Danzy Senna subtitles her latest book, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?, as a “personal history” rather than a memoir. The difference between the two terms is subtle but important–the book is as much a chronicle of her ancestors and a racially-divided world as it is a story of her own life.

Outwardly, the book hinges on the relationship between Senna’s parents: Fannie Howe, a writer from the prominent white Boston upper-crust, and Carl Senna, a black intellectual from fuzzy Southern origins. The unlikely couple married in 1968, full of hope and revolutionary zeal, only to divorce in 1975, their union a victim of alcoholism, domestic abuse, and the social pressures of an inter-racial marriage on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement. More significant, however, is the relationship between Senna and her father. At the book’s core is the author’s dogged search for information regarding her father’s roots–an often exhausting and heart-wrenching search that propels her on a journey through the South.

I found myself completely wrapped in the tangled threads of Senna’s family history, eager for her to solve the mystery of her heritage. However, there was something keeping me from becoming completely involved in the story–something in her tone... more »

It’s almost here! Thanks to your generous support and contributions, the new Fringe site will be ready to launch on June 29. Designing and building a brand-new site is a pretty complicated task, and we appreciate your patience and understanding as we work out the last few tweaks.

As part of the redesign, the blog will be fully integrated with the main site. Stay tuned for specifics and our new address. We can’t wait to show off the new face of Fringe!

“The only true currency in this bankrupt world… is what you share with someone else when you’re uncool.”

In a recent essay for Rumpus, Rick Moody confesses his dark past as a high school outcast. Ostensibly, this is surprising–though not necessarily a household name, Moody is very well-known in the literary set, and gained fame with his novel, The Ice Storm, which later became a feature film starring Kevin Kline, Tobey Maguire, and Sigourney Weaver. However, those who know writers and other creative types pretty well will tell you that most of us share a bond stronger than art–we were all tragically uncool in high school.

The main focus of Moody’s essay is about Bill, a band composed of Bill Gage, a man with Down’s Syndrome, and his brother John, whom Moody was friends with in high school. Moody sets the stage for his discovery of this band by describing his group of high school friends: a motley and eccentric group of outcasts that others called a “cult.” They were fused together in their loneliness and creativity–talent that gets automatically labeled “weird” by teenagers everywhere.

I was, of course, uncool in high school, as were many of the most awesome people I know.... more »

Here’s the conclusion of our interview with Chamber Four:

Aside debates about the value of ereaders, and clips of other sources discussing the value of ereaders, what type of content are you trying to publish?

Sean: We’re really trying to promote the book reviews as a source of book information for readers by readers. The database is growing steadily, and our ambitions for it are big; we’ll be importing it to a searchable, cross-referencing database at some point, hopefully soon. We’re also planning to launch a digital magazine soon.

Nico: I’ve always been frustrated with the way book reviews are done. Music and movie reviews are geared toward telling people if the music/movie is good or not, why aren’t book reviews the same way? On the blog side, we also post about literature and reading, as well as ebook issues. I think our best posts are the more sprawling, big-picture pieces, because we’re all in the midst of figuring out this tectonic shift in a medium that’s been stable for almost 600 years, so I find pieces that can encompass the magnitude of that shift to be the most compelling. And while we do repost some big news items, we filter a lot... more »

Fringe has been collaborating with Chamber Four on an interview swap to exchange information about digital literature. It’s been an interesting dialogue–the interview with Fringe’s Editor-in-Chief Lizzie Stark can be found here. Now it’s Chamber Four’s turn to answer some questions! Lizzie sat down with Chamber Four founders Sean Clark and Nico Vreeland (Eric Markowsky wasn’t available, due to a little thing called his thesis) to talk about writing and reading in the digital revolution.

Part I now, Part II will be published tomorrow.

Why did you decide to start this site? How did you come up with the name? Who are its founding members and how long did it take you to get the site up?

Sean: The three of us (Eric, Nico, and Sean–all from Emerson College’s MFA program) came up with the idea while discussing books and Nico’s new Sony e-reader. We actually got the first build put together after a long week of work, but some of our planned improvements are still being worked on. I think an enormous disconnect seems to exist between readers (and to an extent writers) and publishing as a business. Since finishing school, I’ve longed for a better way to discuss and share... more »

The members of Emerson College’s literary blog, VERNACULAR, are proud to present:

Vernacular Spring Gala
An evening of live music, food and drink, and social networking

Join us on Friday, May 15th from 7p.m.-10p.m. at GRUB STREET (160 Boylston St, Boston, 4th floor) for a chance to mingle with local publishing professionals, writers, bloggers, students, and Emerson College faculty. Check us out at www.vernacularlit.com for details about the event, and to purchase discounted advance tickets! ($3 advance / $5 door) Free booze and food included in ticket price– yes, really!!

Live music provided by Gentlemen Hall and Heinz Healey Schaldenbrand; food provided by Teele Square Cafe; drinks provided by Narragansett Beer and Equal Exchange Cafe.

I challenge you to find a better deal in the city this weekend! See you there.

Note: You must be 21 years of age to consume alcoholic beverages. Food and drink will be provided while supplies last.

Thanks to all of you, Fringe has reached our fundraising goal (and then some)!

You can look forward to a hot new design coming to Fringe in June. We hope you’re all as excited as we are.

Along with the approaching redesign,
the gorgeous spring weather, and our interactive Round Robin story project, we at Fringe are excited about a few shakeups going down behind the scenes.

We are pleased to announce two new editors joining the staff with our upcoming June installment! Llalan Fowler has taken the reigns of our nonfiction section from Shuchi Saraswat, who has shifted to fiction editor. Llalan is the editor of the Globe Corner Bookstore blog, writes a weekly column about beer for Bostonist, and also writes weekly for Emerson College’s Writing and Publishing blog, Vernacular. She is also a worthy arm-wrestling opponent and devoted Cleveland Indians fan.

Dara Cerv is helming our (de)Classified section. She has an MFA from Emerson and continues to be a Boston-area poet. Her work is forthcoming in Sixth Finch. She’s currently working on a chapbook of love poems that really aren’t love poems at all.

Please join us in welcoming Dara and Llalan to the Fringe family!

“The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.”–Joan Didion, from the essay, “On Keeping a Notebook”

My first notebook came to me as a Christmas gift from my sister when I was six. She had made it in a crafts class at the junior high, and it was pink, with multicolored paper pages and the word “diary” stamped in gold on the front cover. Though I wrote in it sporadically, I didn’t start keeping a faithful journal until the winter of my freshman year of high school. Writing in a notebook is a practice I’ve kept up with, more or less regularly, since starting that random February day. I keep twelve years’ worth of notebooks in a large red storage bin in my closet here in Boston. About once a year, on some rainy Saturday, I’ll pull one out and start reading. Half-forgotten memories can pull me in, sometimes for hours at a time, but mostly I tire of myself quickly and put it all away in disgust. But I would never throw them away.

In... more »

Looking for something to do this weekend? The weather promises to be gorgeous here in New England, so why not take a trip to Newburyport for the 4th Annual Newburyport Literary Festival?

DATES AND HONOREES ANNOUNCED FOR THE

FOURTH ANNUAL NEWBURYPORT LITERARY FESTIVAL – APRIL 24 – 25, 2009

Mission of Fourth Annual Festival is to Encourage “Reading for a Lifetime”

Newburyport once again welcomes local and national authors and readers alike to celebrate “Reading for a Lifetime” at the Fourth Annual Newburyport Literary Festival (NLF), organized by the Newburyport Literary Association, on April 24 – 25, 2009.

Located in Newburyport, Massachusetts, with its rich literary heritage, the NLF is a unique opportunity for local and nearby community members to meet with and to hear from well-known authors from every genre in a picturesque setting.

NLF 2009 Honorees include:

David McPhail – McPhail is an award-winning author and illustrator of nearly 200 books beloved by children, parents and librarians across the United States. McPhail is one of the most prolific and influential children’s authors in the country. McPhail has garnered many prestigious awards, including a New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Book of the Year for Mole Music in 2001.

Dorothy LaFrance – LaFrance recently retired from... more »

Sounds too good to be true, right? Wrong. Wednesday, May 6, Everybody Wins Metro Boston is hosting a fundraiser to benefit the literacy program. I’ve been volunteering as part of their Power Lunch program since last fall, traveling to a South Boston elementary school once a week during my lunch break to read to William, a third grader. It’s been a great experience, and besides the benefits of exposing kids to reading, I’m rediscovering my own love of Curious George, The Magic Schoolbus, and The Bearenstain Bears.

Structured like a “Battle of the Bands,” this Guitar Hero fundraiser gives participants the chance to form their own bands and then duke it out for ultimate rock star supremacy. As if that’s not enticing enough, when else can you say you’re playing video games “for the kids”? It’s a no brainer.

{Cross posted to Vernacular}

The time has come again for the Dirty Water Reading Series to invade Grub Street headquarters! Join the fun this Sunday as Black Ocean, Quick Fiction, Redivider, and, of course, Fringe, present readings from Zachary Schomburg, Emily Kendal Frey, Blake Butler, and Fringe’s own (de)Classified editor, Dara Cerv.

There will be high-falutin’ fun, like the perennially popular literary MadLibs between each reading, a raffle, Texas-style suds, down home grub, and country tunes. There may even be some square dancing, you never know.*

The Details:
Sunday, March 29th at 7 PM
Grub Street, 160 Boylston St., Boston MA
Suggested Donation: $1

Hope to see you there!

*There will be no square dancing.

Fringe’s Special Enviro Issue debuted today, featuring literary selections with a special focus on green and environmental topics. Fringe isn’t the only journal looking toward the environment for inspiration, though.

Ever since Henry David Thoreau famously “roughed” it on the shores of Walden Pond, writers have used their natural surroundings as fuel for their creative fires. Lately, though, this environmental concern seems more omnipresent than ever. While staffing my company’s table at AWP, I was surprised by the number of people who asked if we published any nature writing anthologies. We don’t, but it got me thinking that it’s a good avenue to consider pursuing, since it’s obviously a hot button issue that’s in demand and in the forefront of our global consciousness.

I also came across two literary journals while at AWP that focus primarily on the natural world. The Fourth River is a journal run out of Chatham University in Pittsburgh, and “welcomes submissions of creative writing that explore the relationship between humans and their environments, both natural and built, urban, rural or wild. We are looking for writings that are richly situated at the confluence of place, space and identity, or that reflect upon or make use of landscape and place... more »

I returned from my second AWP conference exhausted, laden with lit journals and assorted swag, and feeling a mixture of inspiration and disappointment. I promptly took a long nap, and only after I woke up the next morning was I able to properly begin processing the 4-day hurricane known as AWP.

This is not to say that this year’s conference was somehow more tiring than years past–AWP is always a hectic weekend full of readings, panels, drinking, and dancing, but this year’s conference came with many added dimensions for me: responsibilities.

I attended the 2008 conference in New York City as a student–a Publishing student, no less. I had nowhere to be other than the panels and readings I had painstakingly circled in the official program. In my free time, I perused the Bookfair, but I was quickly overwhelmed by all of the smiling lit journal editors asking “What do you write?” It’s a seemingly simple question, but for me, it’s always been a loaded one. Having attended Emerson, where the dual-focus writing program is both a blessing and a curse, my identity as a writer has gone through more than a few crises. Since students in the Publishing program are not... more »

Let me start off with a confession: I have never read a John Updike novel. Despite this deficiency, he remains in my mind as one of the most, if not THE most, prolific literary writers of our time, standing shoulder to shoulder with Joyce Carol Oates and Philip Roth, giants of American literature.

Updike’s “A & P” was the first short story we read in my freshman year composition class in college, and I still remember reading his description of Queenie, the pubescent temptress who slaps barefoot into the local A & P to change Sammy’s life forever: “With the straps pushed off, there was nothing between the top of the suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane on the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. I mean, it was more than pretty.” Sure, he was a classic “man’s man” writer (just a paragraph before, Sammy wonders parenthetically if girls really have a brain or if it’s “just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar”), but his deft use of language and tone more than made up for... more »

Most of us are aware that women are awesome and capable of just about anything. However, sometimes people seem to forget that while we are able to give birth, run countries, and cure diseases, we also do crazy things every once in a while, like drink beer and tell jokes. Weird.

Former Weekly Dig staffer Lissa Harris has noticed the slightly disturbing trend of the “look at women[insert completely inane and irrelevant activity here]!” headline and decided to create a blog dedicated to calling attention to these stories. Women Do! is just getting off the ground, so if you know a good story that meets this criterion: “The true Women Do story is not about medical issues, or gender discrimination, or anything properly related to women qua women. Oh no. It is about the shocking spectacle of women doing stuff that people generally do. At its heart is typically an earth-shattering revelation that some women, for instance, like to drive motor-cars or eat ice-cream.”, be sure to send your tip to womendoblank[at]gmail.com.

Former Fringe Blogger and Redivider Fiction Editor Matt Salesses has pioneered a new project he calls “Live Essays: An Experiment in Up-to-the-Minute Nonfiction.” The tagline: “I have decided to post this essay as I am writing it, and to write it as it is happening. We’ll see what comes of this. Other essays coming soon?”

It’s an interesting approach, for a couple of reasons: 1. Matt is primarily a fiction writer. 2. Matt is living in Korea, teaching English. 3. The immediacy of the writing tends to create a sense of intimacy that we wouldn’t normally get from an essay, as we feel we’re reading as the action is happening.

This breed of insta-writing is popping up elsewhere, as well–the cell phone novel has become one of the most popular literary forms in Japan, according to this week’s New Yorker article by Dana Goodyear. Sites like the Japanese Maho I-Land cater to young writers who can tap their tome as if texting on their cell, and then upload it directly onto the site, where readers can follow the installments as quickly as they’re written.

It is a phenomenon both thoroughly modern and a bit antiquated–popular novels were often serialized in newspapers in the days of Dickens,... more »

Nothing says “Happy Holidays” quite like lewd mad libs, spiked eggnog, and literary offerings from four Boston lit journals: Fringe, Redivider, Quick Fiction, and Black Ocean.

Hear Sean Lanigan, Oni Buchanan, Pamela Painter, and Fringe’s own Kim Liao as they share tales of family cheer so dysfunctional, you may actually find yourself grateful for your own family this holiday season!

As always, each reading will be punctuated with interactive Mad Libs (in the form of classic carols), a raffle, and free snacks and libations.

Come for the readings–stay for the eggnog.

Dirty Water Reading Series
Sunday, December 14, 2008 7pm
Grub Street
160 Boylston St, Boston MA 02110
$1 Suggested Donation

The last issue of Fringe for 2008 is live–check it out for your quarterly dose of innovative and evocative writing and art from our impressive list of contributors.

As winter begins its descent, we (Bostonians especially) often begin to feel imprisoned by nature, chained by the shackles of snow, ice, and bitter winds. Much of the work featured in this winter’s issue deals in some way with our universal struggle to overcome those boundaries (whether it be our social phobias or a giant glass bottle) imposed by the world around us:

• Cati Porter’s multimedia poem “Fructify” is a quiet, almost haunting, verse about a woman who “wants to scream/but her mouth has become a honeycomb”
• Jean-Michel Buche’s artwork is clean and organic; tightly organized and meticulously detailed, it’s reminiscent of cells and science–of the things it takes to build a life.
• In “Some Things I Just Can’t Talk About,” Casey Wiley tells the story of Tim, a man who can’t quite seem to get over the pain a certain Uno’s manager caused him, as he goes through his days railing at the world.
• It’s no secret that small town America is becoming not much more than a fairytale our parents tell, but Kelley Calvert renders the... more »

The optimism in the air in Boston this past week has been nearly palpable. What with Obama’s victory Tuesday and the unseasonably warm November weather, there’s a smile on nearly everyone’s faces these days. It’s a welcome reprieve from the doom and gloom of the economic crisis and the impending winter chill. Though there was much gleeful shouting, car horn beeping, and giddy bouncing on Tuesday night around 11pm, the most exuberance I’ve seen was at the Orpheum Theater Thursday night, when I went to see the Decemberists.

It was my second time seeing the Portland band, known for their eccentric stage antics and literary lyrics, live. The first time their set was punctuated with a giant whale puppet and members of the band diving into the audience at the Avalon to crowd surf. Many of their songs are more mythic tales than pop song, with tracks ranging from “O Valencia!” which tells the story of a star-struck romance in the vein of Romeo and Juliet, to “The Mariner’s Revenge Song” in which a man finds justice in the belly of a whale. The group has an ode to the writer Myla Goldberg and in fact, lead singer Colin Meloy’s sister is... more »