News Round Up

Ninth Letter is happy to present WORDHARVEST on Saturday, September 29 starting at 4pm. The official description: Five stellar writers read from their work as the harvest moon rises. Check out this ridiculously fantastic roster:

• Jensen Beach (For Out of the Heart Proceed)
• Roxane Gay (Ayiti)
• Ted Sanders (No Animals We Could Name)
• Amy Sayre (The Widows of Whitechapel)
• Chad Simpson (Tell Everyone I Said Hi)

Wow! I've had the pleasure of hearing each of them read before and it will be a real treat to see them all together. You're going to be there, right? Of course. It's totally worth a trip to Champaign, IL. The reading will be at Cowboy Monkey (6 Taylor Street, Champaign, Illinois 68120). Seriously, it's going to one hell of a good time. Hope to see you there!

Congratulations to LeAnne Howe, U of I creative writing professor and former CNF editor for 9L, on being awarded The Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas.
 
Head over to the A/V section of ninthletter.com for the latest in a series of two handed drawing  videos from Ninth Letter designers, inspired by the stories and essays in our Spring/Summer 2012 issue. This month's videos are for "Picnic Geese," "Something Californian," and "The Scientist." Psst...I can also tell you that I'm working on an interview with "Picnic Geese" author Joseph Gross, so keep an eye out for that in the coming weeks.

Brynn Saito's poem, "Match," from the Spring/Summer 2012 issue was featured on Verse Daily.

Okay, I think that's it for now. Don't forget to enter our contest for Robin Hemley's "Study Questions for the Essay at Hand," if you haven't already. 

Contributors: we love sharing good news, so be sure to let us know if you have a new book coming out or have readings scheduled or any other news we can pass along to our readers via the blog. Contact us at info@ninthletter.com.

A 9L Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day, beloved readers! To celebrate, we offer you a Valentine in the form of the brand new, music video for "Old Skin" by The Size Queens along with an extra special treat, "Affirmations for a Blow Up Doll." We hope you love it. And most importantly, be sure to leave your own affirmations here in the comments section!

9L Exclusive - Seth Fried Q&A

Seth Fried. The Great Frustration. May 1.

And now, Ninth Letter brings you an exclusive Q&A with Seth Fried, author of the first blockbuster of the summer, The Great Frustration.



(Thanks Seth!)

Seth Fried has appeared twice in Ninth Letter in vol. 3, no. 2 and vol. 6, no. 1. Be sure to pick up a copy of The Great Frustration on May 1! Stay tuned to the blog for more Seth Fried exclusives in the coming weeks.

9L Exclusive: Brian Oliu's Siren(1).exe

Brian Oliu has been creating fantastic videos for his lyric essays about 8-bit Nintendo games. We're thrilled he has made an outstanding one for his essay from Ninth Letter "Siren(1).exe," which appears in vol. 6, no. 1. The video reminds me, in the best ways possible, of those great 80's computer movies (e.g. War Games, Tron, etc.). The essay is tragic and beautiful. Enjoy!

Bad Writing

Here's a promising looking documentary, Bad Writing, about a guy who wanted to be a poet and his discussions with several writers, including Steve Almond (vol. 1, no. 1, vol. 2, no. 1, and vol. 4, no. 2) and DA Powell (forthcoming in vol. 7, no. 2), about writing. While the trailer seems to focus more on the filmmaker's failure as a poet, the more interesting part of it, for me at least, is the question of bad vs good writing really being about a piece either failing or being successful as a work of art. My initial reaction is to say that a piece of writing can be well written and still not be good art. Can it work the other way around? I'd have to think about it more.

Anyways, the movie is already open in select cities, so check your local listings. Stop by the Bad Writing website for more information.

Thank you, readers!

Happy Thanksgiving to all our readers. Many thanks for supporting us and other lit mags through the years. We hope you have a lovely day.

To make it even better, check out 9L contributor (vol. 1, no. 2 & vol. 6, no. 2) Ander Monson's fantastic video essay, "I Have Been Thinking About Snow."

New Updates

Check out the new video podcasts on ninthletter.com--an interview with South African Information Science professor Archie Dick, folk singer/songwriter Bitch, and award winning Native American filmmaker James Fortier. All can be found here.

Nao Bustamante Podcast

Check it out, fresh out of the package on the main page.

Just because it's summer between reading periods doesn't mean we've got our feet upon the desks. Check back and see what we're up to and where we're going to be this Fall.

It's because we love you--especially as a friend. Especially if you're on myspace. Click on over!

Ninth Letter on Portuguese TV!

Check out the Camara Clara archives--they did a segment on Philip Graham's reports to the US from Lisbon and highlighted his video postcards published on this blog via YouTube. The segment aired last week on June 10, so go to the Camara Clara site and select "Arquivos," then choose "10 de Junho de 2007." Philip comes in just before the 11th minute mark. It's mostly in Portuguese, but you can get the gist of it...

Cool! International TV stars!

Calling Video Artists

Hey, are you, or is someone you know, an artist working in video? Ninth Letter is calling for video submissions for our Featured Artists section of ninthletter.com. Check out the submission guidelines here. And pass the word around to your artsy friends.

Bring Me the Head of Diogo Alves!

Philip Graham’s wanderings in beautiful Lisbon lead him to discover art in some out-of-the-way (and unsettling) places. Body parts, serial killers, Morlock-esque performance artists, awe-inspiring Victorian-era machinery, and disconcerting photos: watch and listen as PG leads you through some of the more fascinating and macabre corners of Lisbon’s cultural scene.

Can't get enough of living in Lisbon vicariously? Visit McSweeney's Internet Tendency to read PG's regular reports from his year abroad.

In My Language: Inside the Autistic Mind

The video begins with the sound of otherworldly singing, singing sans words, and the image of a woman poised in front of her apartment window, back to the camera, rocking back and forth, flailing her arms and fluttering her fingers. Next we witness the scraping together of two abrasive objects, plastic or metal things possibly. We watch as the woman’s hand repeatedly strokes some unidentified surface. She shakes a dangling necklace with one hand, hits it with the other, all the while chanting like some possessed shaman. The camera cuts to record the long spiral of an orange slinky from the inside, an aesthetically pleasing shot which recalls the neon tunnel of some amusement park ride. Stroking ridges with her fingernails, fondling the knob of a dresser–these are motions any of us might make in an idle moment, while on the phone or lost in thought. Yet Amanda Baggs is not like the rest of us; she is autistic, and she stopped making eye contact and using verbal communication a long time ago. She interacts with the world in a way most of us would regard as meaningless or non-sensical. For most of us, these moments are anomalies, not a way of life. We watch as she opens a book, not to read but to rub her face against its pages. Palms flat on the cover, she moves her head up and down and presses her nose into the binding, taking obvious pleasure in the texture and smell of the pages.

The second half the video, which was made entirely by Amanda herself, is titled “Translation.” Through the use of a special computer which vocalizes what she types, Amanda shares the following insight with respect to her behavior: “Far from being meaningless, the way that I move is an ongoing response to what is around me." Ironically, others describe this constant dialogue with the external world as being in a world of her own.. She explains that if she limits herself to responding to fewer stimuli, presumably other human beings and spoken language as is customary or “normal,” only then do people feel she is opening herself up to "true interaction with the world." Her thinking is only taken seriously if she learns the language of others. Only then is she said to be communicating, is she thought to be aware, intelligent, a person.

The video occurs to the viewer as something like performance art, a conceptual piece done by some member of the avant-garde. Yet what it offers is a rare glimpse into the austistic mind, and for many, it is simply life. Watch and be moved.

Philip Graham Reports: International Short Story Conference in Lisbon

Author and erstwhile 9L fiction editor Philip Graham reported to us this summer from the 2006 International Conference on the Short Story in English, which was held in the beautiful city of Lisbon, Portugal. Many stellar writers from across the globe participated in this year’s conference, including Portuguese author Gonçalo Tavares and Irish author William Wall, both of whom have new work featured in the latest issue of 9L. Former 9L contributors Katherine Vaz and Robert Olen Butler were also among those who shared their talents. Thanks to Philip and to video producer Nathaniel Gottlieb-Graham, we can get a taste of this amazing literary event…

(PS: You can also read Philip's dispatches from Lisbon at McSweeney's Internet Tendency)