Newsletter, Winter 2012

This is the FC2 Newsletter in which we tell you about our website, prizes, current releases, collective members, and more.

WWW.FC2.ORG

Please visit the FC2 website for a complete list of FC2 authors and titles, information regarding the mission and history of the Fiction Collective 2, and submission guidelines for the Sukenick and Doctorow Innovative Fiction prizes. News and author interviews are regularly posted to the FC2 Blog and promoted through Facebook; please “like” our the FC2 Facebook page if you have not done so already. Recent additions to the blog include an in-depth interview with Sara Greenslit, author of As If A Bird Flew By Me (FC2 2011), and a podcast with Jeffrey DeShell, author of Arthouse (FC2 2011). The blog also houses the archive of FC2 podcasts with authors such as Kate Bernheimer, Brian Evenson, Cris Mazza, Steve Tomasula, and Lidia Yuknavitch among others. New to the blog is the most recent installment of Fiction Correctives with Bayard Johnson. Fiction Correctives is a mini-interview series that presents Collective members’ musings on FC2’s mission, cherished backlist titles, and artistic innovation.

CURRENT RELEASES

Swim For The Little One First by Noy Holland
Rescuers Among Skydivers Search Among The Clouds by Patrick Lawler
Fat Girl, Terrestrial by Kellie Wells

FORTHCOMING TITLES, SPRING 2013

The Pet Thief by Kassten Alonso
They Dragged Them Through The Streets by Hilary Plum
Linda Perdido by Mac Wellman

PRIZES

The 2012 submission period for FC2’s Ronald Sukenick and Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prizes has closed. Judges Jeffrey DeShell and Rikki Ducornet will select the winning manuscripts. The winners will be announced in May of 2013.

The Sukenick Prize is currently in its sixth year of operation. Past winners include:
Mother Box by Sarah Blackman (2011)
Rescuers Of Skydivers Search Among The Clouds by Patrick J. Lawler (2010)
As If A Bird Flew By Me by Sara Greenslit (2009)
Museum Of The Weird by Amelia Gray (2008)
Beautiful Soon Enough by Margo Berdeshevsky (2007)

The Doctorow Prize is currently in its fourth year of operation. Past winners include:
Linda Perdido by Mac Wellman
Another Governess/The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych by Joanna Ruocco (2010)
Father Flashes by Tricia Bauer (2009)

COLLECTIVE MEMBER NEWS

Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art is currently on exhibit at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. The exhibit runs through February 3rd and features the work of over fifty artists and writers exploring the artistic possibilities of language. Presenting works from the 1960s to the present, the exhibition includes paintings, sculpture, installation, video and works on paper that raise questions about how we read, look at, hear, and process language today. Don’t miss the work by and inspired by FC2 authors Michael JoyceMark Amerika, and Vanessa Place.

George Angel, author of The Fifth Season (winner of the 1995 Nilon Award, FC2 1996), just returned to his home in Medellin, Colombia from Cadiz, Spain, where he was invited to speak on Theater of Crisis at the Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Cádiz. The second edition of his collection of plays in Spanish, Cómo Morir en un Solar Ajeno (Párpado Teatro, 2012), was published this past October.

There’s a wonderful conversation with Kate Bernheimer at The Pleistocene.

The app/novella, Brief by Alexandra Chasin, is out at iTunes for iPad with Jaded Ibis Press. Ebook and print versions will be available in 2013. Chasin’s “Composer & I,” a short narrative film co-adapted with Cathy Lee Crane, was shown at the Athens Film Festival and the New York Short Film Festival. Alexandra Chasin is the recent recipient of a fellowship in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She will be reading her work at KGB in New York, NY on January 6th and at DIRE in Cambridge, MA on February 1st.

Congratulations to Brian Conn who is the recipient of the 2013 Bard Fiction Prize. Conn will be Writer-in-Residence at Bard College during the spring 2013 semester.

Jeffrey DeShell talks with Rebecca Wolff in BOMB Magazine about his novel Arthouse (FC2 2011) and her novel The Beginners (Riverhead 2011).

An interview with Brian Evenson and FC2 webmaster Matthew Treon is posted at Weird Fiction Review.

Larry Fondation’s FC2 title, Angry Nights was published in French by Fayard. In the coming months, Fayard will publish another of Fondation’s books, titled Common Criminals.

Diane Glancy is currently a professor at Azusa Pacific University. Her recent collection of poems, It Was Then, was published in 2012 by Mammoth Publishers. This past October, Glancy received a Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Missouri.

Threats by Amelia Gray was long-listed for the University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize. Gray’s essay on Featherproof Books appears in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers. Her story “House Heart” is forthcoming in issue 54 of Tin House and her story “The Swan as Metaphor for Love” appears in Joyland.

Sara Greenslit describes herself as “falling off the writer wagon” after successfully placing a book and 12 poems last year. This year, she received her certification in veterinary acupuncture and is studying for a certification in veterinary Chinese herbal medicine. In addition to practicing veterinary medicine, Greenslit is collecting graffiti with her cell phone camera and shopping a recently finished manuscript that splices medical records to narrate the history of an illness.

Noy Holland’s collection, Swim For The Little One First, was just released from FC2. Holland also has a short story forthcoming in NOON. This past fall, she has participated in several readings. On Noveber 28th, Holland read at KGB with Diane Willams and Christine Schutt. On December 6th, she’ll read with Sam Michael at Franklin Park. On February 7th, Holland will read from her work at Temple University. You can read her story “Chupeta” at Web Conjunctions.

Bayard Johnson is doing the final edit on the book Indian Killers, which he and Russell Means were writing when Russell left to walk among the Ancestors.

Lynn Kilpatrick’s crown of sonnets prose poems, “To Be Unnamed,” will be exhibited with blind drawings by artist John Sproul at The Gallery at Library Square inside the Main Salt Lake City Library from May 4 to June 14, 2013

You can read Michael Martone’s story, Delaware Death Trip, at Cedars.

Lance Olsen will live and write at the American Academy in Berlin as the Mary Ellen van der Heyden Berlin Prize in Fiction Fellow from January through May 2013.

This March, the US publication of Kit Reed’s novel Son Of Destruction will coincide with the release of The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories from the Wesleyan University Press. Reviews of Son Of Destruction can be found in The Guardian and The Financial Times.

Melanie Rae Thon is the recipient of the Utah Book Award in fiction for In This Light: New & Selected Stories. Thon will read for City Arts at the Salt Lake City Library on December 6 (7pm) and at the University of Massachusetts on January 31st 2013. Her recent publications include the fusion photographs “Everything Is Good” and “Morning Light” inAltered Scale, “Music & Meaning” in Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Fiction, and the poems “The Good Samaritan Speaks” and “The Window” in Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion.” Her fiction titled “Instructions for Extinction” was recently reprinted in David Shield and Matthew Vollmer’s Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux Lectures, Quasi-Letters, ‘Found’ Texts, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts. Thon has additional work—fiction and interviews—forthcoming in Lumina and Fourteen Hills.

Diane Williams’s collection Vicky Swanky Is A Beauty was released last January by McSweeney’s; McSweeney’s is now publishing the collection as a paperback. Williams has stories forthcoming in Tin House and the London Review of Books. She read at KGB on November 28th with Christine Schutt and Noy Holland and will participate in another reading at KGB on January 27th (7pm) in celebration of the launch of Tin House’s winter issue.

Don’t forget to listen to Lidia Yuknavitch’s interview on Brad Listi’s Other People podcast. Yuknavitch’s Dora: A Headcase is recently out from Hawthorne Books.

RECENT REVIEWS OF FC2 TITLES

Blake Butler reviews the last forty years of FC2’s publishing history at VICE.
Margo Berdeshevsky’s Beautiful Soon Enough at Poetry International.
Kate Bernheimer’s The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold at Rain Taxi.
Matt Kirkpatrick’s Light Without Heat at The Collagist.
Alan Singer’s The Inquisitor’s Tongue at The Altered Scale.
Melanie Rae Thon’s The Voice of The River at The Altered Scale.

LINES PULLED FROM COLLECTIVE MEMBERS’ WORKS-IN-PROGRESS: A MINIANTHOLOGY

“Now, because of the radiation, the radio’s flickering on and off, the whole dashboard doing the disco ball thing, and the chupacabras are on the roof, coming down the windshield, scratching at the glass to get inside, to me, and the glass, already crackly from the radiation, it’s bowing in, can’t hold them all.”
Stephen Graham Jones

“I was almost insane with joy when I received your letter. Erasmus, De Copia.”
Alexandria Chasin

“How do you explain a word like resurrection in a language where there’s no room for it.”
Diane Glancy

“At night I lift my head to the ceiling, where my daughter lives above and my God above this, and I say: God, bless this girl who cares for her mother, God keep this girl safe, keep her somewhere hidden somewhere out of the light, so that her eyes may become wide dark voids and she might better reflect her Maker.”
Amelia Gray

“if you’re going to have to get ________, it’s a _______ one to get”
Sara Greenslit

“Joey boy kicked his chickenbirds and the feathers fly up to me.”
Noy Holland

“I believe in the mind’s ability to unhouse itself, in the mind’s ability to create another mind to believe the story it tells.”
Lynn Kilpatrick

“In my diary, I write: People don’t take trips; trips take people.”
Lance Olsen

“This morning a white-winged dove and a red cardinal sat still in a crown of white flowers together, thirty feet above the earth, as if this was their nest, as if by wonder they’d been married.”
Melanie Rae Thon

Fiction Correctives Interview with Bayard Johnson

The newest installment of Fiction Correctives features Bayard Johnson, author of Damned Right (FC2 1994), which has been translated into German as Speed Taxi (Faber & Faber). Read our interview with Bayard Johnson here.

DEADLINE EXTENDED FOR SUKENICK AND DOCTOROW PRIZES

In an effort to accomodate power loss on the east coast, FC2 is extending the deadline for the annual FC2 Ronald Sukenick/ABR Innovative Fiction Prize and the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize to November 10th. Please submit your book-length manuscripts to FC2’s online submissions manager no later than November 10th.

FC2 Book Prizes: Submit by November 1st

Please pass the word: the submission period for FC2’s Sukenick and Doctorow Book Prizes will end November 1st. Submit your manuscript through our online submissions manager.

The Ronald Sukenick American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize is open to any writer in English who has not previously published with the Fiction Collective 2. Novelist Jeffrey DeShell is judging this year. The winner receives $1,000 and publication.

The Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize is open to any writer in English with at least three books of fiction published. Rikki Ducornet will judge this year. The winner receives $15,000 and publication.

Visit FC2.org for complete guidelines and additional submission information.

Melanie Rae Thon Wins The Utah Book Award For Fiction

Congratulations to FC2 author Melanie Rae Thon. Her collection of stories In This Light has just won the Utah Book Award for Fiction. Thon will be reading in honor of the award on October 20th (4:30 p.m.) at the Salt Lake City Public Library, Conference Room B (210 East/400 South , Salt Lake City). Copies of In This Light (Graywolf Press 2011) and The Voice of the River (FC2 2011) will be available for sale at the reading.

Of Thon’s recent FC2 title, Carole Maso has written: “The Voice of the River is a beautifully written, deeply inclusive and profoundly spiritual work of art. I am moved by its great generosity above all, and its wisdom. It is a gift like no other.”

And The New York Times has said of Thon: “The reader is swept along… by the taut, magic current of her prose, which carries an exhilarating rhythmic punch.”

Don’t Miss POSTSCRIPT WRITING AFTER CONCEPTUAL ART

If you happen to be in the Denver area, don’t miss out on Postscript: Writing After Conceptual Art. The exhibit will be held at Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art, 12 October 2012 through 3 February 2013.

Postscript features the work of over fifty artists and writers exploring the artistic possibilities of language. Presenting works from the 1960s to the present, the exhibition includes paintings, sculpture, installation, video and works on paper that raise questions about how we read, look at, hear, and process language today. A major current underlying the exhibition argues that the field of literature known as “conceptual writing” can be seen as engaging in a provocative dialogue with the field of contemporary art, producing new insights into the meaning of both literature and art. Co-curated by Nora Burnett Abrams and Andrea Andersson, Postscript is the first exhibition to examine the work of conceptual writing, investigating the roots of the movement in the art of the 1960s and 70s and presenting contemporary examples of text-based art practices (from www.mcadenver.org).

One highlight of  the exhibit will surely be Alexandra Grant’s G. babel, a 7×22 foot painting, composed after FC2 author Michael Joyce’s Was. babel has been described as Alexandra Grant’s most ambitious work to date. Inspired by Michael Joyce’s text, babel portrays clusters of encircled words spread out across a nearly 24-foot-long horizontal plane. Photos of babel can be seen on Grant’s webpage here.

And if you haven’t read Was (FC2, 2006) by Michael Joyce then by all means pick up a copy asap! Was is a wonder work, half-poem half-narrative, an often comic nomadic history whose main character is the fleetingness of information itself.

Postscript should be a fantastic exhibition, and it will feature additional FC2 authors as well, such as Mark Amerika, Vanessa Place, and others.

The exhibit is located at MCA Denver: 1485 Delgany Street, Denver, CO 80202. Museum hours are Tuesday through Thursday from noon to 7pm. Saturday and Sunday from 10am to 7pm. More information can be found at MCA Denver’s webpage.

READING THE BODY: AN FC2 READING at THE MUTTER MUSEUM

FC2 and the Mütter Museum Present:

READING THE BODY
New American Fiction That Explores the Life of the Human Body by authors from the Fiction Collective 2

October 9, 6:30 pm
Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia 19 S. 22nd St.
Philadelphia, PA

ADMISSION FREE

List of Authors:
Samuel Delany is a novelist and critic who lives in New York City and teaches in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at Temple University. His most recent fiction includes Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, Dark Reflections, Phallos, and The Mad Man. His critical essays are collected in several volumes available from Wesleyan University Press and other publishers.

Noy Holland’s collections of short fiction and novellas include Swim for the Little One First, What Begins with Bird, and The Spectacle of the Body. She has published work in Conjunctions, The Quarterly, Ploughshares, Milan Review, Western Humanities Review, The Believer, NOON, New York Tyrant, and Post Road, among others. She was a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council award for artistic merit and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has taught for many years in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, and serves on the board of directors at FC2.

Michael Martone’s most recent books are Four for a Quarter, Not Normal, Illinois: Peculiar Fiction from the Flyover, Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins, a collection of essays, and Double-wide, his collected early stories. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s, Esquire, Story, Antaeus, North American Review, Benzene, Epoch, Denver Quarterly, Iowa Review, Third Coast, Shenandoah, Bomb, and other magazines. He is currently a Professor at the University of Alabama.

Lance Olsen is author of more than 20 books of and about experimental writing practices, including, most recently, the novel Calendar of Regrets and the anti-textbook Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing. He serves as chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two and fiction editor at Western Humanities Review. He is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah.

Alan Singer is the author of five novels, Alan Singer is the author of five novels, The Ox-Breadth, The Charnel Imp, Memory Wax, Dirtmouth and most recently The Inquisitor’s Tongue. He is currently at work on a new novel, Play, A Novel. He is also writes on aesthetics and critical theory. His most recent critical book is The Self-Deceiving Muse: Notice and Knowledge in the Work of Art. He is Professor of English at Temple University.

Beautiful New Poem by Margo Berdeshevsky

FC2 author Margo Berdeshevsky has a new poem up at the Black Earth Institute. Berdeshevsky is the author of Beautiful Soon Enough (FC2).

Submit to FC2’s Sukenick and Doctorow Book Prizes

FC2 is pleased to announce that the reading periods for the annual Sukenick and Doctorow book prizes will begin August 15, 2012 and extend through November 1, 2012.

The FC2 Ronald Sukenick American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize was started in 2006 as a way to find emerging authors whose aesthetic visions harmonize with the innovative aesthetic vision of FC2. The prize is open to any U.S. writer in English who has not previously published with FC2. The winner receives publication and $1,000. The 2011 winner of the Sukenick Prize is Sarah Blackman’s Motherbox. Novelist and FC2 Board Member Jeffrey DeShell will serve as judge for the upcoming 2012 contest.

The FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize was started in 2008 to bring established innovative writers to FC2. The prize is open to any U.S. writer in English with at least three books of fiction published. The winner receives publication and $15,000. The 2011 winner of the Doctorow Prize is Mac Wellman’s Linda Perdido. Writer and artist Rikki Ducornet will serve as judge for the upcoming 2012 contest.

Submissions to both the Sukenick and Doctorow prizes can be made to FC2’s electronic submissions manager starting August 15, 2012. For additional information and submission instructions, please go to http://www.fc2.org/prizes.html.

Fiction Correctives Interview with Lance Olsen

There’s a new Fiction Correctives interview with FC2’s Chair of the Board of Directors, Lance Olsen. Olsen talks about writing heterodox fiction in 2012; his recent FC2 title, Calendar of Regrets; and several favorite backlist titles. Read the interview here.