Viva la Poesia ...

and viva die Schule fuer Dichtung/The Vienna Poetry Academy for organising the retrospective of its work at the Metropol on Thursday night. Christian Ide Hintze presaented videoclips - with H. C. Artmann, Wolfgang Bauer, Falco, Gerhard Rühm, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, Nick Cave in their SfD workshops. There were readings by Julian Schutting and Hemma Bertram, and by Peter Rosei and Ulli Klepalski, and Michaela Schweighofer talked about her manifesto class with Michaela Falkner.

Our haiku workshop with Gabriel Rosenstock (Jean Almeida, Camilo Antonio, Michael Buergermeister, Candy Fresacher, Matias Moulin, Sandra Huber, Sylvia Petter, Vicky Slavuski - we had local stand-ins for Gabriel in Ireland and Matias in Zuerich) read their haikus from a beautiful book that Jean created in a restricted number of copies. (Copies may be obtained from the SfD.) The book is a thank you to the Irish poet Gabriel Rosenstock from his class in Vienna, and shows how international the Vienna Poetry Academy/School really is with students from Argentina, Australia, Switzerland, Canada, USA, Ireland, and Philippines.

We finished the evening with the “poetryschoolsong” - a videoclip with Nick Cave, Falco und Allen ginsberg. (The song appears in “viva la poesia”, book & CD, by christian ide hintze/sfd, residenz verlag 2002.)

Big thanks go to Ide and Harriet and her team for a great evening.
More pix of the book and of the evening, some experimental, can be seen at Flickr.

Cork Loot

And here's my Cork Loot. I would have got more, but I was limited by Euros & Kilos. (Vijay Lakshmi and I did a swap, as did Patrick Cullen and I, but I have to wait until next year for when Scribe publishes his collection.)

Birds from Cork

It was impossible to attend all the events at the Short Story Conference, so I missed readings and panels I wanted to attend. One was a reading by Nuala Ní Chonchúir. But I did manage to attend an Editor's Roundtable in which Nuala participated.

I've just seen that Nuala has posted on her blog about the Conference, so here's some cross-pollination.

Nuala was fiction editor of Southword 14, New Writing from Ireland which I just had to buy since the Conference was after all a short story conference in Ireland, its theme echoing the title of Frank O’Connor’s "The Lonely Voice". I came across some familiar names in Southword 14 : Matthew Sweeney (who had taught at the Geneva Writers' Conference), Tania Hershman of The Short Review, Katie Singer (from several Conferences on the Short Story), and Vanessa Gebbie (via Zoe King and Alex Keegan's Boot Camp in the late 90s); so I'm looking forward to seeing new and old friends.

Nuala also told me about a short story contest she is judging with a deadline end July, open to anyone anywhere, and did I hear online submission? Hope I didn't dream this and will check this out.

To be continued ....

Ha! Comments to the rescue! Just in case the links on the comments to this post don't come through, check out the submission rules for the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Prize which has a deadline 31 July 2008 and a maximum word count of 3K. And the judge even lets you know the sort of stories she likes and lists stories that appealed to her.

Birds & Ornithologists in Cork

I'm still recovering from a terrific time in Cork last week for the 10th International Conference on the Short Story in English. It was raining on Wednesday when I arrived at the Triskel Arts Centre just in time for a workshop with Robert Olen Butler. The key word from that is YEARNING.

On Thursday, the sun was out and we were welcomed in the midst of graduation ceremonies to the conference. Then followed panels and readings by critics and scholars (ornithologists) and writers (birds), and a Plenary Session on the Irish Short Story today. Colm Toibin gave a lunchtime reading, and then on to more panels and participant readings as per the Conference programme. I gave a paper on The Tell of Smell in the panel moderated by Juani Guerra on Cognition, Embodiment and Sensory Imagery and later on had the pleasure of introducing the readings by Allan Weiss and Evelyn Conlon, and of reading together with Vijay Lakshmi. The evening was rounded off by a reception hosted by the Lord Mayor of Cork.

Tobias Wolff read at lunchtime on Friday and panels and readings continued until Saturday evening with Plenary Sessions on varieties of short fiction criticism and theory (Susan Lohafer, Charles E. May, William H. New and James Nagel) and on What makes an American Writer with Clark Blaise, Ana Castillo, Bharati Mukherjee and Z.Z. Packer). Bharati Mukherjee and Robert Olen Butler also gave a reading at the Triskel Arts Centre on Friday night. Students of the University of Central Arkansas exhibited their paintings of selected short stories at the Centre and visitors dined on Guiness and salmon. Edna O'Brien gave a reading on Saturday evening which ended with a dinner at the Clarion Hotel. Pix of the events can be see at the Flickr set on the Conference here.

I was really pleased to meet and hang out with Patrick Cullen from the University of Newcastle and to hear his paper and listen to his fiction. Patrick's (linked) story collection will be published by Scribe next year. Here's a review by Patrick of Nam Le's (unlinked) story collection, The Boat.

Other good happenings were sharing lodgings with Pat Jourdan, meeting up again with familiar faces first met back in 2002 in New Orleans and in 2004 in Alcala de henares, and meeting new scholars and writers in a setting which Conference Director Maurice Lee always says is one where both experienced and beginning writers and scholars all leave their egos at the door.

Another terrific conference experience which will trigger memories as I see all the things I've forgotten to mention.

Good oil in Spanish

When I started out writing in the early nineties while holding down or maybe up my day job, a number of colleagues and friends were rooting for me. I saw some of them again at the Back Burning launch party last February at Faim? in Geneva (Faim is sadly no more) and now Nelson has written nice words in Spanish to oil my will to continue. In fact, it's my first review in Spanish!

His favourite stories were "The Tschusch" and "Grow Up". It's interesting to see how stories are seen differently - how they hold up when crossing cultures. "Grow Up" has been well-received by young and old in Australia and in Europe; "The Tschusch", though, doesn't leave anyone indifferent.

Nelson's blog, has a bit of everything cultural and there are also writing exercises. He writes in French and Spanish, so I've got no excuse for my fractured French and my creaky Spanish - I can pop over to Impresiones to practise. Gracias, Nelson!

Humour in Dijon

I'm just back from an international and inter-disciplinary colloquium - La Creation au feminin: les humeurs de l'humour - organised by Marianne Camus of the Centre Interlangues Texte, Image, Langage at the University of Bourgogne in Dijon on 13 and 14 June. It was an honour being the "ecrivaine invitee" and Marianne Camus did a terrific job translating, or rather rendering, the more humourous pieces I read that were conceived during the online Your Messages Project last November. (I'm also really pleased that I'll soon be able to add her translations to my collection of Stories in French.)

The different types of humour expressed by women creators who were presented and discussed over the two days had an enormous range. I tried to draw it in my mind. Somehow I felt that if you plopped humour as such, in the sense of the traditional and hitherto generic guffaw, belly laugh and leer, in the middle of a plate, the range of "humours" of woman's humour seemed to cling to the edges of the plate, becoming just that - edgy - and balancing a new "generique" in a sort of psychological spin not without a certain responsibility: lose it, ok; but don't drop it!

There were presentations on artists - Lisette Model, Tatiana Trouve, Sarah Lucas, dancers and clowns - and on writers - Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Zadie Smith, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Stevie Smith, Margarete Michaelson, Elke Heidenreich, Antoinette Deshoulieres, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Colette, Dorothy Parker, Nadedja Teffi and Irmgard Keun, and even characters - Sheila Levine, Bridget Jones.

Marie-Daniele Koechlin with her video La Figue was an invited artist as was Myrtille Chartuss with her one-woman show, "Myrtille donne la BANANE a ceux qui en ont... dans le CITRON!?" (Check out her MySpace video extracts.)

The weather was wonderful, as was the food - Restaurant Simpatico and Le Clos des Capucines - and I found La Chouette and stroked her with my left hand on Friday the 13th - to bring me luck! I even sold three copies of Back Burning and spent the proceeds on five different sorts of Dijon mustard and donkey and boar sausage to take back to Vienna.

My thanks to all concerned for a wonderfully stimulating time, and particular thanks to Marianne Camus and Myriam Segura-Pineiro for all the hard work behind the scenes. Check out my pix at Flickr for a bit of a wink and a grin of my take of the two days.

June Open Mic at the Kafka

It was full house at the Kafka for the Open Mic last night although it turned out to be a non-mic event. Maybe the absence of a mic contributed to the absence of background chatter as well as we all attended to projecting our voices. That absence, too, seemed to have a democratising effect - or maybe it was the balmy evening and the frisky audience. Lots of new faces and talents helped make the evening a great warmup for the July open mic. That event will be an all-night do and Hamid has offered breakfast to all survivors.

But back to June where special guest was Cecilia Woloch from the intersection of points between LA, Kentucky, Paris and the Carpathians. She read from her chapbooks poems about love and sex and death and family and swore that the evening was the rowdiest open non-mic she'd ever addressed. She had a grin on her face so I guess she had just as much fun as we did. Hillary mc'd and read some of her work, then we heard the regulars and many new voices, some passing through. Now to get material together for the July marathon when poets again will be on the loose.

Shakespeare in Vienna - for booklovers

There's a delightful bookshop tucked away near the Ruprechtskirche, Vienna's oldest church. The shop is called Shakespeare & Company, a family labour of love that last night hosted a poetry reading on places by Hillary Keel and Cecilia Woloch. Hillary will be mcing tonight's Open Mic at the Cafe Kafka where Cecilia will be reading more of her poetry. Here are some pix from last night's reading and there are more of the bookshop on the bookseller's site.