Literary Cleveland Inkubator to feature Claudia Rankine, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and New Yorker Writers

From our friends at Literary Cleveland:

 

This summer, Literary Cleveland’s annual Inkubator Writing Conference will take place virtually from July 11-25 with 31 free events totaling 78 hours of literary programming.  

 

The 2021 Inkubator will offer a wide range of interactive classes, craft talks, open mics, and panel discussions. This year’s conference features 11 multi-session workshops including teen and intergenerational classes as well as a printmaking and bookbinding workshop for those interested in making their own physical book.  

 

Nationally-recognized writers who will participate include Viet Thanh Nguyen in conversation with Thrity Umrigar and a panel of New Yorker writers originally from Cleveland: Andy Borowitz, Marry Norris, and Kathryn Schulz. An all-star lineup of local authors will lead panels on writing in prisons, solutions journalism, ethical representation in literature, how storytelling can affect social change, and writing about illness beyond the pandemic. Plus four editors from major New York publishing houses will discuss state of the industry and provide feedback on participant’s first paragraphs.  

 

The two-week event will be capped off by a keynote reading and discussion with renowned author Claudia Rankine. Rankine, presented by Cleveland Public Library. Rankine is a MacArthur fellow and the author of Just Us: An American Conversation (2020) and Citizen: An American Lyric, which won the 2015 National Book Critic’s Circle Award in poetry. 

 

Similar to last year, nearly all of the events will take place digitally this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. However there will be an in-person outdoor pop-up event at the Cleveland Public Library Eastman Garden on Saturday, July 17 featuring a book fair, DJ, food and drink vendors, and a community building workshop with an open mic.  

 

The 2020 Inkubator is supported by Cuyahoga Arts and Culture, the Cleveland Public Library, the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, the Northeast Ohio MFA Program, Mac’s Backs Book, Loganberry Books, Appletree Books, Hathaway Brown and the Press Club of Cleveland.  

 

Literary Cleveland is a nonprofit committed to helping people “explore other voices and discover their own.” The organization is a community of writers committed to bringing people into the world of words by providing educational writing opportunities at all levels, promoting new and existing literature of the highest quality, and advancing Northeast Ohio as a vital center of diverse voices and visions. 

 

To register and for more information, visit our website.

Poetry Shops

The New Yorker has an article "the curious persistence of poetry shops": book stores that specialize in poetry, and how they are surviving, and even in a small way thriving, in an era in which many large bookstores have been failing.

"Retail may not get much more niche than poetry, which historically has never been a lucrative proposition. But it does have cachet in some circles, and a dedicated readership. The best poetry stores mix the scholarly with the whimsical, the linear with the arty. Berl’s is in a former gallery space, subleased from two artists, with exposed brick walls that have been painted white, barrel ceilings, a gray Lego sculpture of Walt Whitman, and an eighteen-chair area for readings. On one wall are seventy black-and-white portraits of anarchists and monarchs by the artist Miranda White, Jared’s sister, with whom he has collaborated on a book."

Book Reader (photo by GL)

They somehow fail to mention Cleveland in the article, but we do have a few bookstores that are very friendly to poetry, particularly notably Guide to Kulchur and Mac's Backs.

So, horray to our very own poetry shops

-- and we've got art, too.

• Guide to Kulchur has a new location

The Persistance of Litmags

A lot of poetry--the published poetry, anyway-- in America is coming out in literary magazines. Some of them have names that are words of power: Kenyon Review. Ploughshares. Paris Review. Threepenny.  But-- does anybody read them? Why do people start litmags, anyway?  And... after the excitement of the first few issues.. why do they keep at it?
And, more important: how is it that they keep surviving in the 21st century?
In the New Yorker, Stephen Burt writes about The Persistence of Litmags... and how they've adapted to the electronic age.

• Bookfox ranks literary magazines
• Top 50 literary magazines
• Top ten literary magazines to send your poetry

Bishop and the New Yorker

The New York Times has a long article about the letters between poet Elizabeth Bishop and the New Yorker.

"A world-class procrastinator and Olympian ditherer, Bishop sometimes didn’t finish a poem for decades."

"At times the politeness of poet and magazine seems that of two countries about to go to war — tactful enough with her editors (though she felt that reading the magazine was like “eating a quilt”), in letters to friends Bishop groused about the revisions proposed. (“They once put 23 commas in a long poem of mine,” she groaned.)"

--and, slyly slid in under the discussions of the editorial processes of the New Yorker, William Logan does get in a swift kick here and there:

"The New Yorker has suffocated at times beneath a mask of wry gentility. For all its glossy reputation, the magazine still turns up its nose at stories and poems that make too many demands on the reader. It’s a middlebrow journal for people who would like to be highbrows — and perhaps for highbrows who love a little slumming. The cartoons, as Biele notes, provide an antiphonal chorus to the reckless consumerism of the ads."

-Ouch! Wonder how many times he's been rejected there?

TEN RULES FOR WRITING FICTION

Ten rules for writing fiction

Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don'ts...

part one
part two


About a year ago, a friend and I noticed a theme running through many New Yorker poems: With astounding frequency, they were about writing poetry. Can New Yorker Poets Write About Anything Besides Poetry?


On the passing of the great Lucille Clifton



the message of crazy horse
Lucille Clifton

i would sit in the center of the world,
the Black Hills hooped around me and
dream of my dancing horse. my wife

was Black Shawl who gave me the daughter
i called They Are Afraid Of Her.
i was afraid of nothing

except Black Buffalo Woman.
my love for her i wore
instead of feathers. i did not dance

i dreamed. i am dreaming now
across the worlds. my medicine is strong.
my medicine is strong in the Black basket
of these fingers. i come again through this

Black Buffalo woman. hear me;
the hoop of the world is breaking.
fire burns in the four directions.
the dreamers are running away from the hills.
i have seen it. i am crazy horse.