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.
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.
One MFA student of fiction and one of poetry, each introduced by a peer, will read their work. Tonight: Joah Berg and Scott Seres.
John G. Rodwan, Jr. is the author of the essay collections Holidays and Other Disasters and Fighters & Writers as well as the chapbook Christmas Things. His poems and nonfiction have appeared in journals such as Blood and Thunder, Concho River Review, Cream City Review, Jazz Research Journal, Midwestern Gothic, Pacific Review, Pea River Journal, Red Earth Review and Trickster. A graduate of both Kalamazoo College and Wayne State University, he has lived in Geneva, Switzerland; Brooklyn, New York; and Portland, Oregon, as well as his hometown of Detroit, where he currently resides.7.
J. Gordon Rodwan is a prize-winning photographer whose work has been displayed in the Scarab Club, the Detroit Artist Market, the Birmingham Community House, the Grosse Pointe Arts Center and other galleries as well as in private collections throughout Michigan. As a twenty-year-plus member of the Photographic Guild of Detroit, he is a frequent judge and photography critic for that organization as well as the Greater Detroit Camera Club Council and the Photographic Society of America. For several years, he has served as a photography mentor in Focus: HOPE’s “Focus on the Mission” program. He is an active member of the Lawrence Street Gallery. His photographs have appeared in publications including The American Interest, Belt Magazine and San Pedro River Review. A graduate of both Kalamazoo College and the University of Michigan, he has lived in Detroit for more than forty years.
Help Nicola’s celebrate Dr. Petty’s release of his new book Dr. Petty’s Pain Relief for Dogs. When you join us for this event please if you can bring dry dog or cat food with you for the Humane Society of Huron Valley’s Bountiful Bowls program. The Bountiful Bowls program is a pet food assistance program that helps people with financial difficulties. For more information regarding the program go to bit.ly/1Ywz4TQ
Author:
Dr. Michael Petty is a veterinarian and pain management specialist. He is the owner of the Arbor Pointe Veterinary Hospital as well as the Animal Pain Center (www.animalpaincenter.com), both in Canton, Michigan. He is the immediate-past president of the International Veterinary Academy of Pain Management and the co-author of the 2014 American Animal Hospital Association Pain Guidelines. A frequent speaker and consultant, Petty has also published articles in veterinary journals and elsewhere. He lives in rural Michigan with his wife and two daughters, two dogs, a cat, and a hedgehog.
Garth Greenwell will read from his debut novel, What Belongs to You.
On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia’s National Palace of Culture. There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, drawn by hunger and loneliness and risk, and finds himself ensnared in a relationship in which lust leads to mutual predation, and tenderness can transform into violence. As he struggles to reconcile his longing with the anguish it creates, he’s forced to grapple with his own fraught history, the world of his southern childhood where to be queer was to be a pariah. There are unnerving similarities between his past and the foreign country he finds himself in, a country whose geography and griefs he discovers as he learns more of Mitko’s own narrative, his private history of illness, exploitation, and want.
What Belongs to You is a stunning debut novel of desire and its consequences. With lyric intensity and startling eroticism, Garth Greenwell has created an indelible story about the ways in which our pasts and cultures, our scars and shames can shape who we are and determine how we love.
“Garth Greenwell takes us deep inside a specific Bulgarian subculture to examine the universal: the disparity between the uninhibited lives we desire and the bearable lives we choose. I began reading What Belongs to You in admiration; I ended in tears. An exquisite debut.” –Jamie Quatro, author of I Want to Show You More.
Garth Greenwell is the author of Mitko, which won the 2010 Miami University Press Novella Prize and was a finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction Award and a Lambda Award. A native of Louisville, Kentucky, he holds graduate degrees from Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was an Arts Fellow. His short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review and A Public Space. What Belongs to You is his first novel.
Please join us for a discussion of how to really get big money out of politics by Derek Cressman, author of When Money Talks – The High Price of “Free” Speech and the Selling of Democracy.
Americans know that the corrupting influence of special interest money is destroying our democratic process. And now that the Citizens United decision has thrown out campaign spending limits as abridgments of free speech, they want to know what they can do about it. Derek Cressman gives us the tools, both intellectual and tactical, to fight back.
Former labor Secretary Robert Reich says “When money talks, democracy walks. Read this book to learn how we, the people, can take back our elections from the billionaires and overturn a Supreme Court ruling that is a gross misreading of our Constitution.
Washtenaw Community College, 4800 E Huron River Dr Morris Lawrence Bldg, Seminar Room 101. Donation. rpuri.vice@gmail.com http://www.derekcressman.com/ann_arbor
Michigan native Travis Mulhauser will read from his debut novel Sweetgirl.
“SWEETGIRL is a gritty, compelling novel of a world where even a sixteen-year-old must confront what Edith Wharton called ‘the hard considerations of the poor.’ Mulhauser depicts his people and their landscape with uncompromising fidelity.” —Ron Rash
In his uncompromising and evocative debut novel, SWEETGIRL (Ecco; February 2, 2016), Travis Mulhauser takes readers deep into the heart and mind of an unforgettable young girl—a fearless and headstrong teenager navigating the hard luck terrain of northern Michigan as she looks for her mother, an addict who has gone missing. Percy James’s search launches a complicated series of events, triggered by an unexpected discovery that threatens her very survival. “There’s a big old neon heart pulsing on every page of SWEETGIRL, like the sign to a bar you can’t help but enter,” says Lindsay Hunter, author of Ugly Girls and Don’t Kiss Me. “I felt thrilled and shocked, and I couldn’t stop turning the pages. Travis Mulhauser is a writer to be reckoned with.”
Nine days after Mama disappeared I heard she was throwing down with Shelton Potter. As a blizzard bears down, Percy James sets off to find her troubled mother. For years, Percy has had to take care of herself and Mama—a woman who’s been unraveling for as long as her daughter can remember. In a drug-ravaged farmhouse, Percy finds a neglected infant, and risks everything to save her. But, her decision puts her on the wrong side of Potter, a volatile ex-con who puts a bounty on the young girl’s head. As Percy disappears into the surrounding, isolated hill country, she will face a journey requiring plenty of courage and ingenuity, even as she confronts the nature of her mother’s affliction and the realities of life in a community devastated by meth addiction and the desperation that accompanies it.
“Percy actually started as a supporting character in another book, which I basically scrapped when I realized she was the one I was really interested in writing about,” Mulhauser says of the genesis of SWEETGIRL. “I think her story really came together through her voice, which I would say is heavily influenced by two experiences: a few years working with addict and ‘at risk teens’ in northern Michigan and seven years teaching at a small community college in North Carolina. Both of these experiences exposed me to really tough, vibrant kids who spoke with conviction and bluster, who were often hopeful despite difficult circumstances, and who, generally, did not imbue their very harrowing life experiences with much self-pity or melodrama.”
Travis Mulhauser was born and raised in Northern Michigan, the insular and remote setting of the fictional Cutler County of the novel. Currently, Mulhauser lives in Durham, North Carolina with his wife and two children, where he teaches at North Carolina State University. He earned his MFA from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.
“A riveting novel… far, far funnier than it has any right to be,” adds Brock Clarke, author of The Happiest People in the World. “If you’re a fan of Charles Portis and Denis Johnson… then this book is exactly what you’ve been wanting, what you’ve been waiting for.”
All invited to read and discuss their poetry or short stories. Bring about 6 copies of your work to share. Hosted by local poets and former college English teachers Joe Kelty and Ed Morin.
