Life and Literature after 9/11

Minneapolis Granta Launch
The Loft Literary Center
Thursday, September 8, 2011

In a startling move toward intimacy, the lights are dimmed in the Loft’s auditorium. Fourteen or fifteen chairs are brought up to the front of the room. MPR reporter Marianne Combs folds her hands and looks over her notes—a legal pad with script running edge to edge. Granta Magazine, she is saying, has the reputation of being one of the premier literary magazines not only in this country but in the world. It’s from Combs that we—the audience—learn that writers such as Bill Bryson, Zadie Smith, and Arundhati Roy have landed their debut pieces in Granta, which only highlights the magazine’s ability to seek out spectacular new talent. They call themselves “the quarterly magazine,” the assertiveness of which—let’s call it assertiveness—is more charming than it is malevolent.

The Search for the Literary Mecca

What bookish type hasn’t had a fleeting fancy of moving to New York? The so-called Book Capital of the World, the city is legendary for its literary history. In today’s New York, scores of writers are taking root in Brooklyn, driven out of Manhattan by high rent and commercialization. Brooklyn—they say it’s the new Mecca for writers, a place where book stores thrive, where—unless you’re capable of tearing the fabric of space-time—you literally cannot attend every reading. It sounds delightful.

It’s because of this reputation that the mention of bookish New York has always struck a chord with the rest of the country, whether it be a chord of inspiration or a chord of aggravation. Not everyone wants to move to New York. Why, we wonder, should New York get all the glory? Sure it’s the locus of almost every major publisher and literary agent. Sure it’s where the majority of our nation’s top writers live. But is there really something intrinsic about New York that instills within writers some kind of literary spirit?

Tom Lutz of the Los Angeles Review of Books doesn’t think so.

An Unintentional Career in Retail

Upcoming Event:
Caitlin Kelly Reads from her memoir, Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail
Magers & Quinn
Thursday, August 11, 7:30 p.m.

Although it would certainly take all the frustration out of life if you really did grow up to be a firefighter or an astronaut or a dragon, it would also suck the surprise out of every moment. New York based author Caitlin Kelly was surprised, when the recession hit, to find herself making the unintentional and very unwanted switch from journalism to retail. After losing her job as a reporter for the New York Daily News, Kelly worked for 27 months at The North Face at an upscale mall in White Plains, NY. It was that surprise, however, that led to the crafting of a memoir. Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail is Kelly’s account of what it means to make $11/hr at the age of 50—her first low wage job since high school—as well as an examination of the recession’s effect on the third largest industry in the United States, which is of course its largest source of new and less than desirable jobs. Kelly draws from her own experience as well as that of her peers to show us just how nightmarish the retail life can be. Entertainment Weekly called it “an excellent memoir” while USA Today declared Kelly “a first rate researcher and storyteller.”

Kelly will be reading from her memoir at Magers & Quinn on Thursday, August 11, at 7:30 p.m. MCB was able to get in touch with her and ask a few questions.

Because Literary Diversity is What We Live For

The Twin Cities GLBTQ Writer’s Group
Meeting every first Monday at 7:00 p.m.
The Loft Literary Center
Third Floor Book Club Room

MCB has already established two facts about the Twin Cities:
• We’re home to an extraordinarily supportive network of writers and bookish types
• We happen to have one of the strongest queer literary scenes in the country

Today, MCB will solder together those two facts into one new fact: the Twin Cities GLBTQ Writer’s Group is there for you, you being a writer and you being some shade of queer¹.

Breaking Down those Complicated Relationships

The MN Publishing Tweet Up
Wednesday, July 20
Clubhouse Jäger

The focus, lately, has been community. Though really, when it comes to writers and the book-minded, does the subject ever stray from community? Again, as isolated as we are in our profession and our practices, we’re still very social creatures. We learned that with the talented Hazel and Wren. Today we are going to learn about another extension of the Twin Cities literary community: The MN Publishing Tweet Up.

MCB would like to say that it takes place on x Wednesday of the month, or every x weeks, but unfortunately this wonderful opportunity is still flicking its moistened wings to test out the weather. Regardless, the MN Publishing Tweet Up is a wonderful opportunity, and not only for writers, but for editors, publishers, agents, and just about everyone else who lives and dies by the book¹.

A Book Lover’s Anxiety

One never wants to begin with a cliché. Surely, when we say that ignorance is bliss, our first authorial instinct is to cross it out and think of another way to say it. That’s what a writer would do, in fact. If there’s anything we learn from books it’s to recognize what has been said before. But that’s the darling thing about clichés: they carry more connotations that your average sentence, baggage hidden within each reader. Ignorance is bliss, when you think about it.

Most of us read the news. It doesn’t matter where we get it, as long as it’s news, even though when we say news what we really mean is updates. Here’s what’s changed about this war, here’s what hasn’t, here’s what you’re paying at the gas pump and here’s why, here’s what might lead to a new war, here’s why we’re too nihilistic to take war seriously these days.

One’s tempted to say we’d be better off not reading the news.

Nothing Trumps the Sentence

For those of us who consider ourselves writers, there’s nothing more elementary or atomic to what we do than the sentence. Of course a sentence can be broken into words, but we don’t create the words. We only arrange them. This is what Ryan Block, a visiting writer from the Chicago area, would like to illustrate in a six hour lecture at the Loft this weekend. For writers, this is an opportunity to delve deep into the most important facet of what we do. Everything flows from the sentence.