Literati is thrilled to welcome authors Anne O’Brien Carelli and Brigit Young who will be sharing their new novels Skylark and Wallcreeper & Worth a Thousand Words.
About Skylark and Wallcreeper:
Queens, 2012.
Hurricane Sandy is flooding New York City, and Lily is at a nursing home with her grandmother, Collette. Lily visits Collette often, as she is beginning to lose her memories. When the National Guard shows up to evacuate the building and take them to safety at the Park Slope armory in Brooklyn, Lily’s granny suddenly produces a red box she’s hidden in a closet for years. Once they get to safety, Lily opens the box, where she finds an old, beautiful Montblanc pen. Granny tells Lily that the pen is very important and that she has to take care of it, as well as some letters written in French.
But Lily loses the pen in the course of helping other nursing home residents, and as she searches the city trying to find it, she learns more about her grandmother’s past in France and begins to uncover the significance of the pen with the help of her best friend, a quirky pen expert, and a larger-than-life, off-Broadway understudy. Told in alternating sections (2012 and 1944), this engaging book explores a deep friendship during difficult times and the importance of family.
About Worth a Thousand Words:
Whether it’s earrings, homework, or love notes, Tillie “Lost and Found” Green and her camera can find any lost thing–until a search for a missing person forces her to step out from behind the lens.
Ever since a car accident left Tillie Green with lasting painful injuries, she’s hidden behind her camera. She watches her family and classmates through the lens, tracking down misplaced items and spotting the small details that tell a much bigger story than people usually see. But she isn’t prepared for class clown Jake Hausmann’s request: to find his father.
In a matter of days, Tillie goes from silent observer to one half of a detective duo, searching for clues to the mystery of Jake’s dad’s disappearance. When the truth isn’t what Jake wants it to be, and the photographs start exposing people’s secrets, Tillie has to decide what–and who–is truly important to her.
Anne O’Brien Carelli is the author of adult nonfiction and the picture book Amina’s New Friends. She has always been fascinated by the French Resistance, and studied history at Case Western Reserve University. For her PhD, Anne researched psychology of the gifted. Originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan, Anne lives in the Hudson River Valley in upstate New York. This is her debut middle grade novel.
Brigit Young lives in NYC, along with her lovely husband, Jonathan, a master of funny voices, and hilarious daughter, Simone, a master of colors and the ABCs. She is the author of Worth a Thousand Words.
Literati is excited to welcome author and craftsman Eric Gorges who will be discussing his new book A Craftman’s Legacy: Why Working With Our Hands Gives Us Meaning.
About A Craftman’s Legacy:
The host of TV’s A Craftsman’s Legacy makes the case that the craftsman’s way–the philosophy, the skills, and the mindset–can provide a helpful blueprint for all of us in our increasingly hurried, mass-manufactured world.
Today, even as so many of us spend hours in front of screens and in the virtual world, there is a growing movement that recognizes the power in the personal, the imperfect, the handmade. Eric Gorges, a metal shaper, taps into that hunger to get back to what’s “real” through visits with the fellow artisans he has profiled for his popular public television program. In this book, he tells their stories and shares the collective wisdom of calligraphers, potters, stone carvers, glassblowers, engravers, wood workers, and more while celebrating the culture they’ve created.
Filled with insights about the physical, psychological, and spiritual aspects of craftsmanship, A Craftsman’s Legacy identifies the craftsman’s shared values: taking time to slow down and enjoy the process, embracing failure, knowing when to stop and when to push through, and accepting that perfection is an illusion. Gorges extols the benefits of getting out of one’s comfort zone and the importance of learning the traditions of the past in order to carry those values into the future. Along the way, Gorges tells his own story about leaving the corporate world to focus on what he loves. This is a book for seekers of all kinds, an exhilarating look into the heart and soul of modern-day makers–and how they can inspire us all.
Eric Gorges has been the host of A Craftsman’s Legacy since it began in 2014. After a health crisis caused him to reevaluate his life, he sought out one of the best metal shapers in the country and signed on as his apprentice. In 1999, he struck out on his own, opening the custom motorcycle shop, Voodoo Choppers, in Detroit, Michigan, where he lives today.
Literati is thrilled to welcome back poet Franny Choi who will be reading from her new collection Soft Science
About Soft Science:
Soft Science explores queer, Asian American femininity. A series of Turing Test-inspired poems grounds its exploration of questions not just of identity, but of consciousness–how to be tender and feeling and still survive a violent world filled with artificial intelligence and automation. We are dropped straight into the tangled intersections of technology, violence, erasure, agency, gender, and loneliness.
“Franny Choi’s Soft Science offers an exceptional exploration both of all that comprises the intimate and of all that consumes the communal in our lives. Whether tracking the adventures of the ‘cyborg’ or eavesdropping on conversations between sisters, it’s all the same world. These striking poems ring through with a singular voice, creating a society that helps us understand our own. When you open a book of poems, ‘isn’t that what you came to see?’ Choi builds a world not only of striking beauty and lucid politics, but also, most importantly, with love.” –A. Van Jordan
Franny Choi is a writer, performer, and educator. She is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014) and the chapbook Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has been a finalist for multiple national poetry slams, and her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, the New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fellow, Senior News Editor for Hyphen, co-host of the podcast VS, and member of the Dark Noise Collective. Her second collection, Soft Science, is forthcoming from Alice James Books.
Literati is pleased to welcome poets Adam Giannelli and Tommye Blount who will be reading from their latest collections Tremulous Hinge and What We Are Not For.
About Tremulous Hinge:
Rain intermits, bus windows steam up, loved ones suffer from dementia–in the constantly shifting, metaphoric world of Tremulous Hinge, figures struggle to remain standing and speaking against forces of gravity, time, and language. In these visually porous poems, boundaries waver and reconfigure along the rumbling shoreline of Rockaway or during the intermediary hours that an insomniac undergoes between darkness and dawn. Through a series of self-portraits, elegies, and Eros-tinged meditations, this hovering never subsides but offers, among the fragments, momentary constellations: “moths all swarming the / same light bulb.”
From the difficulties of stuttering to teetering attempts at love, from struggling to order a hamburger to tracing the deckled edge of a hydrangea, these poems tumble and hum, revealing a hinge between word and world. Ultimately, among lofting waves, collapsing hands, and darkening skies, words themselves–a stutterer’s maneuvers through speech, a deceased grandfather’s use of punctuation–become forms of consolation. From its initial turbulence to its final surprising solace, this debut collection mesmerizes.
About What We Are Not For:
Through biography, fairy tale, and history, Tommye Blount’s debut chapbook WHAT ARE WE NOT FOR redraws the fatherland of manhood as a territory beyond whose borders tenderness and cruelty fight for space. The men and boys in these poems are transformed into instruments of pleasure and of destruction, worshipped artifacts and disfigured toys, victims and assailants. WHAT ARE WE NOT FOR moves its reader toward caustic longing, the hope that danger and risk promise.
“Tommye Blount’s WHAT ARE WE NOT FOR is an instruction manual on how to fall to our knees and crawl from the mouth of failed transformations. Here, Pinocchio’s boyhood demands bloodspill for proof and the speaker’s humanity is never fulfilled: ‘After all, I am a broken animal.’ Desire turns toward the darkest trail and does not look back through challenging forms and twisted prosody. This collection is rope and whip, daughter-sons and muzzles, and ‘a prayer they mistake/ for a growl.’ I am not myself, any longer, after these poems.’ Phillip B. Williams”
Adam Giannelli’s poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, FIELD, Yale Review, and elsewhere. He is the translator of a selection of prose poems by Marosa di Giorgio, Diadem, and the editor of High Lonesome, a collection of essays on Charles Wright. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Born and raised in Detroit, Tommye Blount now lives in the nearby suburb of Novi, Michigan. He has been the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from Cave Canem and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His work has appeared in POETRY, New England Review, Phantom, Four Way Review, The Offing, Vinyl, and other publications. He holds an MFA from The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Literati is pleased to welcome Paul Vachon who will be sharing his new book Detroit: An Illustrated Timeline.
About Detroit: An Illustrated Timeline
Let’s talk a walk a long walk, back over three centuries. At the dawn of the eighteenth century Detroit was established as simply an outpost for the French to take advantage of the fur trade while keeping the British at bay. Over the subsequent 300 plus years this small settlement advanced to become a regional hub of commerce, a focal point of nineteenth century industrial strength, and ultimately the nexus of the auto business–the industry that redefined mobility and in doing so changed the course of world history.
Detroit’s long evolution occurred along an often rocky path, marked by a devastating fire, military conquests, conflicts with southern slave hunters, a burgeoning population, all while enduring persistent racial tensions and insurrection. As the Arsenal of Democracy the city proved essential to the allied victory in World War II; but the following decades proved ruinous. As the city bled people and resources, whole areas were decimated–yet nonetheless poised for a rousing comeback.
This book points out many of the seminal events and noteworthy turning points of Detroit’s long journey, some little known: the city’s fall to the British during the War of 1812, the existence of slavery in Detroit as late as the 1820s, and Mayor Hazen Pingree’s aggressive advocacy for the everyday citizen against corporate interests.
Chapters devoted to the twentieth century highlight Detroit’s underappreciated architectural heritage, the development of its notable cultural institutions, as well as the exploits of assorted scoundrels, such as the Black Legion, the Purple Gang, Harry Bennett and Father Charles Coughlin.
Triumphant sports teams, the contributions of religious leaders, and courage of civil rights leaders are all brought to life, completing this chronological sketch of America’s city of the straits.
A lifelong resident of the Detroit area, Paul Vachon is an author, freelance writer and public speaker. He possesses a strong interest in Detroit history, and has written four previous books devoted to the subject. He’s also written guidebooks on Michigan travel. Paul is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. In his spare time, Paul enjoys traveling and nature photography. He also thinks having a map of the state on the back of his left hand is pretty cool.
Literati is thrilled to welcome novelist Jessica Francis Kane who will be sharing her new book Rules for Visiting.
About Rules for Visiting:
A beautifully observed and deeply funny novel of May Attaway, a university gardener who sets out on an odyssey to reconnect with four old friends over the course of a year.
At forty, May Attaway is more at home with plants than people. Over the years, she’s turned inward, finding pleasure in language, her work as a gardener, and keeping her neighbors at arm’s length while keenly observing them. But when she is unexpectedly granted some leave from her job, May is inspired to reconnect with four once close friends. She knows they will never have a proper reunion, so she goes, one-by-one, to each of them. A student of the classics, May considers her journey a female Odyssey. What might the world have had if, instead of waiting, Penelope had set out on an adventure of her own?
RULES FOR VISITING is a woman’s exploration of friendship in the digital age. Deeply alert to the nobility and the ridiculousness of ordinary people, May savors the pleasures along the way–afternoon ice cream with a long-lost friend, surprise postcards from an unexpected crush, and a moving encounter with ancient beauty. Though she gets a taste of viral online fame, May chooses to bypass her friends’ perfectly cultivated online lives to instead meet them in their messy analog ones.
Ultimately, May learns that a best friend is someone who knows your story–and she inspires us all to master the art of visiting.
Jessica Francis Kane is the author of This Close, The Report, and Bending Heaven. This Close was longlisted for The Story Prize and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize, and The Report was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection and a finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in a number of publications, including Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s, The Missouri Review, The Yale Review, A Public Space, and Granta.
We welcome award-winning journalist Rebecca Clarren, in support of her debut novel Kickdown, as part of our ongoing Fiction at Literati series! Rebecca will be joined in conversation by Emily Strelow, author of The Wild Birds. The event is free and open to the public.
About Kickdown:
When Jackie Dunbar’s father dies, she takes a leave from medical school and goes back to the family cattle ranch in Colorado to set affairs in order. But what she finds derails her: the Dunbar ranch is bankrupt, her sister is having a nervous breakdown, and the oil and gas industry has changed the landscape of this small western town both literally and figuratively, tempting her to sell a gas lease to save the family land.
There is fencing to be repaired and calves to be born, and no one–except Jackie herself–to take control. But then a gas well explodes in the neighboring ranch, and the fallout sets off a chain of events that will strain trust, sever old relationships, and ignite new ones.
Rebecca Clarren’s Kickdown is a tautly written debut novel about two sisters and the Iraq war veteran who steps in to help. It is a timeless and timely meditation on the grief wrought by death, war, and environmental destruction. Kickdown, like Kent Haruf’s Plainsong or Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone, weaves together the threads of land, family, failure, and perseverance to create a gritty tale about rural America.
Rebecca Clarren, an award-winning journalist, has been writing about the rural West for nearly twenty years. Her journalism, for which she has won the Hillman Prize and an Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellowship, has appeared in such publications as Mother Jones, High Country News, the Nation, and Salon.com. Kickdown, shortlisted for the PEN/Bellwether Prize, is her first novel. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and two young sons.
Emily Strelow was born and raised in Oregon’s Willamette Valley but has lived all over the West and now, the Midwest. For the last decade she combined teaching writing with doing seasonal avian field biology with her husband. While doing field jobs she camped and wrote in remote areas in the desert, mountains and by the ocean. She is a mother to two boys, a naturalist, and writer. She lives in Ann Arbor, MI. The Wild Birds is her first novel.
Poetry readings are scheduled the 4th Wednesday of each month. These events feature a reading by one or more published poets, followed by an Open Mic at which anyone is welcome to read something of their own or a favorite poem.
Marilynn Rashid teaches basic, intermediate, and advanced Spanish language and composition classes, intermediate literature classes, and the Spanish translation class at Wayne State. Her interests include Comparative Literature and the theory and practice of literary translation. Poetry awards include:
Judith Pearson Siegel Award for Poetry, WSU English Department, 1993
Finalist in New Issues Poetry Contest, Western Michigan University, 1997
Nominated for Pushcart Prize, 2001
Special Merit Award for Poetry, Comstock Review, 2009
Literati is honored to welcome back poet Clayton Eshelman who will be reading from his new collection Pollen Aria.
About Pollen Aria:
That Clayton Eshleman has not ceased from exploration over a career spanning more than 60 years is witnessed by the bulk, range, and diversity of his prior work. Now in his 80’s Eshleman presents us with a last collection of his poems-mostly recent, a few older. That he has sought to open up his life and work, to entwine and entangle it with others, through observation and vision, research and scholarship, translation and editing, and collaboration and conversation, all of this reflects Eshleman’s life commitment, indeed a commitment to life in writing poetry.
Clayton Eshleman has had published roughly 100 books and chapbooks of original poetry, translations, and nonfiction writings, and edited seventy issues of magazines and journals, including the ground-breaking Caterpillar and Sulfur. His writings have appeared in over 500 literary magazines and journals around the world and his books and writings have been translated into over a dozen languages. He has won many poetry awards, fellowships, and translation awards for his works through the years. It is undoubtedly unnecessary to observe that he made and has fulfilled a life commitment to poetry. Now in his 80’s he resides with his wife Caryl in Ypsilanti, MI.
All invited to listen to guild members swap stories or bring their own to tell.
