Reading with Crowley, Meeropol, and Murray

Next Wednesday, February 1st, I’ll join John Crowley, Ellen Meeropol, and Sabina Murray for a reading at Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts. The reading starts at 7pm, and if you’re in the area, I hope you’ll come by. More information is available via the Forbes Library site.

Sabina Murray was a professor of mine in my grad school days, so I’m looking forward to reading with her. And I consider myself lucky to be living in an area where the “local novelist” category includes the likes of John Crowley. Fellow fans of Little, Big may appreciate this needlework sampler that Emily stitched for me a while back. Stitched? Needleworked? Sampled? She made it.

Odd Plots & Haunted Sentences

One thing I’m looking forward to this year is a class I’ll be teaching at the UMass MFA Program in the spring, Odd Plots & Haunted Sentences. For those who might be curious, here’s the reading list.

The Other City, Michal Ajvaz (translated by Gerald Turner)
Poem Strip, Dino Buzzati (translated by Marina Harss)
The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Ursula K. Le Guin
Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link
The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien
Motorman, David Ohle
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (selected and translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers)
The Weird, edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

The Weird isn’t out in the United States yet, so I’m asking my students to special order it from England. It really is that good.

The Board Game Based on Your Life

When they make the board game based on your life, what will the playing pieces look like? Will you roll dice to move around the board? Draw tiles? Play cards with pictures of your friends, your uncles, your pets on them?

Which areas of the board are safe, and which are dangerous? The room that was yours when you were a child. The room you couldn’t bear to step foot in. Maybe: a patch of grass somewhere. Maybe: grandmother’s porch. Maybe: aquarium field trip.

Will you keep score on a pad of paper? Collect sheets of paper money? Count tokens to represent jobs, road trips, arguments, books, loves, food, conversations, births? Mistakes, illnesses, sports events? Drugs, drinks, jogs, degrees? Paintings, sunsets, ceremonies, puppet shows?

How will the board game based on your life represent the board games you’ve played in your life? How long is the timer set for? Is it an hourglass or a ticking clock?

When they make the board game based on your life, they’ll thank you for being a playtester. You’ll get a complimentary copy in the mail. Will you leave it on the shelf with the others? Or will you unwrap it and set it up on the kitchen table, just to see if it looks any good?

Once you understand all the rules, will you play the board game based on your life? Who will be there to play it with you?

On Not Riding a Bicycle

I hadn’t run a mile since high school. Not all at once, anyway. Then I moved to a new town and started running around in it. This turns out to be a good way to get to know a place. Here there are potato fields, corn fields, soybean fields, and an old cemetery. You can run alongside them, and you can run along the tops of the dikes, and then run down to the river. Here’s what the path along the river looked like before the leaves fell off.

This Sunday, I’ll run a 5k. It’s for a good cause: I’m raising money to support Safe Passage, an organization in Northampton, Massachusetts, that provides support to women and children who have experienced domestic abuse. If you’d like to make a donation, you may do so right here.

Or maybe you’d like a running playlist? I just uploaded a sampling of what I’ve been listening to, and that’s available here.

A Little More Gorey

Last week, I went to Cape Cod to read from Cape Cod Noir with fellow contributors Dana Cameron, William Hastings, and David Ulin (who also edited the book). One of the readings was hosted by the Falmouth Public Library. There, I met Jill Erickson, a reference librarian who happens to have performed in several of the Edward Gorey theatrical entertainments which were the inspiration for my story in the anthology, “Twenty-Eight Scenes for Neglected Guests.”

Jill showed me her files on the plays, including Chinese Gossip, Stumbling Christmas, and Heads Will Roll. There were scripts (marked up with notes from the actors and from Gorey), newspaper clippings, and the original programs.

Oh, and the puppets. On her flickr page, Jill has photos of the puppets.