2nd Draft Reading Series

2nd Draft Reading Series Presents Eric Nelson, Amanda Nazario, and Royal Young

June's literary talent comes from Eric Nelson, Royal Young, and
Amanda Nazario

Thursday, June 16, 7:30 pm. Roots & Vines Cafe, 409 Grand St (@ Clinton), Manhattan.
J, M, Z, F to Delancey & Essex; B, D to Grand. 

Eric Nelson has been published in Constellation Magazine, 50 to 1, the Broadset Collective, and Zine World. He has read his work at KGB Bar, Bodega Wine Bar, Bluestockings, Book Thug Nation, Storefront Gallery, Northeast Kingdom, and in the Earshot and Mr. Beller's Neighborhood series. Eric is currently finishing a novel and his book of short stories "The Silk City Series" was published last year by Knickerbocker Circus.

Amanda Nazario is a graduate of the MFA program at CUNY - City College. Her work has been seen in Harpur Palate, SmokeLong Quarterly, New South, failbetter, and elsewhere. She lives in Jersey City. Hear her on the radio sometimes: http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/AN.

Royal Young has just completed his debut memoir FAME SHARK. He has written for various New York magazines and newspapers, and currently does literary coverage for Interview Magazine.

Girls! Girls! Girls!

Join us this Wednesday, May 11, for an all-female revue with Fiona Maazel, Amanda Stern, and Emily Schultz!

Wednesday, May 11, 7:30 pm. Roots & Vines Cafe, 409 Grand St (@ Clinton), Manhattan. J, M, Z, F to Delancey & Essex; B, D to Grand.

Emily Schultz has lived in Richmond, Virginia; Toronto, Ontario; and currently Brooklyn, New York. She is the co-publisher of the online literary journal Joyland. Her newest novel, Heaven is Small, released from House of Anansi Press in the U.S. last October. Heaven is Small was named a finalist for the 2010 Trillium Book Award alongside books by Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. Schultz’s novel The Blondes is forthcoming in spring 2012 from Doubleday Canada.

Fiona Maazel is the author of the novel LAST LAST CHANCE. Her new novel, WOKE UP LONELY, is almost done.

Amanda Stern is the author of the novel, The Long Haul, and several books for children and young adults. She founded, curates and hosts the popular, “Happy Ending Music and Reading Series,” at Joe’s Pub in NYC and is at work on her next novel. Stern is the recipient of many prizes and awards, most notably, VIP status at Zappos.com

Breaking-Up May Be Hard to Do...

But it sure can be made a lot easier when you have great writers who write about it. Tuesday night's standing-room only reading had the audience in stitches as Jim Hanas, Christie Grotheim, Kera Yonker, and Olivia Dunn shared heartache with humor and poignancy.

If you weren't able to make the reading, you can still check out our readers in various places online: 

Jim's book, Why They Cried,  is available here, and you can also visit his website here.

Follow Olivia Dunn's blog here.

You can read essays by Christie Grotheim here, and here. 

Kera Yonker's blog can be found here.

And don't forget Fiona Maazel, Amanda Stern, and Emily Schultz join forces and read at 2nd Draft on May 11!!

 

2nd Draft Reading Series Presents Fiona Maazel, Amanda Stern, and Emily Schultz!

On Wednesday, May 11, the formidable trio of Fiona Maazel, Amanda Stern, and Emily Schultz read at 2nd Draft!

Wednesday, May 11, 7:30 pm. Roots & Vines Cafe, 409 Grand St (@ Clinton), Manhattan. J, M, Z, F to Delancey & Essex; B, D to Grand.

Emily Schultz has lived in Richmond, Virginia; Toronto, Ontario; and currently Brooklyn, New York. She is the co-publisher of the online literary journal Joyland. Her newest novel, Heaven is Small, released from House of Anansi Press in the U.S. last October. Heaven is Small was named a finalist for the 2010 Trillium Book Award alongside books by Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro. Schultz’s novel The Blondes is forthcoming in spring 2012 from Doubleday Canada.

Fiona Maazel is the author of the novel LAST LAST CHANCE. Her new novel, WOKE UP LONELY, is almost done.

Amanda Stern is the author of the novel, The Long Haul, and several books for children and young adults. She founded, curates and hosts the popular, “Happy Ending Music and Reading Series,” at Joe’s Pub in NYC and is at work on her next novel. Stern is the recipient of many prizes and awards, most notably, VIP status at Zappos.com

Are You a Writer? Are You a Parent? Pen Parentis Wants YOU!

2011 Pen Parentis  Writing Fellowship for New Parents POSTMARK DEADLINE is   WEDNESDAY, APRIL 20th

2011 Pen Parentis Writing Fellowship for New Parents   In addition to a full year of promotion, a $1000 prize will be presented to the Pen Parentis Writing Fellow at a public reading of the winning work in Manhattan on Tuesday, September 13, 2011. Entrants must be the parent of at least one child under 10 years of age, but there are no style or genre limitations on the works of fiction submitted for consideration. Entrants can be at any level of their literary careers. The contest will seek submissions starting March 1 and end the submission period April 20 (postmark deadline).   Guidelines: Submissions are by postal mail only and call for a new, never-published fiction story-any genre, on any subject-of up to 1350 words (typed double-spaced on 8 ½ x 11 paper in Times New Roman 12 point or similar font, with one inch margins). Do not put author's name on this manuscript. Do put the title of the story and the word count. Please retype the title of the story and word count on a removable cover page along with author's name, full contact information, and age of author's child(ren). Financial status, prior publication, and hardship stories do not aid your application. Judging is blind. The contest will seek submissions starting March 1 and end the submission period April 20 (postmark deadline). Judging is blind and based only on the following criteria: adherence to contest rules creativity narrative arc emotional truth elements of surprise, humor, writing skill, and/or layers of depth. All genres and styles of fiction are welcome. Novel excerpts are acceptable if they can stand alone as a story. Simultaneous submissions ok, but notify if published elsewhere. Multiple submissions ok, but separate entry fee for each submission. Entry fees will not be refunded. Entry is $20. Pen Parentis members may enter at a discounted rate. If you are a Pen Parentis Author in good standing be sure you are logged in to view a special offer. Good luck and happy writing! Mail entries to: Pen Parentis Writing Fellowship for New Parents, 176 Broadway, Ste. 14F, New York, NY, 10038. You may include a stamped, self-addressed postcard if you wish receipt to be acknowledged. No SASE required as manuscripts will not be returned. Winner will be announced on the Pen Parentis website and by email or phone to the winning author on or before August 1, 2011. Please make sure that author contact information includes either email or phone. Prize: One winning author will be showcased for one year on our website as the "Pen Parentis Writing Fellow," a new emergent author worthy of notice. The Fellow will receive a public showcase of the winning new work in a stunning literary location in New York City, paired with an established author who may function as inspiration and guide (2010's winner, Abby Sher, read with Jennifer Egan and Darin Strauss). Winner also receives $1000, presented at the Pen Parentis Literary Salon on September 13th, 2011, in conjunction with the reading of the winning work. Pen Parentis will publicize this reading for the author and will provide author with any press clips that mention author's name. Pen Parentis encourages, but does not require, attendance to subsequent readings at the Libertine Library in order to 1) be introduced to other authors and 2) network with prospective editors, agents, and readers. Finally, Pen Parentis will feature the winner on our website for one year, updating his/her accomplishments to the community, and will link to their author website, if any, and will promote the author when he/she attends regular Pen Parentis author salon events. Important note: Entrants must be the parent of at least one child under 10 yrs old. While we accept submissions from anywhere, applicants are advised that there is no travel budget. Winners are responsible for their own transportation costs to the reading location in Manhattan. Sponsors: The Pen Parentis Fellowship is generously supported by a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation in California and individual donors. Corporate support is provided by the Thompson Hotel chain, General Growth Properties (The Seaport), Fractured Atlas, and The Libertine at Gild Hall.



Writers Read. Ethan J. Hon on "Animalinside"

This week Ethan J. Hon writes about this recently translated Hungarian work. Ethan is a frequent 2nd Draft contributor, and most recently read last fall in the 7 Deadly Sins reading on Wrath.

Animalinside – László Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann. Translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet. Sylph Editions & New Directions 2010

Often referenced alongside Proust, Bernhard, and Beckett as a master of the long sentence, Krasznahorkai’s prose is invigorated with a deep sense of compassion and tenderness, even in the grayness after the fall of the Eastern Bloc or with Animalinside, the apocalypse.  Here’s the perverse rub about the apocalypse: it requires a witness, there can be no end time in solitude. Extinction, well, that needs no witnesses. Ottilie Muzet writes, “balanced on an absolute messianic hope and an equally absolute despair,” and later, “Repetition is intrinsic to the idea of apocalypse in itself. There is the repetition of endlessly produced scenarios of cosmic terror, each one gaining authority from the previous [one].” The impetus was Krasznahorkai’s requirement that, “Repeat everything exactly as it is in the original regardless of what the English language wants.” 

Like his previous efforts, Animalinside bursts beyond the knotted, twisting syntax into pure cogency and beauty. The text is comprised of fourteen paragraphs and fourteen images. The images and the paragraphs exist in a symbiotic balance, each one generating the next. The sequence can be viewed as a Markov chain where each image/text relies solely on the preceding term, but rising from our destruction, giving a primal cry in the soundless void, real or imagined, is the connective tissue of humanity. As it smothers us. As it reaches our throat.       

Ethan J. Hon is from Omaha, Nebraska. His poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, Cimarron Review, Cannibal, Nebraska Review, and Assembly Magazine. Along with Emily Wolahan, he is the founding editor of JERRY: A Magazine. He divides his time.

2nd Draft Reading Series Presents...Love Bites: Break-Up Stories

Prepare for a new mating season with a look at relationships past with Jim Hanas, Kera Yonker, Christie Grotheim, and Olivia Dunn!

Tuesday, April 26, 7:30 pm. Roots & Vines Cafe, 409 Grand St (@ Clinton), Manhattan. J, M, Z, F to Delancey & Essex; B, D to Grand

Jim Hanas is the author of the collection Why They Cried, a Joyland eBook from ECW Press that includes stories that previously appeared in McSweeney's, Fence, One Story, and elsewhere. His nonfiction and humor pieces have appeared in Slate, Radar, Print, the New York Daily News, and the New York Post. He lives in Brooklyn, and online at jimhanas.com

Kera Yonker's work has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency and other publications. She is the founder and host of the 2nd Draft Reading Series as well as the fiction editor for Jerry Magazine. She recounts the trials of unemployment on her blog, Will Work for Food, and is currently at work on a book of essays about a break-up. Her ex-boyfriend is thrilled.

Olivia Dunn is a graduate of Albany High School and Boston University, where she studied self-defense and film, respectively. She has been living in Brooklyn for the last five years where she has been taking class at NYU, The New School, and The Sackett Street Writer’s workshop.  She works as a waitress in Prospect Heights and keeps a fervently updated blog, available for public consumption at okdunn.tumblr.com. She will be attending the Nonfiction Writing Progam at the University of Iowa in the fall.

Christie Grotheim is currently in the process of writing and publishing a series of humorous autobiographical essays. Most recently, her essays have been featured in online literary magazines including MrBellersNeighborhood.com, Ducts.org and at SmithMag.net. With a background of over fifteen years of creating award-winning graphic design and copywriting, she moved from Texas to Manhattan in the year 2000, where she runs her own graphic design studio in the West Village. Unafraid of exposing herself and her friends, and always on the lookout for new material, it is advised to be mindful of what you do and say in her presence.

Writers Read. Dan Bevacqua on Charles D’Ambrosio’s "Orphans".

 If you missed Dan read last night at 2nd Draft, you're in luck! This week Dan is our guest blogger for Writers Read.

On Orphans

I’m guilty of wanting to have an “experience” with Charles D’Ambrosio’s Orphans.  That must read as lewd or, even, taken out of literary context, perverse.  But what I mean to say is that for several years—years—I walked into every single independent bookstore that I happened upon and, after mumbling to myself in their Orphans-less aisles, asked the cute shop girl reading Ada or Ardor at the sales desk if they stocked a certain book of essays: one Orphans by one Charles D’Ambrosio.  These girls (and they were lovely) always said no.  They would be glad to order it for me, they said.  Years and years of “Thanks, but no thanks” pushed out from between my lips.  I wanted for my hand to reach up one fine day and pluck it from the shelf.   All those Sarahs.  All those poor Emilys.  They’d hoped to make me happy.  But I wanted some f—in’ magic.

    Bookstores in Iowa, in San Francisco, in Arizona, in New York City; Amherst Books and Prairie Lights and City Lights and Moe’s; black market booksellers in upper Manhattan; half-soaked cardboard boxes labeled “Free Take Me” in Prospect Heights and the black hills of South Dakota; nobody had my book.  Not that it’s my book in the same way that it’s Mr. D’Ambrosio’s book.  Yet the attraction between that book and myself was undeniably like the bonds of ownership or love, which are two separate concepts that should never, under any circumstances, be lumped together in the way that I’ve done here.  I felt like the book desired me too, is what I’m saying.  But that’s ridiculous.  I only thought that because of how distant and difficult it insisted on being with me.

    Why it’s challenging to find, or so I hear rumored, is it’s own story.  It might involve legal trouble.  Clear Cut, the small press that gave birth to it, does a small distribution.  I think one of its founding editors died from an overdose.  In other words, Orphans’ parents had problems.  Arguably, they shouldn’t have published it at all.  But if another house had published it then maybe it wouldn’t be such a cute little package (the book fits comfortably in any back pocket).  Another editor might have dulled its many surprises, its joyful as well as depressing revelations, cut out its moments of unconventional genius and beauty.  As the book exists, I challenge any person to define her.  Me, you, them, everybody, we’d be wrong.

    Alone one night in my apartment, after three years spent searching the country for Orphans, tracking down leads in the Lower East Side and Sacramento, aggravating close friends with my obsession, unable to find it in the manner in which I’d hoped to find it, I broke down and bought the book off Amazon.

     I was in no way disappointed.   I got what I was looking for.  But I’m glad that it’s over.

 

Dan Bevacqua's work has appeared in Gigantic, 580 Split, and JERRY Magazine, among others. He has an MFA from Columbia University and lives in Northampton, MA.

   

Writers Read. Roy L. Post on Joan Didion

Welcome to the first Writers Read guest blog post! This week, Roy L. Post discusses Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. At the October 2nd Draft reading, Roy read an excerpt from his memoir, Larry's Inferno, about his father's final days.

Joan  Didion: The Year of Magical Thinking

Magical thinking.  It’s something of an obsession with me.  I see it everywhere.  Because the human brain… it’s just not that good...   We “can’t handle the truth.”  Just us, alone on a rock in cold space, nobody out there, at least nobody we can find to talk to.  So we each have a magical thinking engine in our ultra-complicated brains that makes things up to fill the scary darkness.  Goblins, demons, ghosts.  Gods.  In mourning her husband, zen-like Didion watches her own magical thoughts arise from that engine. Unbidden, uncontrolled.  She speaks of them.  Embraces them as a way to pass thru to the other side of mourning.  Writing after the death of her husband, she asks “How could he come back if he has no organs?  How can he come back if he has no shoes?”  Absurd questions.  Completely real questions.  “How can he come back…”  Doubling down on magical thinking.  Not just the magic “coming back,” but embedded therein is the very notion that there is a place to come back from.  Magical thinking is deeply embedded in who we are.  The human brain… it’s just not that good… but this book most certainly is.

 

Roy L. Post lives in Long Island when he isn’t busy stalking the edge of the known worlds.  A founding member of Circles in the Hair writers’ workshop, Roy’s published credits include the short stories:  “Incident At Mile 51” (1998, Going Postal anthology),  “Arctic Edge” (2005, Circles In The Hair anthology), “The Last Birthday,” (2008, Space and Time # 103).

Writers Read.

One of my favorite parts of 2nd Draft are the moments that follow the readings. More wine is ordered,  hungry audience members eat that delicious Vietnamese sandwich they were too polite to consume during the reading, and the readers become engulfed in congratulations. It's during these moments when the readers are often asked by the audience what inspires them, or what are they reading now, or what influenced the piece they wrote?

Why not have those conversations continue after the night ends?

Next week 2nd Draft will feature blog posts by readers in the series from past and present wherein they'll discuss a particular book or author by whom they're influenced, inspired, or simply moved.

Stay tuned...