May 24, 2012 Poets Sue Guiney and Ruth O'Callaghan

The Work of Sue Guiney

Though born and raised in New York, Sue Guiney has lived in London for  twenty years where she writes and teaches fiction, poetry and plays.  Her work has appeared in important literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic,  and her most recent novel , A Clash of Innocents, was chosen to be the first publication of the new imprint Ward Wood Publishing and was published in September, 2010.  Her first novel, Tangled Roots, was published by Bluechrome Publishing in 2006.

    Sue also has two published poetry collections. Her Life Collected was published in 2011 and the text of her poetry play, Dreams of May, was published in 2006  and has been performed frequently in  theatres and literary festivals.

   In 2005, Sue founded the theatre arts charity called CurvingRoad, in which she still serves as Artistic Director.

    Sue has always worked to find a way to combine her literary and charitable efforts. Most recently, this has led her to focus on modern day Cambodia. Her novel, A Clash of Innocents, is set in Phnom Penh against the backdrop of 2007’s beginnings of the UN Tribunal to bring the remaining members of the Khmer Rouge to justice. In March of 2011, she brought that novel back to the Cambodian people who inspired it, and through a series of charity booksignings and workshops held throughout SE Asia, helped raise funds for a Literacy Through Creative Writing program which Sue has developed for the street children of Siem Reap. These efforts have led to a unique, on-going English language program which is now being taught both on-line and on-site, with Sue’s commitment sending her back to spend at least one month a year there. She is also presently writing her third novel, to be published in 2013, which will also be set in present-day Cambodia.

   Growing out of this interest and commitment is Sue’s recent appointment as Writer in Residence to the SE Asia Department of University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).
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                                                           Ruth O’Callaghan




Ruth O’Callaghan holds the prestigious Hawthornden Fellowship and is a prizewinner in international competitions. Translated into six languages she has read world-wide, including Asia and Europe and her recent successful tour in the USA included audiences of nearly a thousand. 

An international competition adjudicator and editor she hosts two poetry venues in London where both the famous and unknown read side by side. As a mentor and workshop leader both in the U.K and abroad, she works with experienced poets to enable them to approach their poetry with a new perspective and with novice poets to achieve a first collection. Both a reviewer and interviewer Ruth is at present compiling a book of interviews with some of the most eminent women poets throughout the world. 

In 2010 she was invited to Taiwan where she was awarded a gold medal for her poetry. The same year she was also awarded a Heinrich Böaut;ll residency in Eire. In 2009 she was awarded an Arts Council grant to visit Mongolia to collaborate with women poets on a book and a C.D. available from Soaring Penguin. 

Her first two collections, Where Acid has Etched (bluechrome 2007) and A Lope of Time(Shoestring 2009) have completely sold out. The latter has been re-printed whilst her latest collection, Goater’s Alley (Shoestring), was published in March 2010 and has already had to be re-printed twice. She is, at present, working on her fourth collection. 

Ruth has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies and her full collections are: 
  
Where Acid Has Etched (bluechrome 2007) 
A Lope of Time (Shoestring 2009) 
Goater’s Alley (Shoestring 2010)

May 15, 2012: Debra Spark author of Pretty Girl

Debra Spark is author of the novels Coconuts for the Saint, The Ghost of Bridgetown and Good for the Jews. She edited the best-selling anthology Twenty Under Thirty: Best Stories by America's New Young Writers. Her popular lectures on writing are collected in Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing.
The Pretty Girl, a collection of stories about art and deception, will be published in 2012 by Four Way Books.



Spark has also written for Esquire, Ploughshares, The New York Times, Food and Wine, Yankee, Down East, The Washington Post, Maine Home + Design and The San Francisco Chronicle, among other places. She has been the recipient of several awards including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College, and the John Zacharis/Ploughshares award for best first book. She is a professor at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives with her husband and son in North Yarmouth, Maine.

May 8, 2012 Jessica Treadway

Biography


Jessica Treadway is the author of Please Come Back To Me, a collection of short stories published by the University of Georgia Press in September 2010 as winner of the 2009 Flannery O'Connor Prize for Short Fiction.



Jessica Treadway's previous books are Absent Without Leave, a collection of stories (Delphinium Books/​Simon & Schuster, 1992), and And Give You Peace, a novel (Graywolf Press, 2001). Her fiction has been published in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Glimmer Train, AGNI, Five Points, and other journals, and has been cited in The Best American Short Stories anthology.



A native of Albany, New York, she received her bachelor’s degree from the State University of New York at Albany before working as a news and feature reporter for United Press International. After moving to Boston to study for her master’s degree in the creative writing program at Boston University, she held a fellowship at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College and taught at Tufts University before joining the faculty at Emerson College in Boston, where she is an associate professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing.



In addition to her fiction, she has published essays and book reviews for publications including The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, and Glamour. She wrote the libretto for composer Ellen Bender’s opera of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun and served as literary co-translator of “A Crowning Experience” by Kostiantyn Moskalets in From Three Worlds: New Writing From the Ukraine.



Jessica Treadway has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. A former member of the Board of Directors of PEN-New England, where she served as co-chair of the Freedom to Write Committee, she lives in Lexington, Mass. with her husband, Philip Holland.

April 3, 2012 Poet Zvi A. Sesling

Poet Zvi A. Sesling discusses his  poetry, and other aspects of his diverse poetic life...

Publications and Prizes

Journals:

Asphodel, Chiron Review, Ibbetson 21, Illya's Honey, Mastodon Dentist, Midstream,Mobius-The Poetry Magazine, New Delta Review, Poetica, Saranac Review, Timber Creek Review, Touchstone Review, Tower Poetry, Voices Israel

Prizes:

2008 - New England PEN "Discovery" reading, selected by Sam Cornish, Poet Laureate of Boston MA 2007 - First Place, Reuben Rose International Poetry Competition 2004 - Third Place, Reuben Rose International Poetry Competition

Zvi A. Sesling Resume

Personal Favorites

What I'm Reading Now:

 Ballistics by Billy Collins, Apron Full Of Beans by Sam Cornish, Man In The Booth In The Midtown Tunnel by Doug Holder, White Pine by Mary Oliver, The Maine Poets edited by by Wesley McNair

Favorite Authors:

Wislawa Szymborska Ted Kooser Billy Collins Charles Simic Yehuda Amichai Sam Cornish

March 13 2012 5PM Poet, Novelist: Joe Torra

SOMERVILLE WRITER JOE TORRA: A Man who gives it to you straight--with no chaser.

By Doug Holder

" I think poets and artists often take themselves too seriously. I mean everybody is important in some way. Hey--my plumber is more important to me than most poets at any given time. When my pipes are clogged--and I got to go...who am I gonna call? We all have our god given talents..." --Joe Torra

I have always admired Joe Torra, a neighbor of mine in Somerville Mass. He is a self-described "working class" poet, and he is one of the least affected,and talented writers I know. He shoots from the hip, and at times makes you feel like your fly is down. And it's good for you- keeps you honest. Years ago he started his own small press, worked on his critically praised poetry and fiction while making a living as a waiter and a substitute teacher, as well as being a mentor for many an upcoming poet and writer.

For the past 9 years he has taught Creative Writing at U/MASS Boston. I have reviewed and thoroughly enjoyed many of Torra's books and poetry collections, and I have had an opportunity to interview him in the past. Torra has a new trilogy of his novels coming out as well as a new poetry collection. So while there was a break from my teaching duties I decided to meet with him at the Bloc 11 Cafe on a decidedly cold winter's morning.

Doug Holder: You grew up in Medford, and have lived in Somerville for a long time. Medford and Somerville are right next to each other but there is a decidedly different sensibility to each of these towns.

Joe Torra: We have lived here for 30 years. Somerville wasn't the "Paris of New England" 30 years ago. It was called--pardon the expression "Slummerville." Things started to change in the 1990's when Rent Control ended in Cambridge and all these artists moved in for cheaper rent. There were very few small presses and artists here before this. But I do think we take our self much to seriously as an artsy community now. We think we are "so special." It is a turn off to me. But this happens with gentrification--the old timers are pushed out, the artists come in and eventually they are pushed out. I think we are more the "Brooklyn of New England" than the "Paris." (Laugh)

Doug Holder: In some ways our lives parallel each other. We both have had or have small presses. Yours was named "lift." You worked as a waiter, and I worked as a mental health worker, and when we both hit our 50's we started teaching college. Would you say we went through the writing school of hard knocks?

Joe Torra: I call what we did living life. It was a great experience being a waiter, and it gave me time to write. Any life the artist has is the right life--rich or poor- who cares? What I didn't like about being a waiter was that people couldn't believe you were a good writer if your worked in a restaurant. I left this work when I turned 50--it was hard on the body-and I was getting tired. You can burn out on anything if you do it long enough.

Doug Holder: Tell me about your "My Ground Trilogy" that is coming out this spring. It is compilation of three novels you wrote " Gas Station," "Tony Luongo," and "My Ground."

Joe Torra: Yes--they are loosely connected at best. The only one that was published in the States was "Gas Station." The other books were published by Gollancz in England. PFP Publishing is publishing the trilogy. Much of the work is informed by Somerville. "Tony Luongo" is about a Somerville born and bred salesman. In "My Ground" the city is called Winter Hill- a section of Somerville. I couldn't have written these books without living here.

Doug Holder: You are also connected to Bill Corbett's Pressed Wafer Press.

Joe Torra: I am a founding member of Pressed Wafer-it was started by Bill Corbett. It was named after a book by John Wieners. In 1999 Bill approached me about working with the Press and I was looking to publish poets, their chapbooks, etc...

Speaking of Wieners--I think he was overlooked. Robert Lowell was known as the "mad genius" because of his patrician background. Wieners was a working class guy; so he was just known as plain crazy. Very much a class thing.

Doug Holder: You adopted two children from China. You have written about your experiences there. What attracts you to this country?

Joe Torra: The longevity of the civilization--the philosophy-( Daoism in particular), the poets Li Po, and Tu Fu to name just a couple.

Doug Holder: How has teaching at U/Mass been for you?

Joe Torra: I like it. I love the students. When we share excitement with writing that is a great thing. You have to make sure you make time for your own writing. I am older now so I am not quite as prolific as I was years ago--I used to churn books out!

Doug Holder: Getting back to your years as a waiter. Would you say restaurants were a sort of way-station for creative people?

Joe Torra: It was for me. I always worked with interesting people. People who were out in the world. I met so many painters, musicians, and writers. I met people who walked across Europe, etc.. I mean when the help had their meal before the shift the conversation was about what book they read, what concert they went to--what were they writing, etc... Sixty to 70% of folks who worked there were in the arts. A nice place to be.




""Who would ever have thought we'd see a black president? I remember as a boy watching riots on television. Police chasing black protesters with dogs. Power hoses dispersing crowds of black people. My father said that Martin Luther King was only good for starting riots then running away. Where did those white people go? The ones who were burning crosses, and bombing churches, and killing young black men? Many of them are probably still here, collecting social security now. And their children live on." (From Torra's novel " What's So Funny?)

*** For more info about Torra go to joetorra.com

March 6, 2012 Rosie Rosenzweig Scholar, Playwright, Poet

Rosie Rosenzweig

Rosenzweig’s early poetry was anthologized in the first gender-friendly American Hebrew prayer book as well as in various feminist anthologies. As the founder of the Jewish Poetry Festival in Sudbury Massachusetts, she hosted outstanding luminaries like the former the poet laureate Robert Pinsky. Her more current poetry is being collected in a work-in-progress.

Rosenzweig’s interpretations of Biblical women appear in Reading Between the Lines, All the Women Followed Her, and Praise Her Works: Conversations with Biblical Women. Her essays have appeared in Ethical Wills, Making the Jewish Journey from Mid-life through the Elder Years, and the Foreword. Her travel memoir, A Jewish Mother in Shangri-la describes the Jewish Buddhist World of meditation.

Women’s Intergenerational issues have been a focus of her work and a recently completed a play, “Myths and Ms.” At Brandeis for almost a decade, she has been interviewing artists in various media and hosting a yearly panel at the Brandeis Rose Art Museum on the creative process in an effort to understand the psychological and spiritual state of consciousness present at the moment of creation. Defining how creativity can transform the artist, she has currently coined a term called MotherArtTM.
Current Projects

I am writing a book to define the process of creativity based on ten years of interviews with women artists. My recent journal article demonstratives the transformative affects of the creative process. Presently a preliminary book proposal will help to develop and define the experience and sources of creativity.
Representative Publications

Rosenzweig, Rosie. “MotherArtTM and Maternal Health: Transformation from Grief To Compassion.” Journal of the Association for Research in Mothering. York University, Toronto, Canada. Volume 11. Number 1. (2009): 224–238.

Rosenzweig, Rosie. “Post-triumphalism and the New Haskalah.” in New Jewish Feminism: Probing the Past, Forging the Future edited by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein, 397–403. Woodstock Vermont: Jewish Lights Publications, 2009.

Feb 28, 2012 Poet Bernard Horn

Bernard Horn’s most recent book of poetry, Our Daily Words, was selected as a “Must Read” book and a finalist for the 2011 Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. About a quarter of the poems in the book concern Israel and were written during the nine months the author spent there in 2001, teaching at Haifa University. Winner of a Fulbright and five fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Horn’s poems and translations of Israel’s premier poet, Yehuda Amichai, have appeared in The New Yorker, The Manhattan Review, The Mississippi Review, Moment Magazine, and other publications. After teaching in the English Department at Northern Essex Community College for 13 years, Bernie moved on to his present position as Professor of English at Framingham State College, where he received the 2010 Distinguished Faculty Award. On Wednesday, November 16th, at 7:00 p.m., Bernard Horn will present, “Poetry & Terror: The Times & Life of a Family Man.” The program will include the author’s reflections on cross-cultural interrelationships – both in the challenges of translating Yehuda Amichai’s work and in his own poetry. He also will discuss how the activity of translating and the reality of history, in the form of terrorism, impact his writing process, which is grounded in his identity, not as an isolated individual, but as a member of a family and a first generation American.