Meant to post this last month. Going to be at AWP 2010 in Denver, and I’ll be sitting on two very different panels. One panel is a discussion that my Apostrophe Cast partner Amanda Choi and I pulled together called “Shared Locality: Fostering Community and Creating Posterity through Online Reading Series.” We’ll be talking about our experience with non-geographically-centered reading series with folks from DubLit, From the Fishouse, and PennSound. We all do very different things, and we’ll talk about how we determined the various purposes of our projects.

The other panel is a much more specific one that is very important to me. The discussion of 2-year college literary magazines. As the faculty advisor for Luna at Nassau Community College, I’m quite aware of the very specific challenges that students face in trying put a out a stunning magazine each year in the two year environment (where student turnover is greater, campuses are less centered, and non-academic life is busier). Luna is run as a very campus-specific, student-centered publication, which I think is what our campus needs, but many other 2-year college journals are national magazines. I’m looking forward to learning from the people I’ll be sitting with on the panel that day. (Also, on this topic: I did an interview about 2-year college lit mags for an article that should show up on New Pages soon.)

Aldous Huxley scares children with his description of dystopian city of the future - DENVER

My friend Chip Brantley, who knows a lot about food – and other stuff – just published his first book, The Perfect Fruit: Good Breeding, Bad Seeds and the Hunt for the Elusive Pluot. First off, pluots are delicious. They have been our fruit of the summer, and Nina is really into them. And I know for a fact that Chip put a ton of work into researching this book. Years of research into the life and times of one little fruit. Pluots are hybrids of apricots and plums. But it’s amazing the intrigue that went into making these things happen. Chip’s book is not simply a study of the science of fruit breeding; it’s a story of the interests and competing parties involved in creating a product like the pluot (think John McPhee’s Oranges). Go here to read a lot more about this fascinating book.

And Chip has also started an invaluable website about food and cooking it – Cookthink. Sign up for their ‘root source’ updates. I get these emails that continually remind me that I understand very little about what I eat. And their recipe generator is incredibly intuitive; it’s really different than Epicurious or whatever else I’ve seen online.

Conferences in large chain hotels – academic or otherwise – are generally not a good thing involving half-hearted attempts at critical reasoning and wet scrambled eggs self-served from silver trays. &NOW, which will be held in Buffalo October 14-17, on the other hand, is a very good thing (that might still include wet scrambled eggs). This is a festival of innovative literature and literary arts. And they are quite serious about the when they use the word innovative. I’ll be there. So will Johannes Goransson, Tim Wood, and J.A. Tyler. (And a lot of other people like my friends Lara Glenum, Joyelle McSweeney, Danielle Pafunda … go here to see the list – pretty awesome). Johannes, Tim, J.A. and I will be doing a panel called “Words and Pictures: Life After Rupture in Image-Text Collaboration.” It’ll be a critical discussion of various ongoing image-text projects that I’m working on with each of them respectively. Johannes and I continue to chip away at our epic Genius Child Orchestra graphic novel/collage poetry work, which we’ve been working on in some form for several years now (my upcoming comic chapbook, The Remains, from MC Hyland’s Double Cross is a section from this project). Tim and I will talk about our Nine Frayed Leaves book projects (separate site coming soon). And J.A. and I will present our book Glimpse which we are working on furiously these days, and I hope to show samples of on this site soon. Later in the weekend I’ll also be a part of the Action Books reading along with Johannes, Joyelle, Lara, and Arielle Greenberg – particularly looking forward to reading with that esteemed group.

This is new one for Apostrophe Cast. We have an ensemble reading to celebrate the premiere of The Collagist, the new Matt Bell-edited web journal published by Dzanc. Readings from Kim Chinquee, Kevin Wilson, and Charles Jensen. It’s nice to have the chance to celebrate something we’re excited about in the literary world that involves not just a single writer but progress in a community.

As always, the reading will be featured on the site for next two weeks, and indefinitely on our podcast feed.

We’ve been collecting readings furiously over the past few weeks. Upcoming readings from Nate Pritts, Molly Gaudry, Jason Jordan, and a lot of other torch-the-canon writers/readers.

I’ve got some readings coming up for The Complete Collection of people, places & things. (At most of these, I’ll also be presenting some of my new comics.) Really looking forward to getting out and seeing people.

Book Launch: Soda Bar, Brooklyn, NY – Sept. 22 (w/Shanthi Sekaran and Sabrina Orah Mark)

I’m looking forward to this one, in particular. I’m reading with two old friends, from Baltimore and Athens, respectively, and I’ll be reading a block and half from from my new house in my new neighborhood (assuming we’ve moved by then).

510 Reading Series at the Baltimore Book Festival - Sept. 26 (w/ Terese Svoboda, Michael Kimball, Jen Michalski, Justin Sirois, Savannah Schroll Guz, and Shanthi Sekaran)

This one’s al fresco, down in Mount Vernon. Michael’s put together a line-up that I’m really proud to be a part of, and it will be very cool to get back to Baltimore, a city which I will always have a great deal of nostalgia and affection for (and it’ll be cool to read with Shanthi, one of my buddies from my B’more days).

Small Animal Project – Cambridge, MA – October 11 (w/Matthew Derby and Kristen Iskandrian)

Should be a great afternoon of odd fiction. Kristen is one of my closest friends and favorite writers, and Matthew’s Super Flat Times is one of those books that really gave me intellectual license to write The Complete Collection. Thanks to Jessica Bozek for putting this one together.

&NOW Festival - Action Books Reading – Buffalo, NY – October 17 (w/ Johannes Goransson, Joyelle McSweeney, Arielle Greenberg, and Lara Glenum)

This is going to be a fun week – check out this line-up for the &NOW Festival. I don’t normally “enjoy” conferences or “look forward” to them, but &NOW is different – it’s smart and weird and attracts people who think, not people just a bunch of people who want to show off their half-baked ideas over free continental breakfast. Action Books (the sister press of Action,Yes) publishes the work of a lot of these smart people, so I’m happy to share the stage with them. Also, that Thursday, I’ll be doing a critical panel about ruptures in image-text collaboration – more on that soon.

Later this autumn, Sabrina Orah Mark and I are also planning a Southern launch for The Complete Collection and her new book Tsim Tsum down in Athens, GA. More on that and a few other things when plans are set…

An actual image from Sabrina Orah Mark’s doorstep:

They’re giving them out here.

Aaron Burch sent me a couple of contributor copies of this beautiful book in the mail a few weeks ago.

The cover and drawings throughout the book are done my Adam Haynes; he has a knack for making detritus look sublime. I’ve got a comic in there and so does Lydia Conklin (which is cool because she’s a good friend and we draw comics together in the same comics group – we also had stuff in the same issue of Beeswax earlier this year). My comic is called “The Gift of the Lumberjacks.” It began as a prose piece that I wrote after reading Zizek’s take on the role of television in creating our idea of September 11, but it eventually evolved into this comic. Lydia’s stories are selections from her book Camp Interesting, which she just finished and is pretty amazing to read as a whole.

One story that stuck out was Mike Young’s “Stay Awhile If You Can.” It had this sad, beautiful, meandering feel – it conjured the Pacific Northwest as I imagine it, but I’ve never been there. Awesome stories in there from Blake Butler, B.J. Hollars, Amy L. Clark, and many others.

Aaron has also put together this page of web extras. Ben “Guy” Brookshire did three more of his creepy collages in response to Blake’s “Smoke House.” Lydia and I collaborated on a comic, imagining that one of her campers wandered into the woods and found my lumberjacks. See it here (if the link is working).

I love the proliferation of lit journals – online, in print, handmade, etc. But I feel like there’s something a little more special about the debut of THE COLLAGIST. Maybe it’s because I trust Matt Bell. He’s a hell of a writer and he’s got good taste. The issue went up this morning at the stroke of midnight (that’s drama). Here’s what he has to say about the first issue:

The debut issue includes fiction by Chris Bachelder, Kevin Wilson, Kim Chinquee, Matthew Salesses, and Gordon Lish, plus an excerpt from Laird Hunt’s forthcoming novel Ray of the Star. Charles Jensen, Oliver de la Paz, and Christina Kallery each contribute several new poems, and Ander Monson and David McLendon offer two different and unique takes on the personal essay.

The Collagist’s first book review section includes coverage of Terry Galloway’s Mean Little Deaf Queer, Michal Ajvaz’s The Other City, and Brian Evenson’s Fugue State, as well as a video review of Jonathan Baumbach’s You, or the Invention of Memory.

Oh, and to celebrate the birth of The Collagist, we are having a special episode of Apostrophe Cast that Matt curated. That’ll hit next Wednesday night – August 19th (where not talented or organized enough to promise any stroke of midnight arrival).

Just a quick note to say that I was excited to learn that SPD included The Complete Collection of people, places & things in their most recent list of recommended books. I have a lot of respect for Small Press Distribution and what they mean to the literary/artistic landscape. The center is fortunately crumbling and they are there to pick up and give out some of the best pieces.

The Complete Collection of people, places & things does have a profile up at Goodreads. Those of you who have Goodreads profiles, and are so inclined, go and add it to your ‘to-read’ list, and say nice things about it. I’d sure appreciate it. And so would Gargamel.