Announcing: Melissa Pritchard

Superstition Review would like to announce that Melissa Pritchard’s collection of short stories, The Odditorium: Stories, is due for release January 10, 2012. It is now available for pre-order from Amazon.

Pritchard was the featured reader in our Superstition Review reading series in November 2010.

Praise for Melissa Pritchard:

“Melissa Pritchard is one of our finest writers.”—Annie Dillard

“Pritchard’s quicksilver ability to blend biting social/political commentary with a rueful analysis of relationships makes [her work a] delight.”—Publishers Weekly

“I have admired Melissa Pritchard’s writing for several years now for its wisdom, its humble elegance, and its earthy comedy.”—Rick Moody

About The Odditorium: Stories:

In each of these eight genre-bending tales, Melissa Pritchard overturns the conventions of mysteries, westerns, gothic horror, and historical fiction to capture surprising and often shocking aspects of her characters’ lives.

In one story, Pritchard creates a pastiche of historical facts, songs, and tall tales, contrasting the famed figures of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, including Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull, with the real, genocidal history of the American West. Other stories are inspired by the mysterious life of Kaspar Hauser, a haunted Victorian hospital where the wounded of D-Day are taken during World War II, and the story of Robert LeRoy Ripley of “Ripley’s Believe It Or Not” and his beguiling “odditoriums,” told from the perspective of his lifelong fact checker. (From Amazon.com)

Congratulations, Melissa. We look forward to this release.

 

Superstition Review’s Fourth Issue Reading Series, Second Reading

The second reading of the semester took place as part of the Homecoming festivities on the lovely Polytechnic Campus. It was lovely, sunny, but a bit colder than the last few days, and quite blustery. The wind was blowing things around and making it more than a little difficult for all of the departments and organizations with tables set up about their programs.

We hosted our program (thankfully indoors) in the absolutely beautiful facility of the Black Box theater in the Applied Arts Pavilion. Due to a shifting situation on where we wanted/were permitted to hold the reading, the location had changed multiple times, resulting in a series of emails updating our readers. Probably confused me more than anyone else really. Even though I am the reading series coordinator, I had never spent much time on the Polytechnic campus, and did not really have much conception of where all the places were located, though I did eventually find my way to where we needed to be.

I started off by welcoming everyone to the reading and introduced Patricia Murphy, our managing editor and staff advisor. She then proceeded to explain the mission of SR and how we work, operate the magazine, and take submissions.

I then was able to introduce Laura Tohe, who was kind enough to drive out from the Tempe campus to share the written word with interested attendees out at our event at the Polytechnic campus. Laura read a variety of poems, including some beautiful poems from her most recent book, Tseyi, Deep in the Rock, which included poetry in both Navajo and English. She followed this with some assorted other poems, including assorted poems from a collection she is developing that she is calling her Bluebook collection, named because she started them in a blue notebook.

Laura finished the event by reading us a piece of a short story she wrote for Phoenix Noir, a recently published collection of noir mysteries all set in the Phoenix metro area. Mrs. Tohe laughed as she told us that she had never before written a mystery, but when she asked the editor how she should do it, drugs, sex, and murder were apparently the basic ingredients. I truly enjoyed the excerpts she read, and plan on buying the anthology to read the rest of the tale.