Calendar

Oct
23
Wed
Charles Eisendrath: Downstream from Here: A Big Life in a Small Place @ Kempf House Museum
Oct 23 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Charles Eisendrath, retired University of Michigan Knight-Wallace journalism fellows director

Professor Eisendrath discusses his new book “Downstream from Here: A Big Life in a Small Place”, a series of essays about the loves of a place inhabited temporarily, but which shape a person permanently. “Prepare to be inspired.” –JEFF DANIELS

Poetry Salon: One Pause Poetry @ Argus Farm Stop
Oct 23 @ 8:00 pm – 10:00 pm

ONE PAUSE POETRY SALON is (literally) a greenhouse for poetry and poets, nurturing an appreciation for written art in all languages and encouraging experiments in creative writing.

We meet every Weds in the greenhouse at Argus Farm Stop on Liberty St. The poems we read each time are unified by form (haiku, sonnet, spoken word), poet, time / place (Tang Dynasty, English Romanticism, New York in the 70s) or theme / mood (springtime, poems with cats, protest poems). We discuss the poems and play writing games together, with time for snacks and socializing in between.

Members are encouraged to share their own poems or poems they like – they may or may not relate to the theme of the evening. This is not primarily a workshop – we may hold special workshop nights, but mostly we listen to and talk about poems for the sake of inspiring new writing.

Whether you are a published poet or encountering poetry for the first time, we invite you to join us!

$5 suggested donation for food, drinks and printing costs.

8-10 p.m., Argus Farm Stop greenhouse, 325 W. Liberty. $5 suggested donation. onepausepoetry.org, 707-1284.

 

 

 

Oct
24
Thu
Jess Row: White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination @ Angell Hall, Room 3222
Oct 24 @ 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm

White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination (Graywok Press, August 2019) is a meditation on whiteness in American fiction and culture from the end of the civil rights movement to the present. At the heart of this collection of essays, Jess Row ties “white flight”—the movement of white Americans into segregated communities, whether in suburbs or newly gentrified downtowns—to white writers setting their stories in isolated or emotionally insulated landscapes, from the mountains of Idaho in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping to the claustrophobic households in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Row uses brilliant close readings of work from well-known writers such as Don DeLillo, Annie Dillard, Richard Ford, and David Foster Wallace to examine the ways these and other writers have sought imaginative space for themselves at the expense of engaging with race.

White Flights aims to move fiction to a more inclusive place, and Row looks beyond criticism to consider writing as a reparative act. What would it mean, he asks, if writers used fiction “to approach each other again”? Row turns to the work of James Baldwin, Dorothy Allison, and James Alan McPherson to discuss interracial love in fiction, while also examining his own family heritage as a way to interrogate his position. A moving and provocative book that includes music, film, and literature in its arguments, White Flights is an essential work of cultural and literary criticism.

In addition to White Flights, Jess Row is the author of two collections of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost, and a novel, Your Face in Mine. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Granta, n+1, and elsewhere, has been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories, and has won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA fellowship in fiction, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. In 2007, he was named a “Best Young American Novelist” by Granta. His nonfiction and criticism appear often in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Threepenny Review, and Boston Review, among other venues. He teaches full time at The College of New Jersey and occasionally also at NYU. He lives in New York City with his wife and their two children. A student of Zen for 25 years, he is an ordained senior dharma teacher in the Kwan Um School of Zen.

For any questions about the event or to share accommodation needs, please email asbates@umich.edu– we are eager to help ensure that this event is inclusive to you. The building, event space, and restrooms are wheelchair accessible. A lactation room (Angell Hall #5209), reflection room (Haven Hall #1506), and gender-inclusive restroom (Angell Hall 5th floor) are available on site. ASL interpreters and CART services are available upon request; please email asbates@umich.edu at least two weeks prior to the event.

Pamela Reynolds: What a Diary Confers: Children in the Zambezi Valley @ East Quad, Room 1506
Oct 24 @ 2:30 pm – 4:00 pm

Pamela Reynolds will speak about her book The Uncaring, Intricate World: A Field Diary, Zambezi Valley, 1984-85 (Duke 2019). Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town, Reynolds is author of War in Worcester: Youth and the Apartheid State. As U-M Presidential Professor she conducted the 2001-02 Mellon Seminar: Contested Childhood in a Changing Global Order. Following her talk, she is available for further conversation at a reception and book signing held in her honor. Reception RSVP at lizgoode@umich.edu

Oct
27
Sun
Ann Arbor Storytellers Guild: Monthly Meeting @ Ann Arbor Civic Theater
Oct 27 @ 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm

Monthly meeting of the AASG Open to the public.  This Month we are at the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre’s Studio.

Ann Arbor Storytellers Guiild: Scary Stories! @ Serendipity Books
Oct 27 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Come on out to Serendipity Books in Chelsea for a night of chills and thrills. The telling starts simple and small with not-so-scary stories for kids. The stories slowly become more scary and MORE ADULT as the night progesses. Stay if you dare, but BE WARNED! Things get pretty creepy around here.

Oct
28
Mon
Q and A with Agent Mollie Glick @ Angell Hall, Room 3154
Oct 28 @ 9:00 am – 10:00 am

Mollie Glick is a literary agent at Creative Artists Agency. She graduated from Brown University and began her career as a literary scout, advising foreign publishers regarding the acquisition of rights to American books. She then worked in the editorial department at the Crown imprint of Random House, before becoming an agent in 2003. Glick joined CAA in 2016, following eight years at Foundry Literary + Media.

Glick represents many top authors and thought leaders, including Vice President Joe Biden; Senator Kamala Harris; Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Ken Armstrong and T. Christian Miller; MacArthur Grant-recipient astrophysicist Sara Seager; National Book Award-nominee Ali Benjamin; NYT Top 50 Memoirs of the Past 50 Years recipient Patricia Lockwood; #1 NYT bestselling author Mark Manson; and NYT bestselling novelists Carol Rifka Brunt; Jonathan Evison; Sarah McCoy and Nic Stone.

Glick lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two young sons.

Oct
29
Tue
Jeff Morrison: Guardians of Detroit: Architectural Sculpture in the Motor City @ Chelsea District Library
Oct 29 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Detroit is home to gargoyles, grotesques, and guardians that silently watch over the city from their posts high above the sidewalks and streets. Author and photographer Jeff Morrison will discuss the symbolism behind the ornamentation and hear some of the untold stories of the artists, artisans, and architects involved in its creation, all drawn from his book The Guardians of Detroit: Architectural Sculpture in the Motor City. Copies of the book and coloring book will be available for purchase before and after the presentation.

Oct
30
Wed
Ruth Behar: Jewish Cuba: Immigrant Memories, Anthropological Journeys, Fictional Recreations @ Kempf House Museum
Oct 30 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm

Description:Ruth Behar — storyteller, author, poet, educator, and public speaker

Dr. Behar will present a multilayered view of the Jews of Cuba, weaving together various forms of storytelling, from history and ethnography to fiction and poetry.

U-M Author’s Forum: Ellen Muehlberger: Moment of Reckoning: Imagined Death and Its Consequences in Late Ancient Christianity @ Osterman Common Room (1022)
Oct 30 @ 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm

Ellen Muehlberger (history, classical studies, Middle East studies) and Deborah Dash Moore (Judaic studies, history) discuss Muehlberger’s latest book, followed by Q & A.

Late antiquity saw a proliferation of Christian texts dwelling on the emotions and physical sensations of dying—not as a heroic martyr in a public square or a judge’s court but as an individual, at home in a bed or in a private room. In sermons, letters, and ascetic traditions, late ancient Christians imagined the last minutes of life and the events that followed death in elaborate detail. This book traces how, in late ancient Christianity, death came to be thought of as a moment of reckoning: a physical ordeal whose pain is followed by an immediate judgment of one’s actions by angels and demons and, after that, fitting punishment. This emphasis on the experience of death ushered in a new ethical sensibility among Christians, in which one’s death was to be imagined frequently and anticipated in detail. This was initially meant as a tool for individuals: preachers counted on the fact that becoming aware of a judgment arriving at the end of one’s life tends to sharpen one’s scruples. But, as this book argues, the change in Christian sensibility toward death did not just affect individuals. Death imagined as the moment of reckoning created a fund of images and ideas within late ancient Christian culture about just what constituted a human being and how variances in human morality should be treated. This had significant effects on the Christian adoption of power in late antiquity, especially in the case of power’s heaviest baggage: the capacity to authorize violence against others

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