#ArtLitPhx: The 2016 Northern Arizona Book Festival

northern-arizona-book-festivalThe Northern Arizona Book Festival will be celebrating its 21st year at Flagstaff, Arizona on October 10-16, 2016. This weeklong literary extravaganza will be filled with readings, workshops, and book signings. This year, they will feature over fifty writers, such as Diana Gabaldon, Nicole Walker, William Trowbridge, Miles Waggener, Doug Peacock, Matt Bell, William Pitt Root, and Pamela Uschuk.

The events will take place at Uptown Pubhouse, Firecreek, The Orpheum, and numerous other bars, restaurants, book stores, and locally owned businesses throughout the Flagstaff historic downtown.

For more information please visit the Northern Arizona Book Festival and the Facebook event.

Elizabeth Sheets: The Illusion of Ascending

dad readsI’ve always been a reader. I don’t know if this is my parents’ fault or not. Recently I found a crayon drawing and questionnaire book I made when I was in elementary school. On one of the pages it asks what my parents do during the day while I’m at school. My answers were: My Dad builds Rockets. My Mom sits on the couch all day and reads love stories. I don’t think that was entirely true, I mean, my Dad read books too. In any case, I do remember that prior to puberty, trips to the mall were exciting for two reasons: first, because I could climb up and sit in the conversion vans in the car dealership that was actually in our mall; and second, we got to go to Walden Books. My family didn’t have a lot of money, so we didn’t buy a lot of new books there, but it was a thrill just to be there and look around. I knew that eventually the books on those shelves would find their way to our city library.

As a kid, I was fairly well read. Once I got beyond Dr. Seuss, I enjoyed Roald Dahl, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Scott O’Dell, Louisa May Alcott, Franklin Dixon, Carolyn Keene, the Choose Your Own Adventure Series, and of course, Judy Blume. There are a few in that list some might consider literary, but many fall into the category of good old genre fiction. I still have many of them because I saved them for my children. And now I’m saving them for my grandchildren, because I don’t think I was as successful as my parents were at passing down the love of literature.

As I got older, I dove harder into genre writing. Once I could get books from the library that didn’t have the purple dot on them, my literary world was blown wide open. I devoured everything from Jean Auel, Piers Anthony, and Marion Zimmer Bradley to Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Anne Rice. Some of these authors I still read today. Because they’re good, and because I can get lost in the worlds they bring to my mind’s eye.

Once I started my degree program, my literary world was blown open again. Even with all of the reading in my youth, there was much that I missed. Memoirs? Whatever were those? Well, all of those English Lit classes filled me in, and filled me up to the brim with writing on every social topic I could imagine, and a few more besides.

Writing classes and workshops introduced me to the short story, and the idea that writers who don’t get paid are somehow of more value than those who do. I’m not much for martyrs, but I bought in. In my few years in school, my professors helped nurture in me a love of the short story, and an appreciation for the craft of drawing them out of myself and others. And so now, my private library grows full of chapbooks and short story collections. To my list of favorite authors I’m adding Roxane Gay, Aimee Bender, Stacey Richter, Matt Bell, Dan Chaon, Tara Ison, Margaret Atwood, and so many more.

But for all my education, and my editorship with a literary magazine, and my degree in English and Creative Writing… I still read Anne Rice. In fact, she might just be my very favorite person ever (not that I know her personally, but I do follow her on Facebook, so I feel like that counts… anyway).

I’m reminded of this funny thing that happened recently.

modest houseMy husband and I raised our children in a suburban neighborhood of the sprawling Phoenix Metropolitan Area. We had a modest income, and a modest house. We drove practical cars, and our kids went to public schools. There was a house of worship a half mile in any direction from our house. Our neighbors were diverse. To the east was a family of folks who spoke little English, had obnoxious barking dogs, and always had parties in the front yard instead of the back. To the south were the drug dealers. The husband rode a very noisy Harley and cut his entire lawn holding a Weedwacker in one hand and a beer in the other. His wife had no teeth and only wore a bra on Sundays. (I guess they weren’t very good drug dealers.)

We lived in that house 15 years, and our kids came up just fine.

And just a couple of months ago, we moved. Since our income has doubled, so has our mortgage and the square footage of our new house. Our new block is glorious. The neighbors all cut their grass on Wednesdays, and everyone drives a new car. There are bunnies and quail everywhere, and no one parks in their lawn.

School just started a couple weeks ago, and as I was driving past the elementary school on my way back from my morning Starbucks run, I noted that the crossing guard drives a Jaguar. A Jaguar.

This is it, I thought, we have definitely arrived. All of that hard work, education, ladder climbing, etc., has all paid off. Finally. Now we can live among the educated folk. People like us. Cultured people. People who read. If the people across the street are drug dealers, well they’re damn good ones because their kids drive BMWs.

And then I turned down our street. It was a Thursday. Blue barrel pick up day. About three houses in, out came a neighbor down his drive way, pushing his barrel out to the curb. He was wearing a pair of very snug fitting, bright red boxer briefs. His hairy belly was spilling over the waistband, and his tangled bedhead hair pointed in all directions from his unshaven face. He looked up as I drove past. Smiled.

I about choked on my chai.

But it’s okay. I’m glad I saw him. It’s a great reminder: there’s room on the block for everyone.  He cuts his grass, he parks in the garage. Maybe his wife builds rockets.

Guest Post, David Klose: On Falling In & Out of Love with Writing

I start out wanting to write a Blog Post for Superstition Review. I want to make it funny. Knowledgeable. Relate-able. The reader should laugh and think “I would like to talk with this writer.” All great writing is getting people to think they know you, that they would want to talk with you.

But I have no idea what to write about. I just graduated from college and that is about as boring and overdone a topic as any. I might as well write about golfing, or about the time I played flag football at a local park and discovered I am not the sort of person who should be playing flag football at a local park.

I like to write, but have written nothing of tremendous value. That isn’t fishing for compliments, just speaking objectively. Therefore I can’t offer advice to writers, though I have in the past done this very thing and, to this day, I still feel guilty about it. My writing is not terrible and has made some money in academic contests but I know, what everyone knows, but no one likes to say, that undergrad academic contests aren’t worth anything except the prize money. So I can’t write about being a professional writer, because I am not a professional writer.

I’ve had great experiences through my time as a Blogger/Non-Fiction Editor/Student Editor in Chief at Superstition Review, but others, in ways I cannot top, have written about those very experiences for this very Blog. Others, in ways I have yet to mimic, have taken those experiences and grown because of them. I have been to a writing conference but already have, in a previous post, beaten that horse to death with a very small club. I have been to AWP but spent more time touring the city than touring the Book Fair (shameful, I know, but who could have guessed I was to fall in love with cold beautiful grey Minneapolis?).

Hiking TrailBloggers tell you to write what you know, to relate to your audience through what you know. Good with dogs? Write about dogs. Write about how finishing a short story is similar to teaching a new puppy how to piss outside. It’s all about consistency. Go on a lot of hikes? Write something about the writing process and compare it to hiking a new trail, a harder trail than usual. It’s all about persistence. But my dog still sometimes pees on the living room rug, and the last trail I hiked ended with a whimper, not a bang. I thought maybe I could write about how to make the world’s best macaroni and cheese, but then I remembered, halfway through that ill fated blog post, that the best mac and cheese I ever had was made by a girl named Beth one drunken night six years ago at a friend’s house where we were all drinking wine out of plastic red cups and that recipe, like my connection to Beth, was completely lost after that night.

Telling me to write about what I know has always been a sort of cruel task; because I want to write about what I don’t know, and about that which makes me question my sense of authority. I am reminded of a writing professor who, in a soft rant against ‘trigger warnings’, asked our small workshop circle “Isn’t getting triggered the point?” For me, it goes like this: isn’t admitting you don’t know the point?

Here’s what I don’t know: the value of writing and whether or not I am a writer. I have loved books from a young age and can point to moments in my life that were shaped directly by the works of Salinger (specifically his collection of short stories revolving around the Glass family), to Tolstoy’s War and Peace (one of the first books that genuinely made me want to be a better person) to Dubliners by James Joyce which made me first think about becoming a writer. There are more recent examples, as well. In Matt Bell’s Scrapper there is a scene, where our protagonist finds a stolen boy and the snow is falling overhead, and where I, the reader, was so completely transported into that scene that my heart skipped a beat. But the more I work on Social Media for my job, the more I interact with other readers, with other writers, the more new books and new styles of writing I read, the more the doubt inside me grows. As valuable as stories have been to me, how can we properly value them? There have been blog posts in the past about how writers should be paid, for their stories, their poems, and that magazines shouldn’t expect writers to be content with just getting published. But can we really make that case? I would argue the opposite. That now in this sea of media, where everyone, through so many mediums, has the ability to share their voice, the value in stories is dropping or, at the very least, leveling off in an over saturated market.

This makes me doubt my writing. Do I really just want to be another voice in the market? Is there anything I can say that someone couldn’t say better? I honestly don’t know. That’s why I wanted to write this blog post, because I have no idea. What I see, through Social Media, are countless writers celebrating the fact that they are just writing. And this gets me a little depressed. It isn’t enough that we are just writing. It isn’t enough that we can take photos of our notebooks next to coffee cups and filter the image to look antique and post it. Perhaps this is the result of working in a book store and seeing just how many books get published and how few new writers actually get read. It isn’t enough that you have a story to tell. But now I am giving advice to writers, which is something I already said I wasn’t going to do. So let me stop while I am ahead.

Here’s where the title of my blog comes from: I saw Ira Glass perform at the Mesa Arts Center a few years ago in the show “Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host.” It was one of my favorite things I have ever seen and in that performance, Ira Glass quoted a friend who said “when we choose to be with one person for the rest of our lives, we are choosing the person we will spend the rest of our lives falling in and out of love with.”

I think it’s safe to say I’ve fallen out of love with writing. Like any great relationship, falling out of love makes me think of our earliest moments. I remember the first real Creative Writing class I had, where the teacher wrote the words “blue boot” on the whiteboard and asked us, rhetorically, what we were thinking of in that moment. Of course the answer was: a blue boot. Wow, the teacher said quietly, isn’t that amazing? Just by putting two words together, an image was created in our mind. What if, instead of a boot, we did that with a town? Instead a town, a world? Instead of a world, an emotion? What if, through words, we could create the idea of love, of loss, of fear, inside our reader? Wow, all of us students quietly said to ourselves.

This is all to say I still love reading good work. There were two writers I met at Bread Loaf whose writing I loved. One of them had already published a book and I read it in a matter of days. The other one hadn’t published a novel yet, but was certainly almost finished with their first draft. I look up their names every now and then in the usual places. Linkedin. Twitter. Instagram. They aren’t there. They don’t exist on Social Media and this makes me so goddamn happy. Now I can tell myself that, wherever they are, they are focusing on their work. Nothing else. And that one day soon their next book, their next story, their next finished product is going to be put out into the world, and whatever they have created with their words will be stirred within me.

#ArtLitPhx: Spillers No. 4

spillers4

Spillers is Phoenix’s premier short fiction storytelling event. Spillers organizers pick 6 of Phoenix’s best writers, put them on a stage, feature them in 2 episodes of the Spillers After Show podcast, and publish their stories in a collectible book available the night of the event.

The event takes place Monday, May 2nd, 2016 @ 7:30 PM in the Crescent Ballroom.

The Spillers are:

1. Joel Salcido: Joel translates the poetry of the barrio pigeons into surrealist prophecies. He is an MFA candidate in poetry at Arizona State University, and a member of the Gutta Collective, ARTRATs, and Chronic Illness.

2. Michael Holladay: Michael was born and raised in Kentucky. He is an MFA candidate at Arizona State University. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Saint Ann’s Review, Paper Darts, Fiction Southeast, and elsewhere.

3. David Waid: David has two published short stories available on Amazon: Wicked and Loving Lies and Festival of Rogues. His debut novel, The Conjurers, is currently available for pre-order and publishes on June 1st.

4. Tara Ison: Tara is the author of the novels, A Child out of Alcatraz, The List, and Rockaway, the award-winning essay collection, Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies, and the short story collection Ball. She is an Associate Professor of Fiction at ASU.

5. Paul Mosier: Paul’s fourth novel was acquired by HarperCollins as part of a two-book deal. The middle-grade Train I Ride will appear everywhere on January 10, 2017, and an even more depressing novel will come a year after that.

6. Matt Bell: Matt is the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as several other books. His next story collection, A Tree or a Person or a Wall, will be published in Fall 2016. A native of Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

Crescent Ballroom is a 21+ venue, so review the entrance policies on their website. The event is ticketed.

All ticket sale proceeds go to the Harmony Mosier GoFundMe campaign.

Spillers Website | Facebook Event | Tickets

#ArtLitPhx: Matt Bell Signs Scrapper at Poisoned Pen

Matt BellKelly scavenges for scrap metal from the hundred thousand abandoned buildings in a part of Detroit known as “the zone,” an increasingly wild landscape where one day he finds something far more valuable than the copper he’s come to steal: a kidnapped boy, crying out for rescue. Briefly celebrated as a hero, Kelly secretly takes on the responsibility of avenging the boy’s unsolved kidnapping, a task that will take him deeper into the zone and into a confrontation with his own past, his long-buried trauma, memories made dangerous again.

Scrapper is a devastating reimagining of one of America’s greatest cities, its beautiful architecture, Its lost houses and its shuttered factories, its boxing gyms and storefront churches, anywhere hope lingers. With precise and powerful prose, it asks: What transgressions would we allow if we believed they would ensure the safety of the people we loved? What do we owe for our crimes, even those committed to protect our charges from harm?

WHEN:
October 27, 2015 @ 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm
WHERE:
Poisoned Pen Bookstore
4014 North Goldwater Boulevard #101
Scottsdale, AZ 85251

 

Jessica Marie Fletcher: (AWP15) Yes, We Are All Writers, Relax

When I was asked to go to AWP Minneapolis and represent Superstition Review, I didn’t really know what AWP was and what it would entail. I had only just learned a few weeks earlier of its existence. Panicked, I wanted to learned everything and read everyone so that I could fully appreciate the experience. Once I had the flight booked, I heard people talking about AWP left and right. How did I miss this? It became the code. AWP? Yeah, you? Yeah. It sounded like the party of the year, but it was at some speakeasy where only the elite could go, and I somehow got a golden ticket undeserved.

This is how I thought: do I even belong here? How funny that I spent the greater time worrying about humbling myself before the Great that I assumed would be there. I eventually realized that there was no real way to prep for the conference, so I just sat back and watched the #badAWPadvice roll in while I packed my bag (not quite well enough for the snow). I sensed the theme of all the advice: yes, we are all writers, relax.

I was the first to launnamednd on the ground in Minneapolis, so my selfie was the one plastered across the ASU News page and other social media. Already still wondering how I got there, I was even more confused by seeing this. Yes, you are here. This picture in the article was found by my sweet mom, who unknowingly professed her love for me on the Facebook post. Already unsure of myself, I thought that this was even more embarrassing. Quickly, I realized I needed to not take myself so seriously. Many moments on the trip felt like these little nuggets of life wisdom.

I spent that hour alone in the city wandering, getting my bearings, trying to center myself for the event. I never felt like I stopped moving (which made sense given the plane, subway, bus, and walk to the hotel I took to start) that entire trip.

The girls I roomed with were the highlight of the conference. Early on, we bonded, and I was able to learn from these like-minded women, who were in the same undergraduate, lost boat as I was. This bonding—this sense of community—defined the trip. I got it: an association of writers.

We spent our first night in a crowded, local Normal World Pub that couldn’t fit more people in if it tried–and it did try. The Literary Death Match was hosted there, and right away the trip began with awkward bump ins and “excuse me, coming throughs” with fabulous writers like Roxane Gay, Mark Doten, Matt Bell, and Claire Vaye Watkins. We pushed, shoved to the front of the crowd and had the equally the best and worst spot up front and right next to the bathrooms  where the waiters/passerbys had to continuously shove to pass. None of that mattered because everyone was enjoying the readings, the impromptu performance of Matt Bell, and the literary charades to follow.

The conference itself felt like swirling dream sequences. I had a dream before the trip that the conference was like a casino. There were no lights and gambling tones rising above the crowd, but we were enticed into various panels and rooms until we reached the last day and were all ready to go home, slightly broke from buying books and cool totes and souvenirs at the book fair.

I learned a lot from the panels I did go to, and I also learned to relax when I didn’t go to a panel. Everything began to bleed into everything else like watercolors, and I was okay with that. I even sort of liked that better than the regimented plan that I originally assumed would get me through the conference.

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Left to right: Stephanie Funk, Sydni Budelier and Erin Regan

I was not discouraged by the advice, but rather uplifted because every person that I met only reminded me that you write because you love it. I understood that the conference served as a reunion for many writers, who after years teaching or living elsewhere, were able to catch up and engage in the same thought-provoking conversations with other like-minded and intuitive people.
I was thrilled to meet the humans behind the contributors list in SR, to take part in curious conversations, and to connect with the past SR Editor-in-Chiefs, Erin Regan and Sydni Budelier, and the most recent fiction editor and my mentor, Stephanie Funk. It truly was a treat, and I won a golden ticket with the friendships and memories from AWP15.

Photos by Jessica Marie Fletcher