Grace Reading Series

Happy Halloween you all. It is all craziness here before the parade in Park Slope and the children are screaming and so am I. My landlord claims to have 28 kids (he's 75) and I think evidence of this is showing up, as it tends to, on a holiday: lots of little sugared up voices screaming "grandpa" outside, but only for about 5 minutes because I can hear them being hustled into a minivan. He must be this sort of appartional, mythic figure to them. Anyway: I saw Nichelle and Rachel Kramer Bussel and crew at the writerly new abode of Shari Goldhagen and Will Leitch this weekend and Nichelle promises there will be a pic of my crazy blue nails up over there in Nichelle land, but maybe it might happen on her genius Cleavage Day feature (I think Shari is featured from last week--so lovely!) In any case, more love from Brooklyn's favorite road warrior. --Eliz.

Lisa says:

Albuquerque is pleasantly deserted. The weather is perfect -- soft sunlight and sixty degrees under a big sky -- and I wonder why more people don’t live here. My tourmate Vicky and I walk from the Hotel Blue -- which sounds chi-chi but is smoky and rundown and has free cookies and a concierge fond of talking about his head injuries -- to Old Town, a touristy selection of Indian jewelry in the oldest adobe buildings in the city. I have Frito pie and pretend I’m just traveling around the Southwest aimlessly, instead of flying there to hock my literary wares.

I have attached myself to Vicky, who’s written a lovely book about the fictional friendship between Rudyard Kipling and a young boy, because she has not only my mother’s clipped salt and pepper haircut but her nurturing air as well. My tourmates can expense everything, whereas I’m paying out of pocket for this misadventure, so I’ve spent these two weeks trying to stay in crummy motels near the palaces at which my tourmates stay, but there’s something egalitarian about Abuquerque, and we can all stay in the same weird accommodations.

The reading is at a winery, somewhere in Albuquerque. I have a hard time locating myself in car-culture cities. The Hotel Blue shuttles us there -- free of charge -- and we hold our breath as we approach: We have had only one successful evening, which has only slightly repaired our bruised egos, and none of us are sure we can sustain another no-show. But there are actual human beings in attendance, including a lovely fellow named Steve, designer of the First Fiction website, who’s flown over from Phoenix to hear us read. A few folks from the UNM MFA program come, including their director, Sharon Oard Warner, who tells me that one student was assigned to review my book. The student nods at me and says, “I read the whole thing.”

“Thanks,” I say, though I realize she has not paid the whole thing any compliments. It doesn’t matter: if people say they read and liked my book, I usually think they’re placating me, anyway, unless they give me concrete details, or talk about how they rooted for someone they also despised. That’s the biggest compliment, I guess. The girl does tell me that she was so happy that the book had a happy ending, and this confuses me. It has a happy ending? It has a tragic ending, and a realistic one: a
prediction of where low-income Americans will end up.

For the most part, I have stopped reading reviews, but every once in a while I take a peak. One says it has a disappointing redemptive ending (how is working at Wal-Mart redemptive?) and another says, “Ms. Davis need a bit of help with plotting.” Is this blogger offering the help? Sometimes I think these reviews are so audacious, but on the other hand, what makes someone an expert in today’s information-saturated society? I mean, I’m a teacher, for crying out loud. The only thing I know is how little I know: that’s what I learned in college.

The whole process of publishing -- of submitting your literary baby to the world to be judged -- seems bizarre to me at this point. Why is that part of the process so key? Why isn’t writing a novel enough? Let me know if you have the answer. I remain thoroughly confused.

--LISA SELIN DAVIS



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Hey there: learn something about Colorado here today: not only did it produce the first literary wonderboy in recent memory whose writing and ideas actually deserve all the hype, but it has great book clubs! Didja know that? I didn't. --Elizabeth

Denver, CO
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Report from Lisa Selin Davis:

Yesterday was the tour hump day, the fourth of seven. By now, we approach each reading with mild dread. What happened? I used to love reading. Mostly, I loved it before I had a book to sell, before I felt I had to charm people into spending $24. Twenty-four dollars does seem like a lot of money to me. What would I pay $25 for? That’s two and a half entire months of NPR, one ticket to the anti-Wal-Mart documentary, a made-in-sweatshop sweater. Readers, I think, are a rare and precious commodity in this country, a special breed who have the patience and openness to dive into a new book. We should, you know, shower them with love, or whatever.

It seemed at least 10 people there were willing to cough up the dough for a dive into Belly, maybe more. It was our best reading yet. Listen to this, fellow book tourers: Denver is a writers’ dream. There were two book clubs present, both of which were reading all three of our books! Twice, they had to retrieve more chairs from the storeroom to accommodate listeners. They were a wonderful audience -- laughing in all the right spots. Now I understand why bands thank the audience at the end of a performance: a good audience can change everything. I’ve read sections in certain settings that have been a big hit, and, in other spots, zilch. No reaction. It seems strange that the work will seem more or less successful depending on who’s listening to it. It seemed so static to me: once it’s down on paper, that’s the way it is. But it’s not. And that’s the problem: my relationship to the book changes depending on audience reaction. Sometimes I’m proud of it; others, I hold it away from my nose like a mildewed rag.

My motel room in Denver looks out to a closed amusement park, right next to the Pepsi arena: remember the days before every big building had a corporate sponsor? The airport here is designed to elicit the snow-capped Rockies: white peaks rising up from the vast prairie. Of course, inside, it is just another airport, a member of the generic city, except this one has a popcorn store. How much money can one make just selling popcorn? So many ways to make money--I’ve got to think of one.

Today it’s on to Albuquerque, where we pray this new trend of folks actually showing up to the readings and buying books will continue.

--LISA SELIN DAVIS

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Hey everybody. I still have my sore throat so thank goodness for these lovely reports from Lisa Selin Davis, the author of BELLY. Guess what! Everything started looking up in Portland! Now put on some Sleater Kinney and see what's up on tour. --Elizabeth

Monday, October 24, report from Lisa Selin Davis:

Portland, Oregon

What a great town. A friend of a friend of a friend picks me up at the airport--a tall and handsome chiropractic student, with a fading South African accent -- and shows me the city. I’m in love. If we could pack it up and move it two hours from New York, I’d relocate immediately. Or, if I could convince all my wonderful New York friends, and my siblings and mom, to uproot themselves and make the grand shift to Portland, I would. What do you say, guys?

For most of the day, I forget about the reading. This is on purpose, for the pain of the no-show night has followed me, transformed this from an adventure--readings! with other first time novelists! all over America!--into an exercise in dread.

The grass here is brilliant kelly-colored, and the roses are in full bloom, and you can get your own bungalow for $200,000, and there are so many nice coffee shops and art movies theaters. Construction is everywhere, but for all the luxury lofts, they have just as many low-income housing projects. Not housing projects the way we think of them, but nice looking places right next to the richy rich places, so as not to segregate all the poor folks and cause all that angst and anger and crime to brew.

If only I wanted to do something else for a living. If only I’d finished urban planning school and gotten a real job.

We show up at the venue--probably the closest thing Portland has to a Midtown Manhattan after work bar. There are a few stragglers. My tourmates and I greet one another--we are cautious, nervous, family members saying hello in the hospital waiting room, anticipating the diagnoses.

It’s okay. We have about 20 people, maybe, including an entourage from the wonderful Powell’s books. At this point, we have lowered our expectations so as not to have them dashed, but after the reading, I have that sort of sad and empty feeling, and not just because I’d just spent the weekend painting the room in my apartment that’d going to be my bedroom after my boyfriend and his daughter move out. When you do a reading, it’s like an offering, and sometimes you can feel people accept. You can feel them connect. And I didn’t. And I’m jetlagged. And profoundly sad. I eat dinner with more friends of friends--so many wonderful people in this town--and I want to feel like my life is still full of adventures, that there are so many adventures yet to come, but I want to crawl into bed with my cat and my soon-to-be-ex boyfriend, furry and gray-haired and champion snugglers.

--LISA SELIN DAVIS

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from Lisa Selin Davis, y'all:

Wednesday, October 19

Here’s a funny thing I’m learning: a lot of American cities are beautiful. Maybe the northeast has been ravaged more than these middle lands, and maybe urban renewal hasn’t scarred them up as much. Of course, St. Louis was home to the infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing project, such a den of sin that it had to be razed. But most of what my sister-in-law’s parents show me of the city is breathtaking.

How could there be so many Missourian millionaires?

It’s the deciding game of the pennant playoffs tonight, or whatever you call them, -- the Cardinals are playing the someone-or-others for some big prize -- and not one person shows up. Not one. We eat pretzel sticks and assorted other deep-fried carbohydrates in the vast dining room, and try not to want to quit writing and become accountants.

We try to come up with theories. The whole point of touring together is that no unknown can garner a crowd of listeners -- it’s just not newsworthy that someone you’ve never heard of is going to read from his book, which you also haven’t heard of. But when a group does it, precisely to address the difficult prospect of garnering publicity, well, then, in theory, it’s news.

Other explanations include the location -- downtown is deserted at night, except for tonight, what with both the baseball and hockey games, and the last seven non-sports fans avoiding downtown at all costs due to the traffic. Most of these bookstores’ loyal followers are used to seeing readings right there at the store. Apparently, they are not loyal enough to follow them to strange parts of the city, caked with traffic.

Some commiserators blame it on the Midwest. When you get out to Oregon, they say, it’ll be different.

--LISA SELIN DAVIS

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I wrote this big gorgeous thing about James Frey and Leaving Las Vegas and Infinite Jest and AA and an anonymous friend of mine who is in AA for almost a year and who is trying to pull a geographic by getting a mail-order wife. And my computer ate it! It's okay, I go on too long anyway. Repressed novelist. Must cut down on administration if only to make blog posts more brief (wait until you see the one I'm working on about Tuesday night, when I substitute hosted at KGB and some girl standing on a table in the middle of the bar peed ALL OVER this pizza--under instructions from Lisa Carver who was recreating the early nineties, or something)

My own little addiction tailspin of the day--I stayed up late to catch Oprah's Book Club on tv at 1am and I ate this handful of candied violets which is about 12 candied violets too many (I bought them on a whim for my writing class and they wisely only ate half the jar) and I woke up with a major sore throat from all the sugar so I'm hiding and wearing scarves. Thank goodness for Lisa Selin Davis whose report from the road I will post in a sec.

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My hotel room in Milwaukee looks out onto Applebee’s. It’s a special Milwaukeean Applebee’s, in their revitalized downtown, which does have some actual human beings walking around in it. I make the same observations I make every time I leave New York City: there are so many tubby people out there in the U.S. of A, and so many smokers. I walk around searching for Lake Michigan, which you would think would be pretty hard to miss. I finally find it, hiding behind a building that looks like a giant concrete swan, trying to lift off the ground. It’s their contemporary art museum, a big disruption in the blue.

In Lake Michigan, I see the biggest fish I have ever seen swimming around in water before -- a good three feet -- and I look around for a little pebble or something I can chuck into the water, coaxing it back to the surface in its search for food. There is not one single person. That’s the other thing I notice when I go to cities that are not New York: they are so clean. Pebble-less. Everything in its proper place. I don’t miss the smell of stale urine, but I would like access to a little emergency makeshift fish food right about now.

I come across a beautiful old building -- Richardsonian Romanesque, but with a lighter touch than most in this style -- and it’s been converted into, you guessed it, luxury lofts. Around the corner from luxuryville is the cheese tourist trap, where I have a cube of gouda and warm my ears, stinging with cold from the wind off Lake Michigan. It’s a beautiful city, Milwaukee. Who knew? There’s just the matter of the wind -- I’m freezing, but to locals, this is a warm day. A man sits outside on Juneau Avenue, shirtless, in Birkenstocks.

The reading is across the street from the wonderful bookshop here, Harry Schwartz. It’s in a sweet neighborhood on a street called Downer, and we try not to take that as symbolic. We read in a room on the second floor of a restaurant down the street. We compete with the clanging of plates being tossed into the dishwasher, and a couple chatting loudly in the corner. There are 15 people in attendance. I sell one book, to the chatting couple. I am remembering what the other tour-goers told me when I asked if it would be worth me funding this trip myself: it was packed, they told me. We sold piles of books. St. Louis, my tourmates and I decide, will be better. Now I realize that the New York reading was great. What was I complaining about?

--LISA SELIN DAVIS

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Lisa Selin Davis, the author of the fabulous novel BELLY is on tour with the FIRST FICTION TOUR, which brings a few first novelists all over the country to read in fun and booming bar settings rather than in your more sedate bookstore.

(If I sound funky this morning forgive me. I subsitute-hosted for Lisa at the KGB non-fiction reading series last night and my mind is still blown by Lisa Carver's variety show. More on that later. I think. If I'm allowed to even SAY what happened! Apparently things get more out of hand for a subsitute host than for a substitute teacher. That Ms. Carver. What a punk rocker.)

ANYWAY: Here is Lisa's first report from tour:

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

Last night was the first reading of the First Fiction tour. Lenny Lopate did not want to talk to us (how could he not have wanted to talk to three first time novelists who wrote from the male viewpoint? Come on). He wanted to talk to Charlize Theron and Isabelle Huppert. I love Lenny. I love WNYC, but I don’t really want movie stars on there. I can turn on Entertainment Tonight if I want to check in with Charlize. How is Charlize doing, by the way? She looks terrific with feathered hair and shoulder pads.

So we had a small crowd, at a bar in a sort of black hole section of the Upper West Side -- 105th and Broadway. I sold three books, I think. Someone heckled me, and afterwards, he came up to me and said, “You’re wonderful. Can I buy you a drink?” in full slurred speech. I pointed to the man and child with whom I came, and he cocked his head as if not understanding. “I’m with them,” I said.

“So?” he asked, his chest puffing up in belligerence. “That means you’re not going to drink with me?”

“Yes. That’s what it means. Save your beer money and buy a book,” I suggest.

I think that perhaps New York is not a great spot for the tour. My friends have had their fill of my readings (not that they aren’t wildly entertaining), and, besides, we need out-of-posse attendees. We need to go to places where readings are a rare occurrence, where folks are hungry for culture and the cost of living is cheaper, allowing a little book-buying binge. Thus, I am off to Milwaukee this morning.

I arrived two hours early at the Newark airport, after dropping Sami -- who was my stepdaughter-to-be for the last two years, but is now my ex-boyfriend’s daughter with whom I still, temporarily, live -- off at school. Better to be early and risk grumping up, as I’m wont to do in airports.

What has happened to Newark airport? Everywhere I look -- not just in the airport, but, you know, almost everywhere -- retail spaces, or public spaces, have been transformed into luxury malls, and, yes, I would like a pair of Edwin Pearl diamond earrings with my $4 latte. I apologize in advance: it doesn’t matter what I’m writing about; I’ll always talk about money. It’s not because I’m a Jew, though the more money-obsessed I am, the more I feel I’m completing the frugal Jew (or Frewgal) stereotype. But I’m not even really Jewish, not if you think Judaism is an actual religion, instead of a particular sense of humor. It’s just that I’ve chosen a writing life, which means, for now, that I never know where my next paycheck is coming from, and therefore spending $50 to take a car to the Newark airport ($50! Jeez!) causes me some worry. That’s money that could have gone toward rent, or a pair of diamond earrings, something I began to want right about the time all the other Adult Children of Hippies, the educated poor, started inheriting money from their own Frewgal grandparents (mine died penniless) or leaving Legal Aid to become corporate lawyers. I watched so many members of my social class make the leap to the next level, and it looked so good over there. I would make a terrific rich person, I really would. Diamond earrings for all!

--LISA SELIN DAVIS

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I'll be at this reading at KGB tonight--come check it out:

Please join us for a night of non-fiction for and about tough broads. Lisa Carver reads from her new memoir, DRUGS ARE NICE, and Kristin Kaye reads from her book about female body builders, IRON MAIDENS.

Doors open at 7PM; readings begin at 7:15.
KGB Tuesday Night Non-Fiction: 85 E. 4th Street between 2nd & 3rd Avenues. Subway F/V to Second Ave, 6 to Bleecker. FREE! -- www.kgbbar.com

Lisa Carver: DRUGS ARE NICE -- A Post-punk Memoir

In this eye-opening memoir, Lisa Crystal Carver recalls her extraordinary youth and charts the late-80s, early-90s punk subculture that she helped shape. She recounts how her band Suckdog was born in 1987 and the wild events that followed: leaving small-town New Hampshire to tour Europe at 18, becoming a teen publisher of fanzines, a teen bride, and a teen prostitute. Spin has called Suckdog's album Drugs Are Nice one of the best of the '90s, and the book includes photos of infamous European shows. Yet the book also tells of how Lisa saw the need for change in 1994, when her baby was born with a chromosomal deletion and his father became violent. With lasting lightness and surprising gravity, Drugs Are Nice is a definitive account of the generation that wanted to break every rule, but also a story of an artist and a mother becoming an adult on her own terms.

Kristin Kaye: IRON MAIDENS -- The Most Awesome Female Muscle in the World

At age twenty-three and fresh out of drama school, Kristin Kaye landed
her dream job: to write and direct a Broadway show in New York City. Its
title? The Celebration of the Most Awesome Female Muscle in the World,
starring twenty-five of the world’s most muscular women. Her mandate? To
turn The Celebration into a High Art Happening exalting women’s physical and
intellectual strength.

Kaye thought this was her chance to enter a whole new feminist arena, but in
reality she was about to enter another world entirely: her carefully
orchestrated artistic interludes would be sandwiched between skits involving
white lace thongs, smoke machines, and a bodybuilder spinning by her neck.
Kaye tells the whole story in this hilarious book, alternating between an
account of directing the show, which builds to the disastrous climax of
opening night, and reportage on women’s bodybuilding and the little-known
sub-culture around it, including the use of steroids, the side business of
strong women who wrestle men for money, and the judging controversy that
threatens to split the sport in two.

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A big thank you to everyone who came out for our giant fun reading last night! I am proud to report that the house was packed although it was a VERY rainy Monday night. Holiday and Kathleen were luminous, the actors David Costibile, Robin Morse, James Urbaniak, and Kathryn Meisle riveted our attention reading from BIG CATS and from Kathleen's new novel in the works (such a treat--I had hoped for such a sneak preview). Elegant piano accompaniment was kindly provided by Kathleen and Holiday's fellow Iowa alum Jonathan Blum.

I'm so not hungover, but it was such a fun and energetic night that I'm acting like it, sipping vegetable juice and being very quiet here today at my day job (which is a Tuesday-only thang for me). Everything is a little surreal, an effect seriously aided by the strange slide show of New York images they have going in the new fancy-schmancy lobby here. I went down to get a coffee and the first image I caught was people running from the smoke on 9/11--by the time I was pouring my soy milk there was a giant Joan Crawford in a girdle onscreen. I'm hiding now. Hiding and blogging, possibly regressing.

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HOLIDAY REINHORN and KATHLEEN HUGHES read from their luminous and engaging fiction at the GRACE READING SERIES!

Don't miss it:

Tonight, 7pm

at Mo Pitkins, 34 Ave. A (between 2nd and 3d)
NYC 212.777.5660 $5 admission. SUBWAY: F or V train to 2nd Avenue.

With special guests presenting readings from the authors' work:

David Costibile--Caroline or Change
Robin Morse--Six Degrees of Separation
James Urbaniak--thom pain (based on nothing)
Kathryn Meisle--Tartuffe

See you this evening!

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You're definitely going to want to check out this interview with Jill Soloway, our very first! Grace contributor Jessica Dulong spoke to Jill in New York in September.

Here's a taste:

Grace: In Tiny Ladies, you wrote that at one time you “proudly touted the idea that the strongest feminist was one who was political and who knew how to shake her ass to take men for everything they were worth.” Has your idea of feminism changed since the days when “your main hobby was Being Cute”?

Jill: Well, I think I’m always in some manner of ambivalence about how "cute" I want to be. The questions I had then are the same questions I have now. Just how beautiful should we try to look? How much of ourselves do we give away when we try to make ourselves beautiful? They’re questions for me every day. Take the glamour shot on the book. I had all kinds of ambivalence about how pretty I wanted to look, you know? If I look more beautiful, will more people buy the book? If I present myself without my "face" on (as women in the South call their makeup—which is such a telling way to talk about it), will that send a stronger message about the potential of women to be accepted for who they are, without their masks on?

I actually went to the photo session and said to the photographer, "Do me a favor, I want to take a roll before I get my hair and makeup done." And he was like, "Are you sure?" And I was like, "Yeah! I just want to be photographed the way I’d be photographed if I was a male author coming to be photographed." Nobody would do anything to foof me up; he would just take some pictures of me. If I was slightly braver, or a little bit more of a real feminist, I would’ve used those pictures. But when I saw the ones I ultimately ended up using I was like, "Ooooh, who’s she? I want to hear whatever she has to say."

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Well it's finally here--the Grace Reading Series weblog! I have been promising this for weeks, but it's taken me forever to get set up because I just got a bunch of big fake blue diva nails and it takes me a long time to type anything at all.

Join us here for a chat about feminism, literature, my hot blue nails and anything else we feel like discussing. We'll blog, and every month we'll provide you with three reading recommendations--just in case you're looking for amazing books by women at your local bookstore but can't seem to find them (for whatever reason--but we'll get to that soon).

You'll hear from me, from Anne Ishii our Publicity Director; Emberly Nesbitt, Reviews Editor; and Sara Zuiderveen, Events Editor. Plus we'll have some guest-bloggers because there are so many women writers we want to hear from. And maybe Jen Kirwin, Editor-at-Large, will send reports from Mauritius where she is currently on a writing retreat to focus on her first (amazing) book about life as a standup comic.

So many people have helped make Miss Grace's Salon and the Grace Reading Series a reality! Big thank yous to Jay Dixit the webdesigner and Kevin McElroy the endlessly patient and intuitive graphic designer; all my students; the gorgeous generosity of the 2005 support team featuring my entire Novella Class, Cory Greenberg, Rachel Friedman, Glenna Gordon, Quinn H., Jed Ringel, and of course Sara Z., Jen K., Emberly, and my whole extended posse who called and emailed with help. And thank you Julia and Tania for your patience & belief.

Our debut event on September 14 was a roaring success thanks to the fine folks at Mo Pitkins, Jill Soloway and her fabulous book TINY LADIES IN SHINY PANTS, and Jill's genius posse of LADIES: Lili Taylor, Molly Shannon, Lauren Ambrose, Amy Poehler, and Jackie Hoffman who each provided us with a riveting reading of Jill's work. Grace contributors Jessica Dulong, Eryn Loeb, all the Grace editors and especially the superhero Anne Ishii made the night work seamlessly despite lots of audience and not a lot of space!

The reading series and blog are named after my grandmother, who was a feminine literary phenomenon her whole life in my hometown in PA. I'll explain a little more soon, promise.

xxoo

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