Ana Fernandez teaches art courses at the University of Michigan’s Residential College in drawing and printmaking. Her artwork includes elements of drawing, printmaking, fibers and collage. It reflects a tactile sensibility and an affinity for layering, patterning and ornamentation. Thematically, it focuses on the interaction between fashion, representations of the female body and notions of femininity.
Paul Lisicky will read from his memoir The Narrow Door.
In The Narrow Door, Paul Lisicky creates a compelling collage of scenes and images drawn from two long-term relationships, one with a woman novelist and the other with his ex-husband, a poet. The contours of these relationships shift constantly. Denise and Paul, stretched by the demands of their writing lives, drift apart, and Paul’s romance begins to falter. And the world around them is frail: environmental catastrophes like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti, and local disturbances make an unsettling backdrop to the pressing concerns of Denise’s cancer diagnosis and Paul’s impending breakup. Lisicky’s compassionate heart and resilience seem all the stronger in the face of such searing losses. His survival—hard-won, unsentimental, authentic—proves that in turning toward loss, we embrace life.
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From Ernest Hemingway’s rural adventures to the gritty fiction of Joyce Carol Oates, the landscape of the “Third Coast” has inspired generations of the nation’s greatest storytellers.
Join Michigan Notable Author Anna Clark to unveil Michigan’s extraordinary written culture as she discusses Michigan authors and her new book, Michigan Literary Luminaries: From Elmore Leonard to Robert Hayden. The event includes a book signing and books will be for sale.
This fascinating book is a shines a spotlight on this rich heritage of the Great Lakes State with a mixture of history, literary criticism, and original reporting. Discover how Saginaw greenhouses shaped the life of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Theodore Roethke. Compare the common traits of Detroit crime writers like Elmore Leonard and Donald Goines. Learn how Dudley Randall revolutionized American literature by doing for poets what Motown Records did for musicians.
RC Creative Writing alumna Anna Clark is a freelance journalist in Detroit. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The American Prospect, Grantland, Vanity Fair, the Columbia Journalism Review, Next City, and other publications. She is the director of applications for Write A House and founder of Literary Detroit. Anna also edited A Detroit Anthology, a 2015 Michigan Notable Book.
Jan. 29 & 30. RC students direct and perform this popular semiannual 90-minute program of short scenes on a variety of topics and in a variety of styles, many written by RC students.
Jan. 29 & 30. RC students direct and perform this popular semiannual 90-minute program of short scenes on a variety of topics and in a variety of styles, many written by RC students.
A founder and editor of the seminal poetry journals Caterpillar and Sulfur and a former EMU English professor, Eshleman is a National Book Award-winning poet whose poems are driven forward by a neo-Whitmanesque poetic personality, unruly and explosive, and a correspondingly inventive language. “An Eshleman poem is unmistakable at first glance,” says poet and critic Eliot Weinberger. “Image jams against image, not impressionistically but in service of a passionately argued line of reason, a line in which an idea, before completion, turns into another idea, and then another.” Tonight he discusses his career and reads from his new collection, The Essential Poetry, 1960-2015. Signing.
Elizabeth McKenzie will read from her latest novel, The Portable Veblen.
Set in and around Palo Alto, amid the culture clash of new money and old (antiestablishment) values, and with the specter of our current wars looming across its pages, The Portable Veblen is an unforgettable look at the way we live now. A young couple on the brink of marriage the charming Veblen and her fiancé Paul, a brilliant neurologist find their engagement in danger of collapse. Along the way they weather everything from each other’s dysfunctional families, to the attentions of a seductive pharmaceutical heiress, to an intimate tete-a-tete with a very charismatic squirrel.
Veblen (named after the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term conspicuous consumption ) is one of the most refreshing heroines in recent fiction. Not quite liberated from the burdens of her hypochondriac, narcissistic mother and her institutionalized father, Veblen is an amateur translator and freelance self; in other words, she’s adrift.
Meanwhile, Paul the product of good hippies who were bad parents finds his ambition soaring. His medical research has led to the development of a device to help minimize battlefield brain trauma an invention that gets him swept up in a high-stakes deal with the Department of Defense, a Bizarro World that McKenzie satirizes with granular specificity.
As Paul is swept up by the promise of fame and fortune, Veblen heroically keeps the peace between all the damaged parties involved in their upcoming wedding, until she finds herself falling for someone or something else. Throughout, Elizabeth McKenzie asks: Where do our families end and we begin? How do we stay true to our ideals? And what is that squirrel reallythinking? Replete with deadpan photos and sly appendices, The Portable Veblen is at once an honest inquiry into what we look for in love and an electrifying reading experience.
“Man oh man, do I love this book! I have never read anything like it. I can’t believe how funny it is given that we’re dealing at times with pharmaceutical fraud, irreparable brain injury, and comatose veterans. (Family dysfunction, on the other hand, is always funny) Audacious, imaginative, and totally wonderful: The whole books zips and zings. -Karen Joy Fowler, PEN Faulkner winner for We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
“The Portable Veblen is the squirreliest novel I ever read. I enjoyed it completely.” -Ursula K. Le Guin, author of The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness.
Elizabeth McKenzie is the author of a collection, Stop That Girl, short-listed for The Story Prize, and the novel MacGregor Tells the World, a “Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and Library Journal Best Book of the year. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, and has been recorded for NPR’s Selected Shorts. She was an NEA/Japan US-Friendship Commission Fellow in 2010. She received her MA from Stanford, was an assistant fiction editor at “he Atlantic, and currently teaches creative writing at Stanford’s school of continuing studies.
Rus Like Everyone Else is her first novel. She lives in London.
RC Writers Tea, open to majors and current writing students who are non majors, and current students interested in the writing major. In RC’s Benzinger Library.
Local short story writer Alex Kourvo and young adult novelist Bethany Neal discuss valuable writing lessons to be learned from reading our favorite books. For adult and teen (grade 6 & up) fiction and nonfiction writers. Also, Kourvo and Neal host an open house for writers to connect with one another and/or work on their projects at 7 p.m. on Feb, 18.
One MFA student of fiction and one of poetry, each introduced by a peer, will read their work. Tonight: Joah Berg and Scott Seres.
