Robin Oliveira lectures at Pacific residency

upstreet Fiction Editor Robin Oliveira delivered a lecture on “Demystifying the Editorial Process” during the Pacific University MFA in Writing Program Winter Residency at Seaside, Oregon, on Saturday 17 January. Robin’s lecture began with an overview of upstreet’s history, policy and practices, including submission guidelines and the qualifications of the editorial staff. She described the submission-evaluation process, giving a brief statement about what each of the genre editors is looking for.

Regarding fiction, Robin emphasized her belief that character is desire. “If your characters don’t want something,” she said, “there is nothing for the reader to hold on to, and ultimately, no reason for the story. The conflict has to be up front, beginning with line one. A character wants something, and is up against some person, thing, or other obstacle that prevents him from obtaining it.” She went on to discuss various story elements such as scene, dialogue, subtext, time, and drama at the sentence level, citing Douglas Glover’s essay, “The Drama of Grammar,” in the Canadian journal The New Quarterly (No. 105, 2006).

Robin concluded by saying that she thought the biggest challenge for writing students is story structure. “When I’m reading a shortlisted story,” she said, “I discover that it is almost always the ending that fails. When you are editing your stories, check the through line. Boil down your story to its complication, action and resolution to see if it has the architecture to carry it through to a successful end. A successful story is a story in which a character comes to grips with his or her desire through a series of actions in which emotional change takes place that is of significance to the character, and therefore to the reader.” She went on to discuss three stories—Charles D’Ambrosio’s “The Point,” Tim O'Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” and Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral”—reducing the stories to their architecture to illustrate successful resolutions.

Pacific University’s Master of Fine Arts in Writing is a low-residency program in which each student creates a portfolio of fiction, nonfiction or poetry under the supervision of writer advisors. The Atlantic Monthly’s 2007/08 Fiction Issue rated the Pacific program as one of the nation’s top five low-residency MFA in Writing programs, along with the programs of Antioch University, Bennington College, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and Warren Wilson College.

Robin Oliveira, who lives in Seattle, holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her novel-in-progress, The Last Beautiful Day, was awarded the 2007 James Jones First Novel Fellowship. An excerpt from the novel appears in the 2008 issue of Provincetown Arts Magazine. The upcoming upstreet number five is the third issue for which Robin has served as Fiction Editor.

Boisseau poetry collection available for pre-ordering

A Sunday in God-Years (Arkansas, 2009), a poetry collection by Michelle Boisseau which will be released February 1, is now available for pre-ordering through Barnes & Noble, Borders, Target, and Amazon.com, and also by local independent booksellers and directly from the publisher. A poem from the book, “Recriminating Rags of Sunlight,” appears in upstreet number four (p. 75).

A winner of the 2009 University of Arkansas Press Poetry Series, A Sunday in God-Years takes its title from the notion that if we consider ourselves inside the long stretch of geologic time, human history happens in the blink of God’s eye as he rolls over during a Sunday nap. The book is centered on the long poem “A Reckoning,” made up of fifteen shorter sections (some of them documents like wills and runaway slave notices). This long poem tries to reckon and recognize the sticky webs that bind the heirs of those who were slave holders (like the Boisseaus) and of those who were held as slaves.

“In every line on every page of this beautiful and ambitious book, the present comprehends the past ‘the way the sidewalk burns hours after / the sun’s gone down.’ Unsentimental, stunningly alive in sound as well as sense, compassionate, unflinchingly honest, A Sunday in God-Years is a flat out wonderful book, one of the best I’ve read in years.”—Alan Shapiro, author of Old War: Poems

“Even a ‘ragged chunk of limestone’ opens up expanses of geological, historical, and familial time in the artful hands of Michelle Boisseau, who revisits her slave-owning ancestry for a reckoning. . . . Her poems are a unique blend of sensuality, rue, fresh insight, engaging candor, anguish, wicked humor, taut lyricism and a pungent dash of caustic.”—Eleanor Wilner, author of The Girl with Bees in Her Hair

“The title of this splendid book reflects the tonal complexity of these richly layered poems. . . . Boisseau sounds like nobody else and her vision demands our attention.”—Mark Jarman, author of Epistles: Poems

Michelle Boisseau is Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she also serves as associate editor of BkMk Press. She is the author of three books of poetry: No Private Life; Understory, winner of the Samuel French Morse Prize; and Trembling Air, a PEN/USA finalist. She is also co-author (with Randall Mann and Robert Wallace) of the popular book Writing Poems (Longman, 2007), now in its seventh edition.

Greenbaum poem on Poetry Daily

“Little White Truck,” a poem by upstreet Poetry Editor Jessica Greenbaum, will appear on Poetry Daily for Monday 12 January 2009. The poem, which was originally published in the Winter 2008/2009 issue of Salamander, appears below:

Little White Truck

Because the white truck traveling the span of the Williamsburg Bridge
could be the white fastener traveling the top of a zip-lock bag,
the East River and tugs might be contained without spilling
in today’s October light, along with this new spray of trees and
picnic tables which appeared when the industrial tide of Williamsburg
went out. If these could be contained, then likewise the two cyclists,
now dismounted and steadying their bikes as they kiss, and surely
it could hold the music they heard last night eddying again
around their thoughts, and the memory of their first idea of the future
loosed when he held her in a doorway lit by cobwebs of spring rain.

©2008 Jessica Greenbaum

Kauffmann essay in Writer’s Chronicle

“Understated Prose: The Beauty of Conveying More with Less,” a writing craft essay by upstreet author Jay Kauffmann, appears in the December issue of The Writer’s Chronicle. The essay, a re-appreciation of literary minimalism, uses examples from Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Marguerite Duras, Kathryn Harrison and others to illustrate the techniques that characterize minimalist fiction. These techniques include the use of ordinary words, simple sentence patterns, a flat, clipped delivery, attention to surface detail, the absence of emotion, a narrow focus on sensation, and an overall tendency toward omission, compression, and economy of language.

Jay, a former international model and current writing teacher, holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He was a finalist for the Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize and a nominee for Best New American Voices 2009. He currently lives in Paris with his wife and their two children, and will be the 2009 Writer-in-Residence at Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA. Jay’s short story, “In a German Garden,” will appear in the upcoming upstreet number five. We congratulate him on a fine piece of work and hope Fan Club members will take the time to enjoy this issue of the Chronicle.

Dispatches by Robin Hemley—from Manila to McSweeney’s

Robin Hemley, Director of the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and soon to be an upstreet author, is spending the year on a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Philippines with his family. During this time, he’ll be writing regular dispatches from Manila, which will appear as a column in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Robin’s wife, Margie, is from the Philippines, and he has spent considerable time there since 1998, when he was researching Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday (Nebraska, 2003).

Robin, who is also a faculty member in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program, will be the subject of the author interview in upstreet number five. His latest book, Do-Over!, will be released by Little, Brown in the spring of 2009.

Lamb novel to be released November 11

The Hour I First Believed (Harper, 2008), the third novel by best-selling author Wally Lamb, will appear in bookstores November 11, and is currently available for pre-ordering. Wally, whose earlier novels, She’s Come Undone and I Know This Much is True, were both Oprah’s Book Club selections, was interviewed by Editor/ Publisher Vivian Dorsel for upstreet number three. Here’s what he said about how the idea for his new book came to him:

Lamb: …The Hour I First Believed, the novel I’m writing now, started not with a voice or an image, but with an anecdote that a cousin of mine told me. She and her family live in Paducah, Kentucky, the site of one of the school shootings; I think it was about a year and a half before Columbine. Her two younger daughters went to that school, and were friends with the sister of the kid who did the shooting and killing. His name was Michael Carneal, and my cousin’s daughters knew his older sister. So, my cousin was telling me this story about that day—the confusion, and the horror of what had just happened. I believe Michael had been apprehended and taken away, and the school was in chaos, and his older sister was walking in a daze down the corridor, just sobbing and saying, “But in four years here I’ve never even been absent, I’ve never been in trouble.” She was just moaning, at least in the version that I heard. And that was a couple, three, four years before I sat down to write this novel. Every time I remembered the story my cousin told me, tears would come to my eyes, and sometimes tears would fall, and my heart went out to that poor girl and everybody in the school, including this very disturbed kid who had brought the gun to school. I didn’t want to write about a school shooting, but it wouldn’t let go of me, so I started researching Columbine, just because there’s so much out there about Columbine, and lo and behold, that’s where the novel begins, in Littleton, Colorado, at Columbine High School. —“A Conversation with Wally Lamb,” upstreet number three, ©Copyright 2007 Vivian Dorsel

You can read Chapter One of The Hour I First Believed on Amazon.com. Here’s how it begins:

They were both working their final shift at Blackjack Pizza that night, although nobody but the two of them realized it was that. Give them this much: they were talented secret-keepers. Patient planners. They’d been planning it for a year, hiding their intentions in plain sight on paper, on videotape, over the Internet. In their junior year, one had written in the other’s yearbook, “God, I can’t wait till they die. I can taste the blood now.” And the other had answered, “Killing enemies, blowing up stuff, killing cops! My wrath will be godlike!”

My wrath will be godlike: maybe that’s a clue. Maybe their ability to dupe everyone was their justification. If we could be fooled, then we were all fools; they were, therefore, superior, chaos theirs to inflict. But I don’t know. I’m just one more chaos theorist, as lost in the maze as everyone else.

It was Friday, April 16, 1999, four days before they opened fire. I’d stayed after school for a parent conference and a union meeting and, in between, had called Maureen to tell her I’d pick up takeout. Blackjack Pizza was between school and home. —The Hour I First Believed, ©Copyright 2008 Wally Lamb

Thanks to Chapters Bookstore—and to photographer Craig Swinson

We’d like to thank Chapters Bookstore, 78 North Street, Pittsfield, MA, for making its wonderful events room available for two readings by a variety of authors from the first four issues of upstreet. These photographs, taken by Craig Swinson, show the second reading, featuring poets Lisken Van Pelt Dus and Aaron M. Beatty, and hosted by upstreet Editor/Publisher Vivian Dorsel, which took place on Thursday evening, October 30.

The earlier reading, on September 25, featured poets Michelle Gillett and Cynthia Saunders Quiñones, and creative nonfiction writer Frank Tempone. Chapters’ versatile reading/ writing/ events room was also used for two sessions of a fiction writing workshop, “The Reminiscent Narrator,” conducted by Vivian Dorsel in connection with Pittsfield’s community reading project, The Big Read: To Kill a Mockingbird, which took place during October.

Chapters welcomes members of the community who would like to use their room for reading, or for working on their own writing. Once again, we are pleased to have a bookstore in Pittsfield’s central business district—“upstreet,” to us.