Tag: WTAW Press

Celebrating San Francisco Writers Workshop and Noisebridge

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Event, ReadingsLeave a comment

Many of you have heard me talking about my “Tuesday night writers group.” Back in 2006, I started sharing my fiction with some of my comparative literature grad school friends, and one of them pointed me to this public, drop-in workshop that at the time was meeting in the basement of an art gallery near Union Square in San Francisco. The first time I showed up, the moderator, Tamim Ansary called on me to read my story outloud, and as I did so, something clicked: I didn’t recognize my own voice. I’d been reading and thinking about voice in literature from a scholarly point of view, but here I was experiencing my own voice as an embodied thing. It felt stilted, unsure of itself. I could do it better, differently. I could learn. It didn’t hurt that Tamim actually liked whatever it was I read and encouraged me to come back.

This summer marks ten years since I, Judy Viertel, and Kurt Wallace took over from Tamim in moderating the San Francisco Writers Workshop, with Monya Baker joining us later. These days, the workshop is meeting at a hackerspace in the Mission, Noisebridge, and this coming Friday, June 6 at 7 pm, we’ll be gathering there to celebrate the workshop and to fundraise for our venue. Noisebridge allows us space to meet for free, while their own rent is sky high. In addition to hosting our group, Noisebridge also provides a stage for Lit Crawl and other literary gatherings throughout the year. I’ve been encouraging everyone I know to donate what they can to help support this organization that contributes to the vitality of San Francisco’s literary scene.

And please come party with us on Friday! Tamim Ansary himself will be there, presenting his new and very topical book, TRUTHER NARRATIVES. Current co-moderator Monya Baker will also read, and I’m so proud to introduce a few of our current regulars. We will have a book raffle, a storytelling game, food, and an opportunity to tour Noisebridge. I made some nifty postcards and clipboards — you will want one!

Three additional items:

* Check out this YouTube recording of a conversation about literary translation I hosted back in April for WTAW Press. Featured here are Ilze Duarte, Katherine E. Young, Jenny Bhatt, Boris Dralyuk, and Yilin Wang — translating work from Brazilian, Russian, Gujarati, and Chinese. Do email me if you read any of the books mentioned. I’m so curious to hear what makes an impression.

* My publisher, Peg Alford Pursell (whom I first met at the San Francisco Writers Workshop) asked me to judge the second annual Kevin McIlvoy Book Prize. The results are in: the winner is THIS IS ALSO LIFE by Elle Therese Napolitano. This book is an intimate portrait of two women affected by domestic violence to various degrees. Its inventive structure allows a realistic representation of the aftermath of violence and hopefully will be appreciated by other readers when the book is published by WTAW Press. Keep an eye out for it!

* Another group of the writers workshop regulars are putting together a new literary reading on Sunday June 8 at a wine bar in the Mission. Literary scene in SF is clearly *on fire*! Please welcome Public Words! I’m planning on being there. Come hang out.

With appreciation for you all,

Olga

Spring Events

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Event, Links, Publication, Readings, short story, TranslationLeave a comment

“My son wants to take the streetcar. My daughter doesn’t. She doesn’t want to walk, either.” A new fiction of mine, “A Train is Coming,” appears in the upcoming issue of Mom Egg (MER) Review 23, copy available for purchase as a PDF and in print. If you want to hear me read it out loud on Zoom, register for the issue release party (free), where I’m delighted to share the stage with my friend, poet Olga Livshin, among others.

If you can only make it to one Zoom-based Olga Z event this month, I strongly encourage you to come to the translation salon I’ll be MCing on April 17th. Coorganized by translator Ilze Duarte and hosted by WTAW Press (that published my collection), this event will bring to you some of the leading literary translators of the English-speaking world, representing writers from Brazil, India, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and China. Readers of this newsletter will recognize the names of Boris Dralyuk, who translates Andrey Kurkov, and Katherine E. Young, the translator of Akram Aylisli. It so happens that all of the translators on this reading are also writers and poets themselves, and I only wish I had the time to interview them about how they combine their own writing with their translation projects. One thing for sure, they’re masters of the English letters, opening worlds into other languages and cultures for us. Register (it’s a virtual, Zoom-based event)! This will be fun.

Bay Area locals: I have one more event to invite you to. On May 4, at 1 pm, I’ll be taking a part in a brand new Jewish Arts & Bookfest, being organized at the UC Berkeley’s Magnes collection, “one of the world’s preeminent Jewish museums” (I’m just learning about it too). I’m moderating a panel we called Between War and Peace, on the role of Russian literature in the work of Soviet-born Jewish American writers, featuring Margarita Meklina, Tatyana Sundeyeva, and Sasha Vasilyuk. How did we get from worshipping Pushkin, Akhmatova, and Bulgakov to writing about Soviet Jewish–and often female–experiences? How do the structures and ideas of Russian and Soviet lit continue to affect our own storytelling? How does the popularity of Russian lit in the US intersect with our USSR-formed experiences of it, and what do we do with the image of a “Russian writer” as a bearded white (and ethnically Russian) man? Following my conversation with Marat Grinberg, I have ever more questions. Please join me.

And to continue the theme of Soviet-born writers, I’m leaving you with the recording from the event that took place in Los Angeles in March, a reading by this amazing group of writers born in the USSR, and translators working with the post/Soviet experience. Thank you to Olga Livshin for capturing and editing this video. We called this event Diaspora Writers Against War, and we’re continuing to do what we can to raise funds in support of Ukraine. Please donate to Ukraine TrustChain.

Sonoma Community Writers Festival

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Book panel, Event, Like Water, Newsletter, Readings3 Comments

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.

I’m going to #AWP20 in San Antonio!

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Like Water, ReadingsLeave a comment

A conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs is coming up in March, hosted this year at the Convention Center in San Antonio, Texas. I have three events as a part of this conference:

Thursday, March 5, 10:35 am

Room 211, Henry B. González Convention Center, Meeting Room Level

A Panel, High Style and Misdemeanors: The Virtues and Vices of Elevated Prose. (Lauren Alwan, Anita Felicelli, Olga Zilberbourg, Lillian Howan, Aatif Rashid) The hallmarks of high style—elevated voice, obsession with the pictorial, self-consciousness, and poetic devices—are rooted in Flaubert and European realism. Can writers whose work concerns immigration and displacement embrace a stylistic approach that has historically been disengaged and apolitical? Authors of fiction that centers on immigration, intergenerational stories, and belonging, read their work and discuss the intersection of elevated prose and socially and politically engaged work.

Thursday, March 5, 6 pm

Jokesters 22 Pub n Grub, 713 S. Alamo St.

A Reading, WTAW Press and Friends: Join WTAW Press & Friends for readings from Angela Mitchell, Anita Felicelli, Annie Kim, Lillian Howan, Olga Zilberbourg & Sarah Stone. Peg Alford Pursell will emcee.

RSVP on Facebook event page

Friday March 6, 2:30 pm

Bookfair is 2045, located in the Henry B. González Convention Center,  San Antonio, TX.

Book signing! Come say hi please!

Upcoming Reading: Lit Crawl San Francisco

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Like Water, ReadingsLeave a comment

My next reading with fellow authors and friends of WTAW Press is coming up this Saturday! I’ll be reading a short (and probably funny) piece from LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES.

Saturday October 19, 2019 6:30pm – 7:30pm
Third Haus 455 Valencia St, San Francisco, CA 94103, USA

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS EVENT HAS HAD TO BE RELOCATED FROM THE VENUE LISTED IN THE PHYSICAL PROGRAM AND ON THE MAP.

Online Lit Crawl Schedule has the right information!

Pre-order my book!

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn book, Like Water, Publication, PublishingLeave a comment

My book, LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES, is now available for pre-order. You can buy it through my publisher’s website by clicking here, or find it on Amazon. The publisher is now running a pre-order discount. The book will be shipped out close to its publication date, which is September 5, 2019.

Pre-ordering the book is an important part of the publishing process that helps to build enthusiasm for the work among all the parties involved, from publisher to book reviewers and the reading public. More specifically, it gives the publisher the idea of how many books to actually print. If you want to support an author, pre-ordering a book (and later writing a review on Amazon or Goodreads or anywhere else) is one of the best ways to do that.

Thank you!

Like Water & Other Stories

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn book, Like Water, Publication, Publishing, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I’m delighted to announce my first collection of stories in English, Like Water and Other Stories, will appear later this year from WTAW Press. This news is all the more gratifying because I’ve been a fan and a supporter of this press from their beginning a few years ago, and have loved every book they have put out so far. Check out their website, and here’s the announcement.

Mike Smith’s And There Was Evening, and There Was Morning

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Book review, Prose review, Publishing, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Last year, when I participated, in a small way, with the launch of WTAW Press, I got a chance to read the manuscripts in draft form. This month, holding the two published books in my hand was a strange experience: an excitement coupled with worry, How will they hold up? Will the binding solidify the beauty I had glimpsed in the original writing? Will it bring forward the flaws?

Mike Smith’s book, And There Was Evening, and There Was Morning is a memoir of originalterrible loss: the author’s first wife dies of cancer shortly after the birth of their second child. The book is a collection of essays, structured in such a way that in each piece, in each chapter, we return to this tragedy, over and over again. Fifteen times over we are with Mike and the kids, Virgina and Langston, losing Emily. Other sad, scary, happy, and funny things happen in the book. Mike meets his second wife, they marry and move together to a new town in a new state. His stepdaughter, coincidentally also named Emily, goes through a bout with cancer. But oh boy oh boy. Turn the page, and there’s his beloved Emily, dying again.

Difficult reading? No, not at all. It’s a love story. The book reads like a love poem, on a single gulp of breath. Mike’s tendency to introspection, his openness to Emily and her world and the desire to continue his engagement with her interests and concerns, his ability to converse with her work after her death, is so endearing that from the very first sentences I want to know Mike, I want to spend time with him, I find in myself the resources to stay with him through his grief and to go there, into the hospital room, to be with Emily, in her final months, weeks, and days, over and over again. Emily Arndt was a scholar and I find it a solace that a book that she wrote, a revised version of her dissertation, has been published and can be found out there.

I’ll quote the first sentences from Mike Smith’s memoir, to give a sense of its rhythm and what I mean about it being a love story:

My first wife Emily and I were married for ten years. We met when she walked into the small bookstore where I worked and applied for a job. The manager must have hired her that very afternoon because we shared the following Saturday evening and Sunday morning turnaround shifts. It was fitting that we grew to know one another surrounded by books.

Thank you Peg Alford Pursell and WTAW Press for publishing this. Thank you, Mike, for sharing this story. Thank you also for all of your wonderful insight into story and character and the willingness to push and push on a thread of thought.