A Contemporary Reading Series
The Parlor's 2nd Annual Emerging Writer's Festival
Saturday, May 23, 4pm at The Green Lantern (1511 N. Milwaukee)
Sponsored by
Bad At Sports Podcast
By Christopher Hudgens
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Sara Levine’s writing has appeared in Nerve, The Iowa Review, Puerto del Sol, Caketrain, Necessary Fiction, Brain, Child, The Fairy Tale Review, and other magazines.
Her essays can be found in The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: 1970 to the Present and A Best of Fence.
Once upon a time she wrested a PhD in literature from Brown University and received an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies.
She chairs the Writing program at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
By Christopher Hudgens
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The Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials (LDSM) is a diverse collective of theatre artists with backgrounds in performance, literary, and visual arts, individually working in a range of performance traditions with such Chicago companies as Redmoon Theater, 500 Clown, CollaborAction, and the Neo-Futurists. The members of the LDSM first collaborated on Impossible Cities: A Utopian Experiment in 2007, directed by Seth Bockley and produced by Walkabout Theatre Company at the Peter Jones Gallery in Chicago. The show consisted of performances, music, and an art exhibition curated by Angela Tillges, all on the theme of utopia. The LDSM formally came into existence later that same year with the instigation of Theoretical Isolation: A Post-Atomic Experiment, a collaboratively generated performance which premiered in 2009 at the urban design project Arcosanti in Arizona and was subsequently presented in Chicago at the Neo-Futurarium. The LDSM has received grants from the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts at Northwestern University and from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, held residencies at the University of Chicago and Arcosanti, and taught workshops at Arizona State University and in the Arcosanti community. The LDSM continues to make and teach collectively devised, research-based performance, which blends physical, visual, and textual approaches to consider a broad range of inquiries prompted by the spatial, the communal, and the urban.
The LDSM performs an excerpt from Theoretical Isolation: A Post-Atomic Experiment, a collaboratively generated performance inspired by the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and the urban design laboratory Arcosanti. This original interdisciplinary work sets scientific experimentation, Congressional testimony, and old-fashioned magic tricks against the backdrop of Arcosanti’s unique architectural environment. Inspired by the discovery that The Tempest was among the literary texts discussed by scientists at Los Alamos, the performance investigates historical and fictional characters who retreated from civilization in order to re-imagine it, working in geographic isolation to create books and bombs with the potential to change the world. Theoretical Isolation: A Post-Atomic Experiment focuses on a few of these individuals: J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who oversaw the Manhattan Project; Prospero, Shakespeare’s most famous magician; and Paolo Soleri, the architect who founded Arcosanti as a prototypical alternative approach to urban design.
By Christopher Hudgens
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Kyle Beachy’s first novel, The Slide, won the Chicago Reader’s 2009 “Readers’ Choice” award for Best Book by a Chicago Author in the Last Year. The Boston Globe called the novel, “an unusual, and unusually good coming-of-age-story,” and Publishers Weekly described it as, “At once hilarious, strange, and uncomfortable.” His short fiction and essays appear in Knee-Jerk, Hobart, decomP, as a Featherproof MiniBook, and elsewhere. He has lived in Chicago since coming for The School of the Art Institute’s MFA program in 2003, and he currently teaches literature and writing at SAIC, Roosevelt University, and the Graham School of The University of Chicago.
Here, Kyle reads selections from and answers questions about The Most Fun Thing, his upcoming novel about skateboarding, celebrity, bones, and the joys of failure.
By Christopher Hudgens
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Jac Jemc sells books, makes monsters, and writes fiction, poetry, and the occasional review. She’s not normally a fan of the Oxford comma, but she’s gonna leave that one where it lays. Her first novel, My Only Wife, is forthcoming from Dzanc Books in 2012.
Jac’s writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, finished 2nd place in the Marginalia College Contest and placed as a finalist for the Rose Metal Press Chapbook Contest and Sentence Firewheel Chapbook Contest. Jac has completed or is looking forward to residencies at Ragdale and the Vermont Studio Center.
She is poetry editor at decomP, a fiction reader at Our Stories, and is guest-editing issue 7 of Little White Poetry Journal. Mostly though, she blogs her rejections at jacjemc.wordpress.com.
By Christopher Hudgens
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Here James reads from his work-in-progress “The Magnificent Moots,” which he describes as a combination of “The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” “A Wrinkle In Time,” Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game,” the movie “The Royal Tennenbaums,” and the 1970s-1980s TV show Battle of the Network Stars.
James Kennedy is the author of The Order of Odd-Fish (Random House Delacorte Press), a fantastical young adult comedy that was one of the Smithsonian’s Notable Books for Children in 2008.
Booklist praised Odd-Fish as “hilarious . . . readers with a finely tuned sense of the absurd are going to adore the Technicolor ride”.
Time Out Chicago described it as “a work of mischievous imagination and outrageous invention.”
James lives with his wife and daughter in Chicago. You can follow his activities at http://www.jameskennedy.com.
By Christopher Hudgens
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Brendan Short is the author of “Dream City,” which has been called “powerful” (Chicago magazine) and “complex and compelling…highly recommended” (Library Journal). He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. His stories and poems have appeared in several literary journals, including The Literary Review and River Styx. A former writer-in-residence at St. Albans School in Washington, D.C., he currently lives in the Chicago area. Please visit his website, www.brendanshort.net.
In this episode of The Parlor, Brendan reads from his debut novel, “Dream City” (MacAdam/Cage), which follows dreamer Michael Halligan from a childhood in Depression-era Chicago through an adulthood spent trying to collect the comic-book stories he loved as a kid and make sense of an arbitrary and unkind world.
By Christopher Hudgens
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This episode features the 2009 winners of The Parlor’s second annual Emerging Writer’s Festival. The Festival was a great success this year. Great readers, great audience, followed by an equally great barbecue. We at The Parlor are excited by this year’s winners.
This year’s writers (in order of appearance) are: Sarah Terez Rosenblum, Jeanie Chung, Peter Anderson, J.D.K. Goodman, and Jessie Morrison.
By Christopher Hudgens
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Joe Meno is a fiction writer and playwright that lives in Chicago.
A winner of the Nelson Algren Literary Award and the Society of Midland Author’s Fiction Prize, he is the author of four novels, The Boy Detective Fails (Akashic 2006,) Hairstyles of the Damned (Akashic 2004,) Tender as Hellfire (St. Martin’s 1999), and How the Hula Girl Sings (HarperCollins 2001.).
His short story collection is Bluebirds Used to Croon in the Choir (TriQuarterly 2005.) His online serial, The Secret Hand, runs through Playboy magazine at playboy.com. His short fiction has been published in the likes of McSweeney’s, Witness, TriQuarterly, Mid-American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Washington Square, Other Voices, Gulf Coast, and broadcast on NPR.
He is a contributing editor to Punk Planet magazine and is a professor who teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago.
By Christopher Hudgens
The Parlor’s 2nd Annual Emerging Writer’s Festival
Saturday, May 23, 4pm at The Green Lantern (1511 N. Milwaukee)
Emerging Writers Festival Schedule
4:00 pm Sarah Terez Rosenblum – Where She Is
4:30 pm Jeanie Chung – Cuts and Folds
5:00 pm Peter Anderson – One Son Resists
5:30 – 5:45 BREAK
5: 45 pm J.D.K. Goodman – Another Place, Another Time
6:15 pm Jessie Morrison – The Queens of the Northwest Side
By Christopher Hudgens
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Carol Anshaw is the author of the novels Aquamarine, Seven Moves, and Lucky in the Corner. Her books have won the Carl Sandburg Award, the Ferro-Grumley Award, and the Society of Midland Authors Award. Her stories have appeared in Story magazine, Tin House, The Best American Stories and, most recently, in Do Me: Tales of Sex and Love from Tin House.
Anshaw is a past fellow of the NEA. For her book criticism she was awarded the NBCC Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. She is a professor in the MFA in Writing program at the School of the Art Institute. She has just finished a new novel, Carry the One.
