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Tag: Kameron Hurley

June, All At Once

2022-06-052022-06-05 John Winkelman

Voices 2022

I almost made it through the week without adding anything to the library, but at the last moment I attended the reading for the 2022 Dyer-Ives Poetry Contest. The winners and runners-up are collected in Voices, the annual magazine of the Dyer-Ives competition.

The event was wonderful! Over a dozen of the contestants read their pieces. They ranged in age from 7 or so to probably the late fifties, though the readers definitely skewed young, with all except maybe two being under thirty. The high school students had some of the most powerful poems, and the adult winner wrote a very pointedly anti-capitalist poem, which warmed the cockles of my aging heart.

I didn’t recognize anyone at the event, other than the coordinator Kelsey May, who I met in my capacity as editor at The 3288 Review, when we published a couple of her poems back in 2019. The readers made me feel, well, old. Then again, I consider this a good thing, because if after three years away I only saw the same people as in the Before Times, and they were all Millennials or Gen-X-ers, then something would be very wrong with the poetry community in Grand Rapids.

Yesterday evening Zyra and I wandered downtown to the Festival of the Arts and attended the Love and Peace Jam at the Calder stage. It was fantastic! Several local and regional poets, including Dyer-Ives Finalist Naiara Tamminga and Lansing poet Laureate Masaki Takahashi read and performed, and for the first time I had the privilege of hearing our own poet laureate Kyd Kane read her work at a live event. The event was coordinated by The Diatribe, with Foster (a.k.a. Autopilot) and Kyd Kane hosting.

In reading news, I am caught up to 2022 in my backlog of issues of Poetry Magazine. It still feels good to read such a variety of poetry in such a volume.

I am almost finished with Kameron Hurley‘s excellent collection Future Artifacts, which arrived recently from Apex Book Company. I really like Hurley’s work. Her writing is lush and gritty and I sometimes detect echoes of writers like Jack Vance and Robert Howard.

So now that I am reading poetry and short fiction, my next reading project is to work through all of my back issues of The Paris Review, which is a quarterly instead of a monthly, so I should be able to put a sizable dent in the backlog by the end of the year. The Paris Review publishes short fiction and nonfiction, poetry and interviews, so this should be an interesting, varied,  and enjoyable project.

In writing news, I am still typing up my poems from April. I would make much faster progress if my handwriting was not so terrible. One more thing to work on, I guess.

Posted in Literary MattersTagged Dyer Ives Poetry Contest, Kameron Hurley, Paris Review, poetry, reading comment on June, All At Once

A Long-ish Weekend

2022-05-292022-05-28 John Winkelman

New books for the week of May 22, 2022

Oh, what a month it has been. The days are longer, the weather is warmer, and we are not far from the halfway point of 2022. Suddenly this long year has become surprisingly short.

Three new books arrived in the past week.

First up is Kameron Hurley‘s new collection of short stories Future Artifacts, recently published by Apex Book Company. I met Kameron at the ConFusion science fiction convention some years ago, and she has graciously signed several of her books. I haven’t read any of her work in a couple of years, so I started reading it on Saturday.

Next on the stack is Issue 22 of the Boston Review Forum, titled Rethinking Law. I had let my membership to the Boston Review lapse, but they had a re-up offer which was too good to pass up. And since it’s only three issues a year, the additional weight in my house should be manageable.

And on the right is Bad Eminence by James Greer, delivered Saturday afternoon from And Other Stories.

In reading news, I am caught up to autumn of 2021 in my read-through of the pile of unread back issues of Poetry. Time and energy permitting, I may catch up to present sometime in June.

I finished Stephen Duncombe‘s Dream or Nightmare. Though unintended, it was the perfect follow-up to Benedict Anderson‘s Imagined Communities, as though the Anderson is about nationalism and the Duncombe about progressive political strategies, they both make the point that, when it comes to politics (which is to say, practically everything about society), people qua people don’t really notice or care about the minutiae of daily life outside of their immediate reach. What they notice are the stories, the narratives in which connect the individual to the people, places, ideas, and events outside of their immediate purview. This is how conservatives are able to convince their followers that fascism and freedom are synonymous, as long as the Right People are in the in-group. This is also why progressives and lefties are so much less successful at spinning inclusive narratives, as (a) progressives are much more grounded in facts and the real world than are conservatives, and (b) the 15% or so of the USA who are actually left-of-center tend to fail each others’ purity tests when it comes to the work of gathering a community.

To clear my head of modern stresses, I picked up Between Clay and Dust, a novel by Pakistani author Musharraf Ali Farooqi, which arrived at the house back in February of 2016 as part of my (now lapsed) subscription to Restless Books. I finished the book in three days, and it was beautiful. I rated it five stars, and recommend it unreservedly.

As stated above, I am now reading Kameron Hurley’s Future Artifacts.

In writing news, I haven’t done much lately. Too many other things taking up space in my head. I do plan to finish transcribing my National Poetry Month poems over the next couple of weeks.

Posted in Literary MattersTagged And Other Stories, Apex Book Company, ConFusion, Kameron Hurley, politics, reading comment on A Long-ish Weekend

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20 Jun

Talking to someone about an estranged adult child and their parent, and the person could not understand the child cutting the parent off because "if they die, wouldn't you feel terrible you never made peace?" And it's interesting because... (cont'd)

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Father's Day Sunday brunch with @gallafe . Pop-up brunch in the Chez Olga space on Wealthy Street. Pork sisig, singkamas salad, deviled eggs, and rice. Food served until 1:30 pm so you still have time! I think Jim Harrison would have liked this meal.

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17 Jun

Lauren Boebert spells things wrong in her tweets because it dramatically increases engagement, hope this helps.

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