Be back soon

i've been going through a certification program called CELTA to teach English as a second language, and man is it intense.

Writing and Hee-Haw: Would the Round Table Have Been as Round if There had Been Gchat?

It's hard to be witty while typing on Google's Gchat. It's like rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time. At least for me.

Anyway, for InDigest magazine, I blathered on about literary things and the need for masterbatoriums with fellow writer Sam Osterhout.

To read, go HERE.

What I’ve Been Reading On the Web
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* Ferris Bueller's House is For Sale
* The New York Times Photo Blog
* Puck Magazine, digitized by Google Books

I'm doing a reading May 27th for Guerrilla Lit

I'll be reading a new short story for the Guerrilla Lit Reading series, Wednesday, May 27, 7:30 pm at Bar on A (170 Ave. A).

The readers:

Lee Goldberg teaches Literature and Composition at LaGuardia Community College. He has an MFA from New School University and is a founding member of The Guerrilla Lit Reading Series. He is currently working on a novel and a collection of short stories and has just finished his first screenplay.

Meakin Armstrong is fiction editor at Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics (guernicamag.com). For 2007, he received a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference work-study “waitership.” Meakin is also contributor to the book, New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg (Dist U of Chicago Press). Most recently, his work appeared in Our Stories Literary Journal, InDigest, Sweeeeet, and Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. His work is forthcoming in NOÕ Journal and an upcoming book on movies. For eight years, he worked at The New Yorker.

Originally from Los Angeles, Deenah Vollmer is a non-fiction candidate in Columbia’s MFA program. She lives in Brooklyn.

For Guerrilla Lit updates, go to www.guerrillalit.wordpress.com

Another Award: Guernica Fiction Writer Shortlisted for "Africa's Booker"

To tell the truth, I'm getting a bit tired of writing about Guernica on this site, but this is a good one: EC Osondu of Nigeria has had his Guernica story "Waiting" shortlisted for the Caine Prize. The Caine Prize for African Writing is nicknamed the "African Booker," and Africa's most respected writing award.

Picked this story out of the slush. Good things can come from there. I loved the piece from its first few words.

New Fiction on Guernica, from Jennifer Pieroni.

Jennifer Pieroni's three short-short stories are up on Guernica's fiction site. what the three have in common: the beach injuries of some sort of another. Take a look.

The kids were like Lord of the Flies when they got together. My daughter was screaming, saying Eddie’s son stole her magic.

Jennifer Pieroni is editor-in-chief of the literary journal, Quick Fiction. Her work has appeared in Hobart, elimae, Word Riot, and Wigleaf, among others. Work is forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Bateau, PANK, and Corduroy Mtn.

What I’ve Been Reading On the Web
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* London Review of Books now has a blog
* Burma VJ: Reports from the inside, and it took more courage that you yourself probably have (yes, you).
* Triptrop NY: An improvement on HopStop

Guernica Fiction Featured in Dzanc Books Best of the Web 2009

Matthew Derby's January in December, featured in Guernica in (not to get confusing about all of these dates) last October, has been awarded with a Best of the Web designation for fiction. To purchase the anthology (which also features two-time Guernica writer, Glen Pourciau ("Food" and "Cake"), and Guernica colossus (she's been in our pages as a guest fiction editor, short story writer, and poet), Terese Svoboda) go to the Dzanc Books site, HERE.

What I’ve Been Reading On the Web
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• The Roving Editor Profiles Guernica fiction writer, Patricia Engel
  
• Second World War-Era Kodachrome pictures
• The Free Music Archive (Go to Historic Music for the Edison Rolls)
  
• Media Jobs Daily, One of My Favorite Blogs

Guernica/PEN's Ken Saro-Wiwa Event Covered in the New York Times

It's a long sad story. The event was tear-jerking and deeply sad. I came to admire Ken Saro-Wiwa's son, who seems to be fighting for the same causes.

The event was sponsored by PEN for its World Voices festival and Guernica.

Mr. Saro-Wiwa, a popular author who helped create a peaceful mass movement on behalf of the Ogoni people, was executed in November 1995 along with eight other environmental and human rights activists on what many contended were trumped-up murder charges. His body was burned with acid and thrown in an unmarked grave.

PEN, an international association of writers dedicated to defending free expression, along with Guernica, the online literary magazine, sponsored the panel with Mr. Patterson, Mr. Ndibe and Ken Wiwa, Mr. Saro-Wiwa’s son, to discuss Mr. Saro-Wiwa’s literary and political legacy.

Read the entire Times article HERE

New Fiction on Guernica: Jay Johnson

Jay Johnson's Anaphylaxis is now up on Guernica's fiction site. Anaphylactic shock: that can come from a single bee sting. Alone and thirty-six miles out of Soweto, it can lead to death.

I washed down the thick, sweet smelling medicine with water, hoping her cramping intestines would absorb it into her bloodstream fast enough to keep her alive until Soweto.

Jay Johnson is the Editor-in-Chief of Cream City Review and a doctoral candidate in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

What I’ve Been Reading On the Web

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• The Lost Times Square Movie Theatres (some 200 pictures)
• May the Fourth Be With You: Happy Star Wars Day
  
• Republicans Aren't Smarter than 4th Graders
• The American Christian Military
  

Guernica Sponsors PEN World Voices Event this May 2nd

May 2, 2009 | Standing Before History: Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa

Introduction by Larry Siems, with Ken Wiwa, Richard North Patterson, with a reading by Steve Connell and Sekou; moderated by Guernica writer, Okey Ndibe who also write this for us.

On November 10, 1995, Nigeria’s military dictatorship hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa, one of the country’s most acclaimed and popular writers and the leader of a grassroots environmental movement in the oil-rich but impoverished Niger Delta. The region still seethes with unrest and many of the issues Saro-Wiwa gave his life to raise will be the subject of a lawsuit opening in New York this week against oil interests for complicity in his murder. Join Ken Wiwa Jr. and author Richard North Patterson for a discussion of Ken Saro-Wiwa's literary and political legacy, with readings from Saro-Wiwa’s work by Steve Connell and Sekou.

When: Saturday, May 2, 2009: 1–2:30 p.m.
Where: Elebash Recital Hall, CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue [directions]

Free and open to the public
Cosponsored by Guernica magazine and the Martin E. Segal Theatre, The Graduate Center, CUNY

What I’ve Been Reading On the Web
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• My Hometown of Charleston, S.C. Finally has an Atheist Group
• The Last Ziegfeld Girl, Aged 105, is Still Dancing
• Gay Talese is Going to Write About his Marriage
• Interactive Map on the Death and Dying of America's Newspapers
• New film, Garbage Dreams, about Egypt's Zaballeen
• Guernica on the Zaballeen
  

New fiction on Guernica, from Patricia Engel

Patricia Engel's "Dia" explores the tension that can exist between "just friends" of the opposite sex.

I find him sitting on a plastic lounge chair by the hotel pool. I give a little wave and he stands. We kiss on the cheek. He tells me I’m taller than he remembers.

“Sit down, sit down,” he offers just as thunder rolls in, so we find a spot on an iron bench under a flaking white gazebo.

“It’s been a long time,” he says.

Engel’s stories appear in Boston Review, Slice Magazine, Harpur Palate, Nimrod, Driftwood, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Florida Artist Fellowship in Literature, a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarship, and the Boston Review Fiction Prize. (I should say that Patricia and I were Bread Loaf waiters at different times; I don't know her at all.)

What I’ve Been Reading On the Web
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• 1,500 Farmers Commit Suicide in India
• Jennifer DeMerritt's Blog, Old Age and Treachery
• Almost Half of Young America Wants to Move to New York City
• "Cheesecake Dances" on YouTube
  

ASSME

I've been participating in a community blog, for the group, ASSME (American Society of Shit-Canned Media Elites). They're at assme.org

It's a long piece I wrote that I could have just summed up with this song.

(Song makes me think of this Chesterton line, "“Children are innocent and love justice, while most adults are wicked and prefer mercy.” I'm wicked enough to prefer mercy.)

New Fiction on Guernica

"The Question," by Justo Arroyo translated from Spanish by Seymour Menton

"Such fiery pupils—your immediate reaction is to avoid them. But the old man knows it, and he keeps looking at you until you have no other choice but to return his look, even when the fire in his eyes forces you to recognize his existence, which is exactly what it’s all about."

Panamanian Justo Arroyo has published ten novels and six volumes of short stories. “The Question” is the lead story in Héroes a medio tiempo (‘Part-time Heroes’), which was awarded the 1998 Rogelio Sinán Central American Prize for Literature. He has been his country’s ambassador to Colombia, and has represented Panama in conferences in Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

Seymour Menton is an internationally known historian and critic of Latin American fiction. He has published seventeen books, the most famous of which is El cuento hispanoamericano. He has translated several stories and three novels by Cepeda Samudio, Monteforte Toledo, and Severo Sarduy. He has been teaching at the University of California, Irvine since 1965.