Mike Young

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Soda Series #10 this Wednesday at 7pm in Brooklyn

The Soda Series is having our 10th reading Wednesday at the Soda Bar in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn at 7pm. What makes our series unique is that it is a reading and conversation. First short readings and then a 30-40 minute conversation between the writers and the audience. This time we have Roberta Allen, Robin Grearson, John Haskell, and Kirsten Kaschock.  Facebook RSVP

Also, on January 24th  Bradford Morrow, Brian Evenson, and Susan Daitch will be reading. After that the series will be going to four times a year.

Here is a complete list of our past readers: Christine Schutt, Gary Lutz, John Domini, Claire Donato, Mary Caponegro, Tim Horvath, Nick Ripatrazone, Robin Beth Schaer, Brenda Shaughnessy, Anthony Tognazzini, Paula Bomer, Sasha Fletcher, Amy King, Eugene Lim, Matt Bell, John Madera, Jeff Parker, Amber Sparks, Dawn Raffel, David Peak, Ana Božičević, Edward Mullany, Janice Shapiro, Michael Leong, Mike Young, Steve Himmer, Joseph Riippi, Mairéad Byrne, Daniel Groves, Stephanie Barber, Andy Devine, Adam Robinson, Vincent Czyz, Melissa Broder, Stever Himmer, and Josef Horáček.

A very big thank you to all of these past readers and the future ones. You have made and will continue to make the Soda Series a spectacular event!

Kirsten Kaschock makes poems, novels, dances, sometimes people. Her novel Sleight has just been released by Coffee House Press. Her second book of poetry, A Beautiful Name for a Girl, is available from Ahsahta Press. She lives in Philly with three proto-men and their father.
John Haskell is the author of American Purgatorio, I Am Not Jackson Pollock, and Out of My Skin. A contributor to the radio program The Next Big Thing, he lives in Brooklyn.
Robin Grearson is a nonfiction writer who relocated to Brooklyn from Los Angeles last year. When she arrived in New York, she sought to collaborate with visual artists in an effort to expand her writing practice. This interest in art and artists has led to her curating art shows and teaching; she leads a writing workshop for artists at 3rd Ward. Her writing has appeared in print in The New York Times and The Brooklyn Rail, and online in various publications. She is currently working on a memoir.
Roberta Allen is the author of eight books, including Certain People, short shorts, published by Coffee House Press. Her two collections were both praised by The New York Times Book Review. She has been a Tennessee Williams Fellow In Fiction. Her popular writing guide in the 1990s, FAST FICTION, was the first to teach flash fiction. A visual/conceptual artist as well, she has exhibited worldwide and has work in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She taught at The New School for eighteen years and has taught in the writing program at Columbia University. She continues to teach private workshops. Recently, she completed a new story collection called The Princess Of Herself. Her 2000 novel, The Dreaming Girl, has just been republished by Ellipsis Press.
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Welcome to The Lit Pub . . .

Before I say anything else, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Chris Newgent for all of the time and energy he has put into our efforts to bring you the next nine words: WELCOME TO THE OFFICIAL LAUNCH OF THE LIT PUB! I’d like to also thank Matt Bell for his excellent advice during the early planning stages, and I especially need to thank my parents, without whose emotional and financial support this would never have been possible. A big round of applause for the guys and gal at Fuzzco, who helped make our website everything I hoped it could be. Many special words of gratitude to Lidia Yuknavitch, for believing in us before we even knew what we really were. And thank you also to Ethel Rohan, Mike Young, and Ofelia Hunt. Of course, gigantic hugs for the entire crew at TLP for all of their hard work and much-needed emotional support during these last few months (Mike Bushnell, thank you for listening, I am so grateful for your energy; Erika Moya, what would I do without you, seriously, my birthday twin!; Elizabeth Taddonio, you are going to manage the hell out of our community, I know it; Kristina Born, Mark Cugini, David Blomenberg, Nicelle Davis, Jacqueline Kari, Corey Beasley, Jordan Blum, M. M. Wittle, and Dave Kiefaber, I thank you for your belief in this; Richard Nash, Adam Robinson, Kevin Sampsell, Dan Wickett, Zach Dodson, and Michael Griffith, let me tell you how grateful I am for your guidance along the way). And thank you again and again and forever to my parents, who are really the unseen heros behind everything that we have accomplished thus far. Without them, I mean it, this would still be just an idea.

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Soda Series #6 Sunday 7pm – Brooklyn, NY

Reading and conversation with:

Vincent Czyz is the author of the short story collection Adrift in a Vanishing City, to which Paul West devoted a chapter of Master Class. He received two fellowships from the NJ Council on the Arts and won the Faulkner Prize for Short Fiction. His stories have appeared in Shenandoah, AGNI, Louisiana Literature, the Double Dealer Redux, and the Massachusetts Review, which nominated his work for a Pushcart Prize. One his stories was translated into Turkish for an anthology published in Turkey in 2010.

Michael Leong’s poetry career began in the sixth grade when he won his first and only poetry prize in Mr. Harrison’s class for a haiku about a snake. Since then, he has received degrees in English and Creative Writing from Dartmouth College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Rutgers University and has published poems in journals such as Bird Dog, jubilat, Marginalia, Opium Magazine, Pindeldyboz, and Tin House. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, e.s.p. (Silenced Press, 2009) and Cutting Time with a Knife (Black Square Editions / The Brooklyn Rail, forthcoming), as well as a translation of the Chilean poet Estela Lamat, I, the Worst of All (BlazeVOX [books], 2009). He currently lives in New York City.

Janice Shapiro studied film at UCLA where she won first prize in The Samuel Goldwyn Screenwriting Competition. The short films she directed were screened widely at film festivals around the world and she was a recipient of an AFI Filmmakers’ Grant. She has written scripts for numerous studios and independent producers including the cult film, Dead Beat that she co-wrote with her husband, Adam Dubov. Janice’s short stories have been published in The North American Review, and The Santa Monica Review. A graphic piece that she wrote was part of the anthology, What Were We Thinking? published by St. Martin’s press. Another graphic piece appeared in The Seattle Review. Bummer and Other Stories is her first book. She is currently working on a second collection of short stories, a collection of food essays entitled, Eat Like Me, and a graphic memoir, Crushable – My Life In Crushes From Ricky Nelson to Viggo Mortensen. Janice lives in Brooklyn with her husband, son and dog.

Mike Young is the author of WE ARE ALL GOOD IF THEY TRY HARD ENOUGH (Publishing Genius Press September 2010), LOOK! LOOK! FEATHERS (Word Riot Press December 2010), and the chapbook MC OROVILLE’S ANSWERING MACHINE (Transmission Press 2009). He co-edits NOÖ Journal and Magic Helicopter Press. He lives in Northampton, MA.

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Soda Series #5 Sunday 7pm in Brooklyn

Our fifth reading and conversation is Sunday with Nick Ripatrazone, Robin Beth Schaer, Brenda Shaughnessy and Anthony Tognazzini. You can RSVP here.

Our sixth will be on March 20th with Michael Leong, Mike Young, Dylan Landis, and Janice Shapiro.

Upcoming readers include Steve Himmer, Joseph Riipi, Tim Horvath and Gary Lutz.

Nick Ripatrazone is the author of Oblations (Gold Wake Press 2011), a book of prose poems. His work has appeared in Esquire, The Kenyon Review, West Branch, The Mississippi Review, Sou’wester, The Collagist and Beloit Fiction Journal. He will graduate from the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark in May.

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Robin Beth Schaer’s poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Denver Quarterly, Washington Square, Tin House, and
Prairie Schooner, among others. She has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation. She teaches at Marymount Manhattan College and works as a deckhand aboard the Tall Ship Bounty.

Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, in 1970 and grew up in Southern California. She received her B.A. in literature and women’s studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she earned an M.F.A. at Columbia University. She is the author of Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), which was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Bomb, Boston Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.

Anthony Tognazzini’s work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Sentence, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Quarterly West, the Hat, and the Alaska Quarterly Review, among other journals. His collection, I Carry A Hammer in My Pocket for Occasions Such As These, is available from BOA Editions. He lives in Brooklyn.


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A Sentence About a Sentence I Love: An Anthology, of Sorts

A few months ago, in April, to be exact, I started a series of posts entitled “A Sentence About a Sentence I Love” with a sentence about one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s magnificent sentences. This concentration, or, rather, this obsession with the sentence may have come from my, at the time, recent readings of William Gass’s essays wherein he concentrates much of his attention on the sentence as a primary building block in poetry and prose. Essays by Gass like “The Soul Inside the Sentence,” “The Sentence Seeks Its Form,” “The Architecture of the Sentence,” take as their focus the centrality of the sentence toward the construction of thought, and particularly of thoughts within the parameters of fiction. In “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction,” Gass claims that sentences are “the most elementary instances of what the author has constructed….a moving unity of fact and feeling.” Moreover, sentences

must be sounded, too; it has a rhythm, speed, a tone, a flow, a pattern, shape, length, pitch, conceptual direction. The sentence confers reality upon certain relations, but it also controls our estimation, apprehension, and response to them. Every sentence, in short, takes metaphysical dictation, and it is the sum of these dictations, involving the whole range of the work in which the sentences appear, which accounts for its philosophical quality, and the form of life in the thing that has been made (Fiction and the Figures of Life, 14).

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Guest Post, by Mike Young: A Sentence About a Sentence I Love


“Suttree could hear the wheels shucking along the rails and he could feel the ground shudder and he could hear the tone of the trucks shift at the crossing and the huffing breath of the boiler and the rattle and clank and wheelclick and couplingclacking and then the last long shunting on the downgrade drawing on toward the distance and the low moan bawling across the sleeping land and fading and the caboose clicking away to final silence.”
–From Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree.

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Seth Landman’s Invisible Ear

Do you know Seth Landman? If not, you should. I had the pleasure of meeting him a few weeks ago in Denver, thanks to Mike Young. (Do you know Mike Young? If not, you should.) There were burgers, there were pints and $3.00 martinis, and there was a vacuum. And, later, there was a trade. I gave Seth a copy of We Take Me Apart, and he gave me lovely looking copies of the poetry journal he edits, Invisible Ear (Issues 2, 3, and 4), which look like little chapbooks, each with a unique cover, and each printed in limited editions.

Issue 2’s contents looks like this:

Marie Buck, Jessica Fjeld, Brad Flis, Lawrence Giffin, Rachel B. Glaser, Ben Kopel, Lily Ladewig, Emily Pettit, Alex Phillips, Jono Tosch.

Issue 3’s contents looks like this:

Brian Baldi, Ezekiel Black, Jack Christian, Ari Feld, Lewis Freedman, Anjali Khosla Mullany, Mark Leidner, Edward Mullany, Emily Toder, Lesley Yalen.

And Issue 4’s contents looks like this:

David Bartone & Jeff Downey, Eric Baus, Luke Bloomfield, Francesca Chabrier, Phil Cordelli, Loren Goodman, Kim Hagerich, Hailey Higdon, Brian Mihok, Michelle Taransky.

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