How To Break the Promise of the Country

Mon 30 Jan 2017 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

I am proud of our Massachusetts governor, Charlie Baker, and our representatives for standing against Trump and his bullying small-minded, heartless cohort who are intent on breaking the promise of this country. The USA is supposed to be a place people want to go to not escape from.

I’m grateful for the ACLU, SPLC, and all the lawyers and family lawyers who worked pro-bono this weekend. I am disgusted by the Republican Party’s failure to stand up for their own principles and the laws of this country. Ugh.

How much work is not being done these days as well fight for our democracy? There goes the economy as we all desperately call our political representatives instead of working.

On NPR this morning I heard an (all-male) panel talk about this weekend’s protests as “hysterical” because the “Muslim Ban” is temporary and not actually a Muslim ban. Perhaps the empty talking heads have forgotten how quickly temporary powers can become permanent? I don’t think so. They’re still not paying attention to what Trump et al are saying and doing now in their name. Millions of us are. Will it be enough? I hope so.


Bestilicious

Fri 27 Jan 2017 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Best Worst American cover - click to view full sizeWill you be in DC for the AWP grief fest? Yay, see you there. We will be selling books, tweetings and signing useless petitions at table 110-T in the bookfair. But more on that next week, if there is still an internet.

Anyway. We are throwing a reading at the amazing Politics and Prose Bookstore! Juan Martinez and Kelly Link are Juan read on Saturday, Feb. 11 at 6:00 p.m. Juan will be reading from his debut collection Best Worst American — which just received a lovely review in Booklist Online:

“In a podcast conversation about this book’s title story, Israeli writer Etgar Keret praises the suspense Martinez builds by packing scenes with high emotion while withholding information from the reader. This disorienting energy infuses many of the two-dozen short stories collected here, including “Roadblock,” which opens with a pyromaniac aunt and a series of suspicious airplane accidents. Martinez parlays this odd sense of estrangement and tension into subtle, absurd humor. In “Well Tended,” the narrator finds himself caring for a missing neighbor’s houseplants, and he winds up alone in a room with them, watering can in hand, with the ridiculous sensation of being ignored by the plants. Other stories are more bluntly funny, like “Your Significant Other’s Kitten Poster,” which deciphers the contents of innocuous wall hangings and closes with a hilariously violent encounter with a professor in a pool hall. Throughout, Martinez reimagines urban landscapes like Orlando as hellish and spectacular, “lakes afire with reflected light,” and the “aggressively ethnic streets of Culver City.” In his idiosyncratic approach to fiction, Martinez delivers truly new ways to read the world.”


March, March Again

Mon 23 Jan 2017 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

This weekend the new president’s press spokesperson, Sean Spicer, lied to the public and refused to take questions.

March: Book Three written by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell just won about a million awards from the ALA. Yay! I love these books.

This weekend the new president’s press spokesperson, Sean Spicer, lied to the public and refused to take questions.

These photos gathered by the NYTimes (the same paper that did not report on the Trump/Russia connection until after the election, ugh) are heartening, heartbreaking, and inspiring.

This weekend the new president’s press spokesperson, Sean Spicer, lied to the public and refused to take questions.

The White House phone comments line is closed. You can communicate to them through the website or by Facebook Messenger (sorry, what?). Here are the phone numbers — if they ever get turned on again — courtesy of Gwenda Bond:

This weekend the new president’s press spokesperson, Sean Spicer, lied to the public and refused to take questions.

Thank you to the millions of women and their supporters who marched this weekend. It was strengthening to be reminded that millions and millions of people are also horrified to see fascism rising in the US and around the world. I’ll keep making the calls, writing the letters, supporting those who expand human rights, and I expect to be marching with you all again soon.


January 19, 2017

Thu 19 Jan 2017 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin

There is so much that is wrong in this country. Our Massachusetts senators are standing up and shouting, our congress peeps, too — thank you.

It is amazing to see the Republican Party roll over and die without a fight. There is not a single one of the government nominees who would pass their confirmation hearings if they had been put forward by the Democrats. Conflicts of interest? Incompetency? They are a barrel-scraping of old white prejudice. I wish the Democratic leadership would fight it harder. Are they in the back rooms screaming? I hope so.

I witnessed the Republican Party’s obstructionist/anti-, and non-governmentive tactics of the last 8 years but I thought they actually had some principles that they were fighting for, not that they were just being oppositional. Now I see for certain they do not. I look forward to joining one of the marches on Saturday and witnessing the people’s hope that this Republic survives.


Another Whole Paradigm

Tue 17 Jan 2017 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Tender cover - click to view full sizeEvery day I wake up in this weird state of disbelief that 62 million people voted for the hatefest of humanity being put forward as the next President and government.

Then an email like this comes in and I think YES! We will make the future we want and need. Today’s thanks go out to adrienne maree brown (co-editor of Octavia’s Brood) and Sofia Samatar for her collection Tender:

“Sofia Samatar’s stories are just so good. Surprising. Suspenseful at an emotional level — I kept finding myself plummeted into an emotion face first, everything built up so steadily, with such subtle and meticulous storytelling. Samatar earns readers’ trust and uses it to take us into unexpected territory, to make us see ourselves in our power, in our messiness. Tender is the right word, so many of these stories touched into the place of gasping, or tears. Each story had me like, “Oh this is my favorite, I must mention this one.” But then I would read the next story which would be Another Whole Paradigm, similar only in that the writing was astonishing, each word so precise. This collection is an exquisite exploration of what otherness and belonging and place and language and love do to us all. It is visionary fiction. Please accept this as my enthusiastic recommendation to let this book have its way with you.”

Reviewers/Booksellers/Bloggers: please check the book out on Edelweiss.


In Which I Asks the Facebooks

Wed 11 Jan 2017 - Filed under: Not a Journal.| Posted by: Gavin


Tender — the secret knowledge post

Wed 11 Jan 2017 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Tender cover - click to view full sizeYesterday I got a lovely email from David Connerley Nahm author of Ancient Oceans of Central Kentucky who had this to say about Sofia Samatar’s forthcoming debut collection, Tender:

“The stories in Sofia Samatar’s Tender are perfect and profound works of art written with the impossible ease of someone who has unlimited access to the secret knowledge of the exact right order in which words are supposed to go. The stories ring in sympathy with the reader like the favorite stories of childhood or youth or old age: Familiar and strange in the same proportion. These stories give you several new lives to live and with each reading–because you will read all of them several times–you discover new tales and new possibilities hidden within and you are filled endlessly with the pure pleasure of great literature.”


Best Best American

Tue 10 Jan 2017 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Best Worst American cover - click to view full sizeJuan Martinez’s collection Best Worst American winds its way toward publication — well, it’s at the printer so fingers crossed all goes well — and for that final cover that I made with help from Ursula and designed with Kelly we have a quote from Kelly herself:

“A master of the absurd who serves up contemporary American life in rare, blistering slices.”

Juan will be reading in Chicago at Women & Children First and then with Kelly at Politics and Prose in DC during ye olde AWP Conference — and signing at our table in the bookcity — next month. See you there, if DC is still standing.


“If a library came alive…

Mon 9 Jan 2017 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Ben Loory just sent this about Sofia Samatar’s first story collection, Tender, coming in April:

“If a library came alive, and spent ten thousand years walking up and down upon the earth, exploring and dreaming and falling in and out of love, it might write stories like these.”

To which I say, wow! Also: true.

Review copies going out now. Available for download on Edelweiss soon. Watch LibraryThing for more advance copies.