Feb. 20: Abbey Mei Otis, Kelly Link, & Jordy Rosenberg

Wed 13 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , , , | Posted by: Gavin

(from Forbes Library’s press release)

Alien Virus Love Disaster cover - click to view full sizeThe third reading in the Forbes Library Writer in Reading Series “Our Work And Why We Do It” is Wednesday, February 20th, from 7-9pm in the Coolidge Museum at Forbes, featuring three brilliant fiction writers:

Kelly Link
author of “Get in Trouble”, “Magic for Beginners”,
“Stranger Things Happen” and more!

Abbey Mei Otis
visiting from Ohio and author of “Alien Virus Love Disaster”;
first reading from this collection in the area!

Jordy Rosenberg
author of “Confessions of the Fox”
(a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection)

~this event is FREE and Wheelchair Accessible~

Books by the authors will be available for purchase at the event!

(You can read more about the writers here on the library’s website and here on Facebook!)

This series features writers of prose, poetry, nonfiction, and memoir, and beneath these broad categories, constellations of subgenres and forms. The series is interested in exploring how writing relates to work, to a sense of a collective project that seeks to respond to the political and social forms that produce it. The series hopes to affirm the role of creative written work as a measure of response to the exigencies that shape our world.

I’ve been calling this reading In The Offing, an attempt to name a theme I feel captures the character these writers share. While diverse in formally adventurous ways, each carves a unique path toward futures portended in the murk and bright of the present or dredge different possibilities for histories buried in the past. They contain, in the richness of their visions and the lyricism of their articulations, a spirit that echoes Ernst Bloch in his demand for utopia: “that is why we go, why we cut new metaphysically constitutive paths, summon what is not, build into the blue, build ourselves into the blue, and there seek the true, the real, where the merely factual disappears…”

To learn more about the writers and their worlds, you can find a brief interview with Kelly Link from the MacArthur Foundation here, the title story from Abbey Mei Otis’ collection here (with an introduction by Dan Chaon), an interview with Jordy Rosenberg here, and an excerpt from his novel here.

Also, on February 7th, Jordy will be reading at UMASS Amherst as part of their Visiting Writers series! More info here.


Freecycle

Mon 4 May 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Hey, we just successfully freecycled our old workhorse (which was the name of it in the end) Powerbook Mac to a guy who’s going to take it apart and maybe repair it for a computer repair class: excellent!

This press was basically run off that laptop from sometime in 2001 to sometime in 2006. It was bought when our place in Brooklyn was robbed (on July 4th weekend, how patriotic!) and it turned out rental insurance was one of the best ideas we’d ever had. At some point we put in a new harddrive, more than doubling its capacity to a mind-boggling 20GB. Ha. Then in 2006 or so it started slowing down and we stripped a lot of stuff off it and it was replaced with a MacBook. For a while it worked as a mini-server (and an AirTunes repository) then, one day, silence. We toasted it then, we toast it again. (Maybe all that toasting was why it stopped working? Is heat bad for laptops? How about peanut butter)

And now off it goes to a new and more scattered place: thanks old boy, good luck in your next life(/lives)!


King & Russo

Fri 7 Nov 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., , | Posted by: Gavin

Last night we went to see “The Odyssey Bookshop and The Food Bank of Western Massachusetts present A Conversation with Stephen King and Richard Russo moderated by Joe Donahue, host of ‘The Roundtable‘ on WAMC” at the Chapin Auditorium at Mount Holyoke College. The event raised more than $18,000 for the Food Bank and the Odyssey—one of our great local(ish) bookshop—gave them a huge check which made everyone laugh. We also supported local coffee roaster Pierce Roasters (mm, cookies) as they were donating all monies to the Food Bank. Odyssey are celebrating their 45th anniversary, not bad! Next week Rosamond Purcell is coming and the week after it’s Amitav Ghosh. Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies is the next title in their First Edition Club, which has more than 250 members. Wow.

Anyway: King and Russo were great fun. There were 900 people and the mics were acting up so there was some technical (and other) monkeying around (as well as some spooky feedback), but for the most part it was two pros talking about writing and the writing life.  They talked about novels vs. short stories (King’s new book is a collection, Just After Sunset) and about grounding work in the everyday details. Richard Russo (Bridge of Sighs just came out in pb) talked about something he’d been told, “You can’t jump from air to air,” which seemed to catch something right about writing. Joe Donahue (we will get one of our authors on that show!), the moderator, was very good, too. At the end he asked them a question he isn’t allowed to ask on public radio, “What’s your favorite curse word?” King talked about colloquialisms (“I wouldn’t give a tin shit for that”). Gales of laughter.

It was most excellent to see so many people at the reading. Both King and Russo signed books. The bookstore had numbered the tickets so that readers came up in blocks of 50. There are famously fast signers out there but Stephen King is up there with them, it took maybe an hour to reach our tickets, which were numbered in the 400s.