First-Year MFA Poetry and Prose Readings.
Literati is thrilled to welcome magician Nate Staniforth to Ann Arbor’s Circus Bar in support of Here is Real Magic, an extraordinary memoir about finding wonder in everyday life.
About Nate and the book:
“A vivid, deeply compelling, startlingly personal account of life on the far side of the illusion.” –Lev Grossman, New York Times bestselling author of the Magicians Trilogy
Nate Staniforth has spent most of his life and all of his professional career trying to understand wonder–what it is, where to find it, and how to share it with others. He became a magician because he learned at a young age that magic tricks don’t have to be frivolous. Magic doesn’t have to be about sequins and smoke machines–rather, it can create a moment of genuine astonishment.
But after years on the road as a professional magician, crisscrossing the country and performing four or five nights a week, every week, Nate was disillusioned, burned out, and ready to quit. Instead, he went to India in search of magic. Here Is Real Magic follows Nate Staniforth’s evolution from an obsessed young magician to a broken wanderer and back again. It tells the story of his rediscovery of astonishment–and the importance of wonder in everyday life–during his trip to the slums of India, where he infiltrated a three-thousand-year-old clan of street magicians. Here Is Real Magic is a call to all of us–to welcome awe back into our lives, to marvel in the everyday, and to seek magic all around us.
Have you ever pulled a ratatouille and found a rat on your head? Do you ever question the larger impact of a cup of coffee? Have you gotten fed up with constantly being kidnapped? Ever daydream about America’s history if women were the founders?
Do you enjoy question leads that ultimately serve as clickbait in order to intrigue potential audience members?
Then we are the place for you! RC Players is hosting our semi-annual comedic Evening of Scenes performance Friday, Jan. 26 and Saturday, Jan. 27 at 8 p.m. in the Keene Theater, located in the basement of our dear East Quad. As always, our production is as free as the wind beneath my wings!
Tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell your parents, tell your dogs and cats and lizards and rats (they can find themselves in the subject matter of one of the scenes)! Feel free to share this event, or invite people who would love a good laugh in a theater.
2-4 p.m., Trinity Lutheran Church, 1400 W. Stadium. Free. annarborstorytelling.org, 997-5388.
Local short story writer Alex Kourvo and young adult novelist Bethany Neal host an open house for writers to connect with one another and/or work on their projects.
The 2018 Hopwood Underclassmen Awards will be announced and celebrated by Hopwood director Michael Byers. Six RC students have won awards. After the presentation of these awards, Antonya Nelson will offer a reading.
Antonya Nelson is the author of four novels, including Living to Tell and Bound, and seven short story collections, including Some Fun, Nothing Right, and, most recently, Funny Once. Her short stories have appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, Harper’s, and other magazines. They have been anthologized in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, as well as in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program.
Reading and discussion of several poems around the themes of occasions (Jan. 31), and dogs (Feb. 21). Followed by collaborative writing games and exercises. Attendees invited to read their poems. Snacks & socializing.
8-10 p.m., Argus Farm Stop greenhouse, 325 W. Liberty. $5 suggested donation. onepausepoetry.org, 707-1284
Robin Coste Lewis, the winner of the National Book Award for Voyage of the Sable Venus, is the poet laureate of Los Angeles. She is the writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California, a Cave Canem fellow, and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She received her BA from Hampshire College, her MFA in poetry from New York University, an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University, and a PhD in poetry and visual studies from the University of Southern California. Lewis was born in Compton, California; her family is from New Orleans.
Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010. She is the author of the novel, The Idiot, and The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have been anthologized in the 2014 Best American Travel Writing and the 2010 Best American Essays collections. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor. Batuman holds a doctoral degree in comparative literature from Stanford University. From 2010 to 2013, she was writer-in-residence at Koç University, in Istanbul. She lives in New York.
About Across the Waves:
In 1931, the United States and France embarked on a broadcasting partnership built around radio. Over time, the transatlantic sonic alliance came to personify and to shape American-French relations in an era of increased global media production and distribution. Drawing on a broad range of American and French archives, Derek Vaillant joins textual and aural materials with original data analytics and maps to illuminate U.S.-French broadcasting’s political and cultural development. Vaillant focuses on the period from 1931 until France dismantled its state media system in 1974. His analysis examines mobile actors, circulating programs, and shifting governmental and other institutions shaping international radio’s use in times of war and peace. He explores the extraordinary achievements, the miscommunications and failures, and the limits of cooperation between America and France as they shaped a new media environment. Throughout, Vaillant explains how radio’s power as an instantaneous mass communications tool produced, legitimized, and circulated various notions of states, cultures, ideologies, and peoples as superior or inferior
Derek Vaillant is an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Sounds of Reform: Progressivism and Music in Chicago, 1873-1935 .
One MFA student of fiction and one of poetry, each introduced by a peer, will read their work. The Mark Webster Reading Series presents emerging writers in a warm and relaxed setting. We encourage you to bring your friends – a Webster reading makes for an enjoyable and enlightening Friday evening.
This week’s reading features Graham Cotten and Clayton Wickham.
Graham Cotten is from Birmingham, Alabama. Before entering the MFA Program here, he clerked for Chief Judge Blackburn in the Northern District of Alabama, and worked as a litigator. His short stories have appeared in American Short Fiction and on NPR.org.
Clayton Wickham is a fiction writer from Richmond, VA. He currently lives in Ann Arbor.
University of Michigan Museum of Art, 525 South State Street Ann Arbor, MI, 48109. Free. 734.764.0395. http://umma.umich.edu/events/4270/mark-webster-reading-series
