Category Archives: Editing

Editing, Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Public Appearances, Readings

New Pubs, Upcoming PG Readings, & More

It’s October now. Leaves are changing, the temperature is cooling, my wind chime is getting noisier. At the same time, there have been developments in my personal and professional life. Here are some updates from the latter:

New Pubs

I’m honored to have had not just one, not even two, but three pieces published in the October 2014 issue of Festival Writer. Check out the issue here and then click on my name to view all three of my contributions. These pieces tend to resist easy genre classification. This is how I would describe them:

“Baconer” is a prose poem (with formatting) about factory farming, from the perspective of a pig in a CAFO. Please note that this poem uses plenty of profanity and unpleasant imagery. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it, but I think it’s important to know what you’re getting into.

“First Beard” is a nonfiction vignette about my dad, and “Performance Review” is micro fiction. They are so short, I better not say anything else about them (Spoilers!) except that I hope you enjoy reading them.

Upcoming Prairie Gold Readings

As mentioned in a previous post, our Midwestern book tour of Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland will include two October events: one at the Rozz-Tox in Rock Island, Illinois, (Quad Cites area) on October 9 and one at Prairie Lights in Iowa City on October 16. Details:

Thursday, October 9, 2014 – SPECTRA Reading

8:00 pm – Rozz-Tox – Rock Island, Illinois

Our Quad Cities reading will feature fiction by T.C. Jones and Barbara Harroun as well as poetry by Esteban Colon, Salvatore Marici, and Ryan Collins. Part of the Midwest Writing Center’s SPECTRA Reading Series, the event will also include readings by featured poets Lauren Haldeman and Erin Keane. Check out the Facebook event page for more details.

Thursday, October 16, 2014 – Reading

7:00 pm – Prairie Lights – Iowa City, Iowa

Our Iowa City reading will feature nonfiction by Will Jennings and Meghan Brown, fiction by Barbara Harroun, and poetry by Salvatore Marici. Check out the event page for more details.

Video Debut

Since I switched from teaching English 150/250 at Iowa State University to my current position as a communications research assistant at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture (also at ISU), I have been involved in a lot of cool multimedia projects. My job includes writing news releases and articles, updating the Center’s website, managing our social media, publication design, and video production. That last piece is such new and exciting territory for me, and I’m thrilled to share the final version of “STRIPS the Movie” (not the official title), a 13-minute video on the conservation practice of prairie strips that was four months in the making. It premiered at the 2014 Extension Energy and Environment conference in Ames and was followed by a Q & A with the researchers. Now that the feature documentary is done, we are in the process of using the extra interview footage to make a series of video shorts that will, among other things, help introduce a broader audience to the STRIPS project.

Goodreads

Our Goodreads Giveaway is still going on. Five free copies of Prairie Gold are up for grabs! The contest closes October 31. Details here.

If you already own the book and are on Goodreads, please take a moment to add it to your shelf, which you can do here. It helps us out when, after reading the book, our fans take the time to rate it, review it, and vote for it on relevant lists. (Contributors: Goodreads recommends that authors write a brief note on the inspiration for the piece in lieu of a review.)

Also, as part of having a book out, I’ve converted my personal Goodreads page into an author profile. It’s the same as before but with a few extra features, like the ability to have “fans” in addition to friends. I only have two fans so far! If you are on Goodreads and a fan of my work, please visit my author profile to make it official. (Lance needs more fans too. Here’s his author profile.)

I have lots of other exciting news I’d love to share, but I’m going to keep my beak buttoned for just a little while longer until details are finalized. So that’s all for now. Thanks for reading!

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Editing, In the Media, Nonfiction

Writers’ Voices

First of all, I want to say thank you to Monica Hadley and Caroline Kilbourn at 100.1 FM, KRUU-LP in Fairfield, Iowa, for having Lance and me on the show this past Friday. It was both of our first time on talk radio, and we had a lot of fun talking about Prairie Gold with the mother/daughter duo. Thanks also to Monica for mentioning us on her blog.

If you missed the live broadcast, which also included me reading an excerpt from my nonfiction essay “Letters After Achilles,” they’ll be re-airing it Monday (tomorrow) morning at 8:00 CST. You can listen live on their website.

If that’s just not going to work for you (because you’ll be at work, say, and you’re a responsible employee who stays on task), they’ll be archiving it on Writers’ Voices, so check back there at a later date.

I do want to take the opportunity to make a couple minor corrections to my bio, which has changed since the final draft of Prairie Gold was sent to the printers. While I very much enjoyed my two years as an undergraduate English instructor at ISU, as of May 2014 I’ve (temporarily) hung up my teaching hat and have been trying my hand in a new field: multimedia communications. As the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture‘s communications assistant, I write news releases and feature stories, manage their social media, post updates on their website, design publications like their quarterly newsletter, and other fun stuff like helping produce a video for STRIPS, a cutting edge sustainable agriculture practice.

Likewise, I am no longer the nonfiction or social media editor for Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment. In order to give all of ISU’s Creative Writing and Environment graduate students the opportunity to serve on the editorial staff, Flyway positions are one-year appointments. I want to make sure credit for all of the wonderful work Flyway is currently doing goes to the right people: Adam Wright is now the nonfiction editor, and Erin Schmiel has taken over social media.

Of course, you can always find the most up-to-date information about what I’m up to on my Bio/Home page.

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Editing, Musings

Let’s Talk Books

I grew up in Western Michigan, the youngest of three daughters. We didn’t have a lot of money for extras, but my mom could never say no if my sisters or I asked her to buy a book. “Do you need it?” she would always ask, and when we said yes, she never tried to tell us otherwise.

In the past 25-ish years since I learned to read, a lot of things have changed, but the way I feel about books—the way I need books—hasn’t. I’m not just referring to stories and the pleasures of reading but the books themselves, the physical artifacts that contain the stories and endure long after you’ve forgotten what they were about.

And though I have always had a great appreciation for libraries and used bookstores, there is something extra special about a brand new book: the unscuffed cover, the cleanness of the pages, the spine that I will try to keep uncracked for as long as possible. Inevitably, there comes a time with every good book that I realize I need to mutilate it—by folding the corner of a page, writing a note to myself, or underlining a memorable passage—and though I recognize the value of such interactions with the text, especially as a writer, I do not take the decision to first desecrate a book lightly.

Read the rest of “To Make a Book” on the Ice Cube Press blog.

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Editing, Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry

Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland

books

The first box. (June 10, 2014)

I couldn’t be more proud of Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland, which I had the pleasure of co-editing along with with Lance Sacknoff and Xavier Cavazos. The multi-genre collection from 67 different authors illustrates just as many different perspectives on the Midwest, including my own epistolary essay “Letters after Achilles.”

I am so grateful to Jamie Campbell, who designed the beautiful cover; to Dean Bakopoulos, Debra Marquart, and Mary Swander for writing the introductions to our fiction, nonfiction, and poetry sections, respectively; and to the many others who helped in this incredibly collaborative project.

Prairie Gold is now available through the publisher that made all of this possible, Ice Cube Press. Get yours online or ask your local bookstore to place an order.

book signing

Signing books with Lance Sacknoff. (June 13, 2014)

 

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Editing, Web Roves

Web Rove on “Love Affairs, Tiny Windows, and Hand Grenades”

“A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage.” —Lorrie Moore

“Short stories are tiny windows into other worlds and other minds and other dreams. They are journeys you can make to the far side of the universe and still be back in time for dinner.” —Neil Gaiman

“Short fiction seems more targeted—hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them.” —Paolo Bacigalupi

May is National Short Story Month, a time to embrace love affairs, peer through tiny windows, and catch hand grenades of ideas. I’ve selected a few stories to get your literary celebration started. From a longer short story broken up into subtitled sections, to a flash fiction piece of just a single paragraph without a stitch of dialogue, to a story written entirely through dialogue, these three stories illustrate some of the wonderfully various forms short fiction can take.

Check out my picks in the complete web rove, “Love Affairs, Tiny Windows, and Hand Grenades,” at Flight Patterns, the Flyway blog.

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Book Reviews, Editing

Book Review on Bryson’s “One Summer”

Bryson

Me and Bill (October 28, 2013)

Last fall, Bill Bryson visited Ames, Iowa, for a reading. As a nonfiction writer, this was a dream come true. If nonfiction writing was baseball, Bill Bryson would be Babe Ruth. As far as I’m concerned, Bryson is a living legend. I contained my over-enthusiasm about meeting him long enough to lob him a question in the Q&A session and to have him sign my copy of his latest book, One Summer: America, 1927. At the time, I hadn’t actually read the book yet–it’s over 500 pages, and I’m in graduate school–but this winter, I finally sat down with One Summer, and I hardly came up for air until that “one hell of a summer” had ended.

In short, it was fantastic. For the long version, check my book review for Flight Patterns, the Flyway blog.

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Editing, Web Roves

Web Rove on “A Flighty Future”

Inspired by the visual art of Sarah Hatton, I roved the web looking for great writing about bees. But once I stumbled upon Adam Johnson’s “Nirvana,” I had to expand my focus to include domestic drones as well. (The connection? Hager’s short story “Droning.” Tenuous, maybe, but punny enough.)

Check out the links and what I had to say about the pieces in my latest web rove, “A Flighty Future: Bees and Domestic Drones,” at Flight Patterns, the Flyway blog.

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