Ander Monson reads from OTHER ELECTRICITIES and VACATIONLANDSaturday, July 30th, 8:00 PMFREE
 
In Other Electricities we follow glimpses of dispossessed lives in the snow-buried reaches of Upper Michigan\’s Keweenaw Peninsula, where nearly everyone seems to be slipping away under the ice to disappear forever. There is Crisco Hatfield, the breaker of arms; Bone, dropper of bowling balls off interstate overpasses; The Oracle of Apollo in Tapiola, who sees all; Christer, a pyromaniac collector of pornography who jumps off cliffs for kicks; and most importantly there is Liz, the book\’s central obsession, an unknowable girl who crashed through the ice on prom night. Through an unsettling, almost crazed gestalt of sketches, short stories, lists, indices, and radio schematics, Monson presents a world where weather, landscape, radio waves, and electricity are influential characters in themselves, affecting an entire community held together by the memories of those they have lost.
 
The poems in Vacationland are set in Michigan?s Upper Peninsula, land of weather and long winters. His images: hotel pools full of refuse, wadded ATM receipts, cracked windshields in a land of endless snow, that all, ultimately, add benevolence and poise to life?s darker moments. In Monson?s world, the nearest city is a four-hour car ride and isolation is the backdrop for Monson?s vital yet haunting imaginings. His words stay with you and penetrate the heart like a beam of sunlight breaking across the icy Lake Michigan shore.
 
Ander Monson grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He lived briefly in Saudi Arabia, Iowa, and in the Deep South, where he received his MFA from the University of Alabama. He is the editor of the magazine DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared in many literary magazines, including The North American Review, Fence, Field, Gulf Coast, The Bellingham Review, Ploughshares, Boston Review, and the Mississippi Review, among others
 
Check Out: www.otherelectricities.com
 

Winners of the 27th AnnualInternational 3-Day Novel Contest,Meghan Austin & Shannon Mullally read from their NovelLove BlockThursday, August 11th, 8:00 PMFREE
 
LOVE BLOCK by Meghan Austin and Shannon Mullally is the Winner of the 27th Annual International 3-Day Novel Contest. Love Block is a collaborative novel, written via phone and email by writers living on opposite ends of the United States. Through a series of correspondences, two secret agents debate, bicker and commiserate while they search for a mysterious cure for the lovelorn (possibly in the form of a \”love block\” potion that will foil any and all heartbreak). Love Block explores the question of whether or not humans should surrender to the idea of true love. It\’s funny, furious, sometimes crazy and always fast-moving, just like the 3-Day Novel contest itself.
 
Meghan Austin and Shannon Mullally met while earning their MFAs in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. When they agreed to collaborate on this contest, Austin was living in Portland, Oregon and Mullally was living in Chicago. They both now live in Chicago, where they continue to study and write. Love Block is their first published novel.
 
The 3-Day Novel Contest has run every Labour Day Weekend for 28 years and has garnered a reputation as the cheeky and uncompromising rebel of literary forms. It has been called \”a fad,\” \”a threat,\” and a \”trial by deadline\” and it flies in the face of the notion that novels take years of angst to produce. Although every entrant desires the Grand Prize of publication and instant fame, most enter the contest to shake off writers\’ block and to kick up their creativity. They?ll sweat, they?ll cry, their fingers will cramp?they may go mad?and they might just produce something amazing. And if they win, they?ll be published.
 
Checkout : www.3daynovel.com