#ArtLitPhx: The Great Storytelling Mashup of 2018

#ArtLitPhxThe Great Storytelling Mashup of 2018

Location: The Newton 300 W Camel Rd, Phoenix Arizona 85013

June 22nd

7pm-9pm

 

Local storytelling hosts come together for a night to share a story, a song, and a stage. The Storyline SLAM host, Dan Hoen Hull has collected an all star lineup composed of hosts from THE MOTH: Phoenix StorySLAM at Crescent Ballroom, The Storytellers Project, Bar Flies, Chatterbox, Vinyl Voices, Untidy Secrets Storytelling, and The Whole Story! Each storyteller will share a story and play a music video that inspired the story.

Purchase tickets through the link below for $6 or at the door for $8.
https://www.changinghands.com/event/june2018/great-summer-storytelling-mashup-2018

Featured Storytellers:
Jessie Balli (Chatterbox)
Rachel Eseoghene Egboro (The Whole Story)
Megan Finnerty (The Storytellers Project)
Elle Murtagh (Vinyl Voices)
Sarah Maria Rainier (Untidy Secrets Storytelling)
Amy Silverman (Bar Flies)
Sarah Ventre (The Moth SLAM)
Joy Young (The Storyline SLAM)

#ArtLitPhx: The Storyline Slam: Luck

artlitphx10 STORYTELLERS. 6 MINUTES. 1 WINNER

Luck is a very thin wire between survival and disaster, and not many people can keep their balance on it. – Hunter S. Thompson

Ten tellers will have 6 minutes each to share a story based on the theme LUCK.

Sign up on TheStoryline.org May 18th through July 7th to tell a story. Eight names will be drawn posted July 8th on the TheStoryline.org SLAM lineup page. Two more names will be drawn at the beginning of the show on July 13.

Five members of the audience will be the judges and the story with the most points at the end of the show receives a $30 cash prize.

EVENT DETAILS

  • TICKET (admits one) is $6 in advance, $8 at the door from Changing Hands Phoenix.
  • Order at 602.274.0067, by clicking “add to cart” below, in-store prior to the event, or at the door.
  • More info at thestoryline.org »

ABOUT THE COLLECTIVE
THE STORYLINE SLAM is a monthly slam competition hosted by Dan Hoen Hull aimed to further storytelling in The Valley and foster a spirit of fun in the community.

#ArtLitPhx: Rachel Egboro “Telling the Whole Story”

Rachel Egboro bio photoOn Saturday, August 12th Rachel Egboro will be conducting a two-hour introductory storytelling workshop. Rachel is the co-founder of thestoryline.org, a Phoenix storytelling collective. During the workshop, Rachel will give some simple steps to begin and develop a story for an audience. The workshop costs $25 and will be at the Changing Hands Phoenix location. You can find more information and buy tickets here.

#ArtLitPhx: Spillers No. 7

spillers no. 7

Spillers is Phoenix’s premier short fiction storytelling event. Spillers makes its Valley Bar debut with installment No. 7.

Spillers is the voice of Phoenix fiction. Every season, cohosts Robert Hoekman Jr. and Brian Dunn handpick 5 incredible writers, put them on a stage, feature them in 2 episodes of the award-winning Spillers After Show podcast and publish their stories in a collectible book.

The event takes place Tuesday, March 14th, 2017 @ 7:30 PM at Valley Bar. Tickets are $5 general admission or  $12 general admission with theSpillers No.7 book. Attendees must be 21 years or older. Books are available for purchase for $10 at the event.

Check out the Facebook event page for more event information.

All Spillers events feature walk-on music, take-home programs, and a custom cocktail crafted just for you by Valley Bar’s fabulous bartenders. This is a seated event, so get there early to save your spot. For more information, visit Spiller’s webpage.

 

Intern Post, Briauna Kittle: How the Writer Got Her Start: A Look at the Art of Creation

Humans have always been obsessed with how things came to be. Originally, this started with existence, how humans arrived on Earth, how our planet was formed, what caused the lights in the sky; once those topics were milked for all they were worth, these stories narrowed down: how the rhino got its skin in the classic porquoi tale best told by Rudyard Kipling, how narcissism created the echo and reflection from the Greek myth, or why male genitalia looks the way it does as given in the Winnebago Trickster Cycle from the Winnebago Native American oral tradition. Perhaps the most interesting thing is how the same stories are told in a multitude of ways. This could be attributed to use of oral tradition, the passing down of stories through voice, carrying through different narrators with different styles of speaking and different interpretations of the same events. In this way, the story is always changing and refining through a never-ending cycle of editors in order to become the tales we know today.

woodcut of elephant getting its trunk
A woodcut by Rudyard Kipling showing how the elephant got its trunk for his book of porquoi tales, Just So Stories.

There’s something satisfying about creation, too, like scratching an itch you didn’t even know existed. The act of creation through writing, art, music, and crafts is highly valued, even though nobody wants to do it. Everyone dreams of writing a novel but taking on writing as a profession is still generally met with hesitance (“Creative writing? What do you plan to do with that, teach?”). However, in a more visual sense, such as works-in-progress videos by various artists or with crafts like crocheting or knitting, people are hypnotized. I find there’s nothing more calming than watching someone make a watercolor painting, and when the work is finished, I want to find the artist and thank them for allowing me to watch. When I crochet in public, I’m always greeted with a “What are you knitting?” (I’ve given up correcting them) followed by the person watching me work as I wrap the yarn around the hook and pull it through the loops.

The downside to creating is, of course, dealing with doubt. I don’t think anybody in creation stories ever doubted their actions, but being in the arts requires juggling doubt and dancing with failure. One of the ways I personally deal with this is by writing my own creation stories. I’ve found it kick-starts my imagination and returns me to the mindset of seven-year-old me who loved to write how things came to be, to the point of writing a chapter book about star formation. Creativity is a must, too. Why do snails have shells? Well, obviously, a snail started out as a slug and decided it wanted to become strong, like the ant, so it found a shell to live in and now carries its own house on its back as a strength building exercise. It’s unscientific but gives us a new way of looking at the world which is exactly what literature and the arts aim to do: show new perspectives so that we may live without hurting others. Bonding through any form of creation, especially through storytelling, gives us the chance to understand something new, both in intellectual and empathetic standpoints. Even if your next work doesn’t make you the next Charles Dickens, it’s still creation and has the possibility to change someone’s viewpoint. Even if it’s not something you want published, tell the story to a few friends and tell them to pass it on to someone else; in a few generations, you’ll have a masterpiece.

Guest Post, David Huddle: The Nine Strengths

David HuddleThe Nine Strengths: What a Story-Writer Possesses that He or She May Not Realize as Even Greater Strengths in Novel-Writing

You got to know that you know what you know.

–Michael Casey

“The Company Proficiency Test Average”

Obscenities

Beginning fiction-writers usually start with the short story–for the obvious reason that at least on the surface of it, shorter seems easier. But most story-writers also aspire eventually to write novels, and the conventional wisdom is that writing short stories is the apprentice work for writing novels. A stupid way that it’s often phrased is that writing short stories is for children, while writing novels is for grown-ups. However, the occasion of trying to write a novel turns out to be so intimidating for even accomplished story-writers that they can forget to use their most highly developed tools and most valuable habits of creative thinking. Something about all those pages, all those characters, and all that narrative time to be covered can make a would-be novelist panic, forget what he knows, and make unfortunate decisions he’d never make in writing a story.

This was the case with yours truly. I’d published five story collections and a novella before I managed to write a publishable novel. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. In the old computers asleep in my attic two complete novel-manuscripts have found their final resting places. The good news is that recently I’ve written a couple of novels, one of them in three months, the other in six months. Like everything else in writing, this productive phase was mostly just a matter of luck, but I also believe that I’ve finally come into possession of things I knew perfectly well forty years ago. I had the knowledge and the tools all along, but the monster that a novel appeared to be when I was trying to write one scared me out of using my strengths. Instead I tried to rely on my weaknesses–big thinking, abstractions, philosophizing, tricky plot moves, high drama, far-fetched characters, etc. What follows, out of my experience, is a brief discussion of some story-writing tools that I now understand to be even more well-suited for novel-writing than they are for story-writing:

1. A veteran story-writer learns when to leave off, i.e. when to tease, to engage the reader’s imagination by way of omission, to motivate the reader to keep going–in the story or in his or her imagination–in spite of frustration. This applies especially to story endings, but it also applies to sections of stories. Or even to sentences in the middle of a paragraph. E.g., the teasing withholding of how Curt Lemon died in Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” makes a reader understand the deep significance of that death to the members of Lemon’s platoon.

2.  A first principle for story-writers–often so much an assumption that the writer him- or herself is no longer conscious of it–is that it is crucial not to be boring. “Leaving out the parts that most people skip” (as Tony Hillerman phrased it) is pretty natural for a short-story writer, but a beginning novelist will often foolishly feel compelled to fill in a lot of blank pages. The novel occasion can persuade one that one must throw everything into the narrative rather than judiciously leaving many things out.

3.  A story-writer often discovers both the pleasure and the narrative effectiveness of withholding something of narrative importance–of simply not overtly revealing a basic fact.  E.g., the narrative of J.D. Salinger’s “Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes” refuses to say straight out that the woman in bed with the gray-haired man is the wife of the poor fellow who calls the gray-haired man to ask if he knows where his wife is.  Everything in the text points to that being the case, but the absence of a factual assertion infuses the story with ominous possibility and tension. John Irving employs a similar strategy with the death of a beloved child character in The World According to Garp.

4. Because short stories are such a specialized and highly refined literary genre, their practitioners assume that their readers are adults who have little patience for the obvious. Thus, story-writers take pleasure in challenging their readers. People who aren’t serious and skilled readers are not inclined to read contemporary short stories. Those who do read them are literary gourmets. George Saunders, Tobias Wolff, T.C. Boyle, Amy Hempel, and Alice Munro expect their readers to bring background, imagination, a deeply ironic sensibility, and linguistic alertness to the reading occasion. But the high-end readers a story-writer wants are the exactly same readers he wants for the novel he might write if he is lucky.

5. Because the main characters of short stories are almost always “outsiders,” story-writers learn to trust their own strangeness, quirks & kinks, improper thoughts, obsessions, etc. as “the good stuff” of a narrative. This is not traditionally the case with novelists who are most often concerned with mainstream or regular citizens. (In The Lonely Voice, Frank O’Connor argues that “the short story more than any other genre involves a protagonist who is an outsider and operates on the periphery of society.”) Contemporary novels, however, are more and more inclined to “involve” oddball protagonists. Story-writers rely on the oddball protagonist who lives within them, but all too often they think that weirdo can’t possibly help them write a novel.

6.  You do not become a short story-writer unless you possess a natural inclination to narrow the scope, to rely on a very small picture to bring authority to a big picture–to use mostly detailed accounts of scenes as the stuff of narrative. In fact I’m certain that the little-picture method of composition is the path story-writers take to discover whatever truth their work has to offer. Story-writers become synecdoche specialists. However, when they attempt the longer form, they can lose faith in this sophisticated and long-cultivated talent. My experience has taught me what now seems obvious–that the impulse to focus minutely is of as much value in making novels as it is in story-making.

7. Story-writers become geniuses of narrative transitions–or the writing of transitionless narratives–stories that use white space to represent time-gaps instead of conventional phrasing like “A week later,” or “In the days that followed.” Dead space, or lifeless language, in novels is just as deadly as it is in stories, but the beginning novelist may not think so. By the way, my all-time favorite transitionless moments in fiction occurs in Flannery O’Connor’s “Parker’s Back:

…Sara Ruth agreed to take a ride in his truck. Parker parked it on a deserted road and suggested to her that they lie down together in the back of it.

“Not until after we’re married,” she said – just like that.

“Oh that ain’t necessary,” Parker said and as he reached for her, she thrust him away with such force that the door of the truck came off and he found himself flat on his back on the ground. He made up his mind then and there to have nothing further to do with her.

They were married in the County Ordinary’s office because Sarah Ruth thought churches were idolatrous.

8.  After Hemingway, “show, don’t tell,” became the story-writer’s mantra. Contemporary story-writers (most extravagantly and brilliantly, Harold Brodkey), however, have shown the way toward both showing and telling. The show-don’t-tell template, though, never leaves the story-writers’ thinking, whereas it often doesn’t show up at all in the efforts of a beginning novelist. And story-writers making early attempts at novel-writing–because they don’t believe it applies to making narratives ten or fifteen times longer than a short story–are all too often inclined to switch off that useful little interior mantra that never stops whispering “show, don’t tell.” They explicate too much of what they should dramatize. I advocate both telling and showing, but I think I do a better job of telling because my habit is to err on the side of showing.

9.  The dynamic nature of the interior lives of individual human beings is the bread and butter of fiction-writing. The interior life is what fiction brings to art that the other forms either can’t manage at all or else have to try to accomplish in unnatural ways–e.g. voice-over in movies. Both story-writers and novelists understand this perfectly well. What a story-writer brings to the novel-writing occasion is a refined sense of interior-life management. Which is to say that the story-writer is less inclined than the apprentice novelist to indulge a protagonist in pages and pages of soul searching and mental noodling. Naïve novelists can be wildly indulgent when they open up their characters’ thoughts and feelings, whereas story-writers bring speed, agility, and tact to their rendering of their characters’ thoughts and feelings. Novel readers may want more pages, but they also want narratives that intensely engage them from beginning to end. Which is to say that just because they’re reading a novel they’re no more tolerant of literary fooling around than a story reader is. They want what we all want–the dream that is so compelling we don’t want to wake up.

Communications and Ruminations

First off, I want to thank our new cast of commenters for coming. I hope you keep reading, and feel impressed or intrigued enough with the goings on of our magazine to get this link our to your friends and loved ones. Feel free to keep leaving us comments here at the Superstition Review Blog, and help us build both a digital and geographical literary community.

(If you have any insight, suggestions, concerns or questions, please leave a message!) 842078_greek_helmet_1

It is the natural means of humanity to connect to the masses in the method of words–the written and spoken words have both served as the gatekeepers to society. It seems as if the rubric of culture is that civilization truly exists once a verbal history has developed. The translation back and forth between spoken and script tradition is how humanity has obtained much of its heritage and history. For example, this is observed in the philosophies of Plato as transcribed by Socrates, and the epic origin poetry of Homer as spread through oral storytelling.

Therefore, it is with great honor and contemplation that we here at Superstition Review invite you to share on this tradition at our side. We have an upcoming reading on Monday, November 17th. This reading circles back to our local Arizona State University community by featuring undergraduate ASU Creative Writing students. If you are a student at ASU and interested in reading, please contact us to see if spots are available. As always, we hope to see you there, and more information is forthcoming.

Finally, keeping in mind the important of written-to-oral-and-back again communication in this culture, consider it an act of service and reverence to the English language to attend and participate in readings. Based on the desires of its participants, all languages will change, flourish, or go extinct over time.

Based upon your emotional and intellectual reactions to the following image, please, Readers, tell us what direction you would like your verbal culture to go next:

funny-pictures-kitten-is-tough-and-should-not-be-messed-with