Happy Birthday, A Cappella!

What do you give one of your two favorite local - and I mean neighborhood-local! - independent bookstore on their 21st birthday? You give them kudos - it's a tough time to be an indie - and you give them adult beverages, seeing as how they're old enough to drink now. And you buy those books on your gift list and help them keep up the good work.

Happy Birthday, A Cappella Books !

Congrats to Jenny Browne, poet & essayist!

Congrats to my friend Jenny Browne for her terrific piece in today's Modern Love Column in the New York Times.

Yes indeed, we dance while we can.

Gift List

Attention, authors. I'll bet your agent works hard for you. Your publicist? Yep. What bookstores have gone out of their way to hand-sell your books? How about your editor?

Wouldn't it be nice to remember them as you're making up that gift list?

PS This post was neither endorsed nor planted by my agent, publicist, editor, or favorite indie bookstores.

(Picasso's list via BBC.)

Do YOU "Friday Reads?"

Ah, twitterees... if you know about Bethanne Patrick (@thebookmaven) and her wonderful Friday thread, "Friday Reads," then you're an in-the-know type of person. Post on twitter with #fridayreads hashtag what you're reading. It doesn't have to be fancy, literary, je ne sais quoi... if it's written and you can read it and want to share with other readers, let Bethanne know.

But now it's spreading. Not hip to the tweets? That's okay, because TheBookLady's blog is holding up that end of the vibe.

Go here and let the book lady know what you're reading! Spread the reading word, amen!

Associated Writing Programs conference, Feb 2011

Alumni role in MFA programs. Wonderful writers, teachers, mentors like Fred Leebron and Robert Polito. And pal Jeff Hess. And me.

Other People's Words

Oxford Creative Nonfiction Conference

This is a picture of something I've wanted to see since high school - the wall in William Faulkner's Rowan Oak on which he wrote notes for a story. Not that I haven't done that, or perhaps you, but neither of us is Mr. Bill.

This weekend was kind of a dream realized, thanks in large part to my friend Neil White. (You've read In the Sanctuary of Outcasts, right? Right? )

Neil invited me to participate in the Oxford Creative Nonfiction Conference. Yep, in the company of leading lights like Lee Gutkind, Beth Ann Fennelly**, Tom Franklin Dinty Moore, Kristen Iversen from The Pinch magazine...

I'm still not sure if I actually sat on panels with these folks or if I dreamt that part. (I learned from them, what could I possibly say from their side of the table?)

M. and I ate dinner at the fabled City Grocery , and yes, it's as good as they say.
We bought books at Square Books . I signed Invisible Sisters at a happy and crowded reception at Off Square Books, and met Mamacita the cat.

I heard Robert Goolrick read from his mind-boggling memoir The End of the World As We Know It.

And stayed at the excellent 512 B&B

And graded midterms on the drive home.

Because, as the Buddhists say, "after ecstasy, the laundry."

** Those of us who teach, go now to Beth Ann's "A Study of Writing Habits, 2/It's a Doggy Dog World " from Tender Hooks.

Conferences Create Reading Lists... (hinty hint, nonfiction readers!)

I came home from NonfictioNow with a stack of books, most of which I'd been meaning to read, others I wondered how I missed them. In the spirit of what Dinty Moore called "gobsmacked" by the fabulousness of the conference, here is an attempt at suggesting what you might want to read next, and shoutouts to the authors and new friends.

There aren't in preferential order, they're just as my brain hits them.

Meeting Faith, by Faith Adiele
Planet of the Blind, by Steve Kuusisto
Pig Candy, by Lise Funderburg
Carrier, by Bonnie Rough
Fun Home, by Alison Bechdel (okay, I read this the minute it hit the shelves, but if you haven't, drop everything and read it now)
Do-Over, by Robin Hemley
First There is a Mountain, Elizabeth Kadetsky (need to pick this one up now that I'm home.)

In the lit mag world.... Brevity , River Teeth , and the Iowa Review.

More to come, but this girl still needs gallons of coffee.

In the window at Prairie Lights

Here's Invisible Sisters in Prairie Lights * ' window! That's like being in the Library of Congress, as far as I'm concerned.

Check back soon for links to the NonfictioNow Conference here to three days' worth of panel discussions by the best and the brightest in our field, on the memoir, the essay, research, form, past and future.... and keynote talks by the amazing Alison Bechdel and John Edgar Wideman. (not on the same day.)

Alison Bechdel's visual tour of her monolithic (her word, not mine) journal keeping, as well as a forced-perspective photo of journal as monolith, made my weekend.

*PS Proof that it's Iowa? Note the window's reflection of the guy in overalls and a tractor cap.

Just sayin'