Author Archive for liz

Ave Bromberg and Brett Bloom discuss the new book
Belltown Paradise / Making Their Own Plans
Friday, February 25th, 8:00 PM
 
This double-sided volume offers two books detailing inspiring examples of artists, environmental visionaries, and concerned citizens who have had a direct impact in shaping their urban environments. The groups were invited to write their own accounts of their histories, failures and triumphs while working to redesign neighborhoods in creative and exciting ways.
Belltown Paradise?is a concentrated study of urban renovation activities around the corner of Elliot and Vine Streets in the Belltown neighborhood of Seattle. The first three chapters present the work of community activists who successfully preserved open land in one of Seattle?s most densely packed neighborhoods to create the Belltown P Patch, a community garden, and transform three adjacent early 20th century workers? cottages for writer?s residencies and a community center called Cottage Park. The chapters also cover Growing Vine Street, an initiative to slowly convert Vine Street, which runs along one side of the garden, into a ?green? street that cleans rainwater runoff from adjacent high-rise condo buildings while providing pedestrian-friendly space for urban dwellers. The fourth chapter is the first comprehensive chronicle of the work of artist Buster Simpson?s 30 years of public work in Belltown. Buster?s work and dedication have had an important impact on the aesthetics and conceptualization of environmental planning in the Belltown neighborhood.
 
The second book?Making Their Own Plans?shares the histories and tactics of four independent groups from four distinct urban centers: Portland, Oregon; Chicago, Illinois; Hamburg, Germany; and Barcelona, Spain. City Repair (Portland) began a number of neighborhood initiatives aimed at promoting a sense of community; their primary initiative creates public squares in and around the middle of the traffic intersections, resulting in what they call ?intersection repair.? The Resource Center (Chicago) had been working since the late 60s to find creative solutions to environmental and social problems in the city, primarily through reuse and recycling initiatives. A recent plan, detailed in their chapter, works to convert 6000 acres of vacant city land into farms that simultaneously clean the air, produce local organic produce, employ homeless persons, and beautify the city. Park Fiction (Hamburg), starting in 1995, organized exhibitions, design workshops, protests, and spectacles in their successful fight to preserve an open waterfront space and create a community-designed park on the Elbe River. The inhabitants of Can Masdeu (Barcelona) squatted then rehabilitated an old hospital and the surrounding grounds into space for living, gardening, neighborhood events, workshops and classes. Their chapter details their struggles with both local authorities and the exhaustion of radical communal living.
 
In the Field (Brett Bloom and Ava Bromberg) explores complex social constellations created by urban land use. We share ideas and take action inhabiting, transforming, and opening up spaces to new possibilities for creatively generated public space and autonomously produced neighborhood planning. Activities include public projects and written Field Guides, examples are available on the web site: www.inthefield.info
 
They will be on hand to discuss and sign the book.

Joseph Suglia reads from Years of Rage
Saturday, May 14th, 8:00 PM
 
Joseph Suglia earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University in 2002. He now teaches at several universities in Chicago. Besides H?lderlin and Blanchot on Self-Sacrifice, a book-length study of the theme of martyrdom in modern literature, his writing and literary criticism has been published in numerous scholarly journals and anthologies, including diacritics, Germanic Notes and Reviews, German Life and Letters, The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Focus on German Studies, Literature and the Law, and The Facts on File Companion to the American Novel. Suglia also regularly contributes to the online magazine, YouthQuake.
 
YEARS OF RAGE was considered by many presses to be ?too intense? and ?too controversial? for publication. No one denied its literary merit, but many were afraid of the book because it forced readers to identify with the young killer who serves as its main character and narrator.
 
Inspired by the Columbine High Massacre, Years of Rage takes place inside of the head of a schoolboy who is bent on murdering his classmates. We, as readers, see what he sees. We think what he thinks. We feel what he feels. We enter a nightmarish world in which it is impossible to separate objective reality from the phantoms of the mind, a world where there are no limits, a world where desire gears toward destruction, a world where love merges with violence.
 
There is a great deal more going on in his new book Years of Rage than merely a response to school shootings. Suglia wanted to write a novel about a self that is ?universally rejected.? The horizons of high school, according to the logic of Years of Rage, are the horizons of the universe. ?Columbine? served as the perfect occasion for writing about this relationship between the self and the world.
 
Check out www.yearsofrage.com

Stefan Kiesbye reads & signs
Next Door Lived a Girl
Friday, January 28th, 8:00 PM
FREE
 
The winner of Low Fidelity Press’s first novella contest, Stefan Kiesbye was born on Northern Germany’s Baltic coast and grew up in West Berlin. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan. Stefan Kiesbye’s stories and poems have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. He currently teaches writing at Eastern Michigan University and works as a freelance writer. Stefan Kiesbye will be reading and signing Next Door Lived a Girl at the event.
More info is at the Low Fidelity Press website: www.lofipress.com
 
Reviews:
“This is Stefan Kiesbye’s brilliant debut, a book so quiet and yet so maddeningly powerful, you just have to wonder about him a little bit. You will read from beginning to end and you will feel this world and its inhabitants neither responding nor reacting in ways you quite expect, but nevertheless, rising up beneath you in a most compelling and unsettling way, and when you are through you will scratch your head and tell someone they have to read it too.”
-Robert Olmstead, 2004 Novella Award judge
 
“Kiesbye’s dark, distinctive vision of humanity, is composed with such narrative skill and verve as to render the bleakness bracing, the grimness utterly gripping. A significant and powerful debut.”
-Peter Ho Davies
 
“Next Door Lived a Girl is both laconic and feverish, with German adolescent boys poking their sometimes violent way into the world. The violence here is somehow both surprising and inevitable. The novella has a fascinating combination of everyday domestic life and subsurface violence, and Stefan Kiesbye is to be praised for this quietly eloquent tale, this mixture of the horrifying and the everyday.” -Charles Baxter