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The Future of APRIL

APRIL 2017 is going to be the best party of our lives: a single day of festivities on April 1st featuring an all-star Poet, Playwright, Novelist and Drag Queen competition, readings from our favorite authors, a mini book expo and more under a literal circus tent at Hugo House.

This extravaganza will also be APRIL’s last hurrah. For the past five years, we have been so thrilled to be arts organizers in Seattle, but now we are closing up shop. A few of us have left to pursue MFAs and teaching positions out of state. Willie is working hard to complete his first novel in his time as a Hugo House fellow. Sarah is doing excellent work with Letter [r] Press. Frances is writing weird think pieces about video games. Our former managing director Tara’s first book, BOYFRIENDS, is about to be released from Instant Future.

APRIL "retires" at a time when the Seattle literary community is thriving. We have so much confidence in the strength of this community.

Since 2011 when Tara and Willie founded APRIL, Seattle has gotten a new poetry press, a journal dedicated to promoting the literary arts, many of the authors featured at the festival have published new books to critical acclaim.

So many people smarter than us are doing the work to connect independently published authors with new readers and create a more equitable literary community. We truly can’t wait to go to the events other people are curating right now.

Thanks for being part of all our literary seances, post-reading fried chicken dinners, boozy book parties and more.

We hope you’ll join us April 1st, 2017 (APRIL in April! Finally!) to celebrate.

Thank you so so much, The APRIL staff

P.S. We’re still excited to see everyone at Short Run this weekend! Stop by to pick up some "vintage" APRIL gear and some beautifully printed chapbooks from Cold Cube Press.

Our 5th Anniversary Party is tonight!

It all begins at 8:00pm at Fred Wildlife Refuge. Performances will feature a mix of five past “classics” and five new readers, each reading 500 words or less.

Music by DJ Goo Goo to follow. Sample some of his mixes here & here. Tickets are $5 at the door to honor 5 years of APRIL; $50 VIP tickets are available online to help make 5 more years (includes your choice of APRIL swag (tote, shirt, etc.) and a signed program from this special anniversary event). 21+ This event is supported in part by Poets & Writers.

Our performers:

Jessica Mooney is APRIL’s first contest winner selected by The Seattle Review of Books! Read her winning entry, "Love Canal."

Her short fiction has appeared in The Rumpus, Salon, City Arts Magazine, Arcade, the What to Read in the Rain anthology published by 826 Seattle, and elsewhere. She was a recent finalist for Washington State's Gar La Salle Storyteller Award and a 2016 recipient of a City Artist grant from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. Jessica was a 2014 Made at Hugo House Fellow and received a writer-in-residence award as part of the Lady Assassins Writing Collective from Storefronts Seattle in 2011.

Ed Skoog was born in Topeka, Kansas in 1971.He is the author of two collections of poetry, Mister Skylight and Rough Day, both published by Copper Canyon Press. He has been a Bread Loaf Fellow, the Jennie McKean Moore Writer-in-Residence at George Washington University, and writer-in-residence at the Hugo House. He has taught at the University of Montana, Wichita State University, and Tulane. He also received a fellowship from the Lannan Foundation.

Elissa Ball is a poet, comic, and feminist who lives in Spokane, WA, where she reads Tarot cards professionally. In 2012 Blue Begonia Press published The Punks Are Writing Love Songs, her debut collection of poems. Monofonus Press published Personal Growth, her humor book, in 2014. Elissa has performed at Bumbershoot, Elliott Bay Books, college auditoriums, house parties, bars, and the Henry Art Gallery. Her ongoing feminist project, Strong Female Leads, is at strongfemaleleads.tumblr.com. She tweets about justice, puns, and music on Twitter @elissaball.

Maged Zaher is the author of Thank You for the Window Office (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), The Revolution Happened and You Didn’t Call Me (Tinfish Press, 2012) and Portrait of the Poet as an Engineer (Pressed Wafer, 2009). His collaborative work with the Australian poet Pam Brown, Farout Library Software, was published by Tinfish Press in 2007. His translations of contemporary Egyptian poetry have appeared in Jacket Magazine, Banipal, and Denver Quarterly as well as The Tahrir of Poems (alice blue books, 2015). Maged is the recipient of the 2013 Stranger Genius Award in Literature.

Robert Lashley is the author The Homeboy Songs (Small Doggies Press) and a semi-finalist for the PEN/Rosenthal fellowship. His work has appeared in Feminete, No Regrets, and Your Hands, Your Mouth as well as Many Trails To The Summit, an anthology of Northwest form and Lyric poetry.

Sarah Galvin is the author of a book of poetry called The Three Einsteins (Poor Claudia, 2014) and The Best Party of Our Lives (Sasquatch, 2015), a nonfiction collection of true stories about gay weddings. She is a regular contributor to The Stranger and co-founder of Fashion Hot Dog 225, an art gallery and website (Seattle’s only high fashion, high art, high hot dog art space.) She has an MFA in poetry from University of Washington. In addition to poetry her interests include demolition derbies, bouncy castles, and confetti cannons. She has a recurring nightmare about a sentient house. Her poems and essays can be found in io, Pleiades, New Ohio Review, Dark Sky, Pinwheel, Alive at the Center, and Vice Magazine.

Bernard Grant is the author of the nonfiction chapbook Puzzle Pieces (Paper Nautilus Press). His stories and essays have appeared in Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row, Crab Orchard Review, Stirring, Sequestrum, and Fiction Southeast, among others. He was awarded a 2015 Jack Straw Fellowship and serves as Associate Essays Editor for The Nervous Breakdown.

Leena Joshi writes and makes videos, music, and other media. She lives in Seattle, Washington. See more at her website.

Anastacia Tolbert is a writer, Cave Canem Fellow, Hedgebrook Alumna, and Artist Trust EDGE Program Graduate. She is the writer and performer of 9 Ounces: A One-Woman Show and the writer, co-director, and co-producer of GOTBREAST? (2007), a documentary about the views of women regarding breast and body image. Her poetry, fiction and nonfiction have been published widely.

Hannah Sanghee Park’s first book The Same-Different was the 2014 winner of The Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award, recently given a starred review by Publishers Weekly. She was selected as one of Poets & Writers Debut Poets. Park is a recipient of fellowships from The Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Fulbright Program, The CBS Writers Program, The Poetry Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and others.

DJ Goo Goo is a music journalist/copywriter who has put off novel writing and zine making to spend evenings DJing at various venues around town.

It’s almost time for one of our most popular events: “A Poet, a Playwright, a Novelist and a Drag Queen: APRIL’s Annual Storytelling Competition!”

Contrary to popular rumor, the drag queen does not always win! In fact, the playwright has won 50% of the competitions, with each genre coming in second at least once. And every competition has been very close. There's no telling who will win!

Hosted by Paul Constant with performances from poet EJ Koh, playwright Sara Porkalob, novelist* Brian McGuigan and drag queen Mal DeFleur. TONIGHT: March 17, Hugo House. Doors at 7:30, event starts at 8pm. $15 at the door This event is co-presented with Washington Ensemble Theatre.

*Novelist used as a stand-in term for “prose writer” because marketing.

BIOS: EJ Koh has appeared in World Literature Today, TriQuarterly, Southeast Review, Pleiades, Columbia Review, Narrative Magazine, and Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics (Black Ocean Press, 2014). She has been featured in Flavorwire’s 23 People Who Will Make You Care About Poetry, Culture Trip’s 10 Americans Changing the Face of Poetry, and Brit + Co’s 16 Modern Poets You Need To Know About. She accepted fellowships at Kundiman, The MacDowell Colony, Napa Valley’s Writers’ Conference, Vermont Studio Center, Hannah J. Caldwell Excellence Award, Jack Straw Writers Program, and the Nadya Aisenberg Grant. She earned her MFA at Columbia University in New York for Creative Writing and Literary Translation in Korean and Japanese. In addition to lecturing at the Richard Hugo House, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Washington, Seattle University, Portland Community College, and a panelist for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. Sara Porkalob is a Seattle native with a BFA in Theatre and Original Works from Cornish College of the Arts. She specializes in site-specific performance, arts activism, immersive arts education, and theatre theory. Her work has been seen at 5th Avenue Theatre, Annex Theatre, Book-It Repertory Theatre, Seattle Public Theatre, Taproot, Bumbershoot, and other local venues. An Asian-Pacific Islander and fervent fourth wave feminist, she is a devotee of intersectional studies and is committed to dynamic story-telling and cultural place-making in her community. Brian McGuigan is the director of Lit Crawl Seattle. His essays have appeared in Gawker, Salon, The Stranger, and elsewhere and have received support from 4Culture, Artist Trust, and Seattle Office of Arts & Culture. In 2010, The Stranger shortlisted him for their Genius Award in Literature, and in 2011, City Arts named him one of Seattle’s Power 50 Culture Makers. Currently, Brian’s working on a memoir. When he’s not lit-crawling and writing, he’s the co-founder/curator of the reading series, Cheap Wine & Poetry and Cheap Beer & Prose. For about a decade, he worked in programs and marketing at Hugo House, where he organized and promoted hundreds of readings, events, and writing programs. He is now the program director at Artist Trust. Follow him at @iambrianwithani. Mal De Fleur is a creative collaboration between Seattle vocalist Bradford Schroeder, pianist Christopher Jones and makeup artist/impresario Jack Caton. A non-gendered, non-nationalized chanteuse, Mal DeFleur recontextualizes the modern cannon through the lens of cabaret tradition. Gershwin holds court with Kim Gordon. Dietrich shares an evening with Justin Vivian-Bond. Crowned a “Person of Interest” by The Stranger, Mal DeFleur was also a featured performer at Out of Sight, a survey of PNW contemporary art, and Mo-Wave’s Visual Art Exhibition 2015. In addition to gracing the stages of The Triple Door, Chop Suey, Vermillion, Fred Wildlife Refuge, Kremwerk and Pony, Mal presides over a quarterly midnight show at Vito’s.

We’re opening in one week with these fantastic authors.

We might be panicking a little bit because the 5th annual festival opens in one week. But we are also completely out-of-our-minds excited because we’re kicking it off 7:30pm at the Pine Box March 15 with these incredible authors.

First, Writer-in-Residence Jenny Zhang: Jenny Zhang is a poet, writer and performer living in New York. She’s the author of the poetry collection Dear Jenny, We Are All Find (Octopus Books) and a regular contributor to Rookie.

Read her essay about Weezer, being fetishized, and killing your idols.

Next up, Alejandro de Acosta is a teacher, writer, and translator—in no particular order. He was born in Buenos Aires in 1972 and grew up in Caracas; Madison, Wisconsin; and Cleveland, Ohio. In Austin he founded mufa::poema, a micropress that distributed a dozen poetry and prose chapbooks. In addition to collaborations with Joshua Beckman, translations of Micrograms by Jorge Carrera Andrade and Five Meters of Poems by Carlos Oquendo de Amat, as well as numerous contributions to anarchist periodicals and anthologies, his recent publications include two collections of critical and experimental essays: The Impossible, Patience (Ardent Press, 2014) and How to Live Now or Never (Repartee/LBC Books, 2014). Most recently, he translated Fabián Ludueña’s H.P. Lovecraft: The Disjunction in Being (Schism Press, 2015). Two current projects are an anthology of writing by and about Antonio Porchia and a translation of Fabián Ludueña’s Beyond the Anthropic Principle. He lives in Olympia, WA.

Read four of his poems right now.

Third, we have Sara Jaffe, who we featured at our Book Club last year. Sara Jaffe is a fiction writer living in Portland, OR. Her first novel, Dryland, was published by Tin House Books in September 2015. Her short fiction and criticism have appeared in publications including Fence, BOMB, NOON, Paul Revere’s Horse, matchbook, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She co-edited The Art of Touring (Yeti, 2009), an anthology of writing and visual art by musicians drawing on her experience as guitarist for post-punk band Erase Errata. Sara holds a BA from Wesleyan University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, RADAR Productions, and the Regional Arts and Culture Council. She is also co-founding editor of New Herring Press, a publisher of prose chapbooks.

Read her short fiction right this second.

And finally, a woman after our own heart, Kelly Froh is a co-founder of the comics festival Short Run Comix & Arts Festival. Froh has self-published many mini-comics and zines including her most recent "The Weeknight Casserole Collection". She is an art teacher with Seniors Creating Art and Creativity Inspires Conservation at the Seattle Aquarium. In 2015 she was nominated for a James W. Ray Venture Project Award. Kelly has performed her comic stories at the Hugo House's acclaimed Literary Series, Gridlords in Portland, Lit Crawl, Pecha Kucha, On the Boards, and at Bumbershoot. Kelly is the co-founder and Managing Director of Short Run Comix & Arts Festival, now entering its 6th year, having just been awarded its first NEA grant.

Get your eyeballs to her comics.

2016 Book Expo Vendors

The 2016 Book Expo is almost here! On Sunday, March 20th at Hugo House, you’ll be able to buy books from Future Tense Books (pictured) and more than 50 other presses from around the country. Gird your wallets, people.

alice blue books is a micropress based out of Seattle, and the creator of small run handmade books and art books, as well as the chapbook series SHOTGUN WEDDING, focusing on poetry, fiction, nonfiction and graphic novel work in the Pacific Northwest.

Alternating Current Press is a boutique independent press and promotions team based out of Palo Alto that is dedicated to publishing and promoting incredible literature that challenges readers and has an innate sense of self, timelessness, and atmosphere. Since 1993, ACP has created chapbooks, paperbacks, zines, online resources, zine libraries, spoken word events, poetry readings, national book tours, and literature collections, as well as offering services in author and press promotions, such as blog tours, book tours, book trailers, audio recordings, merchandising, editing, critiquing, and book clubs.

Atelier26 Books is an independent press founded in 2011 in Portland, Oregon, and specializing in contemporary literature in elegantly designed trade editions.

Babel/Salvage is an engine for artistic and literary ingenuity and community involvement in Seattle that focuses on new work and seeks to promote creative outsiders, experimenters, innovators and interdisciplinary savants from all walks of life.

Black Heron Press publishes three or four titles per year of literary fiction, poetry, and select nonfiction. BHP originated in 1984 in Seattle and moved to Mill Creek in 2007.

Cascadia Author Services’ mission is to provide the very best of the essential services an author needs, and nothing an author doesn’t need. The people at CAS love books, love writing, and love helping new authors create great books.

Chin Music Press publishes risky books as “literary objects”—books that are a pleasure to touch as well as read. Founded in Tokyo in 2002, CMP is currently based out of Seattle.

Coffee House Press is an internationally renowned independent book publisher and arts nonprofit based in Minneapolis, MN; through their literary publications and Books in Action program, CHP acts as a catalyst and connector—between authors and readers, ideas and resources, creativity and community, inspiration and action.

Cold Cube Press is a risograph publisher located in Seattle, Washington.

Copper Canyon Press publishes extraordinary poetry from around the world to engage the imaginations and intellects of readers.

Dock Street Press is a traditional independent publishing house specializing in compelling narrative non-fiction and clean, intelligent fiction. DSP isn’t concerned with certain word counts or genres. If a story reads well, regardless of length, it should be housed in an attractive cover with great looking paper, and make the reader contemplate the physicality of it all.

Dorothy, a publishing project publishes two new books simultaneously each fall, working to pair books that draw upon different aesthetic traditions to emphasize the endless stylistic and formal variety of literature.

Factory Hollow Press publishes books, chapbooks and broadsides in both limited and trade editions.

Future Tense Books was founded in 1990 in Spokane, Washington, and is one of the longest-running small presses around. Future Tense is run tirelessly by Kevin Sampsell in Portland.

Fuzzy Hedgehog Press is based out of Seattle and publishes literary speculative fiction. So far, the press has published two authors and plans to publish one new author every year.

Hobart was created in 2001, began with monthly online issues, and eventually moved to daily content, a biannual print journal, and book publishing (in 2006).

Isthmus Review is a print journal of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry published biannually in Seattle, Washington.

Jesus Mary Anne Joseph makes screen-printed poetry broadsides and, occasionally, screen-printed underwear.

Letter [r] Press is a collectively-run publisher of handmade books, ephemera and the Small Po[r]tions journal. The journal is designed, printed and bound by the editors in the Jik Ji Studio courtesy of Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas.

Lettered Streets is a micropress based out of Seattle and Chicago, specializing in difficult-to-categorize projects of varying lengths. Lettered Streets publishes prose, poetry, essays and hybrid work, and will publish their first Seattle author in 2016.

Magic Helicopter Press publishes prose, poetry and multimedia work. MPH publishes across platforms, mediums and “the universe.” Founded in 2007 in Ashland, Oregon, MHP has resided in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts and now operates out of Portland, Oregon.

Melville House is an independent publisher located in Brooklyn, New York. It was founded in 2001 by sculptor Valerie Merians and fiction writer/journalist Dennis Johnson in order to publish Poetry After 9/11, and now publishes fiction, poetry, essays, memoir and more, in addition to running a number of series, including The Art of the Novella, The Last Interview, and The Neversink Library.

Minor Arcana Press specializes in geek authors, spiritual minority authors and romantic/gender/sexual minorities such as LGBTQ authors and the fetish community and pairs them with provocative cover artists to create beautiful books and empower overlooked and outsider authors and artists.

Moss is a (mostly) online journal of Northwest writing. In 2016, Moss released entered the world of print with an anthology of its first three issues.

Mountaineers Books publishes a variety of outdoor recreation, sustainable lifestyle, and conservation advocacy books, including many award winners. Whether you're into outdoor activities, living a healthy lifestyle, or interested in becoming a good steward of the environment, Mountaineers Books has the information you need to guide you on your next journey in confidence and safety.

Nada Dada Magazine is a collective of writers and artists that produce a serial publication of poetry and prose. Started in early 2012, the magazine now represents 7 writers living across the country, with half the staff in Seattle. Nada releases both web and print editions. The print editions range from free copies to hand bound editions containing uniques.

Neoglyphic Media is a boutique publishing outfit based in Bellingham, WA. We publish limited run art books and comics from a wide array of international artists as well as a regular newspaper publication, Emergence, featuring real news and reporting alongside the best comics section anywhere.

Night Pong is a series of graphic cultural history zines by Minh Nguyen and Aashish Gadani.

Northwest Press’ mission has been to publish quality queer comics work and help rising talents reach wider audiences, and to increase the visibility of LGBT comics in general. In addition to NWP’s original print releases, the company has amassed a great catalog of top-notch digital work, presented with polish and style.

Old Growth Northwest is a 501©3 organization founded in 2012 and headquartered in Seattle, supporting writers and promoting their work throughout all stages of the literary process.

OR Books is a new type of publishing company that embraces progressive change in politics, culture and the way we do business. Their list is highly selective, publishing just one or two books a month, and combines established authors with new discoveries.

Pacifica Literary Review is a small literary arts magazine based in Seattle with print editions in winter and summer.

Poetry Magazine is the oldest monthly magazine dedicated to verse. It was founded in 1912 by the super rad, visionary go-getter Harriet Monroe. POETRY continues to publish work that challenges notions of what a poem can be, and what it can do, and we continue to adhere to Monroe's "Open Door Policy" which keeps of free from ties to any particular thought or school.

Poetry Northwest is the oldest poetry magazine in the Northwest.

Promontory Press is a traditional book publisher in Canada that doesn't like the way the traditional book industry has gone when it comes to being accessible to new authors. We still publish books with the traditional model, but we don't want to close ourselves off to new, unknown or niche authors. In fact, we seek them out.

Raven Chronicles is a 501(c)3 Seattle-based nonprofit literary arts organization, founded in 1991. Our mission is to publish and promote artistic work that embodies the cultural diversity and multitude of viewpoints of writers and artists living in the Pacific Northwest and other regions.

Ravenna Press is an independent literary press based in Washington State.

Razorgirl Press is an independent publishing company committed to publishing literary quality genre fiction to act as a bridge between the literary and genre communities. We are dedicated to publishing literature from marginalized communities and allowing authors who have not previously been given a voice the chance to get their stories out into the world.

Rose Alley Press publishes rhymed and metered poetry, cultural commentary, and an annually updated booklet about writing and publication.

Scrambler Books is an independent press based out of Sacramento, CA. is an independent press based out of Sacramento, CA.

Seattle Review of Books was founded by Martin McClellan and Paul Constant. It intends to reflect, record, and celebrate our underserved literary community, and examine exactly what it means to love books and writing in Seattle in the 21st century.

Sidebrow is a Portland and San Francisco-based small nonprofit press focusing on experimental poetry, prose poetry, and fiction, with 2-3 new titles each year.

Sincerely Analog Press publishes conceptual projects, made by hand.

Spartan publishes short, minimalist prose.

StringTown Press is an annual magazine available at independent bookstores in the Northwest and selected locations throughout the country

Tavern Books is a not-for-profit publisher of poetry founded in Portland, Oregon publishing translations from the world’s finest poets, new works by innovative writers and revivals of out-of-print classics. All Tavern Books titles are permanently in print, honoring the cultural contract between publisher and author, as well as between publisher and public.

The Furnace is a quarterly series at Hollow Earth Radio for prose that features one writer who reads one piece to completion. Hosted in partnership with Hollow Earth Radio—the writer has the opportunity to perform their story in innovative ways and the audience is given a chance to really listen and experience a whole piece. In addition to the live performance we also produce limited edition chapbooks of each piece read. Our mission is to encourage innovative storytelling and a vibrant literary community.

Till is an annual writing retreat at Smoke Farm in Arlington.

Troy's Work Table Publishing is an independent publisher of chapbooks.

Two Plum Press produces slim volumes of literary works both contemporary and classic. Titles include works of poetry, essays, fiction, philosophy, visual art, travel and food writing. Books are produced in industrial southeast Portland, Oregon.

University of Washington Press is an American academic publishing house. The organization is a division of the University of Washington, based in Seattle.

Wave Books is an independent poetry press based in Seattle dedicated to publishing the best in contemporary poetry, poetry in translation, and writing by poets.

Willow Springs publishes the finest in contemporary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as interviews and profiles with some of the most notable authors in contemporary literature, including Marilynne Robinson, Stuart Dybek, Aimee Bender, Jess Walter, Robert Wrigley, Dorianne Laux, and many others. Founded in 1977 and published twice yearly, Willow Springs features two interviews per issue, as well as essays, fiction, and poetry by a variety of writers—from the unknown and up and coming, to U.S. Poet Laureates and Pulitzer Prize winners.

YesYes Books is a small press publisher based in Portland, Oregon.

Yeti Press Comics recently relocated to Seattle from Chicago, is a small publishing behemoth that has published 21 comic books and graphic novels over the last three years.

Zine Archive and Publishing Project is a volunteer-driven community archive that promotes self-publishing, fosters new creative works and preserves a “living collection” of over 30,000 zines. ZAPP has been deemed the world’s largest uncensored collection of what some consider to be a form of current folk art, making it a unique and valuable cultural resource.

February Book Club: The Bridegroom Was a Dog, by Yoko Tawada

from New Directions

APRIL Book Club features are selected by Seattle authors and community members. This month’s pick comes from Summer Karaskova. Summer is a writer and translator and previously served as one of APRIL’s earliest team members.

For me, finding new authors to admire is directly related to the editors who dare to expose them. Publisher by publisher. It’s how I like to read. So when Tara asked me to host Book Club, I knew I wanted to select a title from the New Directions “Pearls” series. Discovering their twenty odd “short masterpieces by great authors” was like tapping into a gushing vein of artistry, history and culture. Their ambitious, six-year-old project has created a space for slim, potent, and above all translated work by authors known and unknown. Famous, infamous and obscure. It reminded me how much I owe, not only to great authors, but to great publishers. Like the best neighborhood bookstores, their curatorial taste and economic bravery shape our ability as readers to just get stuff. Good stuff. Like Yoko Tawada’s The Bridegroom Was a Dog.

This little guy sits squarely in the uncanny valley, where a series of not-quite-possible (or believable) events catalyze entirely relatable moments in a culture I’m not likely to understand anyway. There's a lovely balance of attention paid to the characters wrapped up in this animalistic affair. It feels certain and definitive in some ways. Delicate and spare in others. The plot may be low-stakes and, if you read certain Amazon reviews, “very unsatisfying [and leading] nowhere, real fast.” But if you like intimate portrayals of weird, wonderful people, I think you should join us on Valentines Day. It’s a romance, after all. So bring your lovers. All of them.

In February, the APRIL Book Club will meet Sunday, 2/14 at 4pm at Little Oddfellows, the cafe in Elliott Bay Book Company.

#The Bridegroom Was a Dog #Yoko Tawada #New Directions #Summer Karaskova #book club #pearls #translation #it's how I like to read

January Book Club: Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, by Sarah Manguso

from Graywolf

APRIL Book Club features are selected by Seattle authors and community members. This month’s pick comes from Peter Mountford. Peter is the events curator at Seattle’s Hugo House and author of two novels: A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), and The Dismal Science (Tin House Books, 2014). The Dismal Science was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award in Fiction and a New York Times Editor's Choice. A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism won the 2012 Washington State Book Award in fiction. His short work has appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, Granta, Best New American Voices 2008, Conjunctions, Southern Review, Salon, Slate, and Boston Review.

I have long been a very avid fan of Manguso's work. I read Two Kinds of Decay years ago, and was very taken with the contrast between her very agonizing material and her clear-eyed and unsentimental, almost astringent, prose style. I often teach the Lives essay that came out alongside that book, called "The Cure," which is, to my mind, the best "Lives" essay ever published (for those who don't know, "Lives" is a weekly very very short essay in the NYT Magazine). I read The Guardians, her book which is ostensibly about the suicide of a friend of hers, a few years ago, I think when it came out. The book is very short -- her books seem to get shorter and shorter, as she whittles ever more out of each successive volume -- and fragmentary. It's very much a collage book, very pointillistic and non-linear. Again, the style is so shockingly unsentimental that it demands your attention, in a certain way. Although I'd long been a fan of Manguso's I'd never met her until last year (2015), when she happened to be in town the night my girlfriend Jessica and I were hosting a dinner party for some writer friends, so we invited her. It was one of those things where it's very strange to meet the person after reading so carefully so much of her writing. Especially since her form is the personal essay, so in a sense I know quite a bit about her. She turned out to be a human being, after all, much to my relief. And now she has this new book. So I really want to read it.

In Janaury, the APRIL Book Club will meet Sunday, 1/10 at 4pm at Little Oddfellows, the cafe in Elliott Bay Book Company.

#Sarah Manguso #Ongoingness #Graywolf #the end of a diary #Peter Mountford #dinner parties #book club

APRIL’s Big 2015 Independent Press Gift Guide

For the new baby in your life and/or the historian: The U.S. Supreme Court Decision on Marriage Equality (Melville House)

An excellent gift for anyone born this year, so that when they grow up they can look back at something more significant than what crappy pop song was top of the charts the year they were born.

Also great for the historian who enjoys a beautifully designed tome that marks an historic occasion.

For the poet who already has all the books: A broadside from Copper Canyon

They’re affordable, they’re beautifully printed, you’ll probably be the only person who thinks to get the poet in your life something so lovely.

#gifts #end of the year listicles #adrian tomine #Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi #clarice lispector #Sawako Nakayasu #alice blue #shotgun wedding #sara jaffe #mary miller #claudia rankine #chloe caldwell #chelsea martin #instant future #copper canyon #broadsides #marriage equality

November Book Club: Souvenir by Aimee Suzara

from Wordtech

APRIL Book Club features are selected by Seattle authors and community members. This month’s pick comes from Michelle Peñaloza. MIchelle grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. She is the author of two chapbooks: landscape/heartbreak (Two Sylvias Press) and Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes (Organic Weapon Arts). Michelle is the recipient of fellowships and awards from Kundiman, 4Culture, and Hugo House as well as scholarships from VONA/Voices and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, among many others.

Aimee Suzara's mind excites me. I'm in admiration of the ambition of her focus and of the breadth of her ability to create connections across time and space. Her book of poems, Souvenir, is an intertextual collection that investigates the complex history between the US and the Philippines and the complex history of what it means to be a citizen of diaspora. Through the lens of the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis and the history of the US-curated "Philippine Reservation" that was an integral and large (47 acre site) part of the fair, Suzara brings together museum exhibits, artifact objects, pseudo-science, propaganda, multiple voices, and pop culture (hell yeah, Grey's Anatomy references!) to interrogate the legacy of imperialism and the ways in which we behold and are beholden. I'm excited to talk about this book with folks and excited that Aimee will be able to join us for our discussion! She will be in town teaching a class at Hugo House, and will be stopping by beforehand to join APRIL Book Club time and our discussion of Souvenir.

To learn more about Souvenir, read Carribean Fragoza's review on Souvenir from the LA Review of Books and Kenji Liu's review from The Rumpus.

In November, the APRIL Book Club will meet Sunday, 11/8 at 11am at Little Oddfellows, the cafe in Elliott Bay Book Company. Order the book from EBBC now.

#Aimee Suzara #Wordtech Communications #Souvenir #World's Fair #Filipino American history #Spanish American war #VONA #imperial mashup #white man's burden #Michelle Penaloza #APRIL #book club

October Book Club: Dryland by Sara Jaffe

from Tin House

APRIL Book Club features are selected by Seattle authors and community members. This month’s pick comes from Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, most recently the author of a memoir, The End of San Francisco (City Lights), winner of a 2014 Lambda Literary Award. She’s also the author of two more novels and the editor of five nonfiction anthologies, including Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform (AK Press), an American Library Association Stonewall Honor Book and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.

“Jaffe’s writing is crisp and tender — every chapter ends just before the reveal, giving the book a jarring momentum — and we’re stuck with Julie’s feelings inside our own heads, our bodies taut with anticipation.” --Read Mattilda’s full review over at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Excerpt from the book on Tin House’s Open Bar.

In October, the APRIL Book Club will meet Sunday, 10/11 at 3pm at Little Oddfellows, the (newly restyled!) cafe in Elliott Bay Book Company.

#Tin House #Sara Jaffe #Dryland #Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore #San Francisco Chronicle #flannel #swim team #book club

September Book Club: The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa

from Canarium

APRIL Book Club features are selected by Seattle authors and community members. This month’s pick comes from Jane Wong. Jane Wong‘s poems can be found in Best American Poetry 2015, Best New Poets 2012, Pleiades, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, Squaw Valley, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is the author of the poetry collection Overpour (Action Books, 2016). She teaches at UW and the Hugo House.

I first came across Chika Sagawa’s work through a poet and translator I’ve admired for years: Sawako Nakayasu. The book I found, Mouth: Eats Color (Rogue Factorial, 2011), is presented as a collaboration between Nakayasu and Sagawa. Mouth: Eats Color immediately provokes and expands our parameters of tradition, nationhood, and translation. I loved how translations turned and turned again in French, English, Chinese, and Japanese, confounding language, genre, and time/space. Sagawa, who was one of the first female modernists in Japan, died in 1936 at the early age of 24. Nakayasu invokes Sagawa’s ghost and does not distinguish who writes what (making Nakayasu’s original work, Sagawa’s original work, and Nakayasu’s translations indistinguishable). The collection also calls forth other transnational poets who have passed away, including Frances Chung (a Chinese American poet who also died at a young age in 1990). There’s a ghostly and spiritual connection between writer and translator here, and I’m thankful for Nakayasu’s ability to cross those boundaries.

This year, Canarium published a beautiful collection of Sagawa’s poetry and prose. I’m a firm believer in the importance of reading books in translation (and transnational books); oftentimes, I’m worried that we can’t see beyond this tiny continent and the English language. There are numerous presses that I admire who seek to publish work in translation, including Canarium, Copper Canyon, Action Books (check out Ito Hiromi’s Wild Grass on the Riverbank), Litmus Press (check out Four From Japan), Wave Books, etc.

As Nakayasu writes in her introduction to The Collected Poems, Sagawa was one of the very few female modernist poets writing in Japan: “her work is revolutionary for transcending this massive gender divide.” Sagawa and poets such as Yosano Akiko have influenced following generations of innovative women poets, including Ito Hiromi. Sagawa certainly does not shy away from this gendered position. She writes with transparency: “A lamp dangles from the sky like the neck of a woman” and “Forests and windows go pale, like a woman.”

What particularly excites me about Sagawa’s work is her bold imagery and vigilant inquiry –notably grotesque. As a poet who loves the grotesque and the eerie natural world, Sagawa’s poems thrill me. Mina Loy’s proclamation to “LOVE the hideous in order to find the sublime core of it” is definitely here. The speaker is often transformed into an animal self – at times armored, at times vulnerable: “Death strips my shell” and “I become a moth that slams into the window.” This is a world where things aren’t what they seem, testing our imagination and our sense of truth. One of my favorite images from a poem called “Flower”: “a snail crawls through the forest/Above its tentacles is the sky.” We zoom into the interior of the visceral world: “Gradually a chicken bleeds.” Decades into the future, Sagawa’s ferocity is felt through her forceful diction: “Who blindfolds me from behind? Shove me into sleep.” That imperative is both terrifying in its vulnerability and empowering in its command. This teetering back and forth between violence and kindness is striking to me and I aim for that in my own work.

Her ghost is also felt throughout, as she often considers her looming death. She writes with a slow burning vision: “Death deliberately clings to my finger. Peeling off the shell of night, one layer at a time.” I can’t help but think about Keats here, who died when he was 25. In a poem, he addresses that strange limbo world of life and death: “This living hand, now warm and capable/Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold…”

There’s so much to talk about and I can’t wait to discuss Chika Sagawa’s work and Sawako Nakayasu’s beautiful translations on September 13th at 4:00pm. See you there!

In September, the APRIL Book Club will meet Sunday, 9/13 at 4pm in Little Oddfellows, the (newly restyled!) cafe in Elliott Bay Book Company.

#Chika Sagawa #Swako Nakayasu #Canarium #The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa #Jane Wong #Overpour #poetry in translation #transnational authors #ghosts #book club

August Book Club: The Last Days of California

from Liveright

APRIL Book Club features are selected by Seattle authors and community members. This month’s pick comes from Tara Atkinson, the Managing Director and co-founder of APRIL and the author of Bedtime Stories (alice blue books) and Boyfriends, forthcoming from Instant Future. She tweets at @t_m_at.

For awhile I thought a lot about literature making someone feel less alone, after something David Foster Wallace said. It’s a concept that’s easy to imagine in large brushstrokes, but large brushstrokes are always crowding something out. The Last Days of California doesn’t leave anything out and that is what I like so much about it. The narrator, Jess, is traveling with her mom and dad and sister, to California, for the rapture, and she sort of believes the rapture might happen, but she still thinks about her phone and dating, still has conversations with her family about the small towns they drive through, still notices the counter at the Waffle House is sticky or thinks about how hotel towels are different from the towels at home. I’ve been in all-consuming situations and still thought idly about what I’d have for dinner and I’ve been trapped on a bus, bored, then suddenly thinking of a serious topic, just to forget all about it and start worrying about my shirt as soon as my stop came up. That texture of inner life, captured so well in The Last Days of California, feels so rare and real and complete and reassuring when I get to read it. And I did get to! In this book!

In August, the APRIL Book Club will meet Sunday, 8/9 at 4pm by the fountain in Cal Anderson Park.

#mary miller #the last days of california #tara atkinson #liveright #APRIL Book Club #book club #rapture

July Book Club: Ban en Banlieue

from Nightboat Books

APRIL Book Club features are selected by Seattle authors and community members. This month’s pick comes from Richard Chiem, author of You Private Person, a collection of short stories published by Scrambler books. His work has also appeared in City Arts Magazine, Fanzine, elimae, and Everyday Genius, among other places. He tweets at @giganticanovel.

When I first read Bhanu Kapil, I was feeling dark and lonely in some sunny coffee shop in San Diego. I was reading Incubation: A Space for Monsters, completely mesmerized by her hybrid, cyborg text. A book with longing, with cycles. Each sentence felt strange and sudden yet precise, and I felt more comfort in Kapil’s text, in its intimate approaches to silence sadness and memoir narrative, than I did in San Diego’s weather.

Years later, in Seattle, reading Ban en Banlieue, I am still devastated by Kapil. She writes at the edge of language, interweaving layers of real life into a created, haunted space: an afternoon in April 1979. Kapil’s latest assemblage feels beyond personal, beyond historical, existing starkly on its own emotional plane. She has created a novel that leaves me mute, jarred and wanting more.

---

In July, the APRIL Book Club will meet Sunday, 7/12 at 4pm by the fountain in Cal Anderson park.

#richard chiem #bhanu kapil #nightboat books #scrambler books #ban en banlieue #you private person #APRIL Book Club #book club

Emily Kendal Frey, or The Pathless Travel

I earned my MFA in a program where, due to the presiding influence of a Great Aging Writer who prized craft above all else, career guidance was all but explicitly forbidden. No talk of earning a living, let alone of finding an agent. Fine, right? I get the interest in purifying art production from the lesser, messy, and inconvenient aspects of life as an artist-cum-human. Besides, the program attracted writers who had little interest in the kind of work commercially viable enough to earn them a livable wage.

It was a forgone conclusion that everyone would therefor be going directly into teaching, or heading there by way of a doctoral program that would increase our chances of leapfrogging adjunct purgatory onto a tenure track. Point was: there’s no hurry. You’re in academia 4 lyfe. It’s how you’ll pay rent, it’s where you’ll meet colleagues and competition, and most crucially it’s where your work will be read, discussed, and (hopefully) incorporated into the narrative of contemporary literature.

And it was in this spirit, I think, that my thesis advisor did end up offering me some practical-ish advice. He explained that the best thing I could do to establish an audience was to create an interpretive framework for my fiction. Much like a good novel, as we’re told, teaches you how to read it, an author has the opportunity, through interviews, essays, and reviews of work by authors with which you’d like to be associated, establish a critical context in which your work can be profitably discussed.

The “To MFA Or Not To MFA” debate is not one that is likely to see resolution. But that’s not really the point of this kind of debate, really. The conversation is a response to the changing role of writers, a chronicle of our proud retreat into the redoubt of academia where we may regroup, build our strength for the next battle, and defend ourselves against the great forces of perceived ignorance, intolerance, and of course—the greatest foe of all—indifference.

There are of course large systems profiting from the result of this cultural shift—MFA programs are for many institutions a cash machine. And when newly MFA’d writers pivot to join the exploitative adjunct economy, these same institutions profit again. But somehow this big picture stuff doesn’t rattle me. According to Harper’s, the average income of the family that produces a doctor is something like 45k, while the average income of the family that produces a writer is something like 75k. In other words, by and large, this isn’t a population of have-nots, generally speaking. We can afford our poverty.

On an individual level, what’s being exchanged for this debt and, later, poorly paid jobs in academe, is access (or at least the possibility of access) to the machine that makes books matter. And to an increasing number of writers, this is a reasonable exchange, for in that poverty there is at least community, a feeling that one is protected from a culture in decline, and an opportunity to establish that interpretive framework my advisor advised me about.

All of which came up for me when, last night, I spoke with Portland poet (and old personal friend) Emily Kendal Frey. Emily has been adjuncting for years, but is returning to school to get an MSW and seek a career counseling. Given the context I’ve been sketching above, this struck me as an exceptionally brave move, and possibly a model worth examining, if not adopting. To be sure, she’s already been in the trenches, so to speak, and has thus established a position of influence and esteem within the system she’s departing from.

Then again, maybe it shouldn’t even really be seen as a departure, but a dilation of context, influence, and inspiration. To mix metaphors, perhaps she’ll be more like a missionary, entering the wider world to spread the Good Word about poetry, whose own work will become beautifully mongrel and strange, as base, worldly stuff becomes infused with the cannibalizing, self-duplicating notion that the primary dialogue books should have is with other books, and that the context for that dialogue should be closely guarded. Perhaps there’s more at stake in the aforementioned exchange than merely a shitty paycheck.

I don’t think my advisor was wrong to suggest that I invest in the academy whose affirmation could pave the way to broader—or least more supportive/enthusiastic/serious—readership, just as I don’t think Emily is going to damage her work and reputation by pursuing a career outside literature. But I do think there are more valid paths open to writers than I normally see represented in my Twitter feed. Which is why I look forward to keeping up with @EmilyKendalFrey.

seattlish

Get your sweet self to Barboza tonight to rub elbows with all the PYTs of the literary community, for the best week in Seattle lit, APRIL, kicks off TONIGHT!

Here’s the calendar. There are tons of free events, including readings and drinking and general gallivanting. IT’S THE BEST! And it...

aprilfestseattle

Seattlish makin’ us look gooooood.

Earning It

Last night on American Airlines flight 235 from JFK to Sea-Tac I watched Selma, a film I’d been putting off until the Oscars kerfuffle died down, a controversy about the artistic merits of the film, and about the historical record. Of course, the film isn’t a documentary, and in part because I read some Gawker-type investigative piece in which presumably bigoted Academy members were quoted as defending their decision to largely overlook the film on the grounds that it wasn’t good, just black, I wanted to watch it as a story.

Unfortunately, what began as a compelling power play quickly devolved into a tangled mess of grave sermons, hushed conversations, hackneyed supporting characters, insubstantial nods to King’s adulterousness, and a baffling appearance of Malcolm X (which appearance is followed only a few scenes later by news of his assassination).

The trouble with Selma was that the director failed to compellingly harness all the strains she wanted to incorporate into her narrative, so the film seemed to flail about from one charged scene to the next without making a good case for the causal links between them. And yet. Yet what struck me was that—at least at 35 thousand feet in the air—the film did not lack power despite its directorial shortcomings. It did not lack power because of the immanent power of events it meant to portray.

We tend to distinguish drama from melodrama by our impressions of whether or not the emotion on display—indeed the emotion we feel as an audience—is “earned.” Whether or not emotion, and by extension sympathy, is earned is of course subjective, but most would agree that the context for that process is the work of art itself. In other words, the earning must be done within the narrative. To get super elemental and extreme: if I walk up to a grieving family and say “9/11” I’d be fairly certain to provoke an emotional response. But all I’m doing is referring to an event that itself has powerful associations for this family.

I’ve been slowly reading Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04, which weaves together some very psychologically astute interior monologues, playfully cerebral dialogues, and what I think might best be described as thought experiments around a highly autobiographical story about the context in which the book we’re holding was conceived. As Alex Haley described Roots, it could be called “friction,” a deliberate attempt to blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, to use the techniques and narrative gadgetry of fiction to exalt or discover deeper truth. Here’s an excerpt from Part 4:

“…part of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn’t obtain, how the correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensities of the poem itself…”

It is clear that Lerner’s project is to bring this sensibility to the novel, and as I’ve said above the result is often compelling. And yet. Yet what I find myself doing—and I’m sure I’m not alone—is reading through with an eye for what parts are fiction and what parts fact. And I find that problematic because it gamifies the reading of the text in a way that rewards the reader by promising that some elements, to be sure, are true, that there is autobiography, and juicy autobiography at that (money, sexual escapades, illnesses), while leaning for effect on the fact that readers perceive “reality” to have an inherent value.

Seattle has been forefront in the literary blogosphere recently—not because of my trip here as APRIL writer-in-residence, to my chagrin, rather because of a highly contentious article in The Stranger written by author Ryan Boudinot. I won’t even link to it because chances are you’ve already read it, but the passage that stirred up the most ire regarded memoir and the relationship between experience and artistry. Without getting into Boudinot’s intentions in making his observations public, they made me wonder about the impact social media is having on young writers—what draws them to the act, what they choose as subjects, and how they think of story.

When you’re given every reason to believe that there’s an unending thirst for minute-by-minute updates about your experience on earth, how must that change your understanding of artistic merit? Of personal merit? Though Ben Lerner is older than Boudinot’s students, can his interest in conflating of fact and fiction be examined vis a vis this concurrent and sharply rising interest in making the private public?

I admire people who are good at Facebook. From what I understand, it’s pretty much for old people now, but I’ve gotten to see some fairly spectacular examples of people using it to blur that boundary “between text and world” and to become what Germans call Lebenskunstler. Rather than having a particular medium, Lebenskunstler use their own lives as a canvas—an effort very handily captured and shared via smartphone. Though it doesn’t come all that naturally to me, I do hope to earn your attention by sharing some observations this week about my experience at APRIL’s various events, and whatever else bubbles up along the way. I promise most of it will even be true.

-- Shya Scanlon

2015 Author Profile: Wendy Xu

#Wendy Xu #You Are Not Dead #The Hero Poems #Phrasis #I Was Not Even Born #h_ngm_n #Black Cake #Coconut #CSU Poetry Center #APRIL 2015

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