In the third installment of the Chiasmus interview series, Colette Phair joins us to discuss her novel Nightmare in Silicon. She offers insight into the themes of the novel, her creative decisions, and the pros and cons of adopting a gender-neutral robot body.
Visit Colette’s website at www.apocolis.com, and stay tuned for future episodes.
Episode #06 marks the return of the press podcast after a lengthy absence. You tell us if it was worth the wait:
:: Conference recaps from AWP and &NOW :: 2008 releases by Lou Rowan, Kevin Sampsell and Lily Hoang :: Looking forward to Writer’s Edge :: Teaser preview of our upcoming release from Stephen Graham Jones :: First Book Contest :: Post-production update on The Iconographer :: Lidia’s healthy skepticism towards Barack Obama :: WE LOVE STEVE TOMASULA!! :: Andy’s love affair with Big Oil :: Trevor drinks Andy’s milkshake P.T. Anderson style :: Chiasmus mascots Rusty and Chomsky get it on :: Flashmob of kids threatens to destroy the Milwaukie mothership ::
You can shout back by email (contact@chiasmusmedia.net), or leave us voicemail through Skype (username: chiasmuspress). Don’t forget that the podcast is listed on iTunes, which makes subscribing to our RSS feed easy enough that even a U.S. president could do it.
Kevin will be reading from Creamy Bullets on Sunday, June 22 at the Hawthorne Street Powell’s in Portland. Click here for time and location.
Kevin will also be hosting his Booty Call reading series on July 13. Other readers appearing are Steve Almond, Jami Attenberg, Zack Plague, and Melissa Lion.
We love Lily Hoang’s novel (and co-winner of last year’s Undoing The Novel contest) Parabola so much that we’re releasing it in two editions, one standard and one very, very extraduper special.
The standard edition, which will have its world premiere and launch party at the end of next month in Portland, OR (details forthcoming…stay tuned), is in black/white and wrapped in a 6X9 trade paperback cover.
The special edition, which is available for order right now (and exclusively through Amazon.com), is a beautiful, oversized edition with color interior.
Lidia, Davis and Raymond Federman cook up some tasty vittles at &NOW…
Forcing us to choose between Stephen Colbert and Davis Schneiderman just isn’t fair, but we gotta do what we gotta do.
Get him, D.
Hedgebrook’s Women Authoring Change Series Presents:
WORLDING EXPERIMENT – Friday MAY 2, 7:00 p.m.
KOBO at HIGO 602 South Jackson, Seattle
REBECCA BROWN
ALICIA COHEN
MONICA DRAKE
JEANNE HEUVING
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH
If you are in/around Seattle, there is simply no excuse for not attending. Seriously.
REBECCA BROWN is the author of a dozen books of prose including The Last Time I Saw You, The End of Youth, The Dogs: A Modern Bestiary, The Terrible Girls (all with City Lights), Exceprts From A Family Medical Dictionary (University of Wisconsin and Granta), The Gifts of the Body, (HarperCollins) and Woman in Ill-Fitting Wig, a collaboration with painter Nancy Kiefer (pistilbooks.net). Her work is translated into Japanese,German, Danish, Italian and Norwegian and widely anthologized. Brown has also written a libretto for a dance opera, The Onion Twins and a play, The Toaster, and is currently engaged in projects involving altered texts, literary theft, the collision of pop and highbrow culture and the visual arts.
ALICIA COHEN is a writer of essays and poetry. She is the author of bEAR and, forthcoming from Tangent Press, Debt and Obligations. Her essays have appeared in How2, Ecopoetics, and Traffic. She teaches at Portland State University and lives with her family in Northeast, Portland.
MONICA DRAKE has a MFA from the University of Arizona and teaches at the Pacific NW College of Art. She is a contributor of reviews and articles to The Oregonian, The Stranger, and the Portland Mercury and her fiction has appeared in the Beloit Fiction Review, Threepenny Review, The Insomniac Reader, and others. She has been the recipient of an Arizona Commission on the Arts Award, the Alligator Juniper Prize in Fiction, and a Millay Colony Fellowship, and was a Tennessee Williams scholar at Sewanee Writers Workshop. Her debut Novel, Clown Girl, is published by Hawthorne Books.
JEANNE HEUVING’s cross genre Incapacity (Chiasmus Press) won a 2004 Book of the Year Award from Small Press Traffic, and her book of poems Transducer (Chax Press) is just out. She has published multiple essays on avant garde and innovative writers and the book Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore. She is a member of the Subtext Collective, on the editorial advisory board of the electronic journal HOW2, and is a professor in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences program at the University of Washington, Bothell and in the graduate program in English at UW, Seattle. She is a recipient of Fulbright and NEH grants, and was recently the H.D. Fellow at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
LIDIA YUKNAVITCH is the author of three books of short innovative fictions: Her Other Mouths, Liberty’s Excess, and Real to Reel. Her short works of fiction and critifiction have appeared in The Iowa Review, Ms., Zyzzyva, Another Chicago Magazine, Tin House, Exquisite Corpse, and elsewhere, and in the anthologies Fiction’s Present (SUNY Press) and Wreckage of Reason: Contemporary XXperimental Prose by Women Writers (Spuyten Duyvil Press). She teaches fiction, literature, film and women’s studies, and she is hard at work finishing her first novel. She is the founder of Chiasmus Press, and the lead organizer for the Writer’s Edge Innovative Writer’s Conference.
Kevin Sampsell’s soon-to-be-released collection of new fictions, Creamy Bullets, is available for pre-order now on Powells.com. And while you’re there, be sure to read his essay “The Tribulations of a Marquee Changer.” Here’s a quick snippet:
Quite possibly the worst job at Powell’s is changing the marquee. I’m not one to complain usually but each time I go out there to change it, something horrible and life-threatening happens. You see, our marquee is old. And dirty. And the gutters where the letters are supposed to sit are often warped or totally broken. I’m lucky if I can fit more than a couple words on each line. It’s like writing haiku, but with less syllables.
Click here to read more, and then again over here to pre-order Creamy Bullets.
Lou Rowan will read from his new novel My Last Days and short story collection Sweet Potatoes at Powells on Burnside Sunday, April 6 at 7:30 pm. He’ll be reading with Zachary Mason, author of the recent Starcherone release The Lost Books of the Odyssey.
