Photo credit: Geoffrey Berliner
Unfortunately, I was not in the audience back in October when U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine gave a reading (and participated in a Q&A session) with Nicole Cooley at Queens College of The City University of New York. Luckily, though, the event was recorded.
I’ve just had the pleasure of listening, and if you have time this weekend, you might, too.
Enjoy the weekend, everyone. See you back here on Monday.
One week from today, I’ll be heading to Charlottesville, Va., for a few jam-packed days. As I’ve mentioned here before, I’ll be teaching a freelancing seminar at WriterHouse, participating on a short-story panel for the Virginia Festival of the Book, and speaking at a local Jewish congregation.
My seminar handout has been emailed to WriterHouse, and I know what I’ll be reading from Quiet Americans for the panel. This weekend, I’ll finish polishing my presentation for the congregants. In my “things-to-take-with-me” pile I’m carefully placing the ARC I need to read en route so I can write a review that’s due one week after my return.
I’m so looking forward to this trip–and immensely grateful to everyone who is welcoming me in Charlottesville.
“For me, the writing life doesn’t just happen when I sit at the writing desk. It is a life lived with a centering principle, and mine is this: that I will pay close attention to this world I find myself in. ‘My heart keeps open house,’ was the way the poet Theodore Roethke put it in a poem. And rendering in language what one sees through the opened windows and doors of that house is a way of bearing witness to the mystery of what it is to be alive in this world.”
–Julia Alvarez, quoted in 1998 in The Writer magazine, with the quotation republished in “Great Writing Tips from 125 Years of The Writer,” in the magazine’s April 2012 issue.
Erika Dreifus lives and writes in New York City. Her story collection, Quiet Americans, was published in January 2011 by Last Light Studio Books. Erika is a contributing editor for The Writer magazine and Fiction Writers Review and an advisory board member for J Journal: New Writing on Justice, and she wrote the section on “Choosing a Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing” for the second edition of Tom Kealey’s Creative Writing MFA Handbook (Continuum, 2008). Erika’s writing practice encompasses fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Erika is also the editor/publisher of The Practicing Writer, a free (and popular) e-newsletter featuring advice, opportunities, and resources on the craft and business of writing for fictionists, poets, and writers of creative nonfiction.
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A high-ranking Nazi’s wife and a Jewish doctor in prewar Berlin. A Jewish immigrant soldier and the German POWs he is assigned to supervise. A refugee returning to Europe for the first time just as terrorists massacre Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. A son of survivors and the family secrets modern technology may reveal. These are some of the characters and conflicts that emerge in Quiet Americans, in stories that reframe familiar questions about what is right and wrong, remembered and repressed, resolved and unending. Portions of the proceeds from sales of Quiet Americans are being donated to The Blue Card. Quiet Americans has been named a 2012 Sophie Brody Medal Honor Title (American Library Association) and recognized as a “Notable Book” (The Jewish Journal) and “Top Book” (Shelf Unbound).
