Poster Design by Michael Goldkamp

Check out some great interviews with festival authors by The Inlander.

Check out more interviews and kind festival coverage at the Spokesman-Review.

For the official word on times, locations, prices, etc., please check out ewu.edu/getlit or pick up a festival guide at your local Inlander rack.

In a rowboat on the Perkiomen Creek, near Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, I caught a 1 lb bass on a Pocket-Fisherman reel (one of those $9.99 promotional deals I’d seen on channel 29).   And so, with my bass, dangling from the stringer, someone took this picture of me and in the background you can make out the shadowy figure of a girl, who would later become my muse.  In the photograph, she’s wearing a t-shirt over her swimsuit that reads something about being the “REAL THING,”  and she’s smiling because, well, she has fully developed breasts and I haven’t grown into my limbs yet.  That, at least, is my theory on her smile and I could be wrong.

I hope I’m wrong.   And if I am, the reason is that this girl was not a muse at all.  She was just another self in a parade of selves, and as I celebrated my catch, I was doing that I And Thou thing that the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber talks about.  He says, for example, “Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons.”

And here’s where you might want to excuse the kids from the room.

Perplexed doesn’t cover my state of mind as I contemplate what I perused recently in a 1977 essay by Sandra M. Gilbert:

While the male poet, even at his most wretched and alienated, can at least solace himself with his open or secret creativity, his myth-making power, the female poet must come to terms with the fact that as a female she is that which is mythologized, the incarnation of otherness… and hence the object of anthologies full of male metaphors…

Read more »

Undoubtedly the Star of the Nineteenth Century

I’ve been making friends with a German woman who is studying to be a middle-school English teacher. She and I talk about poetry together and she has shared some reading lists with me from which she’s studying for an oral exam that will qualify her to begin her teaching practicum.

I was surprised by which poems were selected for the 19^th Century American poems. For instance, I’d never read the poetry of Emerson. Don’t we seem to take his essays more seriously than his verse? William Cullen Bryant I had hardly heard of. And Longfellow—besides trying to memorize “Paul Revere’s Ride” in 4^th grade, I was largely unfamiliar with his poetry, too.

Poems of the 19^th Century

1. William Cullen Bryant, “The Prairies” (1832) Read more »

remember when you used to get toys?  that was great, right?  the novelty of something new, the imaginative sparks that resulted, and yada yada yada…

kids get toys.  readers, not so much.  some books are very pretty, or interesting to hold, but they’re rarely fun like a toy is fun.  and i love a good bookmark, but they don’t really get my motor runnin’.  and what other accessories do readers really get that be possibly be fun?  a fucking lamp?  that’s lame as shit.

but allow me, dear readers, to blow your damn minds right now—cuz you do have a new toy: small demons.

this new website somehow contains a ridiculous amount of data regarding people/places/things that are covered in your favorite books, and it maps them for you.  you can even go on an actual map, zoom in, and see what books are tied to that place.  don’t ask how the magical wizards responsible for this thing conjured it into existence.  just enjoy it.  check out the bajillion references to drugs in your dog-eared copy of infinite jest.  see all the books johnny rotten pops up in.  discover how many tomes take place in east village.  it’s all just so awesome…

welcome to the internet’s newest & greatest time suck.

Do They Really Need to Be Separate?

When a friend recently asked my dude, Tracy, how Germany was treating him, he replied, “It is almost like Denver, it’s just that here I’m illiterate.

Life is full of fear and wonder when you’re illiterate. Getting the mail is daily cause for dread. Each envelope is filled with words that often don’t make sense even when typed into Google translate. Sometimes the temptation to ignore the documents in German is too great to resist. And then when you get around to looking at them, they can be very surprising.

Being from Seattle, the polite but not-so-warm way of Germans feels fine and familiar. When you do meet a warm person, however—and we have met one—it is really comforting. The nicest German we’ve met so far works at the Nuremberg equivalent of the DMV. He smiled at us, spoke to us in slow, simple, understandable German, and joked around that we should come back and chat with him so we could practice our German. He asked what we wanted our license plate number to be and gave it to us.

This week when I was looking through our auto paperwork so I could apply for a resident parking permit, I noticed a paper that didn’t look quite as official as the rest. It begins with, “You are valuable, Shira!” (Du bist wertvoll, Shira!) Read more »

The best sentences orient us, like stars in the sky, like landmarks on a trail.

This is what Jhumpa Lahiri wrote recently in the first piece of a new series called Draft in the New York Times, which will feature writing on the art and craft of writing.

They remain the test, whether or not to read something. The most compelling narrative, expressed in sentences with which I have no chemical reaction, or an adverse one, leaves me cold. In fiction, plenty do the job of conveying information, rousing suspense, painting characters, enabling them to speak. But only certain sentences breathe and shift about, like live matter in soil. The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates.

–Jhumpa Lahiri, “My Life’s Sentences,” The New York Times

Another article this week in the New York Times, “Your Brain on Fiction,” offers a scientific explanation to this “live current” sensation that great sentences can evoke, as described by Lahiri: Read more »

If you’re a writer looking to submit work to a literary journal, let me tell you a small story and you can take from it what you will: Often in Willow Springs selection meetings, we have an argument about whether or not a poem is accessible to a wide audience. We argue over whether the poem uses references in a way that is helpful to the meaning or if instead,  the obscure references narrow down who would enjoy what the poem is trying to do. We call the latter “Poet’s Poems” and the decision we make about accepting one varies each time but more often than not, the poem is rejected.

         I tell this story, not because I write poems with specific literary or artistic references but because I enjoy poets who do, poets like Major Jackson and Melissa Kwasny but I had to learn to enjoy them. I have to thank Christopher Howell for introducing me to Melissa Kwasny. Last year during workshop he taught us how to read her book  The Nine Senses. I’d read the book before class and had been thoroughly unimpressed, frustrated even. A year later, I know why I was unimpressed: I was an idiot. I saw a book full of prose poems that seemed to be about trees and leaves and birds and I took every phrase LITERALLY.

The Nine Senses by Melissa Kwasny

 Now, I read The Nine Senses with respect and concentration because it requires both to be appreciated. These are not poems to be read idly while also watching the television. Kwasny’s poems move so quickly and leap so deftly, it’s the reader’s responsibility to commit to her level of intensity. Here I’ll show you: Read more »

An Interview with Robert Lopez, from Willow Springs 69

I tell students that you have to cultivate your fears, your perversions, your peccadilloes, your compulsions. You have to use that stuff because it’s ultimately going to make the work vibrant and come off the page. All the stories we tell have been told a million times before. Nobody’s going to come up with a new story. It’s all the same old thing; somebody is losing something, somebody wants something, somebody is afraid of losing something, somebody is afraid of wanting something. We can’t not write those stories. We cultivate the strange things that make us unique, and that uniqueness is what connects us to other people. Otherwise strangeness is just a freak-show.

Over the first weekend of March, Jonathan Johnson, the earthy poet of E.W.U.’s Creative Writing Center, led us on a journey.

We didn’t pack mules.   We packed a mini-van.

We didn’t trap beaver, possum or mink.  But a brave undergraduate with a beautiful soul knit me a wool cap without leaving the passenger seat.

We didn’t track any hostile natives.   We ate and drank with them at bars and coffee shops.

As part of our Literature of the Northwest course, a group of five set out from The Elk, a pub in Spokane’s Brown’s Addition.    Then, it was onto the inspiration for Marilynne Robinson’s book, Housekeeping, which is situated in the fictitious town of Fingerbone, a pseudonym for Sandpointe, Idaho.   After an over-night stay at the K-2 Inn (the smell of rose petals combining with Marlboro to great effect) we rose one by one and made our way through slushy streets to the Monarch Cafe.  There I overheard a dude with a walking cane talk about his missing journal with the barista/cashier.  After receiving my IV of caffeine and reading through some Richard Hugo (a prelude for later) I listened to smatterings of monologue:  “I’m all in favor of retiring early!  I told my mother-in-law that I’d be done at 45… I’ve got things to do, personal things.”  With those ditties of wisdom mixing with the I-pod play-list of Nickel Creek and Death Cab, we hit the trail around the legendary Lake Pond Oreille.  The snow-capped Cabinet mountains turned on a hinge in the windshield.   Acres of larch, oak and ponderosa pine reflected upon the glassy surface of the water, and Highway 200 careened us through Kootenai, Hope and Clark Fork…   Somewhere in the meringue that is Montana mist, a bald eagle flew between two clear-cut hills and disappeared.  And all the while, the author of In The Land We Imagined offered his stunning commentary on all things awesome!

Read more »

Q: What do you have to say about the competitiveness in the writing world today?
A: Welcome to the jungle.

Q: How do I make my cover letter stand out?
A: Don’t be a rainbow in the dark.

Q: What is your revision process like?
A: Roll with the changes. Keep on rolling. Keep on rolling.

Q: How to you maintain a positive atmosphere in a workshop setting?
A: Love is a battlefield.

Q: What character in literature has inspired your work the most?
A: Tom Sawyer.

Q: What kind of work do you publish? What kind of writing are you looking for?
A: I want to know what love is. I want you to show me. Read more »