Get Lit! was an amazing experience, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t help this quiet ennui that’s crept up on me since it ended. I met and heard some spectacular authors, writers who who’ve inspired me, artists that I never dreamt could all inhabit the same 30-mile radius without imploding or summoning the four horsemen of the apocalypse. And it’ll take me at least a fortnight to absorb all of the wisdom I gained during the past few days. I learned so, so much.
It’s like seeing your favorite band for the first time live. Leading up to the event, you’re a manic wreck, sporadically blurting out the band’s name in daily conversation, listening to their records over and over again, making sure that you’ll know all of the words so you can sing along and not miss a beat or a word. You become what Steve Almond calls a Drooling Fanatic. You start to lose your grip on time. The closer the event comes, the faster time goes. And then it’s here. Your favorite authors, the people who inspire you, the books you owe something to, they’re all around you and it’s tough to take in. You don’t realize what’s just hit you. Read more »
Hey readers & lurkers, I’m the new kid on Bark and I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce myself. I’m new to blogging in general (unless the rumors about me having a secret Tumblr where I write emo things I’m too embarrassed to even put down in my notebook are true—and I’m not saying they are), so this will be fun! And because I fancy myself a poet, I’m going to do this in poem form. You’ll probably recognize this from elementary school. Its technical name is an acrostic, but instead of lame adjectives like “Creative!” and “Athletic!” I’m going to give you a fun fact for each letter of my name.
Can often be found baking cookies
Also known as Fitz
Secret science nerd—graduated with minors in biology & neuroscience
Especially loves getting mail; especially hates slow walkers
Yuengling is from Philadelphia. (So am I.)
Poet in the EWU MFA program
Amateur photographer
Technologically challenged #WhatAreHashtags
Rarely understands memes
Is a middle child. (Everything they say about middle children is true.)
Convinced that owning a milk frother would lead to complete happiness in life
Keeps hotel key cards
Nice to meet ya!
Spokane is the key. And if you ask me “the key to what?”, I’d have to say the key to the metaphysical fun park! It’s like the entire Lilic City, the hometown of Bing Crosby and Gonzaga basketball, is nothing more and nothing less than the glossy sign at the entrance to North America’s grand spiritual conundrum. You are here! (See the arrow! Or, could that be a question mark?) Why are you here?
Why I happen to be here over twenty-five years after leaving has nothing to do with church. It corresponds a little bit with this calling I felt to start another new church, known as Latah Valley. But the ultimate reason comes into view when that commercialized ecclesial wrapper has been peeled back… revealing what the Celts refer to as a thin place in the world.
Consider the odds. What are the spiritual hot spots of the world? The top-ten locales for communing with one’s deity of choice, or for congregating with the hoypoloi of doctrinal sensibility and decorum? Rome? Jerusalem? Tibet? Mecca? You see, as the last of these designations suggest, each so-called axis mundi has been overrun with familiarity. Spokane is familiar. Yet, not in the same way. Spokane is familiar like the brick wall in Diagon-Alley in the Harry Potter series. Spokane is familiar by way of the same metaphorical thinking that eventually made Mecca, Saudi Arabia into the mecca of every genre of culture on earth. Spokane is the nirvana-nexus into the new world without the Grunge-movement of Nirvana and Kurt Cobaine. Spokane is on the cusp of major, authentically enfleshed revelation, something akin to Joseph Smith before Mormonism went big (and even before Smith himself went big with his declarations concerning bigamy).
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I don’t know as much as I should about the Bosnian War but I do remember it.
It was really far away but our school called an assembly so that we would not shut it out of our minds. “It’s just as if people were dropping bombs over Berkeley right now,” the school principle told us, to show us how close war could be.
I carried around “Zlata’s Diary” for weeks from the dinner table to my room and around the house. I read it in a quick, obsessed way and then felt guilty for being annoyed by her haircut on the front cover.
Then I met Ajna. A brother of a friend of my mom’s had gone to Bosnia. For humanitarian aid or because he was a journalist. He had brought back a family from Sarajevo. Mother, father, three children, including a baby.
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Excuse me while I lose it.
I have a bit of a reputation on Bark and in my MFA program. I tend to put everything on the table. Nothing in my life is private. Or so I’d have you believe. The truth is I keep certain secrets better than a Secret-Keeper, and right now my life is in a bit of a shamble. A few weeks ago, I lost my job, adding to the already desperate situation of my finances. No one told me I would be poorer in graduate school than in undergrad where at one point I had three jobs at once. And that just adds to the current stress of my academic life, you know the process of writing a thesis. But I know shouldn’t worry, my advisor says my thesis only has to be the best quality of writing I can write at this point in my writing career, so no pressure.
The problem is my writing is getting better, on a technical level. And I don’t mean anything close to Pulitzer-worthy, I mean infinitely better than the portfolio I submitted to get into grad school Read more »
i was gonna do this whole big post right here. a sort of “state of the union” type thing for mfa programs. (SOTUMFA?) and i was gonna crowd-source the whole thing, and get mfa’ers from all over the land to talk about what’s happening in their programs. then i got lazy. but the original spark behind that idea still seems relevant, even if i don’t do any actual reporting.
there’s been some funny business afoot at columbia college in chicago. a few weeks back, it was announced that long-time chair of the fiction writing department there, randy albers, was not having his contract renewed & he would essentially be demoted to just a faculty member. not for “performance-based” reasons, according to the dean of the school of fine & performing arts—but because of money prioritization. i didn’t really know what that word meant, but it sounded like something a sneaky consultant would come up with (which turned out to be pretty much true).
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… Or is it the other way around?
The clip below purports to be a keynote address from the global “Technology Entertainment Design” expo (TED), a series of science and research conferences funded annually by the nonprofit Sapling Foundation. In the clip, English billionaire industrialist Peter Weyland discusses the relationship between technology, human expansion, and defiance of authority, as first embodied by the myth of Prometheus in Greek mythology.
You will notice almost immediately that the date-stamp on the clip places the lecture in March of 2023. Savvier viewers may also note that the figure of Weyland is actually Australian actor Guy Pearce, famous from films such as Memento and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. The clip is a piece of viral marketing, first screened exclusively at this year’s actual TED conference in Long Beach, California, and produced for the occasion by Alien director Ridley Scott. The clip was designed to not only advertise the TED talks themselves, but also Scott’s upcoming Alien spinoff flick Prometheus. The name Weyland, incidentally, is a reference to Weyland-Yutani, the mysterious “Company” behind the tragic events of the original Alien film. Read more »
I like going into other people’s houses and looking at their stuff. I like open houses and estate sales; I’ll take garage or yard sales if that’s as close as I can get. If you’ve ever looked out your living room window and caught a passerby looking in, that might have been me. It’s not that I’m a snoop–even when house-sitting, I’ve never been one to go through other people’s drawers and cupboards–it’s just that in many ways, the things people decorate with or leave lying around say so much about them. Maybe it’s because I grew up with a messy mother and a father who loves to remodel the house, but the more someone has on their mantelpiece, coffee table, or kitchen counter (aside from rotten food or garbage) the more comfortable I tend to be with them. Minimalists strike me as secretive, as do those who go in for too much interior design. I like to go into someone’s house and see their books and pens and teapots, their kids’ toys, the board game they played last night, their toothpaste. I like tchotchkes. Knickknacks. When I say, “That’s an awesome lamp,” I’d love it if you told me where you got it, why you like it, and why you chose to put it where you did. Read more »
19 Comments 
Get Lit! was an amazing experience, don’t get me wrong, but I can’t help this quiet ennui that’s crept up on me since it ended. I met and heard some spectacular authors, writers who who’ve inspired me, artists that I never dreamt could all inhabit the same 30-mile radius without imploding or summoning the four horsemen of the apocalypse. And it’ll take me at least a fortnight to absorb all of the wisdom I gained during the past few days. I learned so, so much.
