AQLF

The AQLF has announced its very exciting initial slate of authors to appear in October! This is truly a great group, and I am honored to be part of it. Click on the names for information about each writer:

Mark Doty
Kate Bornstein
Alex Sanchez
Daphne Gottlieb
Ed Madden
Kate Evans
Dan Vera

Keep an eye out on the AQLF blog and here for updates.

Sneak preview

We've worked hard over the past few months to create a great 2008-2009 season at the Center for Literary Arts...and now I can announce it:

Caille Millner, author of the memoir The Golden Road: Notes on My Gentrification, which takes place, in part, in San Jose. (Sept. 2008)

Ana Castillo, novelist and poet, whose most recent novel The Guardians is about life along the US/Mexico border. (Oct. 2008)

Four-time Tony Award-winner Terrence McNally, author of many great plays including Kiss of the Spider Woman and Love! Valour! Compassion! Our theater arts department will put on one of his plays to coincide with his visit. (Nov. 2008)

National Book Critics Circle-winning poet and memoirist Mark Doty, author of the best-selling memoirs Dog Years and the recently-released collection Fire to Fire. In one of his events, he will do an on-stage conversation with his partner, the writer Paul Lisicky, about being a literary couple. (Feb. 2009)

Fantastical short fiction writer and novelist Aimee Bender, who teaches at USC, author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. (March 2009)

Slam poet and novelist Thad Rutkowski. (April 2009)

Plus...one more major poet whose name I can't yet announce, but as soon as I can, I will.

O Life, O O

I just finished reading Dog Years by Mark Doty. I think he's an amazing writer--both as a poet and a memoirist. This book is about dogs. Love. Loss. Mortality. It touched me deeply. Loss, and how and why we go on, has been a central feature lately in my life and writing.

Here are two of my favorite passages from Doty's book:

"It's only human to mourn and to reach toward forwardness at once."

"Despair, then, isn't a place we leave--some kind of psychic location we pull into, look around, then pull out of again, relieved to not have to live there. It's more like a dimension of the self, which once opened, is part of us forever, a pole within, a spot of darkness, deeply magnetic. ... Without it, might we just float away, unable to feel the darkness and suffering of the world? The adult self requires balance; if we don't internalize some of the terrible gravity around us, then we might as well not have been here at all."

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That last Doty quote reminds me of these lines from Rilke's Duino Elegies (which I'm using as an epigraph to the book I'm working on now):

We wasters of sorrows!
How we stare away into sad endurance beyond them
trying to force their end! Whereas they are nothing else
than our winter foliage, our sombre evergreen, one of the seams
of our interior year—not only season—they’re also place,
settlement camp, soil, dwelling.

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And just to prevent this entry from dwelling only in the serious: Happy Global Orgasm Day!