Bay Area Folk — on Thursday, April 4, I’ll be participating in a community writers festival at a university about an hour and a half north of San Francisco. An event organized by the wonderful fiction writer Miah Jeffra and his students, this will be an afternoon and evening program of readings and panels on writers’ craft and the publishing industry. Take a look at the full schedule.
At 5:20 pm, I will be moderating a panel “From a Reader to a Critic” about book reviewing.
At 7 pm, I will appear with my fellow writers published by WTAW Press and will read a story (or two) from LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES.
No need to register in advance. Show up if you’re able to! There will also be a book fair: a great opportunity talk to small presses, mags, schools, and buy your next favorite book.
It’s still January, and so not too late, in my book, to wish you all a happy New Year. For those of you in San Francisco Bay Area, my first event of the year is coming up this Saturday, February 3. Come to the Main branch of the SF public library at 2 pm.
I will be reading an excerpt from my novel-in-progress set in Leningrad in the year 1990. This event called “A Sense of Place” is organized by my friend Beverly Parayno, whose collection of stories WILDFLOWERS it was my pleasure to blurb. I’ll be reading alongside Beverly herself, Toni Mirosevich, and Norman Zelaya. I’m delighted to meet these acclaimed writers in person and to hear their stories of the Bay Area and beyond.
In the past few months, I have published two stories. One, a brand new fiction “Make Peace with the Cake” — about an ex-Soviet immigrant parent coping with the post-COVID, war-time social tensions and her own anxieties — appears in the Museum of Americana, a magazine that has generously published 1, 2, 3 of my earlier stories.
Another piece, “Sweet Dreams,” is an older story that remains important to me for personal, creative, and political reasons. It was first published circa 2010 in an issue of Mad Hatters’ Review and has now been brought back online by the Bulb Culture Collective, a magazine that gives home to stories that first appeared in now defunct online magazines. What a noble quest! I certainly have more work to send their way.
Last but not least, the service that I have been using to send out my newsletter (TinyLetter) is being discontinued, so I’m attempting to use my website provider (WordPress) for these emails. Those of you who are already subscribing to my website may have already seen some of this information. Please let me know if you encounter any other technical issues.
Bay Area friends — come out to our Lit Crawl event on Saturday, October 21, 5 pm at 518 Valencia.
This event was a long time in the making. As Ukraine approaches its 600th day of defending its sovereignty against Russia’s assault, it remains paramount to continue to tell our stories and to refute the propaganda narratives that are festering in the social media spaces.
I’m really looking forward to hearing the poems, stories, personal essays and more from this group of Bay Area writers with deep personal connections to both Ukraine and Russia.
Lit Crawl is a part of San Francisco’s Litquake festival going on right now. Make sure to check out the full program and to participate in other events. It’s an amazing experience!
How does one celebrate finishing a draft of a novel? Here’s my plan: I’m organizing an event with a few writers I deeply admire and whose books share some of the sensibilities that dictated my own. Transplants all, we write about the places that were important — perhaps, foundational — to us, churning memories into new stories. Please join me on August 6 for this ONLINE reading and conversation. Register on EVENTBRITE to receive the Zoom link.
Tamim Ansary’s SINKING THE ARK is set in Portland, Oregon in 1973, “Before it became Portlandia.” Barbara Barrow’s AN UNCLEAN PLACE is anchored to the campus of an experimental middle school in Atlanta, Georgia in 1992. In HOPE YOU’RE SATISFIED, Tania Malik captures Dubai during the weeks and months of uncertainty as Saddam Hussein’s army invades Kuwait in 1990, and the world awaits US response. Alicia Rouverol’s debut DRY RIVER is set in California’s suburban Mill Valley during the housing market bust of 2008. Moderator Olga Zilberbourg’s work-in-progress, DON’T SHUT THE DOOR is set in 1990 in Leningrad, USSR, just before it falls apart.
Please support writers and literature by buying books:
Tamim Ansary is the author of The Invention of Yesterday, Destiny Disrupted, Games without Rules, West of Kabul, East of New York, among other books. For ten years he wrote a monthly column for Encarta.com, and has published essays and commentary in the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Alternet, TomPaine.com, Edutopia, Parade, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Bill Moyers, PBS The News Hour, Al Jazeera, and NPR. Born in Afghanistan in 1948, he moved to the U.S. in 1964. He lives in San Francisco.
Barbara Barrow (she/her) is the author of AN UNCLEAN PLACE (Lanternfish, 2023) and THE QUELLING (Lanternfish, 2018), which was selected as a Gold Winner for Literary Fiction in the Foreword Indies Awards. Her short stories have appeared in FAULTLINE, SOUTHERN HUMANITIES REVIEW, CIMARRON REVIEW, and elsewhere, and she also publishes literary criticism in environmental humanities, women, gender, and sexuality, and nineteenth-century literature. Originally from Atlanta, GA, she has lived in New York, Germany, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and now Lund, Sweden, where she teaches literature and writing and lives with her husband, daughter, and pets.
Tania Malik is the author of the novels HOPE YOU ARE SATISFIED (May 2023, Unnamed Press) as well as THREE BARGAINS (W.W Norton) which received a Publishers Weekly Starred review and a Booklist Starred review. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Off-assignment, Lit Hub, Salon.com, Calyx Journal, Baltimore Review, and other publications. She lives in San Francisco’s Bay Area. More at www.taniamalik.com.
Alicia J Rouverol (she/her) is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Salford and is the author DRY RIVER (Bridge House Publishing, 2023) and co-author of ‘I WAS CONTENT AND NOT CONTENT’: THE STORY OF LINDA LORD AND THE CLOSING OF PENOBSCOT POULTRY (SIU Press, 2000), favourably reviewed in the New York Times and nominated for the OHA Book Award. Her stories, nonfiction and poetry have appeared in THE MANCHESTER REVIEW, THE INDEPENDENT, and STREETCAKE, among other journals. A 2008 recipient of the Elizabeth George Foundation writing grant, she received her Creative Writing MA and PhD from University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing (2013; 2017). In 2019 she was an inaugural Artist in Residence at the John Rylands Library to develop a short story collection themed on place and migration, recently accepted by Bridge House Publishing. DRY RIVER is her first novel.
Olga Zilberbourg‘s first English-language book, a collection of short and flash fiction, LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES, was published by WTAW Press in 2019. It explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to The Moscow Times. It also explores themes of bisexuality and parenthood. It received warm reviews from a number of publications and was named a finalist in the 2019 Foreword INDIES Book Award. Zilberbourg’s fiction and essays have appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Bare Life Review, Narrative Magazine, World Literature Today, Alaska Quarterly Review, and others. She has published four collections of stories in Russia.
Andrey Kurkov has been one of the most important Ukrainian voices who tell the story of the Russian invasion to the Western audiences. He is a powerful fiction writer who has had to put aside his creative writing for the past months to tell the story of his country. He’s also an amazing storyteller, and one of those rare people whose humor and wit color everything they do. Don’t miss this opportunity to see him in Palo Alto a week from today. He will be appearing at 6:30 pm at Palo Alto’s Rinconada library. This local appearance might be the last chance to see him in the Bay Area for a while.
San Francisco Bay Area friends! Come help me celebrate the publication of my friend Richard May’s new collection of stories, BECAUSE OF ROSES. I got to talking to Rick at a Litquake event one year, when we attended an event focused on literature in translation. I’m so impressed with the geographic and cultural range of his fiction. He writes unabashedly about love that can spark between men at every stage of life, across language barriers, ideological divides, and in the face of grief and fear. It helps that love has chance, leprechauns, and roses on its side. I delight in the magic of these stories, their kindness, and the joyful appreciation of the male bodies.
APRIL 23, 2:30 PM
MANNY’s (3092 16th St, San Francisco, CA 94103)
Rick has hosted several reading series in San Francisco, and he’s a great entertainer — I expect this to be a lot of fun with some surprises!
I am delighted to have the opportunity to interview one of Ukraine’s best-known authors, and an author whose work I’ve been admiring for so many years, Andrey Kurkov, as a part of Litquake’s year-round series The Epicenter. Andrey Kurkov has been one of the most vocal voices in the West in support of Ukraine. He has traveled widely in Ukraine and the world, collecting stories and communicating the realities of this war in the premier English-language newspapers and magazines. He will be presenting a new book called DIARY OF INVASION (Deep Vellum Press) that collects some of these stories. As horrific as Russia’s war on Ukraine has been, Kurkov’s point of view is illuminating and delivered with kindness and respect for the readers. It’s a necessary book to read right now.
My friend, editor Briony Everroad introduced me to Kurkov’s work many years ago. Briony worked with Kurkov when his novel Death and the Penguin was first translated to English by George Bird and published in the UK to great success. It’s a hilarious and profound novel about the aftermath of the USSR’s fall, as seen through the eyes of one Kyiv-based journalist. Following Kurkov’s work over the years, I had a chance to review his novel Grey Bees last year for On the Seawall. I was so pleased to see that this novel and its translator, the amazing poet and man of letters, Boris Dralyuk won the National Book Critics Circle Prize a couple of weeks ago. Huge congratulations to all.
Come! This event is free, with recommended donations. (And please donate if you can!)
It’s such an honor and delight to be reading together with two authors whom I deeply admire. Tatsiana Zamirovskaya’s novel THE DEADNET (Смерти.net) is one of the most interesting, innovative novels I’ve read in the recent years, and when I heard that she’s coming to the Bay Area I jumped at the opportunity to introduce her work to the local literary community. In many circles Polina Barskova’s work needs no introduction: she is a poet of force, vision and integrity, and we’re lucky to have her teaching at UC Berkeley. Her recent book LIVING PICTURES was published by NYRB (trans Catherine Ciepiela) and her poetry has been widely translated to English.
Where: Adobe Books, 3130 24th St, San Francisco, CA 94110
When: Saturday March 25, 2023, at 7 pm
This event will be held in English.
The full event announcement:
Three writers born in the Soviet Union will read from their work and discuss responses to the ongoing Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has been met with an incredible flowering of poetry against war, yet we also must note the many voices that have fallen silent. As writers, one of our tasks is to find meaning in the unfathomable events that we witness. We reach into the past, into the institutional and family archives, to gather material for this work. The ongoing war makes much of this work impossible. Even the language in which some of us work—Russian—has become deeply stained by association with the Russian government. Yet we continue to reach for meaning in the past, in the stories we tell, in the emotional and bodily truths that we try to shape into words and language.
Polina Barskova is a scholar and a poet, author of thirteen collections of poems and three books of prose in Russian. Her collection of creative nonfiction, LIVING PICTURES (NYRB, 2022) received the Andrey Bely Prize in 2015 and is also forthcoming in German with Suhrkamp Verlag. She edited the Leningrad Siege poetry anthology WRITTEN IN THE DARK (Ugly Duckling Presse) and has four collections of poetry published in English translation. Barskova is a renowned scholar of World War II who has edited multiple volumes on the culture of the besieged Leningrad. She teaches in the Slavic Department at UC Berkeley.
Tatsiana Zamirovskaya is a writer from Belarus, who moved to Brooklyn in 2015. She writes metaphysical and socially charged fiction about memory, ghosts, hybrid identities and borders between empires and languages. Tatsiana is the author of three short story collections and a bestselling novel about digital resurrection THE DEADNET. Published in 2021 in Moscow, it received great critical and popular acclaim. She is also a journalist and essayist, writing about art, traumatic memories, dictatorships and dreams.
Olga Zilberbourg’s English-language debut LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES (WTAW Press) explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to The Moscow Times. Born in Leningrad, USSR, she grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia, and makes her home in San Francisco, California. She serves as a consulting editor at Narrative Magazine and as a co-facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop. Together with Yelena Furman, she has co-founded Punctured Lines, a feminist blog about literature from the former Soviet Union. She is currently at work on her first novel.
Here’s something to look forward to in 2022: I get a chance to do an event with journalist and poet Kate Greene about her book ONCE UPON A TIME I LIVED ON MARS — a personal story of Kate’s participation in a NASA-sponsored Mars dome experiment that dives into the history and culture of spaceflight.
Some of Kate’s biggest questions in the book explore the kinds of bodies that get to participate in space flight, pointing to how our human biases and social structures limit our quest for knowledge.
It’s an exciting, wide-book, and I hope that thanks to ZOOM many of you will be able to tune into the conversation. Huge thanks to Richard May for organizing and Folio Books San Francisco for hosting. Buy our books from Folio and register for the event here!
Olga Zilberbourg 