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<div align="left">Marginalia - March 2010</div>
Marginalia

Upcoming Events

March 10
Poet Bob Hicok
Public Craft Q&A, 1:30 p.m.
Piper Writers House
ASU Tempe Campus

March 11
Poet Bob Hicok
Public Reading, 7:30 p.m.
Pima Auditorium (Room 230)
Memorial Union
ASU Tempe Campus

March 25
Author Charles D'Ambrosio
Public Craft Q&A, 2 p.m.
Piper Writers House
ASU Tempe Campus
Public Reading, 7:30 p.m.
Pima Auditorium (Room 230)
Memorial Union
ASU Tempe Campus

April 20
Poet Franz Wright
Public Reading, 7:30 p.m.
Pima Auditorium (Room 230)
Memorial Union
ASU Tempe Campus

April 21
Poet Franz Wright
Public Craft Q&A, 11 a.m.
Piper Writers House
ASU Tempe Campus

ALL EVENTS


Piper Online Book Club


March Selection
The Dead Fish Museum

by Charles D'Ambrosio

Each of these eight burnished, terrifying, masterfully crafted stories is set against a landscape that is both deeply American and unmistakably universal. Taking place in remote cabins, asylums, Indian reservations, and the streets of Seattle, this collection of stories, as muscular and challenging as the best novels, is about people who have been orphaned, who have lost connection, and who have exhausted the ability to generate meaning in their lives. Yet in the midst of lacerating difficulty, the sensibility at work in these fictions boldly insists on the enduring power of love.


Comments? Questions? Suggestions?

Let us know what you think about the new online version of Marginalia. Send an email to editor Beth Staples.


Looking for Past Issues of Marginalia?

They are all on the Piper Center for Creative Writing website.


Piper Partners

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College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
300 E. University Dr
Tempe, AZ 85281
480-965-3391

Department of English

PO Box 870302
Tempe, AZ 85287-0302
480-965-3168

Creative Writing Program
LL 315C
480-965-3528

Young Writers Program

Office of Youth Preparation 502 E Monroe St
Suite C124
Phoenix, AZ 85004-4435
480-496-1393


March, 2010
Visiting Writers Series Continues with Bob Hicok and Charles D'Ambrosio

The spring Distinguished Visiting Writers Series continues this month with poet Bob Hicok and author Charles D'Ambrosio.

Hicok has a reputation for being the everyman poet: accessible, relevant, honest. Elizabeth Gaffney, for the New York Times Book Review, wrote: “His judicious eye imbues even the dreadful with beauty and meaning." You can see what she means in Hicok’s poem, “The menu,” from HFR #36:

Talk more of your mother’s last cigarette
curling the white smoke of popes
outside the hospital, of holding it to her lips,
how she passed you
the final drag, the filter wet, disgusting,
essential.

Hicok will join us March 10 and 11 to discuss and read his work, while D'Ambrosio, an award-winning and acclaimed short story writer, joins us for a Q&A and reading later this month.

First-year MFA fiction student Laura Ashworth will introduce him. “The first short story I read by Charles D’Ambrosio was ‘Screenwriter.’ It absolutely captivated me with descriptions like, ‘But her lips were lovely, the color of cold meat, and her eyes sunk deep in their sockets, were clear blue. When you looked into them you half-expected to see fish swimming around at the back of her head, shy ones.’ All of D’Ambrosio’s work encompasses unique descriptive elements that pull the reader into the rich, textured universe of his character’s lives.”

Visit the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series website for complete details about the Hicok and D'Ambrosio events, as well as the upcoming visit by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Franz Wright.

Limited Number of Signed Francine Prose Broadsides Available

Award-winning novelist Francine Prose found time during her busy residency last week to autograph a limited number of broadsides created by creative writing program manager Karla Elling. These beautiful broadsides are available to anyone contributing $100 or more to the Piper Center for Creative Writing.

Click HERE for more details and a photo of the broadside.

HFR's "Dredge" in Best American Mystery Stories 2010

Matt Bell’s having a pretty good year. Not only is his book, How They Were Found, forthcoming from Keyhole Press, but his fiction has also appeared in journals like Conjunctions, American Short Fiction, and Willow Springs. He is also the editor of The Collagist, an online literary journal that launched in August. And if that isn’t enough, his short story “Dredge,” which appeared in HFR #45, has just been selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2010. Editor Otto Penzler called it his favorite story of the year.

If you haven’t had the chance to read it yet, you can find it on the Hayden's Ferry Review website. Even better, you can subscribe to HFR to make sure we can continue to trumpet the work of amazing writers like Matt Bell.

Dwayne Betts Provides Hope, Inspiration for Students at Adobe Mountain School

On January 22 as part of the Distinguished Visiting Writers in the Schools Series, ASU’s Young Writers Program (YWP) went to Adobe Mountain High School to talk to a group of young men about A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison by Dwayne Betts in preparation for the author’s late February visit. The workshop was not like YWP’s usual creative writing residencies in Arizona’s 4th—12th grade classrooms. This one was in a juvenile correctional facility; a long-term, state-run lock-down residence in the desert.

Click HERE for a complete recap of the event.

Alumni Book Review


Lightning Forest, Lava Root
by Erica Maria Litz

Erica Maria Litz’s first collection traverses the small distance between origin and formation with an unhurried attentiveness. The boundaries between earth and being, body and dwelling, and rhythm and pulse blur in the poems of Lightning Forest, Lava Root.

(MORE)


Trivia Time

How many years transpired between Charles D’Ambrosio’s first collection, The Point, and The Dead Fish Museum?

The first person to email editor Beth Staples with the answer will receive a copy of our upcoming Piper Online Book Club selection, The Dead Fish Museum.


Hayden's Ferry Review


Issue #45 is available now. Click here for subscription information.


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