Tag / Story Week

by Michael

Story Week at Columbia College, pt 2

Story WeekLast week I went to a few sessions at Columbia College’s festival for writers.  It was another generous time at what they called one of the largest free conferences for folks interested in writing and publishing.  Sadly, like good gatherings, it ended.

The last session I went to consisted of a panel–including two publishers, one editor, and two agents.  They talked for an hour about submissions, traditional and self-publishing, marketing, and voice.  They said a lot.  I wasn’t trying to write their comments or answers to questions, as much as I was taking them in.  Here are a few quotes were worth capturing from the panel:

There’s no threat of books and stories going away.  None.

…how it’s going to end up, I’m not too sure.

Publishing is the intersection between art and commerce.

No one place is central to the conversation.

There’s a really bright future.  For every book.

There were certainly less inspiring words.  But I’ll keep these and revisit them.  Perhaps you will too as you write, revise, and submit.

by Michael

Reading To You

We had been to the Harold Washington Library before, but you were too young remember.  So when we walked in from the State Street entrance, you looked around and your eyes trained up, especially when we walked into the round atrium that, as a space, feeds the soul.

We went to the children’s library, to get books and to read.  You pointed out the security, the police, like you always do, and the matronly officer who I wanted to call auntie spoke with a smile that you exchanged for one brighter than her own large grin.  You walked around pulling titles, saying “This one” and “That one, daddy.”  We sat on a multi-colored bench, the one like the old benches that you used to be in parks on the south side when I was a boy, before the city built shelters on corners, when churches like our family’s bought advertisements to tell people waiting on 95th or 87th or Halsted to come and worship.

After we read our first book, we went downstairs and thumbed through the four books we checked out because we would really read them later.  You were excellent in quieting down and listening to three authors read excerpts from their fiction, listening and only occasionally murmuring, as if each of them was pulling you next to them, lowering their voices, and, for a few minutes, reading to you.

At HWLC for Story Week

At HWLC for Story Week

by Michael

Story Week at Columbia College Chicago, pt 1

A room of generous people, lavish with their words, though precise, all of them attentive to turns of phrase, metaphors, and descriptions and dialogue and little slices of character as expressed in five to seven minutes of reading.  Students and teachers, each one accepting parts of the label emerging writer, gather and clap for their friends who stand behind the podium stammering and then flowing and for their professors who seem used to the space and the art and for that newly published novelist whose work is being read as if for the first time to a hungry audience of well-wishers.  Then there is Sapphire, the bold poet whose voice stood up in the written form of a novel she said people forgot they didn’t like, and who reminded me that writers could be activists or not but that all writers needed to be good, and who remembered some of the greats by going down a notable list of influences that read like a canon because it included folks like Richard Wright and Lucille Clifton and Sonia Sanchez.

Sapphire signing books

Sapphire signing books