’re maybe not working on so much now …

A. Not so much.

Q. Tell us a little bit about it.

A. I’ve been thinking a lot about point of view. It’s a novel that plays with point of view. I’m hesitant to talk about it too much, because the influences are very disparate. I read from it on a mini-tour of the Bay Area, and got some very good responses to it. It’s very encouraging. My publishers, I’m sure, would like me to get it over and done with ASAP. It’s going to take a little longer than I thought it would.

Q. What are you reading these days? Besides kids’ books?

A. I’m always reading. I’m reading Dagoberto Gilb’s book of stories, Before the End, After the Beginning. The Curfew by Jesse Ball, who teaches at the School of the Art Institute. And I’m rereading Handwriting, a book of poems by Michael Ondaatje. I always come back to Ondaatje.

Achy Obejas reads at Sunday Salon Chicago on March 25 at 8 p.m. at Black Rock, 3614 N. Damen Ave.

Photo credit: Audrey Keller Photography

Emily Gray Tedrowe is the author of the novel Commuters (Harper Perennia), which was named one of Entertainment Weekly’s “best books of the summer,” as well as an IndieNext pick and a Target Breakout Book. She has received awards from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Ragdale Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. Originally from New York City, Emily lives with her family in Chicago, where she is working on a new novel.