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.

Breiner Begins Blogging

The chronically employed Sandy Breiner, Vermont College of Fine Arts alumna, memoirist, and (most important) upstreet author, has entered the blogosphere with The Serial Worker. Sandy is the author of the upstreet number one creative nonfiction piece “Fast Food Family,” an excerpt from her memoir, Tales of a Serial Worker: 63 Jobs and Counting. Those 63 jobs of a mere three years ago have now grown to 69, and the purpose of Sandy’s blog is to celebrate what has become a career in itself: continual vocational rebirth. In addition to listing Sandy’s 69 jobs (from Corn Detasseler to Assistant Historical Romance Editor) and posting narratives about them from time to time, The Serial Worker invites readers to enumerate their own serial careers, describe their worst job ever, and even asks whether they have ever worked with her—an obvious attempt to rival Facebook in the networking field. We congratulate Sandy on her energy, and wish her success with the blogification of her memoir (Job #70?).

Come join us in LowellColumbus Day weekend

The first Massachusetts Poetry Festival, which is being promoted by its organizers as “An Epic Celebration,” will take place in Lowell on October 10-12, 2008. This new event will include workshops, readings, discussions, films, “Downtown Kerouac Places”—a guided tour of the locations that were important in the life of Lowell’s best known literary resident—and a Small Press Fair on Saturday, October 11, in which upstreet will be an exhibitor.

The Massachusetts festival is being compared with the biennial four-day Dodge Poetry Festival, “the largest poetry event in North America,” the most recent of which concluded on September 28, 2008, in Stanhope, NJ. It will have a long way to go to achieve that magnitude, but the possibility is there. Most of the events will be free, but tickets will be required for the featured readings, on Friday evening and Saturday afternoon and evening. Festival sponsors include the Massachusetts Poetry Outreach Project, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, and many Merrimack Valley and Lowell business, educational, and cultural organizations.

The Merrimack Valley was chosen because of its rich literary history, which in addition to Jack Kerouac includes Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry David Thoreau. Some have observed that Berkshire County’s literary heritage makes it an excellent location for a future Massachusetts festival—and not just for poets!

Come visit upstreet in Lowell. Maybe some year soon we’ll be greeting you in Pittsfield.

Hostovsky poem chosen for Pushcart anthology

A poem by Paul Hostovsky, author of the upstreet number four poem “A Woman Taking off Her Shirt,” has been selected for Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the Small Presses (Pushcart Press, 2009). The poem chosen for the anthology is “Dream,” which appeared in Volume 28 of Blueline, a literary journal published by the State University of New York at Potsdam. This was the ninth of his poems to be nominated for a Pushcart Prize (including the one that appeared in upstreet number four), but the first to be chosen as a winner.

Paul Hostovsky’s poems have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, and have been published in Carolina Quarterly, Shenandoah, New Delta Review, Atlanta Review, Poetry East, and many other journals and anthologies. He won the Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Award for 2001 and the White Pelican Review’s Hollingsworth Prize in 2005. He has two chapbooks, Bird in the Hand (2006), which won the Grayson Books Poetry Chapbook Competition, and Dusk Outside the Braille Press (2006), winner of the Riverstone Poetry Chapbook Award. He makes his living in Boston as an interpreter at the Massachusetts Commission for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, where he specializes in working with the deaf-blind. Both of his chapbooks are available for the blind through Bookshare.org.

Paul’s first full-length collection, Bending the Notes, is due out in January 2009 from Main Street Rag. About the collection, Jeffrey Harrison (also an upstreet poet) says: “This book kicks ass. … Equally adept with fixed or not-so-fixed forms as with free-wheeling free verse, Hostovsky shows us, over and over, in language that is always alive, what it is like to be alive.” You may visit Paul at his website.