SNS | 1-27-24
Join me online for the first SNS of 2024, an evening of literary performance and open mic reading
Featuring: Maxine Chernoff & Marisa Crawford
Theme: Simultaneity (scroll down for prompt)
Hosted By: Hollie Hardy
Saturday January 27, 2023
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)
Online Event
Free Admission
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The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to 3 MINUTES MAX
Scroll down for monthly writing prompt
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Meeting ID: 897 8202 8736
Passcode: 447624
Author Bios
Maxine Chernoff was Dept. Chair and Creative Writing Professor at SFSU. She is the author of twenty books of poetry, most recently Light and Clay and Under the Music, both by MadHat Press of Massachusetts. She is winner of the 2009 PEN Translation Award with Paul Hoover for their translation of Hoelderlin and a 2013 NEA Fellow in poetry. In 2016 she was a visiting writer at the American Academy in Rome and in 2013 she was a visiting professor of Creative Writing at Exeter U in England. Also a fiction writer, her story collection Signs of Devotion was one of the 1993 NYT’s books of the year.
Marisa Crawford is the author of the poetry collections The Haunted House, Reversible, and, most recently, DIARY (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023). She is the editor of The Weird Sister Collection (Feminist Press, forthcoming 2024), and co-editor, with Megan Milks, of We Are The Baby-Sitters Club: Essays & Artwork from Grown-Up Readers. Marisa is co-host of the 90s rock podcast All Our Pretty Songs. She lives in New York.
Write with Friends! Register for The Write-In!
LET’S WORK ON THE THEME TOGETHER!
Join me the week before SNS, on Saturday afternoon, January 20, for the monthly Write-In, a generative online workshop with Hollie Hardy.
Write-In Details/ Sign Up
January Writing Prompt:
Simultaneity: the quality of existing or occurring at the same time; happening at once
“What sense it makes for these two mornings to exist side by side in the world where we live, should this be framed as a question, would not be answerable by philosophy or poetry or finance or by the shallows or the deeps of her own mind, she fears.” ~from Anne Carson’s short story “1=1”
For this month’s theme, I was inspired by a recent episode of The New Yorker Fiction Podcast, in which the speaker in Carson’s story tries to reconcile going for a swim in a beautiful lake while refugees are drowning in the Mediterranean. I was struck by the universality of this challenge—babies are born while others die, we eat while others starve, we are warm in our homes while others sleep outside, while planes crash and bombs drop, we drink our coffee and read the headlines, while the rich and powerful ruin the world. I think there’s something deeply human in these juxtapositions.
But simultaneity doesn’t require opposites, just concurrence. One can hum in the shower while washing one’s hair, dreaming of pancakes, listening to George Winston. One can invite friends over and they can all talk at once.
So, this is your January challenge, should you choose to accept it: write into the idea of simultaneity.
Tell us a story; sing us a song; write us a poem.
SOME IDEAS TO GET YOU STARTED:
Make a list of “where you were when” moments
Let more than one thing arrive at once (or in layers) into your poem or story and allow meaning (or its lack) to arise in the juxtaposition—these might be big ideas, or small observations—a child crying, a cardinal on a branch in a snowstorm
Perhaps begin with dailiness or interiority and then move outward into the world
If you want to go more speculative/sci-fi, you might consider alternate realities (watch Everything Everywhere All at Once for inspiration)
Or something else!
As ever, the theme is optional—an invitation, not a requirement, feel free to interpret loosely or ignore.
FOR INSPIRATION:
Teju Cole Reads Anne Carson on The New Yorker Fiction Podcast
The Children poem by Donald Revell
Simultaneously poem by Kimberly Grey
Emotional Intelligence poem by Pimone Triplett