Reading Local Seattle

{ Small Press Month }

In the entire month of March, Pilot Books will observe a daily celebration of small and independent presses as part of Small Press Month. For the thirteenth small press month, the The New York Center for Independent Publishing chose Seattle author Sherman Alexie as the face of the small press author. Alexie notes about small presses, “The small presses represent what is most brave, crazy and beautiful about our country and our literature. So let us all sing honor songs for the independent publishers.”

An author take the stage at six o’clock every day. Authors include the likes of CA Conrad, Joshua Beckman, Chelsea Martin, Kevin Sampsell, and Tao Lin to local small press writers such as Sarah Mangold, Carol Guess, Stacey Levine, and Nico Vassilakis. Contributors to Reading Local: Seattle include Matt Briggs, John Olson, and Doug Nufer.

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Local Poet and Bus Driver Michael Spence reads at King’s Books Friday, January 8th.

{ Michael Spence, 01/8, King's Books }

Nationally acclaimed for his profound poetry and locally appreciated as a King County Metro Transit bus driver, Michael Spence will be reading his work at King’s Bookstore (218 St. Helens Ave, Tacoma) on Friday, January 8 at 7 p.m. This event is free and open to the public. There is an open mic to follow Spence, so poets are encouraged to come read a poem or two.

Michael Spence earned his B.A. in English from the University of Washington. Upon graduation he served for four years as a naval officer aboard the USS John F. Kennedy. Shortly afterward Michael began working locally as a Metro bus driver. He has been driving public-transit buses in the Seattle area for the past twenty-five years.

When asked how a Pacific Northwest poet can ‘Keep Clam’ as they endure Seattle’s driving rain by bus or navigate tons of transit steel and sets of wheels through ever-present urban gridlock, Spence offers his riders Zen-like patience and clever metaphor:

As for having nerves of steel to drive a bus, it seems in my case at least that rhinoceros hide is more of a prerequisite—I try to ignore a fair amount of malarkey in order to concentrate on driving safely”,  said Spence. “One arguably good thing about the job is that it gives me material for writing poems. In fact, I’ve had several bus-driving poems published, and I had another one accepted at the beginning of this month by The New Criterion.

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{ Old paperbacks make for a good holiday-time fire. }

By Doug Nufer

I used to despise going through book stores during the holiday season. Holidays marked time: year after year, to shop at those stores was to expose myself to all of the books that had been published instead of mine. And yet, I had no choice. I had to keep on writing. It made me think of Humphrey Bogart in African Queen, getting back into the leech-infested waters to drag his boat through the weeds.

At the beginning of the millennium much has changed, for better and for worse. Book stores are closing, and a hog’s share of those left are chains that focus on bestsellers. Most of the few independents would rather deal with conglomerates than with independent presses. Small publishers that pay next to nothing demand a writer submit through an agent, even though no agent can afford to peddle manuscripts to publishers that pay next to nothing. For micro presses, literary contests , narrow submission/reading periods, and the pocket veto rejection have become standard. To submit, a writer must either enter a contest for a fee or wait for the month of the year when the press is considering new work. Many submissions are permitted on-line, which makes it easier to submit and to be rejected. The rejection slip has gone from being an all-too-common courtesy to a quaint relic, with “Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” replacing the litany of euphemisms for, “Hit the road, Jack,” but even winners face a losing proposition: after many months or years, the book comes out, only to be widely ignored. At least now, I can feel fortunate to have been published at all.

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{ Maged Zaher, 12/10, 7:30, Open Books }

By Dana Guthrie Martin

Maged Zaher was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt, where he earned an M.Sc. degree in structural engineering, specializing in computer-aided design. In 1995, he led the team that did the analysis of the seismic effect on the Meridian high-rise hotel in Giza, Egypt. In 1998 he earned a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Akron, Ohio. He has worked at many large software companies, and participated in building products such as AutoCad, Hotmail, Windows Presentation Foundations and Microsoft Student. His main areas of interest are API (Application Programming Interface) design and building scalable, and flexible SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) systems. His collaboration with Pam Brown, Farout Library Software, was published by Tinfish Press in 2007. Zaher will read from his debut collection, Portrait of the Poet as an Engineer, recently released by Pressed Wafer, Thursday December 10th, at Open Books in Seattle.

Dana Guthrie Martin: Your first language is Arabic, and you wrote poetry only in Arabic until about 10 years ago. Why did you make the switch to writing poetry in English, and how has that affected your writing? Do you still write in Arabic at all?

Maged Zaher: This is an important question. I switched for multiple reasons:

1. I didn’t think my Arabic poetry was any good. I was under the influence of the poets I read then, and my work was purely derivative. A new language was a new beginning of sorts.
2. More important, in Arabic there is a split between the written and spoken languages. Imagine if you are using the language we are using now for talking, but when you write you do so in Medieval English; quite a split, isn’t it? — the attraction of the English language was that I can write in the same vernacular that I speak in. This is why you find a fascination with the colloquial in my English poems.

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{ Time is not a stiff tick }

YouTubia is neither a utopia or geographical location but a portal through time. In essence, a cue, a prompt, a provocation that stirs a memory so vivid and enveloping it constitutes a location, a cleft in the topologies of time. For Proust it was a madeleine soaked in tea; for me, it is a tiny screen of pixels, Red Skelton bouncing up and down in a crowd of screaming girls while a young Mick Jagger sings “Tell Me” with the Rolling Stones in the lobby of the London Palladium September 22nd, 1964. The emotion is palpable. The separation of 45 years melts away. I want to grow my hair long. I want to walk on the wild side and write explosive dangerous poetry like Arthur Rimbaud and Gregory Corso and Bob Kaufman and Allen Ginsberg. I want to push boundaries and open the doors of perception, wide. I want to devote my life to art and poetry and go to England and visit the house where Keats wrote “Ode To A Nightingale” and watched coal deliveries and ate nectarines and met Fanny Brawne. The song gives me all those feelings anew, fresh, vigorous, unqualified. Nothing limps. Nothing balks. Everything is limitless. This is not the slow controlled glide of mature, later life, but the reckless energy of youth, before any seeds have been planted, before any ships have sailed, before any struggles and disappointments have denatured and tamed that feeling. The surprise of seeing the very young, incipient Stones exactly as they appeared on TV in 1964 with their peculiar blend of English Romanticism, raffish libertinism, and the electric blues of Chicago’s Southside brought the strength and purity of that original feeling back to me. Did it last? No, of course not. A 61 year-old man cavorting about like a shaggy teenager would quickly swerve into buffoonery. Age has done much to enrich and undermine the Stones after 40 odd years of almost relentless performance. But a lesson was learned.

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{ Book Espresso Machine at Village Books (photo Lindsey Otta) }

This fall, three bookstores in the Pacific Northwest (Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, Eagle Harbor Books on Bainbridge Island, and Village Books in Fairhaven) will be able to provide you nearly any book currently in stock with the countries largest digital book distributor, Ingram, or from the millions of archival books that have been digitized by Google. Instead of the three or four weeks required to special order a hard-to-find book, these stores will be able to provide a book in the length of time that it takes to order a cup of coffee and drink it. They will do this using a print-on-demand machine called the Book Espresso Machine.

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