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You are viewing the most recent 10 entries May 17th, 201202:39 pm: Donna Summer
Donna Summer's music defined my late high school years. It's hard to believe that she's gone. I started my first novel, Fat Girl Dances With Rocks, with two high school girls practicing their disco moves to Donna Summer's Last Dance in a suburban kitchen. Here's an excerpt: Felice, oh, Felice could dance. She put Last Dance on the stereo and moved the speakers into the empty room. She wore a silver disco purse slung across her black tank top. A small edge of fat swelled over her jeans. She didn't hide it, but she had thrown away today's lunch. Felice closed up to things she needed -- no milk, no bread, no greens -- but when she was thinking from her nerves and muscles, she was hot. All I had to do was follow... We had a couple of hours before Felice's parents would get home from work. The music started out dreamy, then woke up. Felice pushed me through the moves: twist, step, twirl out, twirl back. Then came the hard part: crossing and uncrossing our arms, circling each other, bumping hips to keep the rhythm, first left, then right, wanting every move to be in perfect time, but the whole dance moved us out of time. We had no relation to five o'clock when ... Felice would finally let the needle slide on over to the next song without lifting it back to the start of Last Dance, when she'd have to turn on the stove and start browning the meat for her family's supper. That was never going to happen. She would keep her hand firm against my back. I would learn to understand the beat. Tags: dance, deaths, donna summer, fat girl dances with rocks, fiction, high school
May 7th, 201212:41 pm: Writing Room Reading, Wednesday June 13, 7-8:30
Forbes Library, 20 West Street, Northampton, MA Every Wednesday and Saturday morning from 9:30- 12:30, writers of every description -- novelists, poets, memoir writers, essayists, journalists, translators, performance artists and more -- join Forbes Writer In Residence Susan Stinson for companionable writing time. The Writing Room has been open for two years, so we’re celebrating with a reading. We end our writing time together with the option of sharing a quick taste of our writing, and now we’re offering a sampler to the community. Join us to hear: Katie Arroyo Sally Bellerose Kat Good-Schiff Jamila Gore Bill Gural Cynthia Hinckley Grace LeClair Rick McNeil Kristi Mientka Naila Moreira Mary Nelen Megan Nolan Mistinguette Smith Jill Turner Susan Stinson Tags: library, northampton, readings
April 11th, 201204:31 pm: Sylvester Graham Evening
Wednesday, May 2, Forbes Library, Coolidge Museum. 7 pm. Free! This is the last in this year's Local History/Local Novelists series. I'm jittery about it coming up so soon, and also really happy. Stephen Nissenbaum, author, SEX, DIET & DEBILITY IN JACKSONIAN AMERICA: Sylvester Graham & Health Reform Lynne Gerber, author, SEEKING THE STRAIGHT & NARROW Susan Stinson, Forbes Writer in Residence, author, VENUS OF CHALK ... Sylvester Graham was a nineteenth century author and health reformer whose name is forever associated with the Graham Cracker (although he probably wouldn’t endorse the cracker as we know it today). He lived in Northampton from 1839 to 1851, and is buried in the Bridge Street Cemetery. Come hear a historian, a scholar of religious life and a novelist illuminate Graham’s own life and work, as well as his legacy in U.S. culture.
Stephen Nissenbaum, Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is the author of Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform. His other books include The Battle for Christmas , which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (with Paul Boyer), which won the American Historical Association's John H. Dunning Prize.
Lynne Gerber’s talk will focus on Graham's legacy in American culture, discussing two contemporary Christian organizations concerned with food and sex: First Place, a Christian weight loss program and Exodus International, the country's largest ex-gay organization. A scholar in residence with the Beatrice Bain Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley, Gerber is author of Seeking the Straight and Narrow: Weight Loss and Sexual Reorientation in Evangelical America .
Susan Stinson is Writer in Residence at Forbes. Author of five books, including Fat Girl Dances with Rocks, and forthcoming Spider in a Tree, which is about Jonathan Edwards, she will be reading from a novel-in-progress about Sylvester Graham.
The Connecticut River Valley is rich in both novelists and history. Forbes Library is a place where novelists come to research and write alongside others interested in local history and literature. The Local History/Local Novelists series, now in its second year, invites the community to enjoy and join in the conversation between history and fiction that both engages and creates our changing cultures.
The series is curated by Susan Stinson, author of three novels as well as a collection of poetry and lyric essays. Awarded the 2011 Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize from the Lambda Foundation, she is also a writing coach, freelance editor, and gives cemetery tours. Her website is http://susanstinson.net/.
Stinson said, “The premise is that the depth, complexity, courage and joy with which we engage with history is, in large part, determined by the depth, complexity, courage and joy with which we engage with story. Fiction of 'all kinds sharpens those skills like nothing else.” February 22nd, 201205:19 pm: March 7 Daley and Halligan
Local History/ Local Novelists Series Presents an Evening Inspired by Dominic Daley and James Halligan Wednesday, March 7, 2011 at 7 pm Coolidge Museum at Forbes Library In 1806, Dominic Daley and James Halligan were accused of murder and were tried in Northampton. The two were found guilty and hung before a crowd estimated at 15,000. Both men were Irish immigrants of Roman Catholic faith during a time when discrimination by a predominantly Protestant culture prevailed. The evening will explore this historical event through the voices of a novelist, a poet and a composer. Michael White is the author of six novels, including The Garden of Martyrs, which is based on the Daley and Halligan incident. His latest novel, Beautiful Assassin, won the 2011 Connecticut Book Award for Fiction. He has also published over 50 short stories in national magazines and journals, and has won the Advocate Newspapers Fiction Award. He was the founding editor of the yearly fiction anthology American Fiction, as well as the magazine Dogwood. He is the founder and director of Fairfield University's low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program and Professor of English at Fairfield. Eric Sawyer has written an opera based on Michael White’s novel, The Garden of Martyrs, with libretto by Harley Erdman of the UMass faculty. It is in workshop with a full premiere expected in 2013. His opera Our American Cousin recently received its stage premiere from Boston Modern Orchestra Project and was released on the BMOP/sound label. Mr. Sawyer has received the Joseph Bearns Prize, awards from the Tanglewood Music Center and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a recent prize from the Ravinia Festival for his piano trio Lincoln’s Two Americas. He is on the music faculty at Amherst College. James Francis Cahillane is a native of Northampton and a Korean-era Air Force veteran. Jim sold cars and managed at his family’s former dealership for five decades. A 1992 business sabbatical led to graduate school and a new writing career. His books include The Best Place of All: An Irish-American Memoir of Pluck, Luck and Automobiles and On History’s Front Steps: One Irish Clan’s Exploits in Northampton, Massachusetts, “The Paradise of America.” Books will be for sale by Broadside Bookshop. Part of the Local History/Local Novelists Series curated by Forbes Writer in Residence Susan Stinson. For more information, visit www.forbeslibrary.org or call 413-587-1017. All events are free and open to all.
January 9th, 201208:50 pm: Wed, Feb 1 Reading: Jedediah Berry, John Crowley, Ellen Meeropol and Sabina Murry
Forbes Library Local History/ Local Novelists Series Celebration of Local Novelists Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 7 pm Coolidge Museum at Forbes Library JEDEDIAH BERRY’s debut novel, The Manual of Detection, received the William L Crawford Award and the Dashiell Hammett Prize. His short stories have appeared in journals and anthologies including Best New American Voices and Best American Fantasy. He has worked as an editor at Small Beer Press, and teaches at the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. JOHN CROWLEY is the author of eleven novels, most recently Four Freedoms, about which a reviewer in The New York Times wrote, “John Crowley is a virtuoso.” He has received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. The Blackstone Audiobook edition of his beloved novel, Little, Big, was released in January. Publishers Weekly gave ELLEN MEEROPOL’s debut novel, House Arrest, a starred review, calling it "thoughtful and tightly composed, unflinching in taking on challenging subjects and deliberating uneasy ethical conundrums." She holds an MFA from the University of Southern Maine. She lives in Easthampton. SABINA MURRAY is the author of three novels and two short story collections, including the PEN/Faulkner Award winning The Caprices. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Guggenheim Foundation and Radcliffe Institute and is on the fiction faculty of the MFA program at UMass Amherst. Her latest, Tales of the New World, was recently published by Grove/Black Cat. Books will be for sale by Broadside Bookshop. The idea behind the Local History/Local Novelists Series is that the complexity, courage and joy with which we engage with history is, in large part, determined by the complexity, courage and joy with which we engage with story. 20 West Street Northampton, MA 01060 413-587-1011 Forbes Library website. Tags: forbes library, northampton, novels, readings
December 14th, 201111:23 am: Martha Moody Fairy Tales
Three excerpts from my novel MARTHA MOODY, along with a brief afterword from me, are now up at The Lavender Review. It was interesting to go back to this work, and to think about why I wrote it. I appreciated the invitation to send work from guest editor Rachel Steiger-Meister, who also has fiction in this issue. This is the Fairy Tales issue of the online journal, and it features work by many very good writers, including Sarah Schulman, Leopoldine Core & Eileen Myles (whose novel Inferno won a Lambda Literary Award last year) , Malinda Lo and Catherynne M. Valente. Tags: fiction, lavender review, martha moody, novels, posted writing, publication
December 7th, 201111:35 am: Open the room. Open the door.
We tamp it down, or maybe not. There is always something we’re dreaming of. We’re always swimming toward the next opening. We’re always wishing for the good grace of an honest move. The emotional life of this world is so rich. It is whole. We hold it. A prayer. A motion. The room is cool. The women warm it. Every moment calls us forth. We answer. I may need to eat a peanut butter sandwich, but the language expands us. It experiences us, completes us, or, never, really. Not completion, although it urges us into that ache. Greetings are invitations. Come. We will work, sometimes in ways we don’t recognize. We’ll work with the most delicate intentions. What else might happen? We come to the gathering, come to the forest, come to the pasture, come to drink. We come to the depths again. Come to the sandwich. Come to the warmer place. Come to drink. There’s nothing like the flow of simple human want. There’s nothing like.
September 29th, 201107:12 pm: Rebekah Hawley
Here is a picture of a gravestone I love, which we'll be stopping by on the Jonathan Edwards in Northampton walking tour of the cemetery that I'm leading a week from Sunday: Sun, October 9, 1 pm, Bridge Street cemetery.  This is Rebekah Hawley. She was the mother of Joseph and Elisha Hawley. Rebekah, Joseph and Elisha are all central characters in SPIDER IN A TREE, my novel about Jonathan Edwards. Rebekah was Jonathan Edwards's aunt. She was the sister of his mother, both of whom were daughters of Solomon Stoddard, known as the pope of Northampton, who was the minister in Northampton for sixty years before he chose his grandson Jonathan to be his successor when he died. Rebekah was married to Joseph Hawley. I call him Uncle Hawley in the book to afford confusion with his son, who has the same name. (Also buried nearby is another Joseph Hawley, Uncle Hawley's father, who died after being gored by an ox.) Uncle Hawley ended a spiritual awakening in Northampton by cutting his own throat under doubts about the state of his soul. Jonathan Edwards included this terrible information in a postscript to a letter he wrote to the Reverend. Mr. Benjamin Coleman in Boston, which eventual became his book A Faithful Narrative of the Surprizing Work of God, published in Boston and -- this was huge for a colonial writer -- in London. The younger Joseph Hawley grew up to study with his uncle Jonathan Edwards, to become the mouthpiece for the effort to have Edwards dismissed from his Northampton pulpit, and later to apologize for his role, both privately and in the newspapers. Joseph Hawley was also a key figure in the preRevolutionary War legistlature in Boston, where he was a firebrand along with his colleague Sam Adams. Elisha, his younger brother, was the father of twins and refused to marry their mother, although Jonathan Edwards tried to force a marriage. He became a soldier. Rebekah was an unusual widow for her time in that she never remarried. She made cheese for a living, and when her son Joseph married, instead of turning over the household to his new wife, which was tradition, she had a wall built that divided it in half, so she could remain in charge of her own home life. The poem on her stone is quite wonderful, and we know the whole text thanks to the nineteenth century local historians, although some of it has sunk now into the ground. The wonderful photo is by Jody Wheat. Tags: cemetery tour, forbes library, jonathan edwards, joseph hawley, northampton, rebekah hawley, spider in a tree
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