Although yours truly didn’t get first spot, its still an honor to be recognized for the Reynolds Price Short Fiction International Literary Award, especially considering the submitted piece was a first try at experimental writing, an homage to Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics. Thanks to the Center for Women Writers at Salem College for the acknowledgement.
Peep out the official announcement listing all the awards, the winners, honorable mentions and finalists at the below link:
…but not holding my breath. Here’s a most welcome surprise in my inbox from a recent literary contest submission that has me honored to have work recognized and be reminded, once again, how writing is a lifetime practice of patience and perseverance.
Last Thursday, 19 February, yours truly had the honor and pleasure to share inspiration and inspired work at The Emerald Tablet’s “Under the Influence” co-founded and hosted by writer Evan Karp. Tucked away in North Beach central, the venue is both a cozy and spacious spot featuring some beautifully impressive artwork by Tibor Simon-Mazula. During introductions, Karp asked the audience how many had been to The Emerald Tablet before, and out of a packed house, only one person raised their hand, so the event brought in a roomful of newbies, including myself.
co-founder and host Evan Karp
Tapped to read first, I dutifully followed “Under the Influence’s” ekphrastic guidelines and read completely new work, written for the evening and inspired by Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, Robert MacFarlane’s Wild Places (and though I didn’t mention it that evening, but also Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost).
Yours truly
Since yours truly was coming down from all those butterflies after reading first, I hope I can be forgiven for failing to snap a pic of second reader Patrick Newson, who shared an excerpt from his fellow Oregonian Ken Kesey, and then dived right into some fiction with New Zealand as both background and character: “always in the shadow of that big brother to the West…where language is only a barrier for the weak. ”
Thaisa Frank
Thaisa Frank had stories nestled inside stories, which was part of the spirit she channeled that evening, an 19th century writing desk. She described the writing desk as an instrument for “gentlemen of means” and explained how the desk had recently been stolen otherwise it would have been sitting on stage before us. Years ago though, her mother convinced her to buy the antique during a family trip to Brontë country. Frank spoke of how influence can cause anxiety, calling on Harold Bloom, but she found that losing the writing desk was also freeing in a sense. In the chest was her mother’s journals, which reading later after her mother had passed, she realized, despite the difficulties of their relationship, many of the entries could have been written by Frank herself.
Abbie Amadio
Abbie Amadio, also a fiction writer had one of the most memorable bios, admitting she was worried about technological detachment and conspiracy theories. Reading from a novel-in-progress, she channelled Bret Easton Ellis, knowing full well the kind of reaction he typically draws from readers. Amadio explained how she came to read Ellis for the night, by closing her eyes and randomly pulling a book from her shelf. Her piece was about a telephone survey collecting data for memory enhancement: “I hear my robotic voice and type Jerry P’s memory to databank and already forget it soon as its typed.”
Joe Stillwater and his daughter
Filmmaker Joe Stillwater and his daughter shared one of their favorite children’s author who wrote the story Moonman, Frank Ungerer. They showed pictures of Moonman looking down on Earth and getting jealous of all the people having fun. So Moonman crashes onto Earth and gets arrested but because he’s a moon he can slim himself down during his phase to escape.
The father-daughter reading gave yours truly an idea, and now I’m hoping to host lit events where writers with kids bring their kids to read a story or share a piece of art that influences both parent and child, and then a parent reads his or her work. We’ll see if we can get this in the mix.
Driving back to East Bay
Always a treat to be out and about inspired by local artists and by local environs. Thanks “Under the Influence” for this artistic drunken affair! To see how it all went down, check out the video here:
Portugal has long been a place to visit since I drew up the post-college list of “50 Things I Want to Do Before I Die.” Almost fifteen years later, I finally got to see the land of my namesake. I’d always thought our family name was Spanish–that was until I was introduced by my in-laws to the Brazilian legend Jorge Ben, who’s real name is Jorge Duilio Menezes.
My interest in our Portuguese background only grew after reading Stegan Zweig’s biography Magellan. In all seriousness, anyone who is a fan of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit should really pick up this adventure tale. Its just as breathtaking and riveting–only thing is this story is brutally true. Not only is my paternal family name Portuguese in origin, but Fernão de Magalhães AKA Magellan, the great Portuguese pilot purportedly the first person to circumnavigate the globe, landed on my maternal grandfather’s island Limasawa near Leyte and died on Mactan killed by Philippine chief LapuLapu. Portugal is in the blood. This was proved soon as we touched down in Lisbon, and I had to show my passport to customs. The officer asked without hesitation, “where did you get that name?” I told l him I was part Filipina, and he answered, “That name is Portuguese, you know.” I got the same response when I departed the country and every other time I had to show my I.D. Apparently our handle draws attention.
Thanks to the Youth and/in Literature Conference hosted and organized by CETAPS of the New University of Lisbon I was able to visit this land of my European heritage. To learn more about the conference, click here.
Outside of academia, our time in Lisboa was nothing but captivating. She is a city of heart-breaking beauty. So many gorgeous buildings, such striking architecture and art from so many different historic epochs all in various stages of decay–a striking difference between the U.K., which has endless reserves of money to restore and preserve their architectural and cultural heritage. Not that Portugal is to blame for the decay and neglect.
The conference in Lisbon spent a good deal of time discussing Portugal’s inequality both among its own population and in contrast to other E.U. and U.K. states. The conference organizer took good time to criticize and analyze how the rest of the world wrongly classifies them as part of the self-destructive misnomer “PIGS,” and I’m looking forward to enhancing materials and topics for my Modern Global Issues course as well as explore this country’s history and future for later writing projekts based on ideas learned and experiences had in this diverse and complicated country.
If you like fresh seafood, custardy pastries, the hot sun burning down in the daytime, and balmy nights wandering crowded avenues and alleys then you’ll love Lisboa. So much of Portugal’s capital reminded me of my other favorite and complicated metropolis, the City of Angels. When we hailed a cab at the airport, our driver greeted us with one simple word “Diga.” Our ride to the hotel could have easily been mistaken for a trek across the 405 or the 10 freeway. The shining slant of the sun was just as blinding as it is in Los Angeles. Oleanders, yucca, bougainvillea, and penstemon all competed in showy force along freeway embankments and bordering sidewalks. The air was hot and dusty. Street art covered every blank surface, grabbing the eye’s attention.
We stayed at the Continental Holiday Inn Hotel at Rua Laura Alves 9, only a five minute walk from the university where the conference was held, and at the other corner of our hotel complex was a cafe and patissiere where we enjoyed all sorts of sweet and puffy delectables during our stay. Soon as the conference let out, we were free to explore the city, so we spent the money and hopped on board the Lisbon sight-seeing double decker bus to get a good lay of the land. Sweltering hot, we took in both sun and city, traveling first to Belém.
Our first day of exploring this country of explorers led us to the historical monument Padrão dos Descobrimentos (Monument to the Discoveries). Built to commemorate the fifth centennial of the death of Prince Henry the Navigator, this edifice sits at the edge of a pier overlooking the River Tagus, the point of departure for all the great Portuguese sailors, including Vasco de Gama.
We continued the maritime theme by visiting Mosteiro dos Jerónimos (Jerónimos Monastery) where de Gama is buried and where the cathedral’s ornate architecture features nautical symbols, ship’s knotting and ropes. The colorful statues of the Virgin Mary and Child are most exquisite and looking upon them its no wonder how the Catholic faith can take hold of hope and the imagination. It is this Monastery where most every famous sailor last prayed before pushing off to foreign waters.
Just across the way from the Monastery is the Museu de Marinha, where yours truly spent a good few hours scribbling notes and clicking the camera, gathering as much research as possible, which may find its way on this site, so stay tuned. Not only did this museum hold impressive replicas of the caravels that the likes of Columbus set off on to discover a passage to the Indies, but there is also a comprehensive collection of all the tools and gadgets that made precise navigation and cartography possible such as the pocket globe and compass. I dream of owning a replica pocket globe someday. This technology, invented by the Arabs, adopted by the Portuguese, and advanced by the British, made each culture ruler of the sea at some point in history.
They say Venice is one of the few places to truly meet expectations. Well, Lisbon shatters expectations altogether. She is full of surprises. Music is everywhere, pumped into the Metro station and in cafes and fado bars. Music is on street corners and in the rhythm of the daily life. On two separate evenings, we stumbled upon two open air concerts right next to the city centre Metro. The first concert was performed by a youth orchestra playing contemporary “classic,” and the second was an adult orchestra playing a more traditional composition. A night can’t get more magical, under the stars, a cool breeze blowing through and a full orchestra performing with skill. Lisbon is a constant state of amazement.
For a taste of Portuguese song, feast your ears on the following: Melody Gardot’s Lisboa, António Zambujo’s Flagrante, and Ana Moura’s Desfado.
Another evening we dined at the Casa de Alentejo, a 17th century Moorish palace turned into a club meeting ground and now a restaurant to enjoy a real Portuguese meal. The entrance is a nondescript facade that we would have otherwise missed if it wasn’t for the large party standing and chatting outside. Once inside, a long stairwell leads you to a jaw-dropping atrium elaborately tiled with lavish wooden arches. The second story holds a ballroom and dining rooms, where walls are covered with pastoral paintings. Not a place to be missed.
No trip abroad would be complete without a day of shopping, and we got our fill at Baixa and a seven-story El Corte Ingles. A city as artful as Lisbon carries its own laid-back and sophisticated sense of style. Not a hipster to be seen, the clothes match the weather, bright, eye-catching, and celebrating sun and flesh. After the hard work of bargain hunting, we topped off the evening with a ride on one of the funiculars to see the panoramic views offered by the Bairro Alto. Like the Casa de Alentejo, the Gloria Funicular would otherwise be missed if one didn’t know what to look for. Tucked in an alleyway, the tram chugs slowly up a steep hill, where we passed ladies making the same trek on foot wearing five or six inch heels. Blink, and you’ll miss one of the many street art murals that makes Lisbon distinct.
Our last night in Lisbon had us living life like we’re golden. Our guidebook, The Lonely Planet’s Pocket Guide to Lisbon insisted no other bar offered a better view and snazzier place to enjoy a cocktail than the Terrace at Bairro Alto Hotel. Its a tiny space where you have to wait in the downstairs bar before you can get called up for seating to enjoy a 180 degree view of the city with the River Tagus in the distance and the Golden Gate. We sipped martinis and watched the moonrise. Life is a blessing!
But Lisbon wasn’t the final stop on our summer travels. There is still Sintra, a romantic hillside city just thirty minutes away from Lisbon. Check back here for more on the city of poets.
SMC MFA @ Lit Crawl 2014 features Joshua Braff, Lily Brown, Robert Andrew Perez, Susan Sasson and yours truly. Save the date for Saturday, 18 October, 6pm, location TBA.
The Diasporas Conference ran con-currently with Interdisciplinary.net’s other conference “The Apocalypse”, and it was great fun asking those presenters how the apocalypse was going during mealtime. I also got a much appreciated dress rehearsal from the apocalyptic attendees who asked about my research and then surprised me with a host of questions, which even more surprisingly I found myself not only able to answer but enjoyed mulling over and discussing.
So what was presented in Oxford? Along with fantastic papers such as fellow Saint Mary’s College Professor Dana R. Herrera’s “#OFW: Social Media and the Public Discourse Regarding Overseas Filipino Workers” provocative topics included:
What Difference a Century Makes: Caribbeans in the Amazon in the Turn of the 20th and the 21st Centuries, Maria da Graça Martins
Locating the Self in a Disaporic Space: A Study of Imtiaz Dharker’s Poetry, Rimika Singhvi
The Stories We Tell: Drifting and Linking in Dionne Brand’s Prose, Eshe Mercer-JamesEconomics and Diaspora, Ram Vemuri
Each of the presenters on my panel complemented each other’s work, as we all spoke on ambivalence and pluralism to deepen the discussion of diasporas from multiple perspectives. See for yourself:
Session 8: Border-crossing Narratives Chair: Richard Merritt
Then the World Widened: Daring Creative Writing Students to be Cartographers of the Global Imagination, Rashaan Alexis Meneses
John MacKenzie’s Letters I Didn’t Write: Home is Where You Are, Kristen Smith
Collaborations in Diaspora: Canadian Experiments in Cross-Diasporic Multi-Authored Poetry, Heather Smyth
And what exactly did I present?
The abstract:
Then the World Widened: Daring Creative Writing Students to be Cartographers of the Global Imagination
Pankaj Mishra called for a “bolder cartography of the imagination” in his essay “Beyond the Global Novel” (Financial Times 2013), and a chorus of critics echoed his sentiments posing that the “global novel” or “world literature” sacrifices the specificity of real political traumas for the sake of deadened, feel-good multiculturalism. Though no matter how publishers and academics categorize, plenty of creative writers in our proliferating MFA and PhD creative writing programs aim to tackle transnational narratives. Likely to fictionalize aspects of their own transnational experience or origins, a novelist-in-training will set the world as her stage and her characters as polyglots. How will she avoid the relativistic dead-zone of multicultural platitudes while interrogating notions of politics and identity? How does she begin to depict what Mishra demanded as a “challenging cultural otherness”?
The global or transnational storyteller will likely implement such techniques as the multi-stranded narrative. She will have to demonstrate multilingual sensitivity, and her fiction will undoubtedly straddle simultaneous senses of space and time. This paper examines ways for creative writing students to practice these specific techniques by exploring the works of Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and Chris Abani’s Virgin of Flames both of which demonstrate linguistic virtuosity and polyphonic narratives with the intent to grasp what Bertolt Brecht named the “estrangement effect.” Taken from a craft rather than theoretical approach, this paper will illustrate ways to shape a de-centered, global narrative. For a cartographer at this scale must pursue intersections of truth and art, which requires from the writer and the reader a mutual construction of story and meaning. The writer, in this sense, relies on ambiguity and ambivalence to create a purposeful vertigo that is both world-making and world-breaking.
An excerpt:
In crafting the polyphonic narrative, the writer will want to assume that all perspectives, no matter the social or economic standing, have something to lose. From the wealthiest and most comfortable to those who are beyond the margins, every voice has to count. So how to justly cover the stakes? How to viscerally capture the urgency of what’s at stake for each character? The writer must ask herself:
How does each character represent a microcosm and how do these individual microcosms make a multiverse?
How does each perspective contradict, complement, mirror, and refract one another?
How best to splinter the self of each character, knowing that heart, body, and mind are in opposition with one another for each character?
How do these oppositional forces within each character map time and space both for the characters and for the reader?
The takeaway from this conference in this particular network is that passion is key. Interdisciplinary.net goes to great lengths not to emphasize titles or rest on stature but to focus on shared interests and dialogue. Each of the presenters were deeply invested in their topics, which was most engaging and inspiring.
As for what happened in Lisbon, the two conferences couldn’t have been more different. The first one was small and intimate. Forty attendees maximum aside from the two organizers, everyone present sat on a panel, so attendance was expected through the duration of the conference. Conversely, at the New University of Lisbon, I never got a hold of how many attendees were present because people were always coming and going. Half of the presentations were in Portuguese, so panel attendance was uneven depending on which language was spoken. Despite the variation, the opening keynote speaker, Shane Blackman, Professor of Cultural Studies, Canterbury Christ Church University, Kent, United Kingdom, proved most informative and timely, speaking on ethnography, which yours truly will be experimenting with come fall semester.
My panel included:
1) Bulgaria and Spain, Petya Yankova and Lida Aslanidou (University of York & City University London, UK)
2) “Then the World Widened: Daring Creative Writing Students to be Cartographers of the Global Imagination”, Rashaan A. Meneses (Saint Mary’s College of California, USA)
3) The Biggest Loser: Mercer Mayer’s Little Critter Series, the Queer Art of Failure, and the American Obsession with Youth Achievement, Michelle Ann Abate (Ohio State University, USA)
Of course, with the good counsel of a wise colleague I didn’t present the same paper from Oxford, but riffed off the original and found myself deeply interested in exploring how the bildungsroman of the 19th century reflects the building of a nation that mirrors the building of an individual through socialisation. Pushing the idea into a contemporary context, I’m curious to see how the bildungsroman, especially concerning the global novel, examines how individuals gain agency in parallel to how ethnic minorities might pursue sovereignty in the face of national hegemony. Yes, a mouthful, but this is the stuff that revs my engine. With that said, here’s an excerpt:
3. Performing Identity
Our identities demonstrate our allegiance to certain traditions and our rejection of other traditions. We essentially perform our allegiances or denial through identity. How we act and who we act with is our show of moral, personal, spiritual and physical integration into specific communities and even our integration into our larger global society. Jopi Nyman speaks to this in “Performing Englishness”: “By rewriting the generic repertoire of the Bildungsroman, the novel does more than represent a post-colonial critique of a Western genre. Rather, by redefining the process of learning in the context of the nation as a way of learning how to be English, the novel addresses questions of (national) identity and stresses its performative character.”[1] Identity is performative demonstrating our membership or rejection of values and traditions, and we might see the parallels between how the shaping of an individual identity reflects the shaping of a community or even a nation as Benedict Anderson speaks to in his Imagined Community.

[1] Nyman, p 97.
And now what?
I’m eager to continue exploring how global writers explore issues of identity, transnationalism and politics through craft techniques. I’m also hoping to scheme up a panel+workshop with fellow literary artists to explore the following themes:
1. How does your literary work serve or shape your social action or your commitment to social justice?
2. How do we read AND write for craft versus culture (in terms of being a person of color writer)?
3. How can writing & reading chart a “living” map of culture, identity, self, and community?
(Jaipur Literary Festival, 2014, Panel session on the Global Novel with Jhumpa Lahiri, Jonathan Franzen, Jim Crace, Maaza Mengiste, Xioaolu Guo moderated by Chandrahas Chaudhry. Presented by British Council).
Returning home after a three-week trip, presenting at academic conferences and checking out the sights and sounds of Oxford, UK, Lisbon, Portugal, and its environs, yours truly came back to a warm welcome from writer Barbara Jane Reyes, inviting yours truly on a Virtual Blog Tour (see her original post on the virtual blog tour here), which is defined by Vince Gotera below (borrowed from BJR’s post):
The “virtual blog tour” is an excellent, friendly way for writers, artists, and other creative folks to bring attention to their own work as well as that of others. It begins with an invitation from another artist or writer. Then in your blog you acknowledge the person who invited you, answer four given questions about your work and your process, and then invite three other people to participate. These people then do the same thing, referring their blog readers to the blogs of three more people, and so on. It’s a wonderful sort of “pyramid scheme” that’s beneficial for everyone: the artists and writers as well as the readers of their blogs. We can follow links from blog to blog and then we can all learn about different kinds of creative process and also find new writers and artists we may not have known about before.
In case you didn’t know, Barbara was and still is to this day my Virgil to the Bay Area. When I became a NorCal transplant from the City of Angels, it was Barbara who plugged me into the writing community, Barbara who introduced me to PAWA Inc, which if you haven’t checked out, you really should, and Barbara who continues to blaze the trail that I’m panting to keep up with. So hats off to BJR, who continues to inspire and provoke imagination, intellect, and engagement. Barbara’s work is fierce both on the page and as a leader in the literary/arts community. She pushes the boundaries of word and meaning while drawing the reader into urgent intimacy. See for yourself.
I was never a Santacruzan queen To witness, to make way,
Black eyeliner, push up bra Our thirst and our wedding bands —
I was never a curtsying debutante To fill stone jars with water, to wed,
Loud, gum-smacking babygirl Our glamour and our armor.
I was never a tiaraed Miss Fil Am To transfigure, dazzling as the sun.
Source: Poetry (May 2014).
I love how she plays with form in the poem above, and the contrast in imagery that bumps up against one another like tectonic plates, shaking our world as we know it. Her work is simultaneously both present, in and of the moment, anchored to a particular time and region, and also timeless, stretching across centuries and continents. Please do yourself a favor and read more of Barbara Jane Reyes’ brilliant work.
Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2010), winner of the Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry and a finalist for the California Book Award. She was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books, 2003) and Poeta en San Francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. She is also the author of the chapbooksEaster Sunday (Ypolita Press, 2008) Cherry (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2008), and For the City that Nearly Broke Me (Aztlan Libre Press, 2012). Her work is published or forthcoming in Arroyo Literary Review, Asian Pacific American Journal, Boxcar Poetry Review, Chain, Eleven Eleven, Fairy Tale Review, Fourteen Hills, Hambone, Kartika Review, Lantern Review, New American Writing, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry, TAYO, Unpublished Narratives, xcp: Cross CulturalPoetics, among others.She is an adjunct professor at University of San Francisco’s Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program, where she teaches Filipino/a Literature in Diaspora, and Filipina Lives and Voices in Literature. She has also taught Filipino American Literature at San Francisco State University, and graduate poetry workshop at Mills College, and currently serves on the board of Philippine American Writers and Artists (PAWA). She lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland, where she is co-editor of Doveglion Press.
As for the Q&A part of the Virtual Blog Tour:
1. What are you currently working on?
A manuskript about Filipino Overseas Workers also known as OFWs or what I’m calling our 21st century troubadours.
Recently presented two papers on the craft of writing the global novel/fiction (see video above) or inciting a global imagination, which I’d like to pursue further, exploring how writers tackle through craft transnationalism, identity, and politics on a global scale.
Researching Portuguese & Spanish explorers for another projekt.
Hoping soon to do more research on transculturation during Elizabethan times.
2. How does your work differ from others of its genre?
See above.
I’m very much interested in this idea of the global novel or world literature (again, see above video), which I riffed on at this summer’s conferences. From the papers I presented, one of which is titled “Then the World Widened: Daring Creative Writing Students to be Cartographers of the Global Imagination” below is an excerpt, which to my own surprise pretty much sums up what I’m fixing to do with my literary pursuits:
The global novel shuttles across language borders, geographical and political boundaries, and historical epochs. Writers who take on the task of using the globe as setting and world history as backdrop are today’s cosmographers, aiming to chart where we have come from as a global society and where we may be heading. In the quest to map the core and periphery or the Global North and the Global South, these writers reveal where and how ethnic, economic, gender, political, spiritual and other divisions intersect, contradict, or complement one another. Global novelists incite what Viktor Shklovsky calls “a world-awareness”1. …For Shklovsky, art aims to reorganize or re-envision the world, and this world awareness reaches beyond sensation; more than seeing or feeling, it requires active participation, agency, and a deliberate problematizing of awareness. Art, in this sense, is purely experiential, it is the inciting of awareness or inciting a global imagination for the reader to construct meaning and participate in the storying process.
3. Why do you write/create what you do?
Its the best and only way I know how to live.
4. How does your writing/creating process work?
I try to read, watch, and eavesdrop as widely and attentively as possible and am inspired by labour and geography. For some reason, I can’t tear myself away from the idea that how we make a living, how we pay our rent/mortgage, feed our loved ones, and spend most of our waking hours is intrinsic to how we find meaning and place. Of course this can be devastatingly limiting and deterministic, but more often than not, I find that exploring how vocation & occupation shapes a person and therefore a world is completely astonishing.
And now onto my favorite part of the Virtual Blog Tour, introducing four–though its supposed to be three, but I’m following Barbara’s lead because these writers are the bees knees–four brilliant literary artists. Please peep out their work!
Raina J. León, Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006) and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, has been published in numerous journals as a writer of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Her first collection of poetry, Canticle of Idols, was a finalist for both the Cave Canem First Book Poetry Prize (2005) and the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (2006). Her second book, Boogeyman Dawn (2013, Salmon Poetry), was a finalist for the Naomi Long Madgett Prize (2010). She has received fellowships and residencies with Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Montana Artists Refuge, the Macdowell Colony, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale. She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latino and Latina arts. She is an assistant professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California. http://rainaleon.blogspot.com/
Emily Breunig, from childhood onward, has lived and worked in all sorts of places, from California’s Central Valley to Texas to New England, China to Sweden to Southern California. She is fascinated with dislocation and the way that it impacts life in nearly every corner of our world–along with the tales people tell to make sense of it all. In her writing, she aspires to explore what this all means for individuals and their relationships with others as they struggle to find a community. She holds a BA from Yale University and an MFA from St. Mary’s College of California. Her first novel is represented by Levine Greenberg and short fiction is forthcoming in Pasiphae, from Valeveil Press. She lives in Silicon Valley. http://emilybreunig.squarespace.com/
Marianne Villanueva is a fiction writer who writes everything from opera librettos to short stories to novellas. Her work has been published in The Threepenny Review, ZYZZYVA, The Chattahoochee Review, J Journal, Juked, PANK, Word Riot, The Crab Orchard Review, and many other places. She is currently working on a collection of linked stories. Her blog is Kanlaon: http://anthropologist.wordpress.com/
Gregory Leadbetter’s pamphlet The Body in the Well was published by HappenStance in 2007. His book on Coleridge’s poetry, the transnatural and the dilemmas of creativity, Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) won the CCUE Book Prize 2012. He has written radio drama for the BBC, and was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2013. He is Reader in Literature and Creative Writing at Birmingham City University, where he leads the MA in Writing and the Institute of Creative and Critical Writing. www.gregoryleadbetter.blogspot.co.uk
Inspired by the International Retreat for Writers fellowship at Hawthornden Castle last June 2013, “The Others Are Strangers” is a tale that worked more like a possession. I have a sense of where the voice, the imagery, and this family came from, but its not like I could point to any fixed origin, certainly not in my life, certainly not autobiographical, but still a projekt that came from something both deep and transcendent. About a young boy from Midlothian Scotland, who feels estranged from his father, mother, and older brother, he desperately wants to be close again–to live like a family once more.
I’ve been told hard copy issues are in the mail, and I can’t wait to get my paws on them. In the meantime, I dedicate this story to my fellow Hawthorndeners who made the residency an event I never want to forget. Here’s to you Hamish, Georgina, Allisdaire, Greg, Gretchen, Rosanna, Terry, Joan, and Julian.
If you’re so inclined, take a sneak peek of the story at New Letters website and catch the shout out included in Robert Stewart’s “Editor’s Note.” Then consider purchasing a copy for yourself or any lover of lit.
yours truly reading a short story hopefully forthcoming this year in print
2014 has already begun with some sweet honors. The second weekend of January not only included a visit from my cousin Evan Napala of the DC-based band Cigarette, who’s music you should give a listen to here. That Saturday, yours truly gave a quick and dirty Composition presentation at a faculty development workshop for Saint Mary’s College, and the weekend was wrapped up with a reading on Market Street in San Francisco at the Hazel Reading Series.
Set in a gallery where artists paint, run a printing press, and fashion clothes, a uniquely SF space that invites the city to joins in full force, The Hazel readers included the below, each invited by last reading’s previous writers, also listed.
Rashaan Alexis Meneses invited by Allison Landa Sarah Frisch invited by Miriam Bird Greenberg Mei Li Ooi Carolyn Cooke invited by Ahmunet Jessica Jordan Monique Wentzel invited by Lydia Fitzpatrick David
Hazelers are asked to introduce themselves and talk a bit about the piece they’ve chosen to read, which may be something they consider experimental.
Sarah Frisch, fiction
Fiction writer and former Stegner fellow, Sarah Frisch posed a speculative piece also about giving birth but played with the idea that men do the deed while their women partners can only stand by and watch.
Mei Li Ooi, fiction
Mei Li Ooi was most inspiring with a performative piece utilizing the whole space at the front, assuming the role of each of her characters to capture both the audience by emphasizing tone, mood, and the urgency of her story.
Carolyn Cooke, fiction
Professor and Department Chair of Writing, Consciousness and Creative Inquiry in the MFA Programs at California Institute of Integral Studies, Carolyn Cooke grabbed our attention immediately with a story about San Franciscan insomniacs.
Monique Wentzel, fiction
And last but certainly not least, current Stegner Fellow Monique Wentzel read a most intriguing short story about a hole that opened up in the south of U.S. endangering a whole town and all the living.
Each of the writers were phenomenal, and as the organizers had introduced at the beginning, organic themes and threads surfaced with each work. The audience was treated to surprising commonalities such as male protagonists and the theme of birth. The next Hazel Reading Series is 5-7pm, Sunday, February 9, 1154 Market. Its a true literary gem in the Bay Area. Many thanks to Erica Eller, Sara Marinelli, Shruti Swamy, and Mei Le Ooi.
The organizers of Hazel Reading Seriesletter printing and fashion making at the reading spacethe hosting gallery space
Rashaan Alexis Meneses 