CCLaP Weekender
From the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography
October 24, 2014
Megan Stielstra: The CCLaP Interview Photography by Jaejin Hwang Chicago literary events calendar October 24, 2014 | 1
THIS WEEK’S CHICAG
For all events, visit [cclapce
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 24 7pm
Sappho's Salon Women & Children First / 5233 N Clark St / $7-10 womenandchildrenfirst.com Jenny Magnus and the Crooked Mouth says, "Each of our five members writes songs, and each has a distinct and different way of coming at things." Sheila Donohue is a performance poet with four National Poetry Slam Champion titles and has enjoyed feature performances of her poetry and comedic writings at Steppenwolf, Curious Theatre Branch, the Green Mill, the Art Institute, and the Chicago Cultural Center and on Oprah and National Public Radio.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 25 10pm
Delphic Arts Center Delphic Arts Center / 5340 W. Lawrence Ave / $10 facebook.com/delphicarts Music, poetry, comedy, monologues, and more are welcome.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 26 6:30pm Does Not Love Release Party The Whistler / 2421 N Milwaukee Ave https://www.facebook.com/events/727701953975978/ Come join Curbside Splendor Publishing and a lineup of terrific writers in welcoming James Tadd Adcox's debut novel, Does Not Love, into the world! Readers include Kathleen Rooney, Kyle Beachy, Okla Elliot, and Daniela Olszewska.
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GO LITERARY EVENTS
enter.com/chicagocalendar] 7pm
Uptown Poetry Slam The Green Mill / 4802 N. Broadway / $6, 21+ slampapi.com Featuring open mike, special guests, and end-of-the-night competition.
7pm Asylum Le Fleur de Lis / 301 E. 43rd / $10 lefleurdelischicago.com A weekly poetry showcase with live accompaniment by the band Verzatile.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 27 6pm
Aaron Christensen Harold Washington Library / 400 S State St / Free chipublib.org Just in time for Halloween, Aaron Christensen takes us on a joy ride through the annals of horrifying (and just plain horrible) fright films. Christensen discusses his recent book Hidden Horror: A Celebration of 101 Underrated and Overlooked Fright Flicks. Being held in the library's Cindy Pritzker Auditorium.
7pm
Poetry off the Shelf: A.E. Stallings Poetry Foundation / 61 West Superior St / Free poetryfoundation.org A. E. Stallings studied classics in Athens, Georgia and has lived since 1999 in Athens, Greece. She has published three books of poetry, Archaic Smile, which won the Richard Wilbur Award; Hapax; and Olives. Her verse translation of Lucretius, The Nature of Things, appeared Penguin Classics in 2007. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. October 24, 2014 | 3
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 28 6pm
Chicago After Dark Citywide Release Party City Lit Books / 2523 N. Kedzie / Free cclapcenter.com/chicagoafterdark Celebrate the release of CCLaP’s newest book, a “city all-star” student anthology featuring work from 31 contributors spanning ten different schools across the city and suburbs. Featuring free food and drinks, plus performances from random contributors drawn out of a hat, this marks a major new milestone for both the center and the city’s literary community, and the heralded arrival of Chicago’s next generation of daring, soon-to-be famous writers.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 29 6pm
Bryan Stevenson Harold Washington Library / 400 S State / Free chipublib.org In Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson, one of the country's most visionary legal thinkers, social justice advocates and a MacArthur 'genius', takes us on an unforgettable journey into the broken American criminal justice system. Books will be available for purchase and the authors will sign the book at the conclusion of the program. Admission is first come, first serve; reservations not required. Being held in the library's Cindy Pritzker Auditorium.
7pm
Barbara Mahany Women & Children First / 5233 N Clark / Free womenandchildrenfirst.com Join us for a reading and conversation with Barbara Mahany, longtime Chicago Tribune feature writer. Slowing Time, a collection of meditative essays, was picked by Publishers Weekly as one of the Top 10 religion books for fall 2014. She explores the themes of paying attention and carving out quietude among the noise and the whirl of the modern-day domestic. Before joining the Tribune, Mahaney was a pediatric oncology nurse at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago.
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9pm
In One Ear Heartland Cafe / 7000 N. Glenwood / $3, 18+ facebook.com/pagesIn-One-Ear/210844945622380 Chicago's 3rd longest-running open-mic show, hosted by Pete Wolf and Billy Tuggle.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 30 7:30pm Joan Larkin & Anne Laughlin Women & Children First / 5233 N Clark / Free womenandchildrenfirst.com Joan Larkin's previous work includes My Body: New and Selected Poems and Lammy recipient Cold River, which served as the basis for her play, The AIDS Passion. Anne Laughlin's story "It Only Occurred to Me Later" was a finalist in the Saints and Sinners 2013 Short Fiction Contest, and three of her novels received Goldie Awards. She was named a Writers Retreat Fellow by the Lambda Literary Foundation twice. She lives on the Chicago River with her spouse, Linda Braasch.
To submit your own literary event, or to correct the information on anything you see here, please drop us a line at cclapcenter@gmail.com.
October 24, 2014 | 5
MEGAN ST 6 | CCLaP Weekender
After an upbringing in small-town Michigan, then a rough-andtumble youth that took her to Europe among other places, author Megan Stielstra eventually landed in Chicago, where she became a traveling professor as well as a young mother. A veteran of the local theatre group 2nd Story, her confessional piece about postpartum depression was chosen for the prestigious Best American Essays 2013, which is what eventually led to her collection Once I Was Cool from Curbside Splendor. Back in April, CCLaP executive director Jason Pettus had a chance to sit down with Stielstra on the campus of Columbia College, where they talked at length for the center’s podcast about adulthood, finding humor in the darkest subjects, and the messed-up things bored young people can do with Jiffy Mix. The CCLaP Weekender is happy to present a typed version of that talk today.
TIELSTRA THE CCLAP INTERVIEW October 24, 2014 | 7
CCLaP: I do not know a lot about your upbringing or what brought you to Chicago, so let’s start there and work our way up to the new book. You were born and raised in Michigan, is that right? Megan Stielstra: Yes. What was it like there? What were you doing there? Well, I grew up in Chelsea, which is now a pretty big town. Jeff Daniels, the actor, grew up in Chelsea, then ended up moving back there and starting a theatre company, and now there’s a super lively theatre community and lots of restaurants. But when I was there, it was a lot smaller. It’s also the Jiffy Mix capital of the world, so when my friends and I were younger, we used to take the Jiffy Mix tour—you know Jiffy Mix, right, the corn bread with the boxes and the blue label—so we would do the Jiffy Mix tour because at the end you’d get a box with the corn bread, and you’d go home and make fucked-up things with the corn bread, because what else are you going to do when you grow up in a small town? You either make out in the corn fields or make weird shit in your parents’ kitchen. Anyway, that’s what it was like there when I was growing up. And when I left for college, I went to journalism school in Boston, because I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I figured journalism was how you did that and make...some money? [Laughter] Had you thought at all about doing anything creative in your high school and teenage years? What I was then was a reader. I was the kind of kid who would cut class in order to hang out at the library. So the writing I was mainly doing was in my journal. I was just...please note that I am now gesturing writing in the air. [Laughter] You know, it’s just you on your own, a notebook by yourself, and you’re writing about zombies and elven fairies instead of algebra. So that’s how I came into it. I did a lot of theatre and debate in high school, which I loved in part I think because of the teachers involved. But I never really thought about doing anything in theatre [for a living], which is weird because I’ve ended up becoming part of a theatre company. It’s part of the work I do now here in Chicago. Since your book goes so much into this—and we’ll get into detail with this a little later—at what age did you start getting involved in indie rock and getting involved in that scene? 8 | CCLaP Weekender
I had a friend in high school, and we met because our sixth grade Health teacher paired us up. You know how in middle school, the super-cool kid and the brainy kid who gets As will get paired up? And I had to get As, because my dad was the principal. [Laughter] Lots of people threatening to shave my head all the time. It was tragic. Anyway, so Scotty and I were paired up in Health class, and he would make me all these mix tapes, with the Dead Milkmen and Fishbone and Dead Kennedys and all kinds of crazy stuff. He’s the one who started getting me into Jane’s Addiction a little bit. And then later, when I started dating boys secretly—you know, when we were making out in the corn fields—there was this one in particular who was a big Jane’s fan. And it was just listening to Nothing Shocking in his car, over and over again, that I think really got me involved in the music. And I ended up going to the very first Lollapalooza, and it was one of my first live shows—Jane’s Addiction, Siouxie and the Banshees, Henry Rollins—and it just blew my mind that there could be all these different kinds of sounds but it was still thousands of people connecting. And I thought that was such a profound thing, and I think I’ve been searching for that connection all the time ever since. Any kind of art, whether we’re talking music or theatre or writing, for me it’s a two-way street. It’s a person putting the work out there, and a person responding to the work. And I try to be both parts of that relationship. I see some people who are just making work and don’t get involved in the other part, and I think, how can you even do that? How do you feed yourself? So what ended up taking you from journalism school in Massachusetts to creative writing in Chicago? I think because I sucked in journalism school. I mean, I would turn in papers, and I would get them back and they’d say, “You’re writing too many words!” This was 1993, ‘94, and the study of journalism as an industry was very different then. But I was definitely into the long sentences and the non-direct language. I was interested in the thought processes of journalism, and all these things that aren’t involved in straight reportage. I think I got a little lost, and I don’t think that’s unusual for someone who’s eighteen, in a completely new city that’s in a completely new world. I think the thing for me is that I was on a scholarship, and I knew that this particular school and this particular field wasn’t right for me, but I didn’t know how to leave that scholarship. But I found that it would transfer if I went to an American school overrseas, so I was like, “Shit, that sounds great.” So I went to Italy for a year, and I took Lit classes. I studied European Literature and Italian Literature and I just sat around and read. And I read and I read and I October 24, 2014 | 9
read, and I modeled for those art studios where everyone is sitting around painting a nude model, so I’m sure there are still lots of nude paintings of me floating around Europe, which is fine. And I remember walking into a grocery store at eighteen and realizing for the first time that I could buy liquor, which was a huge moment. So I grabbed the cheapest thing that was there, which was grappa. I’ve since had really good grappa, which is lovely, but that was not good grappa. [Laughter] But it was somewhere in that year, of just reading and reading and reading, that I realized that what I wanted to be doing is writing fiction. And at the time I was dating this guy over there who wanted to move to Chicago. So I applied to every school in the Chicago area, and Columbia College offered me the most money, so this is where I came. And I do think it was one of those moments that makes me believe in fate a little bit. Because the way that [Columbia College] taught writing, the way they engage with writing, is exactly what I needed. It seems like we’re constantly talking with people on the podcast who are either graduates of Columbia or professors there. It seems like there’s a real coalescing going on there in the last ten years, and it’s becoming a major center in the entire United States for creative writing. I think so. I hope so. There’s a lot of change there right now, and I’m not really in the loop of a lot of it, but for me, it’s always been a magical place. I was taught to respect the creative process, to experiment, to try, not everything you put down is final and perfect. Not everything you write is ready for immediate critique. There are different levels and forms of feedback, and I think [Columbia] was good at teaching me how to approach my first draft of things. You can’t judge the first thing someone puts out in the same way you judge Raymond Carver’s 20th draft that was edited by the New Yorker. I’m someone who felt very unsure of her work at the beginning, and I really needed that. I needed to see how the work could develop over time. I’m really grateful for it, and now as a teacher I try to provide that for my students. You’re one of those interesting teachers here in Chicago, in that you have to make this little circuit of all the schools. You teach at Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and here at Columbia; and for those who don’t live here, I should explain that those are literally on either opposite edges of the city. Tell us a little bit about what it’s like to be in that kind of position, and what it’s like to go from one set of students to another. Is there a different ethos? Are there different types of students at these different places? 10 | CCLaP Weekender
I’m sure that there are, but it’s not something I really see. What I’m doing is sitting in a room with people who have an idea of what they want to show. That’s really what writing is—“I’m seeing something in my head, and I’m seeing it so clearly, and I want to get it out of my head and put it in your head.” As writers we do that with chicken scratch on a piece of paper, but somehow I can do that in a way that you can see and feel and connect with in some way. So I’m not really working with the whole of the college and what that [institution] represents. I’m working with people who want to make some shit. Who want to put the words out there and work their asses off to do it. The best way I can describe this crazy patchwork life that I have, of running all over the city, is just...gratitude. Both as a human being and as a writer; I’m constantly sitting around in places with people talking about what makes for a good story, and how we can all connect with each other on a human level. And that influences my work, so I go home and think, “Shit, I totally know now how to solve this problem that I’m having in this essay I’m working on, because so-and-so in my class was talking about this thing that Don De Grazia did in his work.” I mean, I can get into some specification. At Northwestern I teach in the creative nonfiction MFA program in Continuing Studies, so most of my students are working full-time day jobs then taking night classes, and are exploring their writing after a whole other day of other fields, like advertising and law. At the University of Chicago my students are a little bit younger, and at Columbia the classes are mixed in these really lovely ways. In my classes last semester I had a Vietnam vet who had been waiting to retire before starting on creative writing. But in general the people who show up are the people who want to work, and that’s who I’m there for. Before we get into the new book, let’s talk about something else that takes up a lot of your life, because I find this a really fascinating project you’re involved with, 2nd Story. Just to start out, I’m going to have you explain this in more detail. Basically, it’s a collective group, and the members of the group, about 25 people altogether, are the ones who put together the pieces for the public events you do. It’s a collaborative process. Why don’t you walk us through that process a little more? There are about 25 or 30 of us in the company, but there a couple hundred storytellers we work with throughout the Chicago area. Those of us in the company are there to support those people in their writing and their performance. So let’s say you’ve lived some crazy amazing life and you have some crazy amazing stories, which I’m sure you do; we all do in some ways. My job at 2nd Story is not to say, “Tell me your story and I’ll go October 24, 2014 | 11
write it.” It’s, “Hi, I’m going to support you in its development. It’s yours. Your voice, your way, your lived experience, and I’m here to have your back.” So someone we bring on board is going to work with a writer for a couple of months, to get that work the best they can on the page, and then they’re going to pass that off to a theatre director; we partner with theatre companies all around the city. And then we work with musicians and sound designers, depending on what venue we’re in, and we work with a lot of non-traditional venues, bars and restaurants and classrooms and conference centers and backyards and outdoor weird crazy spaces and corporate things. We can come to your house and do it in the backyard. [Laughter] My backyard? We’ll come in with a lighting crew! So the kinds of crew we work with will depend on the space. And so then we do the performance, and then after the performance we have a committee that works on what to do with the work after that performance. So we have a podcast we put out, and right now our audience for that is around 10,000 per episode, which is really amazing. It’s one of my favorite things about this digital culture we live in now, that the work can travel in these ways that the younger me living in a small town in Michigan would’ve never been able to engage with a storyteller in a big city in that kind of way. And then a few years ago we put out our first print anthology, which is actually one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. We have a print archive of hundreds of stories that we’ve produced over the last decade, and to have to pick 23 pieces out of all those almost broke me. I was going to bring up this book myself, actually, because it was put out by Elephant Rock Books, owned by a friend of ours here at CCLaP, Jotham Burrello. Did he approach you, or did you approach him? He’s so amazing. We were sitting around 2nd Story and saying, “Okay, it’s book time,” so I called Jotham and asked him if I could take him out for a beer and pick his brain about the right publishing venue for us. He knows more about publishing than anyone I know, so I wanted his opinion: should we self-publish this thing? Should we do an electronic publication? Should I be trying to pitch this to major houses? Just, what would you suggest? And he was like, “Oh, I’ll put it out. When can you have a draft?” And I was like, “Fuck.” That whole used-car salesman idea popped into my head, like, “Is there Scotch Guard in the Lincoln?” and the salesman says, “Do you want there to be Scotch Guard in the Lincoln?” [Laughter] So I said, 12 | CCLaP Weekender
“Well, when do you want the draft?” “Well, can I have it the next time we meet?” “Sure you can have it the next time we meet.” And I ran back to the company and we made this book. It was this really fascinating collaborative project. I think one of the things that was most interesting is that when you’re making a book, for the purposes of distribution it needs to “Sometimes the only way be stamped with the word “Fiction” we’re going to get through or “Nonfiction,” and what do those all this crazy fucking mess words mean? With 2nd Story, since we do so many of our performances is to laugh our asses off. There are things that I’ve in bars, we’re always playing with the question of how do you tell been through, and if it stories in bars, and the natural doesn’t come out as funny sense of exaggeration that comes at first, it’s not going to with that. But now all of a sudden come out at all. Like, I we have that word “nonfiction” have more to say about associated with the book, and how does that change things? So I sat depression, but in that first down with a few company members piece I wrote about it, my and a very awesome team of interns, mission was, ‘How do you and we backtracked all the stories. write about depression in a It was a really fascinating project, and my favorite anecdote from that way that’s not depressing?’ At the end of the day, I’m process was that we have a story in that book by Sam Weller about trying to give that to an Amber Lynn, who’s a porn star. audience, and I don’t want And Sam had given certain time to depress the hell out of periods where Amber Lynn was on them.” the cover of Hustler or whatever, so I had to turn to my young male interns and say, “You guys, this is going to be really hard...” [Laughter] “...but I need you to do some research on Hustler for the entire decade.” I mean, c’mon, best job ever! So we made this book, and it’s interesting, because the name “2nd Story” comes from the fact that we tell the first story and hope the audience will tell the second. We hope the sharing of stories will help convince people to share their own stories. And that was the hope of putting the book out too. My hope still is that people will read the stories, then put it down and think, “God, I could do this too. I can be a witness to my own experiences and I can share that.” I think that we need that. I would like writing to become more joyful. We can be taught that it’s something to be afraid of. “What’s your sentence structure?” versus how can October 24, 2014 | 13
we use these stories to connect to people. Well, okay, let’s talk about the new book for a bit, Once I Was Cool. Put out by our friends at Curbside Splendor. How did things go with Curbside? I’m assuming pretty well. Yeah, I’m just still kind of blown away by the whole experience. I’m so proud to be a part of their catalog. If you stop and look at all the things they’re putting out right now, it’s so diverse. They put out things that aren’t in English; they put out experimental work; they put out essays; they put out visual art. And diversity in age and gender and location, and the different kinds of stories they’re giving a platform to. I think that’s really important. I think it’s really necessary for the publishing industry right now. And as a Chicagoan, I’m grateful to add my little part, my experiences in this city. I’m glad to be able to put it out there and help give a wider representation of what this city is. Not everyone here looks like me, and not everyone here lives like me. I don’t mean to sound corny, but this world needs lots of different voices. I think that’s what independent publishing gives us. So I’m just glad to be a part of that, and with Curbside specifically. Speaking of all this, your book is a little unusual in that it’s a collection of personal essays. I think it would normally be tempting for a writer with their first book to...is this your first book? This is my second, actually. I had a story collection out in 2011 called Everyone Remain Calm with Joyland, another independent press. I was just about to say, I would think it would be tempting to put out a story collection, maybe a novel. Was it the essays themselves that led you to want to do a book of them? Or was it the other way around? That’s an awesome question. When I first started talking with Curbside, it was “stories.” That was the word we were using, because that was the word I would use to describe my work. I write short fiction, but also because of my years and years of work with 2nd Story, I was writing personal narrative. They were still stories, but they were true stories of stuff that had actually happened to me. So when Curbside and I were first talking, it was like, “Let’s just call it ‘stories’ and put all the work in there and call it a day.” But then this kind of mind-blowing, magical thing happened, where one of the pieces I wrote for 2nd Story ended up being selected for The Best American Essays 2013. So it came out, which I’m still kind of reeling from, and all 14 | CCLaP Weekender
of a sudden this word “essay” was attached to my work, and I hadn’t really thought about it. All my training was in fiction writing, and even when I approached nonfiction, it was through the lens of fictional narrative and character development. So I called up Curbside and said, “Hey, this thing is going to happen, so let’s think about the word ‘essay’ and what that means to my work.” So I sat down with the manuscript I had given Curbside and I realized that of everything I had submitted, 80 percent of it was true, so I took the work I would classify as fiction out, and I wrote new work to put in, and we’re calling it ‘personal essay’ because that’s what it is. Much of it is confessional. You get into some sensitive topics in your personal life and things like that. How difficult was it to sit down and do that, knowing you were going to have this large public audience of random strangers reading through it? You know, I have to admit, I’m just starting to realize now what I’ve done. [Laughter] Well, this is me, and this is my life. It’s a little scary to think, “Oh, if someone doesn’t like the book, does that mean...” I mean, how is it going to be taken personally? Many of those pieces were written for public performance, several of them for 2nd Story and many for other places. Chicago has an amazing performance community; there’s all kind of work happening on stages and on microphones and in bars all around the city, any given night. It’s so fucking exciting to see how it’s growing. But I never really sat down to write any of that work thinking, “This is stuff I’m writing for a book.” It was, “This is stuff I’m writing to share in a performance, with the 10 people or the 50 people or the 800 people showing up to that performance, and it’s going to be that one night, this one experience that we’re all going to share.” I didn’t think it was going to travel beyond that, so it’s been kind of an interesting process, examining that for myself. And there are some stories that I chose not to share in the book, because for whatever reasons I’m not ready to put them out there like that. It seems there’s a difference between writing [itself ], and when and how I choose to share that writing. Writing is something I do every day. It’s just a part of my life. I drink coffee, I take a shower, I play with my kid, I write, I go to work, I ride the train. This is part of my day-to-day life. But putting it out there in the world, whether I’m submitting it for publication or give it to a theatrical producer, that’s different. But everything in this book, it’s...ready. It’s ready to be put out there. The subjects of these pieces are subjects that are being discussed out there in the world, and I like to think that I can make a contribution to those discussions. I like to think that what I’m putting out there can push that conversation in some way. Maybe someone can get October 24, 2014 | 15
ideas and learn things from the same way I’m learning things. And I think especially with the piece that was in Best American Essays, about post-partum depression. That was a big one, because that’s such a lonely experience. To know that it’s something that is experienced by so many people really kind of changes how desperate the moment can be. One of the interesting things I find about the book is that it reads in this complex way between very funny writing and very serious, and getting into funny and serious subjects on almost a page-by-page basis. Is that part of your natural writing style, or is that something you very deliberately try to bring to your writing? And how important is it for you to find a balance between funny and serious? That’s very deliberate, and I’m glad you mentioned it. Sometimes the only way we’re going to get through all this crazy fucking mess is to laugh our asses off. There are things that I’ve been through, and if it doesn’t come out as funny at first, it’s not going to come out at all. Like, I have more to say about depression, but in that first piece I wrote about it, my mission was, “How do you write about depression in a way that’s not depressing?” At the end of the day, I’m trying to give that to an audience, and I don’t want to depress the hell out of them. I want them within the experience. So the first thing you need to do is give something to the audience, and there are so many subject matters that are in desperate need of discussion. They’re real and they’re happening, whether we’re talking about violence or sexual violence or mental health issues or depression, all of these incredibly heavy subjects, and we’re not talking about them. People are writing about them, people are making work about them, but why aren’t we talking about them? I’m not saying that we can only write about them in a funny way—everyone needs to find their own way to do the work, in the way that’s comfortable for them. But for me, that was the only way that was going to come out initally. But I think also that I feel both emotions, easily. I think everybody does. There are things that floor us, and that can bring you to your knees, and there are other things that are like, if you don’t step back and laugh and laugh, you’re done. So I wanted to include both in the book. And another thing I was thinking about, when I was putting the final collection together, was that some of those are from the point of view of me now, at 38 years old, and some of them are kind of from the point of view from when I was 18 years old, or when I was 25, or when I was eight. I tried to find my voice in those different times in my life. And so there are some things I experienced that were very serious at the time, but I thought were hilarious, or vice versa. There’s a piece in there that’s fucking riduculous, about these 16 | CCLaP Weekender
one-night-stands I was having at Martha’s Vineyard when I was 18 years old with a dude with a glass testicle, and it was just completely ridiculous. And when I look back on that now, I’m like, “What were you doing, hitchhiking by yourself, having all this sex with these people, not having any kind of care for your own life?” But that was me at that age. And that’s changed a little bit now because I’m a mom, right, and thinking about my own kid being dumb about things. But it’s my life, and I wanted to be truthful about it. And just one more question about the book itself. One of my favorite pieces in the book was about when you were younger and living in the Uptown neighborhood, and living across the street from this big infamous indie-rock music club, and how a big part of your life was just about getting drunk and hanging outside of the club, where you could just listen to the music bleed through the walls. You told us a little earlier about your relationship with the music scene, but now that you’re a little older, what’s your relationship now with it all? Is it fundamentally a youth experience, something like that? Or can we pull things from that experience and take them with us as we get older? Gosh, yes, I think so. It’s changed since then; I think there’s a line in that essay, something about youthful obsession versus adult devotion. And I can’t speak for anyone other than myself, but when I was younger, the music was what was speaking for me. I would hear a song and they were telling the world what I felt. How does someone do that? How does an artist making music get into my brain at 16 years old and express my feelings? Now I can speak for myself quite well, so I need the music in a different way. I don’t need it to voice what I’m going through. This is totally off the cuff; I haven’t really thought through this, and I think it’s a really fascinating question. You know, we bought a condo across the street from the Aragon, and what is fucked up about that sentence is not that we bought it across the street from the Aragon, but that we bought it, period. To this day, and this is one of the things I talk about in that essay, I still don’t know why we did that. We thought we were supposed to. We got together, we ran away to Prague, we lived in Prague for a year, we came back, we eloped, we got a dog, because that’s what you do... So far this list sounds pretty normal. And then we got a condo, because...why? Why do we think we’re supposed to do these things? So we did, and then the recession happened and we were October 24, 2014 | 17
stuck. We couldn’t sell it, we couldn’t get rid of it, and we couldn’t afford it. And the prices kept climbing because there was a recession going on, and there was property taxes and escrow and all these things, and so we were stuck, and we didn’t know what to do. And while all that was going on, a couple of things happened. One, the music. Through all this “what the fuck, we’re adults, we have a mortgage,” all the stuff with the finances—oh, and I had a baby in the middle of all that, so what do you do with that? [Laughter] And then all the while, there’s this music. Megadeath and Kid Rock and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and it’s not like they’re coming through the stereo speakers; they’re coming through the walls, and you could feel the floor vibrate. This is one of those grand old theatres from the 1920s, and was reappropriated into a rock venue, and really the whole neighborhood just sort of shakes when there’s a concert there. It’s absolutely amazing. Somebody in our condo association was like, “We need to send a letter to the Aragon, telling them to turn down the volume after 10 p.m.,” and I was like, “Are you fucking kidding me? You bought a condo across the street from the Aragon. The Aragon has been here long before you, and it will be there long after you’re gone.” And so it wasn’t like the sound bothered me, it was just interesting to have a living soundtrack to this kind of crazy time in our lives, and especially when it’s a soundtrack you have no control over. It wasn’t like I was going to the Aragon and saying, “Oh, I’m in an M.I.A. mode right now.” No, M.I.A. was playing next door. But that would be kind of nice, to have a direct line to the Aragon and be able to say, “Would you please book...” “I’m feeling this right now, could you please play...?” So it was a really fascinating time. And it’s interesting, almost all of the essays in this book were written in that five-year period that we lived next door to the Aragon, after we had our son, trying to piece together our lives. And me trying to figure out who I was and where I fit and who I am before and after children, and how in all of that do you write? How do you find the time? How do you find the headspace? All of these crazy things happening around you, how do you sit down and make work? And so it was important structurally that the book kind of illustrated that. Most of the essays are pretty short. Some have short chunks within the essays, because that’s what my writing life was like in those years. It’s changed a little bit; we got out of that situation and are renting again. Renting! If anyone’s listening to this and is 18 | CCLaP Weekender
thinking about buying a condo...rent! Unless you want to die in the place; but otherwise, rent! And my son is six now, and is in kindergarten and has this whole kind of life that is separate from his dad and I. My husband is a blogger now and works from home, so there are all kinds of different things going on in our lives, but I wanted this book to kind of be a record of that time. You read so much about coming-of-age stories, but what comes out of living through all that shit? How do we approach this word “adult?” To me it’s not a number, it’s not an age. But something about filing all that paperback, something about having a child, and still feeling like everything was crazy and out of control and “What’s going to happen next? I don’t even know! But The Pixies are playing, so let’s go out on the porch and have a beer!” What did all of that look like? So for me, this book is what that looked like. C
Once I Was Cool, from Curbside Splendor, can be found at all major bookstores. Visit Stielstra online at meganstielstra.com.
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CCLaP Publishing
Jamie has lost his brother Matt to the war in Afghanistan. What he finds harder to deal with is that he soon starts to lose a sense of Matt. Hurt and confused, Jamie decides he must travel to the place where Matt was killed--he must go to Kabul. There he finds a surreal landscape of mercenaries and soldiers, violent teenage terrorists, diaspora-trained lawyers in a land currently without law, and where he strikes up a friendship with a beautiful, headstrong local woman. As Jamie’s life descends into a series of unwelcome encounters, and Afghanistan descends further into chaos, things reach a climactic head for the British bluecollar slacker antihero, and it soon becomes clear that his rash trip to a land he doesn’t understand may end up holding deadly consequences. A major new literary achievement, and one of the most metaphorically astute looks yet at the Millennial “War on Terror,” The Wounding Time is a darkly poetic contemporary masterpiece, and marks the brilliant literary debut of London author Hussein Osman.
Download for free at cclapcenter.com/thewoundingtime
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Jaejin Hwang
Asleep PHOTOGRAPHY FEATURE October 24, 2014 | 21
Location: Seoul / Ohio Asleep describes an ambiguous distinction between the peaceful death and falling asleep. I got inspired by the song, “Asleep,� by the Smiths. When I listened to this song, I realized that there were common things between the peaceful death and falling asleep. I tried to describe this theme by natural and random moments in our daily lives with symbolic ways rather than direct answering the topic.
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CCLaP Publishing
An official painter for the Lithuanian Communist Party, Martynas Kudirka enjoys a pleasant, unremarkable life with a beautiful wife and all the privileges that come with being a party member. Yet in the summer of 1989, his ordinary world suddenly turns upside down. Political revolt is breaking out across Eastern Europe, and Martynas comes home to find his wife dead on the kitchen floor with a knife in her back. Realizing the police will not investigate, he sets out to find his wife’s killer. Instead, he stumbles upon her secret life. Martynas finds himself drawn into the middle of an independence movement, on a quest to find confidential documents that could free a nation. Cold War betrayals echo down through the years as author Bronwyn Mauldin takes the reader along a modern-day path of discovery to find out Martynas’ true identity. Fans of historical fiction will travel back in time to 1989, the Baltic Way protest and Lithuania’s “singing revolution,” experiencing a nation’s determination for freedom and how far they would fight to regain it.
Download for free at cclapcenter.com/lovesongs
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The CCLaP Weekender is published in electronic form only, every Friday for free download at the CCLaP website [cclapcenter.com]. Copyright 2014, Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. All rights revert back to artists upon publication. Editorin-chief: Jason Pettus. Story Editor: Behn Riahi. Layout Editor: Wyatt Roediger-Robinette. Calendar Editors: Anna Thiakos and Taylor Carlile. To submit your work for possible feature, or to add a calendar item, contact us at cclapcenter@gmail.com.
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