Join Michelle Richmond on January 26 at the Heritage Theatre in Campbell, California to kick off Silicon Valley Reads 2011. She will be interviewed by San Jose Mercury columnist Mike Cassidy. Music by the Leigh High School Jazz Ensemble.
Co-sponsored by Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley
Doors open 6:45 p.m. – First come, first seated
Program begins at 7:30 p.m., followed by a book signing
Today in the San Jose Mercury news, an article about the essay contest and photo contest the Cupertino Library Foundation is running in conjunction with Silicon Valley Reads 2011. Two grand prizes of $500 each and two prizes of $300 each will be given to the winners of the essay contest, and four prizes of $100 each will be given to the winners of the Holga photo contest (Holgas can be checked out at the Cupertino Library).
Essay contest: Applicants are asked to describe in 500 words or less how the themes of The Year of Fog deal with discouragement, human frailties and the power of perseverance, hope, faith and love. Essay writers are being asked to think about what role fog plays in the story. The essay contest is open to all adults living or working in the city of Cupertino or students attending Monta Vista, Homestead, Cupertino or Lynbrook high schools.
For more details, read the article in the Mercury or visit SiliconValleyReads.org.
Just up on the Glimmer Train website, my piece about research and the novel.
I should mention hear that Linda Swanson-Davies and Susan Burmeister-Brown are my favorite editors of any literary magazine, anywhere. Back in 1999, they called a completely unknown writer and made her day by telling her that they would be publishing the short story “Down the Shore Everything’s All Right.” I remember standing in our small one-bedroom sublet on the Upper West Side, talking to Linda, absolutely stunned and jubilant at the news. When you’re starting out as a writer, encouragement can be hard to come by. All those rejections, all those stories that end up in the trash. A phone call by an editor can turn it all around, remind you that there is some hope for your life as a writer.
Glimmer Train, The Tanning Salon, & My Love Life: the first time I ever picked up an issue of Glimmer Train, when I was living in Atlanta, making five dollars an hour as a receptionist at a tanning salon, I read a short story by an Albanian writer named Jiri Kajane, translated by Kevin P. and Bill U’Ren. I loved the story, and I flipped to the back of the magazine to see the Last Pages, which feature personal notes written by contributors, accompanied by an old photograph. There I saw a fetching baby picture of one Kevin P., dressed as Bam Bam from the Flintstones.
A few months later, I moved to Arkansas to pursue an MFA in creative writing. On my first day of orientation, a very handsome fellow from San Francisco walked into the room. Weeks or months later–it all runs together now–I realized that he was the translator of the Albanian story, the one whose baby picture I’d admired while manning the desk at the tanning salon in Atlanta. Long story short, we’ve been together for 15 years, married for 10 of them. So you might say that Glimmer Train did some preliminary matchmaking.
And, to complete the loop, I just launched a new press, Fiction Attic. Our first book is Jiri Kajane’s story collection, Winter in Tirane. Co-translated, of course, by Kevin P. AKA Bam Bam
Here’s to another 20 years of Glimmer Train.
Sidenote: “Down the Shore” ended up being the lead story in my first book, the 2001 collection The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress. Later, Linda and Susan published two more of my stories, “The Hero of Queens Boulevard” and “The Boulevard of Heroes.”
The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, originally published in 2001 by the University of Massachusetts Press and winner of the AWP Award for Short Fiction, is now available for Nook, Kindle, and other ereaders.
“The stories in Michelle Richmond’s first collection spin artfully off the life of a single character…smart and adept…” The New York Times
“This collection of brief sketches alternating with longer fictions has a novel’s heft, as characters who are just names in one story emerge to take center stage in another. These women’s lives are shaped by fate and by place, forces hauntingly evoked by this talented young writer.” ~The Boston Globe
“Richmond’s writing is perceptive and heartfelt, her subjects at once edgy and familiar. This is a winning debut.” Publishers Weekly
The New York Times Book Review:
The stories in Michelle Richmond’s first collection spin artfully off the life of a single character. Gracie is nearly 30 when we first meet her, sitting in a rented car on the way to the Jersey Shore and just about to break up with her Bruce Springsteen-obsessed boyfriend. Most of the stories circle similar small, critical moments. In the crushingly sweet and brief ”Curvature,” for example, Gracie stands in the doorway of her sister Celia’s bedroom and watches her mother dress the wound on Celia’s back, made by surgery to correct curvature of the spine. A child at the time, Gracie envies the intimacy between her mother and sister and, in those few minutes, recognizes her mother’s capacity for sacrifice and tenderness. In ”Mathematics and Acrobatics,” set years later, Celia and her young daughter, Roberta, witness a bus accident on an icy Georgia road. Celia doesn’t stop to help the victims, and Roberta’s insensitive reaction to the scene makes Celia question both her mothering abilities and her own response to the crash. The settings here — from the Alabama coast to Iceland — frequently shift, as does the perspective; there are stories from the point of view of each of Gracie’s three sisters and a few of her childhood friends…smart and adept.”
About THE GIRL IN THE FALL-AWAY DRESS
A series of locations both familiar and exotic delineate the nineteen linked stories in this award-winning debut collection. Whether leaving, returning, or staying put, the women who narrate these stories are bound to Alabama by history and habit, their voices informed by the landscape and lore of the New South.
Michelle Richmond introduces us to a memorable extended family, in which lies come more easily than forgiveness, and parents and siblings conceal the truth as often as they reveal it. In many cases, the women are forced to choose—between family and lovers, safety and self-sufficiency, the religion they grew up with and the reality of the world they have found for themselves.
In “Down the Shore Everything’s All Right,” twenty-eight-year-old Grace abandons wide Southern beaches for New York sidewalks, only to discover that the Gulf Coast still has a hold on her. In “Intermittent Waves of Unusual Size and Force,” a wayward father is called home from California by a massive hurricane that threatens the lives of his family. In “The World’s Greatest Pants,” three younger sisters watch in awe as Darlene, the eldest and bravest, defies her parents and heads for Texas in a battered El Camino.
An undercurrent of eroticism runs through the collection. “Propaganda” finds the youngest sister alone in an old house in Knoxville, where she forms a symbiotic relationship with a mysterious upstairs neighbor during her husband’s lengthy absence. In “Fifth Grade: A Criminal History,” adolescence and sexuality merge with explosive consequences. A woman dancing naked on a bridge in San Francisco is the central figure of the title story.
The divine and the absurd are uneasy but frequent bedfellows in this volume. “O-lama-lama” portrays the scene of a religious free-for-all at a beachside church in Fairhope, Alabama, while “Slacabamorinico” celebrates the holy commotion of Mardi Gras at a Mobile cemetery. In “The Last Bad Thing,” a love-struck young woman in the Bible Belt is haunted by visions of Ramadan.