SAH named Outstanding Collection from 2012
SAH named Outstanding Collection from 2012
The Story Prize named SAFE AS HOUSES an Outstanding Collection of 2012! I am DELIGHTED BEYOND REASON, in awe of the company my little book keeps on this list, and so thankful to University of Iowa Press Short Fiction & Poetry.
Tender Spirits, an Interview with The Paris Review
Tender Spirits, an Interview with The Paris Review
"I think you can read phoniness in a second in fiction. It’s actually tremendously easy to write mean fiction with selfish people making selfish choices about selfish things. It’s much harder to write well-developed, complicated, contradictory characters."
My interview with the supremely thoughtful and intelligent, wonderful listener and writer Jessica Gross.
The Wellspring House
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Recently I was able to visit The Wellspring House, a retreat for poets and writers in the foothills of The Berkshires in Massachusetts. There I was able to sit by a fire and chat with Preston Browning, the writer and teacher who founded The Wellspring House twelve years ago with his lovely poet wife, Anne. If you are a writer or artist looking for a peaceful space to work, I highly recommend this special house.
Library Journal includes Safe as Houses on their list of "2012 Short Story Collections I Couldn't Forget."
NEATO MOSQUITO! I do hope the collection isn’t “unforgettable" just because of all the shameless murder scenes and erotic images.*
*There is neither murder nor erotica in Safe as Houses. The management is aware that the collection is the poorer for it.
Sincerely, The Management
If you were here I'd be home right now
Yet Another Year End List, by Sean Carman on The Huffington Post Books site
Yet Another Year End List, by Sean Carman on The Huffington Post Books site
Sean Carman gives Safe as Houses love on The Huffington Post Books site! Along with my dear friend Elliott Holt’s twitter murder mystery short story! Exclamation points for everyone!
"The stories in Safe as Houses are quirky and hilarious, but also tell honest emotional truths. It is exceedingly difficult to manage the emotional distance this kind of storytelling requires. Each one is a literary gem."
New Year's Day at The Saint Mark's Poetry Project
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New Year’s Day at The Saint Mark’s Poetry Project
Patty Smith sings a beautiful poem for the children of Connecticut with Lenny Kaye, Steve Earle reads a poem about being a musician in the company of poets, Lee Renaldo plays a song about Occupy, and The Secret Orchestra plays some jazz. An all day marathon of poets and dancers and musicians and…
"Our Education" by Lincoln Michel
Vol. 9, No. 1
EDITOR’S NOTE
So many of childhood fantasies are, from the perspective of a worry-prone adult, nightmares: running away, becoming an orphan, living in a boxcar. Yet the realities of such disorder eventually trump our desire for it; any kid who has tried to run away knows the feeling of getting half way down the block with a backpack and thinking, in a word, crap. This is the moment in which we find the narrator of Lincoln Michel’s tale of scholastic anarchy, “Our Education.” He is trapped in a school from which the teachers have all disappeared, but in his case, there is no option to break the fantasy, to go home.
This earnest and cautious young student continues to work on his final assignment in secret, searching for clues of the teachers and their legacy. “I cannot say what the lack of faculty means,” he thinks, in a deliciously ambiguous turn of phrase. Yet even to speculate on such matters is forbidden. “The concept of the teachers is absurd. What kind of teacher would leave their students?” says the tyrant of the group, former football team captain Clint Bulger. “Such a teacher would be no teacher at all.” And here Lincoln reveals an ontological fissure, one of the many things he does so well: the teachers never existed because they failed to meet the definition of teachers.
All the while the teachers’ lounge, authority’s dark spaceship, is a tall, black column that sits at the center of the cafeteria. Some, who can’t believe the teachers have vanished, think they are holed-up inside, watching. Whenever a hero falls—Lance Armstrong dopes, Bill Clinton cheats, Martha Stewart commits insider trading—I can’t help but think of the Simon and Garfunkel lyrics, “Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio? Our nation turns it lonely eyes to you.” Because in the absence of a hero, what once was a pillar, an organizing principle, is now a dark center—the vacuous teachers’ lounge around which the students, whether they like it or not, eat tater tots and run free.
Halimah Marcus
Co-Editor, Electric LiteratureMake a New Year’s Resolution
To Support Free Fiction
Single Sentence Animation
Our Education
by Lincoln Michel
Recommended by Electric Literature
TIME PASSES UNEXPECTEDLY or, perhaps, inexactly at the school. It’s hard to remember what semester we are supposed to be in. Several of the clocks still operate, but they don’t show the same time. The red bells, affixed in every room, erupt several times each day, yet the intervals between the disruptions wax and wane with an unknown algorithm. The windows are obscured by construction paper murals. Consequently, the sun rises and falls in complete ignorance of those of us attending the school. Many of us participated in the decorations in some lost point of childhood. A few of us still have dried glue under our fingernails.
In the room I sit in now, the windows are covered with a glitter and glue reenactment of the colonization of Roanoke by Sir Walter Raleigh. Outside of the window, who knows?
In my spare time, I write notes for an assignment on my education at the school. I’ve always believed that I’m destined for somewhere better. In my hidden heart, I hold hope that my essay will help me get out of the school.
My classmates laugh at me, even my second closest friend.
“You’ll never turn this in,” he says, grabbing at my notebook. “There will never be anyone to accept it!”
“Leave him alone,” Beanpole Paula says.
“Of course you defend him,” he says, winking at her from beneath his self-cropped brown hair.
Beanpole Paula gives my second closest friend a sharp shove. His shirt bears the logo of a rock band I’ve never heard. When he smiles, I see his braces are discolored with vending machine candy. What’s his name? Either Tommy or Timmy.
Obviously we no longer learn anything at the school or, perhaps more accurately, we learn many things, but not the things that we were meant to learn. We learn about love and pain and friendship. A few of us even learn about fornication, most by watching from afar (twice Carmichael, a small and sickly boy, and I have snuck behind the bleachers to watch the more muscular and nimble students tear off each other’s gym uniforms). History, mathematics, and biology are subjects lost to another time. Most of our textbooks have been repurposed for fuel. There is an ongoing fire in the back corner of the cafeteria.
I myself only have two books, novels long past their stamped due dates, which I keep tucked underneath spare clothes in the back of my locker.
Much of our hushed hallway discussion concerns the teachers. Surrounded by the pale orange lockers, nasty words are uttered. The whispering is merely a habit. The teachers are all dead. Or else they are sleeping. Or in hiding. All that is known is that the teachers have disappeared and the teachers’ lounge is barricaded from the inside.
After the lunch bell, I hurry back to the front hallway with Beanpole Paula. We have an armload of chicken sandwiches, no sauce.
“That was close,” she says.
Paula is almost six feet tall and walks with her back hunched over. I find her awkwardness endearing. She is, currently, my closest friend. We know that our arrangement might end as soon as tomorrow, so when we smile at each other there is a conspiracy in the air. We slap hands in celebration.
“We make a good team,” Paula says, pressing a sandwich to her mouth with both hands. “Let’s always stick together.”
Then Timmy interrupts us, rounding the corner with a half-eaten pizza slice.
Randal has staked the position that the disappearance of the teachers is a victory for the students.
“This school only ever existed to beat us down and prepare us for a world in which we were powerless and others were powerful. Homework is indoctrination, education a cog in the machine of the ruling class.”
Timmy cheers him on enthusiastically. “What can you learn from teachers and tests?” he hoots. “The whole system is fucked from the start.”
Beanpole Paula and Carmichael, on the other hand, hold a different point of view. They are distraught about our lack of teachers.
“What if the teachers have gone in search of better students?” Paula says. “What if we have been forsaken? Left behind?”
Despite beckoning from both sides, I don’t enter the debates. I cannot say what the lack of faculty means. I am, however, working to preserve my chances if the teachers do return. I want to believe that if they return, I will be chosen to graduate to a better place. This is why I work on the assignment in my spare time.
I keep the paper folded in my back pocket. I don’t remember when I received it, but it’s my strongest proof that our teachers are coming back. The sheet of paper says: In your own words, a) what is the goal of your education and b) how far are you, in your mind, to achieving this goal?
My wish for you
May next year give you at least one surprise you like. May your coffees and goodbyes be Irish, your pencils sharpened, your friends all-weather, your linings silver (or dark grey with sparkles because that is very in right now). May all of your Stewarts be Jimmys, all of your Audreys, Hepburn. May you give birth to or say yes to or do something nice for or see a movie with or rescue or adopt or marry or meet for the first time your soulmate, and if you don’t believe in dumb, misguided things like soulmates, may someone or thing prove you wrong. May the jerks stay in 2012. May you never open the refrigerator to find, after pouring your cereal, you are out of milk. Because that is extremely frustrating. Finally, may you eat a lot, like a serious amount, of cupcakes and, should you come to find you don’t like cupcakes, may you give all of your cupcakes to me.
yours truly, Marie
5 Breakout Brooklyn Book People of 2012
5 Breakout Brooklyn Book People of 2012
I am a Brooklyn Break Out Person, according to The L Magazine. Does this mean I will finally get a buy back at The Double Windsor?!
Bling Theory: 10 favorite new books of 2012
Bling Theory: 10 favorite new books of 2012
Hell yes, Johannes!
When you have to leave two dozen or so kickass books off your list simply because 34 is not ten, you know it was a good year for new books.
Two trends I noticed in my favorites newbies of 2012:
- indies rock
- skinny is in
With six of the ten books from small presses—Dzanc, Mud Luscious,…
Bill Murray on Gilda Radner:
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Bill Murray on Gilda Radner:
“Gilda got married and went away. None of us saw her anymore. There was one good thing: Laraine had a party one night, a great party at her house. And I ended up being the disk jockey. She just had forty-fives, and not that many, so you really had to work the music end of it. There was a collection of like the funniest people in the world at this party. Somehow Sam Kinison sticks in my brain. The whole Monty Python group was there, most of us from the show, a lot of other funny people, and Gilda. Gilda showed up and she’d already had cancer and gone into remission and then had it again, I guess. Anyway she was slim. We hadn’t seen her in a long time. And she started doing, “I’ve got to go,” and she was just going to leave, and I was like, “Going to leave?” It felt like she was going to really leave forever.
So we started carrying her around, in a way that we could only do with her. We carried her up and down the stairs, around the house, repeatedly, for a long time, until I was exhausted. Then Danny did it for a while. Then I did it again. We just kept carrying her; we did it in teams. We kept carrying her around, but like upside down, every which way—over your shoulder and under your arm, carrying her like luggage. And that went on for more than an hour—maybe an hour and a half—just carrying her around and saying, “She’s leaving! This could be it! Now come on, this could be the last time we see her. Gilda’s leaving, and remember that she was very sick—hello?”
We worked all aspects of it, but it started with just, “She’s leaving, I don’t know if you’ve said good-bye to her.” And we said good-bye to the same people ten, twenty times, you know.
And because these people were really funny, every person we’d drag her up to would just do like five minutes on her, with Gilda upside down in this sort of tortured position, which she absolutely loved. She was laughing so hard we could have lost her right then and there.
It was just one of the best parties I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ll always remember it. It was the last time I saw her.”
- from Live from New York: an Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live
[via oldloves]
I'm steppin' tall on ya'll
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh_vXdT2xRsDo you like your oatmeal lumpy? Here is the video (god help us all) of my risk from last week’s incredible Happy Endings Reading and Music Series. Think of it as a pre-holiday present to you from me, so heartfelt I even RAPPED it. Thank you (?) Ted Dodson for making me do this.
Ben Jahn reviews SAFE AS HOUSES on Full Stop
Ben Jahn reviews SAFE AS HOUSES on Full Stop
"Allusions, in good hands, send us forward, not back into something we already know. In the case of Bertino’s debut collection, they send us into the sometimes surreal but always convincing world of skillfully drawn plots, complex metaphors, and quirky-serious wordplay."
The Happy Ending Reading and Music Series
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Photos from The Happy Ending Reading and Music Series at The Box on November 21, 2012. Amanda Stern has run the series for almost ten years and last week was the very last one! I was so happy to participate in such a special night with Sondre Lerche, Vanessa Veselka and Zadie Smith.
morning sweetness
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Here’s some morning sweetness for you: the poet Eileen Myles and her girlfriend, writer Leopoldine Core, express the feeling of being in love so perfectly, you just want to roll around in their love all day. Watch them read together over at Jupiter 88.
What the Museum of Natural History taught me
Love from Switchback in San Francisco for this girl, who loves San Francisco right back.
Love from Switchback in San Francisco for this girl, who loves San Francisco right back.
"Bertino’s stories are surprising and funny and extremely well-crafted. This is a collection not to be missed."
At the Museum of Natural History
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From the Mixed Up Files of Ms. Marie-Helene Bertino. At the Museum of Natural History. Sometimes you have to tell being an adult to go scratch.