Peter Turchi

Tempe | Award-winning Authors Peter Turchi and Tara Ison

Superstition Review

When: Tuesday 02/24/2015 at 7pm

Peter Turchi visits with A Muse and A Maze, his followup to Maps of the Imagination. Joining him is screenwriter Tara Ison, who presents Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies,her new collection of non-fiction essays.
With his characteristic genius for finding connections between writing and the stuff of our lives, Peter Turchi ventures into new and even more surprising territory. In A Muse and a Maze, Turchi draws out the similarities between writing and puzzle making and its flip side, puzzle solving. As he teases out how mystery lies at the heart of all storytelling, he uncovers the magic—the creation of credible illusion—that writers share with the likes of Houdini and master magicians.Cinema is a universal cultural experience, one that floods our senses with images and sounds, a powerful force that influences our perspective on the world around us. Ison discusses the universal aspects of film as she makes them personal, looking at how certain films across time shaped and molded who she has become. Drawing on a wide ranging catalog of films, both cult and classic, popular and art-house, Reeling Through Life examines how cinema shapes our views on how to make love, how to deal with mental illness, how to be Jewish, how to be a woman, how to be a drunk, and how to die with style.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Called “one of the country’s foremost thinkers on the art of writing” by the Houston Chronicle, PETER TURCHI’S books include A Muse and A Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic, Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer; Suburban Journals: The Sketchbooks. He has also coedited, with Andrea Barrett, A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft and The Story Behind the Story: 26 Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work; and, with Charles Baxter, Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life. From 1993 to 2008 he directed the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. Turchi recently taught at Arizona State University, where he was director of the creative writing program, and he’s currently a professor of creative writing at the University of Houston.Tara Ison is the author of the novels The List, A Child Out of Alcatraz (a Finalist for The Los AngelesTimes Book Prize), and Rockaway, selected as a 2013 Best Books of Summer by O Magazine. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Nerve, Publishers Weekly, and numerous anthologies. She is the co-author of the cult film Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead.For more information please visit: http://www.changinghands.com/event/turchi-feb2015

 

Spring 2009 Reading Series

Superstition Review

Reading

Superstition Review hosted its first of two readings for its Spring 2009 Reading Series. The Reading Series began in 2008 with a goal to “form a writing community where students can interact with published authors, and where students can also share their own work,” according to Patricia Murphy, Managing Editor of Superstition Review. On March 16th, authors Cynthia Hogue and Peter Turchi dazzled the audience at ASU’s Polytechnic campus with their poetry and short fiction. Hogue read a group of elegant poems that the audience could relate to well, and Turchi read a comical short story that entertained, as well as enlightened, the audience. Those who missed the reading will be able to enjoy an audio podcast of the event here later this month.

Cynthia Hogue
The last reading in the Spring 2009 Reading Series will be held on April 20th at 7:30 p.m. in the Cooley Ballroom of ASU’s Polytechnic campus and will feature student writers from ASU. Students interested in reading their work should e-mail superstitionreview@asu.edu, title it “Student Reading Series,” provide reliable contact information, and paste the work they plan to read in the body of the e-mail. The deadline to submit is April 10th. The final reading will also be a launch party for the new issue, so be sure to attend.

Peter Turchi

Spring Reading Series

Superstition Review

Monday, March 16th Superstition Review will be hosting the first reading of its Spring Reading Series. Arizona State University Creative Writers Cynthia Hogue and Peter Turchi will share their poetry and fiction. The reading will be held in the Cooley Ballroom at the ASU Polytechnic Campus at 7:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public. The reading is generously sponsored by the Student Affairs organization at the Polytechnic Campus and is catered with organic food shares donated by the CSA. Our menu includes:

Swiss Chard Boules Stuffed w/ Chili Pepper Risotto
Roasted Vegetable Dumplings w/ Dipping Sauce
Local Orange Pico de Gallo w/ Tortilla Chips

Cynthia Hogue has published nine books, including an electronic chapbook, Under Erasure, in thedrunkenboat.com (December 2007), The Incognito Body (2006), and two co-edited editions, Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews (2006), and the first edition of H.D.’s The Sword Went Out to Sea, by Delia Alton (2007). Among her honors are an Arizona Commission on the Arts Project Grant and a MacDowell Colony Residency Fellowship, both in 2008. Professor Hogue taught in the M.F.A. program at the University of New Orleans before moving to Pennsylvania, where she directed the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University for eight years. While in Pennsylvania, she trained in conflict resolution with the Mennonites and became a trained mediator specializing in diversity issues in education. In 2003, she joined the Department of English at ASU as the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry.

Peter Turchi is the author of five books: a novel, The Girls Next Door; a collection of stories, Magician; a non-fiction account of the exploits of treasure hunter Barry Clifford, co-written with the subject; an artist’s exhibit catalog, Suburban Journals: The Sketchbooks, Drawings, and Prints of Charles Ritchie; and Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer. He has also co-edited, with Charles Baxter, Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life, and, with Andrea Barrett, The Story Behind the Story: Twenty-Six Stories by Contemporary Writers and How They Work. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has taught at Northwestern University, Appalachian State, and the University of Houston, and for 15 years he directed and taught in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He now teaches and is Director of Creative Writing and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

Join us Monday, March 16th to see these talented writers present their original work. I personally have found the readings not only enjoyable and enlightening, but inspirational to my own work as a writer. I have found few experiences to be as motivational as attending a live reading with contemporary authors. The readings have grown increasingly popular over the past year since the magazine first began the series, and our upcoming reading looks to be our most popular to date. We here at Superstition Review are excited to have such respected authors representing the magazine. We look forward to seeing you all there.

written by Alisha Allston