GalleyCrush: World of Wonders
Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders, forthcoming from Milkweed Editions on August 11, 2020.
Genre: Creative Nonfiction
Fitting Together
In the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, Cathy Park Hong discusses the writing process for her first nonfiction book, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World, 2020), in an interview by Dana Isokawa. Hong talks about patching together “scenes, personal anecdotes, analyses of books, vents about things” and how this eventually developed into a form. “I began mixing and matching these paragraphs the way you would put together stanzas for a poem, and that’s how I arrived at a modular form.” Write a personal essay that revolves around an important belief, opinion, or question. Begin accumulating different paragraphs that contribute to your argument, and then collage them together, perhaps using other texts and facts from research. What’s your organizing principle in providing shape to this structure?
Poets & Writers COVID-19 Relief Fund Open for Applications
Poets & Writers’ Board of Directors has established the Poets & Writers COVID-19 Relief Fund to provide emergency assistance to writers experiencing financial need due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The fund will provide grants of $1,000 each to approximately eighty writers in April. As funding allows, a second round of grants may be awarded.
Writers who are listed in the Poets & Writers Directory as of April 10, 2020; who have received a mini-grant through the Poets & Writers Readings & Workshops program; or who have received the organization’s Amy Award, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award, the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award, or the Galen Williams Fellowship are eligible.
Submit an online application, consisting of a brief set of questions about eligibility and financial need, by Sunday, April 19. Visit the website for complete guidelines. Contact relief@pw.org with any questions. The initial cohort of applicants will be notified of the status of their application by the end of April.
Poets & Writers seeded the fund with $50,000 from the organization’s reserves; donors including Zibby Owens and Michael Pietsch have provided additional support. The emergency fund is an extension of an overarching mission to foster the professional development of poets and writers, to promote communication throughout the literary community, and to help create an environment in which literature can be appreciated by the widest possible public.
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Hoppy Hour With Samantha Irby
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“Years ago, right after I moved into my last apartment in Chicago, the one I expected to die alone in to the soundtrack of an NCIS marathon, I thought I had a ghost.” In this Loft Literary Center video, one of their recent online events from their annual Wordplay festival (held entirely virtually this year through May 9) features a reading by Samantha Irby from her fourth essay collection, Wow, No Thank You (Vintage, 2020), backdropped with video footage of rabbits.
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What I See
“Doctor, you say there are no haloes / around the streetlights in Paris / and what I see is an aberration...” In the Paris Review’s “Poets on Couches” video series, Maya C. Popa reads Lisel Mueller’s “Monet Refuses the Operation” and speaks about how the poem brings her comfort. In the poem, Mueller imagines a conversation between a doctor and the painter Monet, who pushes back against having surgery to correct his cataracts, which may just be the source of his artistic vision. Write an essay where you express your unique vision of the world. Was there a moment in your life when you had to fight to be true to yourself?
Greenidge Sisters
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In this Open Studio With Jared Bowen interview, playwright Kirsten Greenidge; Kerri Greenidge, historian and author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (Liveright, 2019); and Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books, 2016) talk about growing up together as sisters and how their work often overlaps.
Minor Feelings
Happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, and surprise have been named by twentieth-century psychologists as our basic human emotions, but what about other types of feelings? In her first essay collection, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, published in February by One World, Cathy Park Hong writes that “minor feelings occur when American optimism is enforced upon you, which contradicts your own racialized reality, thereby creating a static of cognitive dissonance.” Hong writes that minor feelings are related to cultural theorist Sianne Ngai’s idea of ugly feelings, which are “non-cathartic states of emotion.” Think about a time when you have felt cognitive dissonance with the state of current events or between your personal reality and how the larger world perceives you. Write a personal essay that explores the experience of minor feelings, such as boredom or irritation or envy, that lead to no cathartic outlet or breakthrough. What do you find when you trace these feelings to larger sociocultural or historical forces?
The Written Image: Bernadette Mayer’s Memory
Siglio Press has released a book on poet Bernadette Mayer’s project Memory, in which she wrote and took photos every day during July 1971, creating a lyrical testament to a moment in a life, intimately conjured yet still inevitably out of reach.
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The Houses on My Block: Arte Público Press
It gives me great pleasure to highlight the many aspects of the literary world that exist here in the Houston area through this blog. I feel it is important to keep this work going, especially now during this global crisis, to provide a sense of community as well as a little break from the news.
Starting this month, I’ll be writing about some of the publishing houses here in Houston, including Arte Público Press. Founded in 1979 by Nicolas Kanellos, Arte Público Press is the largest and most established publisher of Latino literature in the United States. Housed at the University of Houston, where Kanellos is a professor of Hispanic Studies, the press has helped launch the careers of notable authors like Sandra Cisneros, whose debut novel, The House on Mango Street, was published by the press; Miguel Piñero, who cofounded the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City; and Obie Award–winning playwright Luis Valdez.
The press also launched the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Program to catalog lost Latinx writings from the American colonial period through 1960. They then branched out into bilingual books for children and young adults with their imprint Piñata Books.
Arte Público Press continues their mission to bring Hispanic literature to more audiences through their programs and books. They publish thirty books a year, so if you got the time, take a look at their massive catalog and consider ordering some of these wonderful books (including the recent release of Richard Z. Santos’s debut novel). Trust me, it’ll be worth your while.
Lupe Mendez is the literary outreach coordinator for Poets & Writers in Houston. Contact him at Houston@pw.org or on Twitter, @houstonpworg.Carnegie Fund for Authors Open for Applications
To help writers impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, we will be highlighting emergency funds available to writers. For more sources of support, read our running list of resources for writers in the time of coronavirus.
The Carnegie Fund for Authors assists published fiction and nonfiction writers who are experiencing “pressing and substantial pecuniary need.” Applications are accepted from “American authors who have published at least one full-length work” of fiction or nonfiction with a mainstream publisher.
The fund typically disburses grants to writers seeking support due to “illness or injury to self, spouse, or dependent child,” but also provides assistance to writers experiencing “some other misfortune” due to an emergency such as fire, flood, or hurricane.
Prospective applicants must first provide their name, address, and e-mail in order to register for an account on the Carnegie Fund for Authors website. After the account has been approved by an administrator, writers may use the online application system or download an application to be submitted by mail. Applications must include documentation of the writer’s emergency situation, such as a letter from a doctor. Additional documentation may be required. Visit the website for complete eligibility requirements and application guidelines.
The Carnegie Fund for Authors grew out of an organization called the Authors Club, a community of literary luminaries founded in New York City in 1882, which kept aside funds for members experiencing financial distress. Over the years, Andrew Carnegie made significant donations to the club, which led the organization to establish a separate fund, the Carnegie Fund of the Author Club. By 1942, the Carnegie Fund for Authors had become its own entity and continued in its mission to serve authors in need.
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