Welcome to the latest edition of The Hinge Story, this time for Short Story Month! We’ve been very happy with both the reader response to both poetry and fiction, and to the writers who’ve been kind enough to contribute.
This month, we’re excited to feature “Laura, Linda, Sweetie Pie” by Daniel Wallace, which first appeared in Wag’s Revue in the Fall of 2009.
You’ll find the story below. Daniel will be checking in during the week and joining us on Sunday, May 20th, from 4-6 pm. Please join the conversation by adding your comments and questions, either by typing in the Leave a Reply box, or, if you want to respond to a particular entry, click on Reply next to the datestamp.
The Hinge, in conjunction with The Casbah, announces Mixtape Readings
A reading featuring the works of Lydia Davis, Albert Camus, Charles Mingus, and Yusef Komunyakaa?
Plus, did we mention a short film—“When Walt Witman Was a Little Girl”—created by Jim Haverkamp will be shown?
Yeah, that’s Mixtape Readings.
Local cultural mavens—this month those mavens are Misha Angrist and Howard L. Craft— read selections from their personal desert island bookshelves in this multi-disciplinary series. They’ll share the texts that changed them, that they love, and that they want to shout from the mountaintop. You’ll come away with your mind on fire and a reading list to keep it aflame.
Where/When: Tuesday, May 22, 8pm, The Casbah, 1007 Main St., Durham
MISHA ANGRIST’s book Here is a Human Being: At the Dawn of Personal Genomics (Harper) tells the true tale of getting his genome sequenced and then making it public—with plenty of rumination about society and policy along the way. Angrist has an MFA in writing and literature from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and his fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous literary journals. He teaches at Duke and lives in Durham.
HOWARD L. CRAFT’s play Jade City Chronicles Vol. 1: The Super Spectacular Bad Ass Herald M.F. Jones—the first installment of the first African American superhero radio serial, The Jade City Pharaoh—recently rocked Manbites Dog Theater audiences. Craft’s other plays include The Vet Who Lived Underground: Dispatches from Beneath the Map and Caleb Calypso and the Midnight Marauders. His poetry collection Across The Blue Chasm is published by Big Drum Press. Craft lives in Durham with his wife and son.
JIM HAVERKAMP
“When Walt Whitman Was a Little Girl.” (Short Film)
Not your typical History Channel biography, “When Walt Whitman Was a Little Girl” tells the startling, unuttered truth about America’s good gray poet. Starting out as an ordinary nine-year-old girl, Walt is soon catapulted into the world with all her senses ablaze, and neither will ever be the same.
Based on a prose poem by M.C. Biegner, the film mixes drama, dance, puppetry, and oddball humor to portray the world through the eyes of a ‘sensitive kid.’ Walt awakens to the mysteries and wonder of nature, leaves her home to seek fame and adventure, is plunged into the horror of war, and finally begins to understand the unspoken poetry of childhood.
The Hinge’s newest poetry workshop will be led by poet and editor Jonathan Farmer. It begins on Monday, June 11, and runs for eight weeks. Each session runs from 7-9 on Monday night.
The class will meet at 305 East Chapel Hill Street, Durham, NC, in The Hinge’s Third Friday Party Studio Space.
Class Description:
The critic and poet William Empson once wrote, “You must rely on each particular poem to show you the way in which it is trying to be good.” In addition to helping each poem be good on its own terms, we’ll be looking to discover additional ways of being good–to open up new possibilities for all of us as readers and writers. The core of that effort will be our workshopping of each other’s poems, but I will also start each meeting with a brief discussion of a published poem that seems relevant to the subjects we’re discussing in the workshop. We’ll also try to develop our community with an email forum; each week, one of the participants will share a published poem he or she finds interesting, along with a few words on what he or she values in the poem. Anyone who has time and inclination can then chime in with questions, observations, favorite lines, other poems it reminds them of, etc. Hopefully we’ll be able to help each other as writers well beyond the eight weeks we spend together, sharing new areas for exploration and starting conversations that will continue long after the workshop is done.
About Jonathan:
Jonathan Farmer is a poetry critic for Slate.com and the founder and poetry editor of At Length. In the latter role he has published work by such poets as Alan Shapiro, Elizabeth Alexander, Rachel Hadas, Kevin Young, Brenda Hillman, Erin Belleu and Major Jackson, whose poems from the magazine appeared in the 2011 edition of Best American Poetry. He has taught poetry writing at The University of North Carolina and The University of California, Irvine, as well as through The Hinge Literary Center. Craig Morgan Teicher, the Poetry Editor at Publisher’s Weekly, has called him “the rarest kind of poetry editor: one who actually knows how to help a writer make poems better.” Kimiko Hahn notes, “he doesn’t revise the work, he leads the writer to draw her/his own conclusions. He opens up possibilities. That is what revision is all about, and this what expert teaching can do.” And Joanna Klink has written, ”He has an uncanny knack for stepping into the world of a poem and making sense of what would happen there. With an exquisite ear, a wide heart, and an intuition for the extravagance of language, he helps poetry be what it is: the speech of what is most possible and most true.”
Edith Pearlman Reading at The Regulator Co-Sponsored by The Hinge
04/19/2012 7:00 pm
Edith Pearlman will read from and sign copies of her collection of new and selected stories, Binocular Vision, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and The Story Prize. Refreshments will be served, including delicious food from Vimala’s Curryblossom and Sandwhich. Thank you, Vimala’s and Sandwhich, for supporting your local literary community.
The Hinge Third Friday
Start: 04/20/2012 6:00 pm
Location: 305 E. Chapel Hill Street, Suite 215, 6 -9 PM
It’s Third Friday and to celebrate National Poetry Month, The Hinge will be composing a Cento–a poem created from other poets’ lines. Come add your favorite line to the sure-to-be masterpiece.
In addition to composing a Cento, we will have our April installation of the Open Wall. Bring a short poem, short story or short memoir piece to add to our flourishing collection of local writers’ talents. “It’s like Open Mic, without the mic.” This month’s theme: April Showers Bring May Flowers.
The Hinge Poetry Workshop Student Reading at The Pinhook
Start: 4/23/12 7:00 pm
Come help celebrate the culmination of The Hinge’s latest poetry workshop, taught by Chris Vitiello, with a workshop participant reading.
The reading will feature poets Lisa Shroyer, Iris Tillman, Jon Mozes, Preston Martin, Jennifer Maness, Victoria Reynolds, and Richard Allen.
Grab a beer and sit back to listen to these talented writers!
The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke presents Professor Diablo’s True Revue
Start: 4/24/12 7 pm
In partnership with us, The Hinge, the CDS presents the debut of Professor Diablo’s True Revue, a collaborative performance series that will feature writers, musicians, visual artists, and others who make extensive use of documentary fieldwork and research in the creation of their art.
The event is going to rock! For more info, check out the CDS’s website.
Friday, March 16, 2012, 305 E. Chapel Hill Street, Suite 215, 6– 9PM
Welcome to the first installment of The Hinge Story! The Hinge has brought together readers and writers of poetry in other installments (see discussions of work by Dorianne Laux, Alan Shapiro, and Michael McFee, among others), and we’ve been delighted by the response from readers and the generosity of the writers who have offered their time and work to this project.
This month, we are reading Edith Pearlman’s “The Story” in honor and anticipation of her April 19 reading at the Regulator Bookshop in Durham. Pearlman’s collection of new and selected stories, Binocular Vision, was published in 2011 by North Carolina’s own Lookout Books. As Lookout’s debut publication, Binocular Vision won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction and was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and The Story Prize. Pearlman will join our discussion on April 17 from 3-4. Her North Carolina book tour, sponsored in part by the N.C. Arts Council, will include stops at UNC-Wilmington, Park Road Books, Davidson College, the Levine-Sklut Judaic Library, and The Regulator (7:00 on April 19! Don’t miss it!).
“The Story” appears below. Please feel free to post your questions, answers and observations in the comment section (if you’re on the home page, you’ll first need to click on “Leave a comment” below or the headline above.) Read what others have written, engage, discuss–and don’t forget to return on April 17 from 3-4, when Edith Pearlman will join the discussion.
The featured reader is Durham’s CHRIS VITIELLO, arts writer and poet extraordinaire, whose new book Obedience (Ahsahta Press; 2012) can be read forward, backwards, or both ways at once. Regardless, it’s a tour de force of sustained scientific and linguistic interrogation.
Chapel Hill’s HASSAN MELEHY, a poet and literary critic who teaches French at UNC, opens the proceedings. Admission is free, though you can support the Café by purchasing a wide variety of beverages, from espresso to alcohol, and food.
Quick Facts
What: Poetry reading
Who: CHRIS VITIELLO & HASSAN MELEHY
When: Tuesday – 27 March 2012 – 8 p.m.
Where: The Looking Glass Café – 601 West Main St., Carrboro, NC
About the Readers
You know the meanings of certain concrete nouns without having directly experienced the things they refer to
You may feel this disappearing, unraveling, or dissipating
This is your decision’s result
This was your decision’s result
Look at your reflection
This is a point of possible closure •
This is the beginning
This happened
This line is being read and has now been read
Relocate that point of possible closure to the start of this book
Align your rituals with this
Take this opportunity •
Hold a noun
Write the first adjective you learned in the space below
–Chris Vitiello, from Obedience
CHRIS VITIELLO is a freelance writer and poet living in Durham. His arts journalism appears regularly in the Independent Weekly, and his books of poetry include Nouns Swarms a Verb (Xurban; 1999), Irresponsibility (Ahsahta; 2008) and Obedience (Ahsahta; 2012), which will be heard and on sale at this event, in all of its multi-directional, interactive glory.
____
Is there a navel reserve below your pectoral fins?
Your voracious palm frond’s in the way—
Studs are added to your collar bone from the organs below the belt.
The church pipes smoking in the distance put the organ to shame:
You can give that old field a corncob lift.
A grain elevator on the horizon of grassy goodness.
The law’s taken over every last storefront and public toilet.
Man can’t get a good sheet of country plastic no more,
No covering for his tender behind
With all the gumshoes sticking it up all over the place.
We ought to be able to buy statehood from those woodsmen in Congress in no time.
What say you to our own place in the heart of the Chamber?
If I were a dummy I might think you was a ventriculist.
The blueprints for the new dome are sky high.
–Hassan Melehy, “Frontier Ditty”
HASSAN MELEHY’s verse has appeared in nthposition, The Hat, Redheaded Stepchild, Red Rock Review, and Borderlands, among others. His most recent book of literary criticism is The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England (2010). He has also published essays on film and cultural criticism, and is writing a book on Jack Kerouac’s poetics of exile. He teaches French at UNC.
About the Wax Wroth Reading Series
Wax Wroth is a poetry reading series organized by Brian Howe whenever he feels like it and has the opportunity to present something really cool. Prior Wax Wroths have been held at the art space at 715 Washington in Durham, and have featured readers such as Tony Tost, Heather Christle, and Chris Tonelli.
Series organizer Brian Howe is a Chapel Hill-based journalist, critic, poet, and et cetera. Find out more about his work at http://waxwroth.blogspot.com/. Questions regarding the Wax Wroth Reading Series may be directed to brian.g.howe@gmail.com.
Welcome to the March edition of The Hinge Poem, a regular feature inviting readers throughout the Triangle (and beyond) to read and discuss a single poem by a leading local author–and to talk directly with the poet him- or herself.
This month we’re featuring Michael McFee’s “Bunk.” To get started on the conversation, scroll down, read the poem, and then post your questions, answers and observations in the comment section (if you’re on the home page, you’ll first need to click on “Leave a comment” below or the headline above.) Read what others have written, engage, discuss–just be respectful. It’s fine to disagree, but we’ll delete ad hominem attacks and insulting language.
Most importantly, remember to come back on Monday, March 19, from 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m., when Michael McFee will be joining us for a live chat on this post.
BUNK
“That’s just a bunch of bunk!”
I hollered at my windbag teenage cousin
teasing out tales about my sister
there on the side porch’s spongy slanted floor,
describing her raw adventures
with twins in a rowboat out on Beaver Lake.
I was too young, too American
to say humbug, claptrap, balderdash, twaddle;
I might have known to call it baloney but hadn’t yet learned guff, hogwash,
or what his ripe lies were: bullshit, horseshit, dogshit, just plain old shit.
And I had no clue that bunk
came from the same Carolina mountain county
where I continued shouting it
at my kinsman multiplying empty words
about how the Vance boys
lost their paddles and had to drift all night
taking turns comforting sis:
he wouldn’t sit down and shut up any more
than voluble Congressman
Felix Walker, who defended an ill-timed oration
on the House floor in 1820
by saying he was “only speaking for Buncombe,”
to the constituents back home
and not to his colleagues who’d been debating
Missouri’s slave or free status.
And so his self-serving pointless speechifying
entered the language as bunkum,
immortalizing my native place as a synonym
for piffle, poppycock, and rot,
nonsense, horsefeathers, flapdoodle, hooey, hokum.
All I knew to do, in 1963,
in my nine-year-old righteous brotherly rage,
choking on the purple prose
of Asheville dusk and the story’s moonshine
and the gall of my slick cousin
filibustering to hear his own foolish voice,
was stick with the loud sentence
adults pronounced to end their arguments:
“That’s just a bunch of bunk!”
About the Author: Michael McFee was born in Asheville, North Carolina, and has taught for several decades in the Creative Writing Program at UNC-Chapel Hill. His nine previous collections of poetry include Shinemaster (2006), Earthly (2001), and Colander (1996), all published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, and The Smallest Talk (2007), a chapbook of one-line poems published by Bull City Press in Durham. He is also the author of a prose book, The Napkin Manuscripts: Selected Essays and an Interview (2006), and the editor of several anthologies of North Carolina literature.
In the coming weeks, Michael will be giving readings throughout the area to promote his new book, That Was Oasis, including the following:
The conversation starts below. And once again, remember to come back on Monday, March 19, from 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m., when Michael McFee will be joining us for a live chat on this post.
Join us Friday, March 16 amongst the Third Friday Durham activities for drinks, chatter, snacks and the second installment of Open Wall, the Hinge’s evolving exhibit of local writers’ short works.
Anyone can put up a piece on the Open Wall.
March’s theme: The Ides of March.
When: Friday, March 16, 2012
Where/Time: 305 E. Chapel Hill Street, Suite 215, 6– 9PM
a collaborative, ever-evolving display of short fiction and non-fiction pieces as well as short poems from local writers. This interactive exhibit will debut Friday, February 17 at The Hinge’s Third Friday event ; bring your own work to add to the wall, or take down a piece you love and want to carry home. (Bring extra copies in case your piece immediately gets snagged for its genius.) Think of it as an open mic without the reading!
Oh, and there’s a theme each month: February’s theme is, you guessed, it “love” or “expired love,” as we will be post-Valentine’s Day.
Welcome to the February edition of The Hinge Poem, a regular feature inviting readers throughout the Triangle (and beyond) to read and discuss a single poem by a leading local author–and to talk directly with the poet him- or herself.
This month we’re featuring Chris Vitiello’s “Lunar eclipse poem, winter solstice 2010.” To get started on the conversation, scroll down, read the poem, and then post your questions, answers and observations in the comment section (if you’re on the home page, you’ll first need to click on “Leave a comment” below or the headline above.) Read what others have written, engage, discuss–just be respectful. It’s fine to disagree, but we’ll delete ad hominem attacks and insulting language.
Most importantly, remember to come back on Saturday, February 4, from 3:00-5:00 p.m., when Chris Vitiello will be joining us for a live chat on this post.
LUNAR ECLIPSE POEM, WINTER SOLSTICE 2010
One witnesses an event, and later describes it to others
At maximum occlusion, the lunar eclipse looked like the gummed, vestigial eye of a cave fish
Interrogation presumes the suspect’s guilt
At maximum occlusion, the lunar eclipse looked like the unshiny, scrimmed eye of a red snapper stacked on crushed ice at market
Steve Reich was going for the middle ground between mathematics and literature
At maximum occlusion, the lunar eclipse looked like a magic marker circle, smudged as the hand that drew it moved across to draw something else
At maximum occlusion, the lunar eclipse looked like the stained paper towels beneath a colander of washed cherries
One needs not describe a quantity
Merce Cunningham said “The eye tries to recognize what it already knows”
A solar eclipse is spectacular; a lunar eclipse, technical
One’s mind does not by default seek relief from repetition
Reich’s music describes nothing; John Cage’s establishes a negative capability for description
3 is 3 regardless of what it counts
One is inclined to believe a quantitative statement over a qualitative one
A confession is the only possible end result of an interrogation
The original word for an irrational number—surd—meant “mute,” as equational notation did not yet exist, so such numbers could not be expressed
Sound requires a medium but light does not
Barred owls open conversation with couplets of “who cooks for you?” but then carry on to chaotic monkey cackles and howls
An interrogator should stand between the seated suspect and the room’s overhead light source
For hundreds of years, algebra developed textually, a form called “rhetorical algebra”
The Voyager spacecraft exited the heliosheath into the heliopause
In some contexts, 3 might be nearly 4, and in another context essentially 0
Emily Dickinson wrote “Eclipses suns imply”
In rounding, one can be said to look past a number
Fish do not fall
About the Author: Chris Vitiello is a freelance arts, performance, and hockey writer in Durham. He received an MFA from the Naropa Institute in 1994. Books include Nouns Swarm a Verb (Xurban, 1999), Irresponsibility (Ahsahta, 2008), and Obedience (Ahsahta, forthcoming 2012). He is concerned with, among other things: clarification, light, stars, the sky, clouds, wind, trees, birds, deduction, eyes, leaves, people and their observable behaviors, grasses, the soil, flowers and their growth, description and representation, vegetables, skins and peels, seeds, nuts, cross-sections, dictionary definitions, synonyms and antonyms but especially synonyms, utility, analysis, skepticism, kindness, goodness, quantity, measurement, direct commands, questions, and fact statements.
The conversation starts below. And once again, remember to come back on Saturday, February 4, from 3:00-5:00 p.m., when Chris Vitiello will be joining us for a live chat on this post.
Welcome to the latest edition of The Hinge Story, this time for Short Story Month! We’ve been very happy with both the reader response to both poetry and fiction, and to the writers who’ve been kind enough to contribute.
