Along with fifteen other debuts, UNDERSTORIES competed on Thursday, September 19th in Late Night Library’s Second Annual Battle of the Books, hosted by Adam Wilson. The writer Rebecca Schiff read for me, and the dynamic duo of Schiff/Understories made it to the FINAL FOUR! Fellow Bellevue Literary Press book GHOST MOTH, by Michèle Forbes, was also in the FF, and eventually Hannah Gamble’s YOUR INVITATION TO A MODEST BREAKFAST was the Last Book Standing. Can’t thank Rebecca enough for donning the literary gloves and going for the glory.
I’m thrilled to have an excerpt from my ongoing work-in-progress, The Desert of Maine, in the latest issue of Western Humanities Review, which is themed “Historiography,” alongside work by Robert Coover, Shelley Jackson, Michael Martone, Danielle Dutton, and many others. Read the brilliant editor’s note here, and if you want a sneak peek of the opening of the story being read live in the “desert,” that would be here.
In a busy summer, one of the highlights for me was a visit to the Walnut Hill School for the Arts, my second, this time for their summer program. During a workshop session, we played around with style and listened to what felt like a slew of versions of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” including a dub-step one that, to my surprise, brought on faces I’d only seen in “Calvin and Hobbes” when Calvin learns that he can make his face permanently really grotesque if he holds an expression long enough. In the evening I read from the thing I don’t know what to call (short story which is now in the land of Novella, which a friend and I like to pronounce as if it is a magical, sun-gilded Italian village perched on the Mediterranean in which people speak only in animated bursts of 10,000-30,000 words. Eventually, it’s looking as though Novella will turn into Novel). While at Walnut Hill, I got to sit down with alumna Evangaline Delgado, and she threw some great questions at me about Understories and the writing life. http://walnuthillarts.org/alumniblog/unearthing-hidden-stories/
This past week, I had the pleasure of reading at the Vica Miller Literary Salon, hosted by none other than Vica herself, who posed insightful, provocative questions throughout the evening. I shared the bill with Royal Young, who can be seen holding Fame Shark, his account of coming of age on the Lower East Side and his vexed, dogged relationship with the concept and pursuit of celebrity. Also on the bill were Lisa Dierbeck, who read from a hilarious work-in-progress about how suddenly coming into money can have unforeseen consequences–an ancient, even folkloric trope transposed seamlessly into contemporary Brooklyn, and Avital Chizhik, whose “Galatea, Galatea” was a metafictional work that called Cortázar to mind. I read from a work-in-progress myself, a story about two dueling composers whose opening I’d read at the Franklin Park Reading Series. The stance above is my “Q&A” pose.
Storyville is a fantastic app that offers its subscribers a short story every week. The editors’ taste veers toward the eclectic and offbeat, and they’ve featured many writers whose work I adore and admire, from Claire Vaye Watkins to Joshua Cohen, Gregory Spatz to Marie-Helene Bertino. Needless to say, I’m thrilled and honored that they chose to showcase one of mine. In a brief background piece, I talk about the early influence of Monty Python, whose prints are all over this particular story. http://storyvilleapp.com/story/a-box-of-ones-own/
“Build an impenetrable wall from your stacks of gloomy realists, gouge out your eyes and sear your fingertips, for I present to you a collection of stories in which the author has had the gall, the coarseness, the utter audacity to have fun while writing.”
Over the next three days (April 24th-26th), I’ll be appearing at the first Ithaca New Voices Festival at Ithaca College, along with a bunch of fine writers: Rebecca Makkai, Jane Roper, Eleanor Henderson, Nathaniel Rich, Sheba Karim, Marie-Helene Bertino, and Robin Ekiss. We’ll kick things off with “micro-readings” at Buffalo Street Books in downtown Ithaca at 5 p.m. on Wed. the 24th, and from there it’s a whirlwind of on-campus talks, visits to classes, and literary discussions, culminating in another reading Friday, April 26th at the Handwerker on campus. It’s free and open to the public, and the whole full-to-bursting schedule is here: http://ithacanewvoices.wordpress.com/schedule-of-events/. Lastly, here’s an article about the festival where co-founder Chris Holmes cites his inspiration as the film “Wonder Boys”–thanks to Chris, Michael Chabon and Toby Maguire.
Robert Lopez, author of Asunder and Kamby Bolongo Mean River, has for several years been running a fascinating series in which he invites writers to contribute work whose only common denominator is its leaping off point, the title phrase “No News Today.” I was delighted to be asked to contribute, and you can see the results here, presumably without interfering one bit with your day’s news intake. http://kambybolongomeanriver.blogspot.com/2013/03/no-news-today-guest-post-tim-horvath.html
Brad Listi is one of those people you might describe as irrepressible; I’ve long admired his Other People Podcast for his candor and the show’s freewheeling nature, its road-trip-like willingness to go anywhere, take entertaining detours, and pull up short at roadside attractions. He also happens to be thoughtful and an excellent interlocutor. I was excited for the chance to appear on the show and talk to him about the role of landscape in my work, as well as bibliomania, my obsession with cities, estuaries, Howard Stern, bridge climbers, my stint in a psychiatric hospital, and other topics too sundry to list. You can see how these all got strung together into a single conversation here: http://otherpeoplepod.com/archives/1827.
