Join The Chicago Poetry Center for a free night of poetry! The Blue Hour Poetry Reading and Workshop is tonight at 6:30 pm! Featuring poets Andy Sia and Matthew Olzmann, his latest book “Constellation Route” is out this month. https://www.poetrycenter.org/january-19-matthew-olzmann-andy-sia/
The Wilder Family and The Newberry Library present “Chasing Wilder in Chicago: Thornton Wilder’s The Eighth Day” on
Wednesday, November 15 at 5 PM
Ruggles Hall at the Newberry Library
60 W Walton St, Chicago, IL 60610
This 50th anniversary celebration of Wilder’s National Book Award-winning, Chicago-based novel will feature a conversation with Thornton Wilder’s nephew and literary executor Tappan Wilder, Jeremy McCarter and Liesl Olson; readings from the novel by professional Chicago-area actors; and cake! The event starts at 5pm with a reception and it’s all free and open to the public. Reservations are recommended.
Join the Department of English as we welcome back alum Sarah Pappalardo in celebration of her book HOW TO WIN AT FEMINISM, a fresh take on women’s rights through the lens of the funniest women in comedy today.
Thursday, September 21 @ 6 PM
Arts & Letters 103
Pappalardo is the editor and co-founder of Reductress, the first and only satirical women’s magazine, and a writer, performer and playwright living in Brooklyn. Born in Boston and raised in the wilds of New Hampshire, she has written and performed at IO Chicago, The Second City, the Magnet Theater, and The Upright Citizens Brigade. She was previously an artistic associate for the Chicago-based Bare Boned Theatre, and her plays have since been performed in front of tiny audiences throughout Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia.
by Robert M. Keding
contributor to the Underground
Packed in to a small meeting room in DePaul’s Richardson Library, a large audience gathered to hear authors Kathleen Rooney and Martin Seay read selections from their newest novels, and then answer questions on their creative processes and experiences within the literary world.
Martin Seay’s book is entitled The Mirror Thief, and follows three different con artists working in sixteenth-century Venice, 1950s Venice Beach, California, and modern-day Las Vegas in the Venice Casino. This bold debut novel, weaving together these three seemingly separate but mysteriously linked narratives, is a masterfully written tale, evoking comparisons to such work as Cloud Atlas.
Seay’s advice to aspiring writers is to do a lot of background research, especially for period pieces like The Mirror Thief. “Even if you have the facts and details right, you still have to make sure the dialogue flows correctly too. Otherwise you might just end up with characters that sound like the people faking British accents on the subway,” he told the crowd. To get the sixteenth-century portions of the story sounding right, he found himself reading a lot of literature of that time—especially Shakespeare.
Kathleen Rooney spoke about her recent novel, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk. This is her second novel, and was just published by St. Martin’s Press in the first weeks of 2017. The story chronicles an aging Lillian, going for a stroll around New York City and recounting various moments during her life, from humble beginnings to a career as the highest-paid woman in American advertising.
Rooney’s advice touched on the differences between writing prose and poetry, another realm of literature which she is invested in. “It’s possible to accidentally sit down and write a great poem. It’s a task so durationally shorter and full of so many chances for happy mistakes… It is, however, much more difficult to sit down for an hour or two and come up saying, ‘Whoops, I just accidentally wrote a really well-crafted novel!’” The room, undoubtedly filled with aspiring writers, could certainly relate.
Be sure to look for The Mirror Thief and Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk, in bookstores now.
On January 15, 2017, writers across the United States and in Europe will come together for WRITERS RESIST, a “re-inauguration” of our shared commitment to the spirit of compassion, equality, free speech, and the fundamental ideals of democracy.
WRITERS RESIST events, large and small, will be held in dozens of locations throughout the US and the world.
Simultaneous January 15th events will be held around the city in The Loop, Logan Square, Humboldt Park, Albany Park/Old Irving Park, Hyde Park, and Pilsen.
See the press release for the full list of exciting events around Chicago!
The LOOP event will take place on Sunday, January 15th, Noon-3:00 PM at Open Books in the West Loop, 651 W. Lake St.
The event will include writers and community organizations from around Chicago. The growing list of readers joining the LOOP event includes:
Audrey Niffenegger • Audrey Petty • Barrie Jean Borich • Brian Kornell • Daniel Borzutsky • Janet Burroway • Juan Martinez • Kelli Ellis • Mark Turcotte • Peggy Shinner • Quraysh Ali Lansana • Rachel Galvin • Rebecca Hazelton • Roger Reeves • Ruben Quesada • T. Clutch Fleischman • Toni Nealie • Tyehimba Jess
Sunday, November 20
7:00 P.M.
The Riverview Tavern
1958 Roscoe Ave.
The Readers:
Mary Hawley is a poet, novelist, and occasional translator. Her poetry collection Double Tongues was published by Tia Chucha Press. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies including Notre Dame Review, qarrtsiluni, Mudlark, and The Bloomsbury Review, and she was the co-translator of the bilingual poetry anthology Astillas de luz/Shards of Light (Tia Chucha Press). She is currently seeking an agent for her first novel, The Sparkle Experiment.
Maggie Kast’s first novel, A Free, Unsullied Land, was published by Fomite Press in 2015. She is the author of The Crack between the Worlds: a dancer’s memoir of loss, faith and family, published by Wipf and Stock. She received an M.F.A. in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has published fiction in The Sun, Nimrod, Carve, Paper Street, Rosebud and others. Two stories have received Pushcart nominations. A chapter of her memoir, published in ACM/Another Chicago Magazine, won a Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council. Her essays have appeared in America, Image, Writer’s Chronicle, Fiction Writers Review and elsewhere.
Mike Puican has had poems in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, Bloomsbury Review, and New England Review, among others. His essays and reviews have appeared in TriQuarterly, Kenyon Review, Brevity, and MAKE Magazine. He won the 2004 Tia Chucha Press Chapbook Contest for his chapbook, 30 Seconds. Mike was a member of the 1996 Chicago Slam Team and for the past ten years has been president of the board of the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago.
Christine Sneed is the author of the novels Paris, He Said and Little Known Facts, and the story collections Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry and The Virginity of Famous Men, which was published in September 2016. Her stories or essays have been included in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, New Stories from the Midwest, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Ploughshares, New England Review, and a number of other periodicals. Christine is the faculty director of Northwestern University’s MA/MFA program in creative writing; she is also on the fiction faculty of the Regis University low-residency MFA program.
An essayist and poet, Matthew Gavin Frank‘s most recent book, Preparing the Ghost–in which memory, mythology, and obsession collide in a strikingly original and enigmatic account of the first man to photograph a giant squid–was named a Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2014.
“Some stunning writing and perversely wonderful research.”–The New York Times Book Review
Frank is the author of the nonfiction books Preparing the Ghost: An Essay Concerning the Giant Squid and Its First Photographer, Pot Farm, and Barolo; the poetry books The Morrow Plots, Warranty in Zulu, and Sagittarius Agitprop, and 2 chapbooks. His essay collection/cookbook, The Mad Feast: An Ecstatic Tour Through America’s Food, is forthcoming November 2015 from W.W. Norton: Liveright. He teaches at Northern Michigan University, where he is the Nonfiction Editor of Passages North. This winter, he tempered his gin with two droplets (per 750ml) of tincture of odiferous whitefish liver. For health.
The Underground 