Created by Midwestern Gothic in partnership with the Residential College, Voices of the Middle West is a festival celebrating writers from all walks of life as well as independent presses and journals that consider the Midwestern United States their home. The Festival will take place on March 12th, starting at 10am, at East Quad. The festival includes panels and a book fair, and is free to the public. Ross Gay is the keynote speaker.
The goal of the festival is to bring together students and faculty of the university, as well as writers and presses from all over the Midwest, in order to provide a perspective of this region and to showcase the magnificent work being produced here, the stories that need to be told…the voices that need to be heard. Truly, this is a celebration of the Midwest voice, and it is the festival’s aim to create an ideal environment for any and all to come and take an active part, to discover and discuss how rich our literary tradition is.
More information at http://midwestgothic.com/voices/
William Anderson is an award-winning historian and author whose interest in the “Little House” books began in elementary school. Much of his research for this book was conducted on-site at the locales of the Ingalls and Wilder homes. He has been active in the preservation and operation of the Wilder sites in De Smet, South Dakota, and Mansfield, Missouri, and edits the newsletter, Laura Ingalls Wilder Lore.
Join U-M History faculty as they discuss their recent publications, which will be available for purchase and signing. Featuring: Stephen Berrey, Howard Brick, Deirdre de Cruz, Gregory Dowd, Hussein Fancy, Nancy Rose Hunt, Martha S. Jones, Tiya Miles, Derek Peterson, Sherie Randolph, Ronald G. Suny, Thomas Trautmann, and Jeffrey Veidlinger. Light hors d’oeuvres and non-alcoholic beverages provided. Presented by the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, the University of Michigan Department of History, and Literati Bookstore.
Reading by InsideOut Literary Arts Project (Detroit) associate director and Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Detroit project coordinator Alise Alousi, whose work is featured inInclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry. The program begins with open mike readings.
Giddy-Up Buckaroos!
Shandra Trent writes:
Since I was a child, words flowed from my brain to the page. No…they gushed. I was a geyser of words. From creative writing to journalism, I had a lot to say. I am a lot like Lio Lionni’s character Frederick, gathering words and colors and sun rays, for the winter days are long & gray & cold. I work with young children. I read to them. I listen at storytimes with them. I notice the books they ask to hear over and over. Rhythm and repetition capture a child’s attention. As a writer, I love the structure of rhyme. It suits my perfectionist nature, working to get each syllable right while finding the most imaginative way to tell my story.
Over the years, many authors have inspired me: MaryAnn Hoberman (A House is a House for Me), Susan Varley (The Monster Bed), and Nancy Van Laan (Possom Come A-Knockin’). More contemporary authors, all from Michigan whose rhythm and rhyme inspire me are Shutta Crum, Rhonda Gowler-Greene, Nancy Shaw, Hope Vestergaard, and Lisa Wheeler. That’s not to say I don’t love a great non-poetic picture book. Frog & Toad stories are my all time favorites, especially to read aloud.
My own children have moved from picture books to YA novels. In fact, they keep asking, “When are you going to write a REAL book?” They aren’t alone in underestimating the picture book. Today’s picture books top out at 500 words; most are less than 200. Picture book authors have to make every word count, while novelists can spend words freely.
Book:
Two young buckaroos wake up, sneak past the sheriff (Mom), and head outside, using Spanish words as they go. “ndale! Hurry!” they cry. They enjoy chases, lasso games, and lots of dirt–but will the sheriff be able to round them up at the end of the day? It also includes a glossary of Spanish words.
MacArthur Fellow and Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond reads from Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.
In this brilliant, heartbreaking book, Matthew Desmond takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the $20 a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched stickup after her hours are cut. All are spending almost everything they have on rent, and all have fallen behind. The fates of these families are in the hands of two landlords: Sherrena Tarver, a former schoolteacher turned inner-city entrepreneur, and Tobin Charney, who runs one of the worst trailer parks in Milwaukee. They loathe some of their tenants and are fond of others, but as Sherrena puts it, “Love don’t pay the bills.” She moves to evict Arleen and her boys a few days before Christmas. Even in the most desolate areas of American cities, evictions used to be rare. But today, most poor renting families are spending more than half of their income on housing, and eviction has become ordinary, especially for single mothers. In vivid, intimate prose, Desmond provides a ground-level view of one of the most urgent issues facing America today. As we see families forced into shelters, squalid apartments, or more dangerous neighborhoods, we bear witness to the human cost of America’s vast inequality—and to people’s determination and intelligence in the face of hardship. Based on years of embedded fieldwork and painstakingly gathered data, this masterful book transforms our understanding of extreme poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving a devastating, uniquely American problem. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.
Literati Bookstore and Michigan Radio Present Diane Rehm
In Conversation with Cynthia Canty
March, 17th, 2016, 7pm.
Rackham Auditorium, 915 E Washington St, Ann Arbor, 48109
Purchase tickets by clicking here.
Literati is thrilled to welcome beloved radio journalist Diane Rehm to Ann Arbor for a reading and conversation in support of her latest book, On My Own. Joining Diane for a post-reading conversation will be Cynthia Canty, host of Michigan Radio’s Stateside.
Each $30 ticket includes general admission and a hardcover copy of On My Own to be picked up the evening of the event. Tickets are also available for purchase in-store. Web orders may be shipped or picked up in-store, please allow at least 24 hours for online transactions to be processed.
About On My Own
In a deeply personal and moving book, the beloved NPR radio host speaks out about the long drawn-out death (from Parkinson’s) of her husband of fifty-four years, and of her struggle to reconstruct her life without him.
With John gone, Diane was indeed on her own, coping with the inevitable practical issues and, more important, with the profoundly emotional ones. What to do, how to react, reaching out again into the world struggling to create a new reality for herself while clinging to memories of the past. Her focus is on her own roller-coaster experiences, but she has also solicited the moving stories of such recently widowed friends as Roger Mudd and Susan Stamberg, which work to expose the reader to a remarkable range of reactions to the death of a spouse.
John’s unnecessarily extended death he begged to be helped to die culminated in his taking matters into his own hands, simply refusing to take water, food, and medication. His heroic actions spurred Diane into becoming a kind of poster person for the right to die movement that is all too slowly taking shape in our country. With the brave determination that has characterized her whole life, she is finding a meaningful new way to contribute to the world.
Her book as practical as it is inspiring will be a help and a comfort to the recently bereaved, and a beacon of hope about the possibilities that remain to us as we deal with our own approaching mortality.
Award-winning radio journalist Diane Rehm has hosted WAMU and NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show for more than 30 years. She is the author of Finding My Voice and co-author of Toward Commitment: A Dialogue About Marriage, written with her husband, John B. Rehm.
A lifelong resident of metro Detroit, Cynthia Canty is the host of Stateside on Michigan Radio. With 35 years of experience in Detroit radio and television, she has served as a popular radio host, television news anchor, producer, and as a general assignment, medical, and consumer reporter. Her reporting and writing have earned her many awards, including an Emmy and honors from the Michigan Association of Broadcasters, the Associated Press and the Detroit Press Club.
Michigan Radio is an NPR news station, and the state’s most listened-to public radio service, attracting approximately 500,000 listeners each week across southern Michigan. Michigan Radio broadcasts at 91.7 FM in southeastern Michigan, 91.1 FM in Flint, 104.1 FM in western Michigan, and is available online at michiganradio.org. Licensed to the University of Michigan, Michigan Radio broadcasts from studios in Ann Arbor.
Literati Bookstore is an independent, general interest bookstore in the heart of downtown Ann Arbor, opened in the spring of 2013 by Hilary and Mike Gustafson.
To purchase tickets, click here.
This local poet, a 2-time Pushcart Prize nominee, reads from his new chapbook, The Continuing Adventures of Orthomax: Now with Bombastic Pentameter! His poetry is marked by a self-deprecating sense of humor that is by turns intellectual and playful. Also, readings by other writers TBA. Signing.
Craig Dionne will present from his title Posthuman Lear: Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene.
Approaching King Lear from an eco-materialist perspective, Posthuman Lear examines how the shift in Shakespeare’s tragedy from court to stormy heath activates a different sense of language as tool-being — from that of participating in the flourish of aristocratic prodigality and circumstance, to that of survival and pondering one’s interdependence with a denuded world. Dionne frames the thematic arc of Shakespeare’s tragedy about the fall of a king as a tableaux of our post-sustainable condition. For Dionne, Lear’s progress on the heath works as a parable of flat ontology.
At the center of Dionne’s analysis of rhetoric and prodigality in the tragedy is the argument that adages and proverbs, working as embodied forms of speech, offer insight into a nonhuman, fragmentary mode of consciousness. The Renaissance fascination with memory and proverbs provides an opportunity to reflect on the human as an instance of such enmeshed being where the habit of articulating memorized patterns of speech works on a somatic level. Dionne theorizes how mnemonic memory functions as a potentially empowering mode of consciousness inherited by our evolutionary history as a species, revealing how our minds work as imprinted machines to recall past prohibitions and useful affective scripts to aid in our interaction with the environment. The proverb is that linguistic inscription that defines the equivalent of human-animal imprinting, where the past is etched upon collective memory within ‘adagential” being that lives on through the generations as autonomic cues for survival.
Dionne’s reimagining of this tragedy is important in the way it places Shakespeare’s central existential questions — the meaning of familial love, commitments to friends, our place in a secular world — in a new relation to the main question of surviving within fixed environmental limits. Along the way, Dionne reflects on the larger theoretical implications of recycling the old historicism of early modern culture to speak to an eco-materialism, and why the modernist textual aesthetics of the self-distancing text seems inadequate when considering the uncertainty and trauma that underscores life in a post-sustainable culture. Dionne’s final appeal is to “repurpose” our fatalism in the face of ecological disaster.
Craig Dionne is Professor of Literary and Cultural Theory at Eastern Michigan University, where he teaches Shakespeare and Early Modern English Literature. He specializes in Shakespeare and popular culture, early modern literacies and cultural studies. He has co-edited Disciplining English: Alternative Critical Perspectives (with David Shumway, SUNY Press, 2002), Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (with Steve Mentz, University of Michigan Press, 2005), Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage (with Parmita Kapadia, Ashgate, 2008), and Bollywood Shakespeares (with Parmita Kapadia, Palgrave, 2014). He was senior editor of JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory for ten years, and he also co-edited the inaugural issue of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (with Eileen Joy, Palgrave, 2010).
