Event: Flash Fiction Forum

Been enjoying The Loyalty of Water? Local to the Bay Area? Not local, but planning on being here on March 12th? Come out and see some of us!

Lita Kurth, she of the yin-yang tattoo, is a cofounder of a vibrant local reading series in San Jose, the Flash Fiction Forum. This time around, you'll be able to meet her in person and listen to both me and Allison Landa read from our writing.

Here's the official information:

WHAT: Flash Fiction Forum! (a bimonthly curated reading series)

WHERE: The WORKS/SJ Gallery, 365 S. Market St. in downtown San Jose (in the same building as the Convention Center parking lot). Parking is about $3/hour.

WHEN: This time, March 12th. Generally, the second Wednesday of the month from 7 to about 8:30 PM. 

HOW MUCH: Although the event is free, beer and wine are available for sale to help WORKS with expenses and they also ask a donation of $2 for those who are able.

WHO: As of today, 3/4, it'll be these beautiful people:

1.     Jan Berkeley “Double Fantasy”

2.     Donelle McGee, “Homecoming”

3.     Jessica Barksdale Inclan, “He Grabbed Me” published in KneeJerk magazine, Oct., 2013

4.     Celia Stahr, “Detroit: Independence Day, 1932” is drawn from a larger work in progress, Frida Kahlo in America: A Mexican Artist’s Cross-Cultural Journey Into the Unknown

5.     Emily Breunig, “For the Children,” an excerpt from her novel, A Ghost at the Edge of the Sea

 6.     Victoria M. Johnson, “Thirteen Things to Do on Friday the 13^th” 

INTERMISSION

7.     Marilyn Fahey, “Last Letter”

8.     Allison Landa “Creation”

9.     Leslie  Hoffman, “Cecile Street”

10.  Renee Schell “Suburban Fantasy”

All are welcome! Hope to see you there.

AWP Spouses

Cathy Day has a great piece up about her AWP spouse, her husband Eric Kroczek. As the proud partner of another one of those registered as "Spouse," I can relate. Especially to this line:

He is the kind of spouse I am too proud to be. My biggest fear growing up was that I’d end up being nothing but Mrs. So and So. 

None of us writes in a vacuum; we're enabled, for better or worse, by those intimate to our lives. I'm lucky enough to have a husband who made me a goodie bag, braved the conference hall full of experimental poets, sat through several evening events, and cheered me on every time I came back with even the tiniest victory. And then he did all of the driving on Saturday after I finally hit my wall.

For me, a big part of growing up in this time and place has been learning that letting other people do things for me doesn't mean I can't do them myself, that accepting help isn't admitting weakness, and that, even if it were, being weak sometimes isn't actually anything to lose sleep over.

All this to say that I've spent a lot of time talking about women writers lately and how that particular community supports me, but it's critical to also mention just how possible my non-woman, non-writer husband makes my work.

The Loyalty of Water: Posts Resume Thursday, 3/6

I was all set to write my own post this evening, but I just got back from AWP, and my brain is shot. We'll have a new writer up on Thursday as per usual; in the meantime, hope everyone's returned if you went and rested either way.

(Nobody's ever going to believe that we drove up to Seattle to get out of the California rain. But it's completely true. Happy to report that the hills are, once again, returning to their riotous neon green.)

The Loyalty of Water: Why Write?

Guest post by Melissa R. Sipin

Why do you write? What are your goals as a writer?

These questions haunt me. Whether it’s late at night after hours of writing or in a seminar with Juliana Spahr, who forces us to read articles on the gatekeepers of literature, the MFA Machine, AWP and its capitalistic complications (like its rejection of the proposed panel, “Principled Protest in Academia: the Story of the University of Houston Sit-in,” and its acceptance of another that encouraged a third [and probably expensive] degree), or Kathi Week’s book, The Problem of Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Juliana asks us to create graphs, maps, and trees of prizewinners in recent Poets & Writers (How many men have won awards? Women? Let’s re-look at the VIDA Count), asks us to interrogate the data of who gets into this or that journal, and asks us to examine the trends of who gets published in this or that prize-winning collection (like Cliff Garstang’s Journal Ranking based upon the Pushcart anthology). She asks us: what do you do with this data?

Faced with all of this: why do you write?

It’s a difficult question for me to answer, if only because the reason why I write is an emotive, intellectual choice, almost like falling in love.

Click to read more ...

If You're New Around Here

Thanks for checking it out!

There's a lot going on in this space these days. The Loyalty of Water, a series on women and writing, written by women who are writers, is in full swing. Posts by Mary Volmer, Allison Landa, Kristina Weaver, and Lita Kurth are up, and new posts by guest contributors arrive Mondays and Thursdays. In between, you can find curated snippets that run along some of the same themes.

Stick around long enough and you'll run into my own writing here as well. Sometimes it even reaches beyond writing on writing and gets into literature, life, community, and random things I stumble upon, including but not limited to the current transformations taking place in the Bay Area, my pet high horses, the problem with H.P. Lovecraft, odd places discovered while on cross country skis in the middle of Swedish winter, and that Swedish winter itself. I am also fond of the Westminster Dog Show, when I remember to watch it.

I also, on occasion, post my fiction writing--or previews of it, at the very least. My first novel is currently on submission, and inquiries are always welcome.

Interested in contributing? Curious to find out what happens when an American moves to Shanghai and encouters a ghost? Wondering just whom I'm going to kill off? There's really only one way to find out...

Connect with me here, on twitter, or via email, at emilybreunig <at> me <dot> com. And keep checking back--we're only getting started.