Category Archives: Entertainment

Interfictions goes online

Posted by Christopher Barzak in Art, Culture, Entertainment, Interstitiality, Literature, Magazines, Publishing, Recommendations, Writing

interfictions1

Another new development for 2013 is that Interfictions, the anthology series that Delia Sherman launched first with co-editor Theodora Goss and then with me as co-editor of the second volume, will be moving into an online incarnation, including poetry, nonfiction, fiction, and hybrids forms.

Fiction editors are myself and Meghan McCarron.

Nonfiction and poetry editor is Sofia Samatar.

Submission guidelines and the submission portal can be found by clicking here. 

But here’s the skinny: We’ll be open for submissions in the month of February. Two issues will appear online annually, Spring and Fall. We’re paying 5 cents a word for fiction, 3 cents a word for nonfiction (preferably 9n the 2000-4000 word range) and poetry honorariums of 20 dollars per poem.

Interfictions was originally published in anthology format, and included work from writers like myself, Theodora Goss, Catherynne Valente, Jeffrey Ford, M. Rickert, Alan DeNiro, Vandana Singh, William Alexander, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Brian Slattery, and Lavie Tidhar.

interfictions2The second volume of Interfictions was an Amazon.com Best Book of the Year.

Send us your best work, your strangest work, your most uncategorizable work, to consider.

We’re in the midst of putting together a fantastic first issue that will release in spring of 2013. See you soon!

 

 

We’re getting ready

Posted by Christopher Barzak in Art, Books, Culture, Entertainment, Interstitiality, Literature, Recommendations, Writing

If you’ve managed to forget that the second volume of Interfictions is being released later this fall, I certainly haven’t.  We’re getting ready to start posting our Annex stories online, as we lead up to the publication date of the book itself, but today, over at the Interstitial Arts Foundation’s website, you can already take a look at the introduction to the book, written by Henry Jenkins, the Provost’s Professor of Communications, Journalism, and Cinematic Art at the University of Southern California.  Previously, and very recently, he served at the co-founder of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT.  Henry’s written a really great intro to the book, which I will excerpt here:

“Please accept my resignation. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”

– Groucho Marx

Let’s start with some basic premises:

  1. I do not belong in this book.
  2. The contributors also do not belong.
  3. You, like Groucho Marx, wouldn’t want to belong even if you could. Otherwise, you probably wouldn’t have picked up this book in the first place.

Let me explain. The editors of most anthologies seek stories which “fit” within prescribed themes, genres, and topics; the editors of this book have gone the opposite direction – seeking stories that don’t fit anywhere else, stories that are as different from each other as possible. And that’s really cool if the interstitial is the kind of thing you are into.

At the heart of the interstitial arts movement (too formal), community (too exclusive), idea (too idealistic?), there is the simple search for stories that don’t rest comfortably in the cubbyholes we traditionally use to organize our cultural experiences.”

Why not go over to the website to read the rest of it, and see if you don’t belong either?

Party, party, party

Posted by Christopher Barzak in Art, Books, Entertainment, Happiness, Oakland Center for the Arts, The Love We Share Without Knowing, Youngstown

Dear All You Youngstowners and those who will be hereabouts come this weekend,  

This Saturday will be one big party downtown.  Why?  Because I’m throwing a party for the release of my new book, which comes out tomorrow, The Love We Share Without Knowing.  There will be food (cross-cultural selections, since the book is set in Japan) and drink (wine and sake), and art (from the Artists of the Mahoning Commons), and though last year we also had music, this year we will be directing you down to the Cedars Lounge, where my favorite local band, The Zou, will be celebrating the release of their first CD, Archeopteryx.  Together, it will be a celebration of the local talent that inhabits this little Rust Belt city.  

The Love We Share Without Knowing Release Party will be held at the Oakland Center for the Arts, on Boardman Street downtown, from 7-10 PM.  Come drink, be merry, listen to me read a section of the novel. Then head down two blocks to Cedars for the Zou’s New CD Release Party from 10 to 2 PM (23 N. Hazel).

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It’s going to be a fun evening.  I hope to see you out.


YSU-Ytown Reading Series

Posted by Christopher Barzak in Books, Entertainment, Homemaking, Literature, Ohio, Readings and Signings, Recommendations, Writing, Youngstown

Just a brief announcement that I, along with my assistant Mona Lisi (yes, it’s her real name, and it’s awesome, isn’t it?), have been doing the work to start promoting awareness of a new YSU-Ytown Reading Series, a new monthly event (during the college school year) I’ve created to bridge university activities with the community that hosts the university.  Here’s a look at the who/what/where/when/why of the series.  I hope if you’re in the region, you’ll help spread the word on your own blogs, Facebooks, Myspace sites, or by any other means.  Word of mouth is always good.  But more importantly, I hope to see you at our first event, which will feature Cleveland author Catherynne Valente on October 6th.  And our second reader, David Giffels, from Akron, will be coming in November to read from his memoir, All the Way Home, published by HarperCollins (read this awesome article in the New York Times about him and his new book!). Read ahead to get all the pertinent info, and please friend us on Myspace and Facebook.

Welcome to the new YSU-Ytown Reading Series. Held at 7PM at Cedars Cafe in Downtown Youngstown on the first Monday of the month (September through December and February through April), we will be bringing you authors from the Youngstown/Cleveland/Pittsburgh corridor as well as the rest of the nation (and the world on occasion) hopefully for a long time to come.

And on top of that, after each featured reader, the mic will be open for our local poets and writers to share their words as well. But to do that, we need an audience to make it happen, meaning YOU.

So please check out the blog entries at this site to find out more about our upcoming readers, and pass the word around about this new community series to anyone you think might be interested in listening to and meeting authors, as well as interested in bringing their own words into awareness in our town, Ytown.

As Bukowski wrote, “a poem is a city” Not to mention short stories, novels and memoirs.  Bring your city and make it part of ours.

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Our first reader will be Catherynne M. Valente, on October 6th at 7 PM.

Born in the Pacific Northwest in 1979, Catherynne M. Valente is the author of the Orphan’s Tales series, as well as The Labyrinth, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword, and four books of poetry, Music of a Proto-Suicide, Apocrypha, The Descent of Inanna, and Oracles. She is the winner of the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Spectrum Award. She currently lives in Cleveland with her partner and two dogs.

This is going to be a great new reading series complete with open mic after the featured reader so we hope to see you all there. Come show your support for local writers, and bring your own work to share!

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The second reader has been announced! The reading and open mic will be held the first Monday, November 3rd, at 7:00, Cedars Restaurant and Lounge in downtown Youngstown.

Former Beavis and Butt-Head writer David Giffels is a columnist for the Akron Beacon Journal and the author of All the Way Home: Building a Family in a Falling-down House, a memoir about coming of age as a father in a ramshackle mansion reclaimed from termites, belligerent squirrels and decades of neglect. The book will be published May 27, 2008.

He is the co-author of two other books: the rock biography Are We Not Men? We Are Devo! (SAF Publishing, 2003), and Wheels of Fortune: The Story of Rubber in Akron, a 1998 history of his hometown that is the best-selling title in University of Akron Press history.

His essays appear in The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia (Indiana University Press, 2006) and The Appalachians: America’s First and Last Frontier (Random House, 2004), and he received a “Notable Essay” citation in Da Capo Best Music Writing 2004. He has written the introduction to a West Point Market cookbook, to be published by the University of Akron Press this fall. His writing has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine.

He is a contributing commentator and essayist on National Public Radio station WKSU in Kent, Ohio. In a 16-year career, he has won dozens of journalism awards, including the 2006 national award for commentary from the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors. He has been nominated five times for the Pulitzer Prize.

Giffels has bachelor’s degrees in English and mass media and a master’s degree in English/creative writing from the University of Akron. He writes in the former servant’s quarters of a semi-rehabilitated Tudor Revival home in Akron, where he lives with his wife, two children, and a large but uncounted number of bats.

I’ll be judging. Just call me Tyra.

Posted by Christopher Barzak in Crazy People, Entertainment, Oakland Center for the Arts, Youngstown

On Saturday, June 14, the latest incarnation of the Oakland Center for the Arts popular Fundraising is a Drag event will feature Downtown Youngstown’s first drag pageant!

The show begins at 8 p.m.. A wine and cheese reception will begin at 7 p.m.. Attendees may bid on items in the fabulous Chinese Auction during this time as well. All winners will be announced at the end of the night. All tickets are $15. Reservations are strongly encouraged.

The evening will be hosted by notorious drag diva Starrlet O’Hara and will feature performances from Maxine Factor, Ahrin Starr, Kage Coven, Mary Kate Rockefellar, Buffy Melendres Starr, SuXanadu, Anita Joint, Alecia Sarkis, Jenifer Kuczek and many more. The panel of judges for the event will include a dazzling array of local celebrities and Ytown A-listers.

Five contestants will compete for the title of the Oakland’s Next Top Drag Queen and prize package that includes a $200 gift certificate from Jaci Clark photography, season tickets to the Oakland Center for the Arts, season tickets to The Stage open mic night, a complete drag makeover, and the most coveted prize, a guaranteed feature role in the December 2008 Oakland Center production of How The Drag Queen Stole Christmas, directed by Robert Dennick Joki.

The Oakland Center for the Arts is located at 220 West Boardman Street in downtown Youngstown. For tickets, please call the reservation line at 330 746 0404. For more information about the Oakland, visit myspace.com/oaklandcenter.

Gettin ready to rock

Posted by Christopher Barzak in Appearances, Books, Crazy People, Entertainment, Literature, Publishing, Reading, SF, Silliness, Writing

Lately I have been in busy hell.  Forgive me if I owe you an email.  Right now, getting revved up to go to Wiscon at the end of this week.  Karaoke Party on Friday night.  Be there or be square, as they say in Paris, or in the 1950s.  Also this Wiscon Alan, Kristin and I will be debuting our first publication in the new Electrum Novella Series, David J. Schwartz’s The Sun Inside, which will rock your socks off.  A review from novelist Elizabeth Bear says: “Beautiful Women.  Exotic cultures.  Fabulous monsters. Audacious heroes. Total war.  Sound familiar?  It should not.”  If that doesn’t pique your interest, I don’t know what will.  Maybe a private karaoke session avec moi dans la Concourse L’hotel en Madison?  Like I said, be there (at the karaoke party) or be square (having not read David Schwartz’s novella The Sun Inside and thus not being able to participate in the conversations gazillions of people will be having about it, sharing communal feelings about a cultural artifact that allows them to talk about, you know, ideas and beliefs)!

So, onward now to make departure preparations.

Ta.