In partnership with the Birmingham Arts Journal and Reed Books, the ASFA Creative Writing Department will once again host the Birmingham area's My Favorite Poem event. 

My Favorite Poem invites poetry lovers from throughout central Alabama to share their favorite poems and to offer what they love about them. 

A reception, hosted by the parents of ASFA Creative Writing students will follow the reading. This event is free and open to the public.

Friday, September 28th at 7:00 pm
Alabama School of Fine Arts
Creative Writing Auditorium
Birmingham, AL

Rebuilding With Poetry

The Booker T Washington magnet school for the arts in Montgomery burned down last month. They lost much of their campus, the library, and a great deal of expensive Visual Arts and Media Arts equipment/supplies. They’ve been displaced to a dormant elementary school, and they’re trying to salvage this school year as they recover/rebuild for the future.

As a result, this year the My Favorite Poem team invited the BTW-CW students to join them at the annual reading event. Eleven students, three parents, and the chair of the Creative Writing Department, AWC’s very own Foster Dickson, will attend; two of their students will join the group of readers. There will be a Poem-on-Demand donation table in the lobby during the reception.

If you’d like to assist the students and teachers of Booker T Washington, you can donate online to the FAME Foundation for fire-related donations. But most direct way for folks in the Birmingham metro area to show their support – especially for the BTW writers -- is to attend the MFP event at ASFA later this month!

Image source: Atlas Obscura

"What's Old Is New": The Fitzgerald Museum Contest

Every year, the F. Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald Museum hosts two annual writing competitions: Poetry & Short Story, in an effort to encourage writers of all ages to carry on the literary legacy of Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald. 

AWC member and author Foster Dickson, who serves on the board of the Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery,  has been working with Executive Director Sarah Powell to bring the jazz onto the page for the Museum's Literary annual contest.  

“2018 is the hundredth anniversary of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald meeting in Montgomery. Rather than being a simple fiction or poetry contest, the Fitzgerald Museum Contest will seek out works that are genre-bending, multimedia, and otherwise unique.”

— Foster Dickson

F. Scott and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald were daring and revolutionary in their lives and in their art and writing. Today, one hundred years after the couple first met in Montgomery, Alabama, the Fitzgeralds’ literary and artistic works from the 1920s and 1930s are still regarded as groundbreaking, and The Fitzgerald Museum is seeking to identify and honor the daring and revolutionary young writers and artists of this generation.

Contest Guidelines:

The Fitzgerald Museum’s annual Literary Contest is seeking submissions of short fiction poetry, and multi-genre works, especially those works that break boundaries and defy tradition, that are highly original in style and scope, and that use literary and artistic techniques in innovative ways. Works with traditional forms and styles will be accepted, yet writers are encouraged to send works that utilize innovative forms and techniques. Literary works may include artwork, illustrations, font variations, and other graphic elements, with the caveat that these elements should enhance the work, not simply decorate the page.

Genres: Fiction, Poetry, Multi-Genre Categories

Grades 9–10, Grades 11–12, Undergraduate

Due to issues of compatibility, all works should be submitted electronically as PDFs to ensure that each submission appears as the author intends. PDF files should be named with the author’s first initial [dot] last name [underscore] title. For example, J.Smith_InnovativeStory.pdf. All submissions should be made using the form on the Fitzgerald Museum website. Each student may only enter once.

Submitted literary works will be judged in three separate age categories, so please be clear about that category. Prose submissions should not exceed 3,000 words. Poetry submissions should have 50 lines or fewer. Multi-genre works should not exceed ten pages. The submissions period is open from September 1 until December 1, 2018.

The Literary Contest will be judged by a panel of writers and artists. Award announcements will be made on March 15, 2019. In each age category, a single winner and honorable mentions will be named.

For more information, you can reach out to thefitzgeraldmuseum@gmail.com.

To learn more about the Museum and the role of the McPhillips family in its preservation, visit the  Encyclopedia of Alabama.

Poet Lana Austin

We are thrilled for AWC member Lana K. W. Austin, whose first full-length collection, Blood Harmony, officially comes out from Iris Press on September 3rd. I asked Lana about her first collection came together and she said:

I joyfully remember the story of how Blood Harmony's title poem, and really the catalyst for the entire book, came into being because it's a tale of how I was oh-so humbled and also magnificently encouraged at the same time.

I was in the senior honors seminar with Claudia Emerson at Mary Washington and I'd been writing history-centered poems about other people, some that'd even been lucky enough to garner awards and scholarships. I will always love narrative poems, especially if they delve into my home state of Kentucky and its iconic music or raw beauty.

But Claudia wanted more. 

"What about your history," she asked? 

I'd shied away from any "confessional" I-centered poems at that point, but as I started searching for my biological family and remembering my years in foster care singing with my half brother, I knew those memories were undoubtedly linked to the more narrative, biographical pieces on which I'd been focusing before. 

I stood humbled before Claudia then, cognizant of the fact that I'd been doing a very superficial surveying of the landscape of my home and my own life. 

She, however, saw it as a moment of epiphany, she with her eager and agile mind always seeking out new information, new visions of the old world. 

She encouraged me onward, which culminated in "Blood Harmony" the poem….which became the fulcrum of my MFA thesis at GMU and which, ten years later, has now become Blood Harmony the book. 

I'll never forget when I first brought that poem to Claudia and, honest to goodness, her face lit up. "You've found your voice!" Her expression and her words ignited me that day and they have every day since.

Here is a sample poem, "Blood Harmony," that first appeared in Columbia Journal in 2016 alongside two other poems from the new book.  

Blood Harmony

A single larynx halved,
             that’s how I perceived it

when I sang with my half
            brother--same mother, 

long gone. She is
            where it came from, 

our ability to blend,
             unique notes in a chord,

but still one voice. His tenor
             a ginger effervescence, 

and my aubergine alto
             painting what felt like

caverns-deep undertones
           in heavier hues,

our voices fused. Even
          in measures when one grew

more dominant on lead
           and the other receded, 

growing hybrid harmony, 
           a hymn shifting, 

we were rivulets divined
         from a vast river.

Creek, brook or stream--
          water from the same source.

Advanced praise

"An ecclesiastical thread runs through this fine book, in that everything has its season, and everything—including joy and grief—goes together. Austin’s poems achieve through their own high and lonesome registers what we expect from the best blues or hillbilly music: the human experience in this weary world is affirmed, even dignified. I am glad these refreshing, bone- and blood-deep poems are in the world."

--Maurice Manning, author of One Man’s Dark, The Common Man, and Bucolics

Blood Harmony introduces a lively new voice to Appalachian poetry. Lana K. W. Austin celebrates the bonds of memory and blood in poems of both harmony and drama, remembering the blood spilled in the coalfields, and the struggles of families with loyalty and courage. The poems pay tribute to the place and soul of the region, the music of blending voices, adolescent desire, and the exuberance of motherhood, the enduring legacy of Jean Ritchie and Bill Monroe, and the mountains where the music was born.

—Robert Morgan,author of Dark Energy, Gap Creek, and Chasing the North Star

The great circle is unbroken in Lana Austin’s first full-length collection, Blood Harmony. The arc of mothering and hard unmothering, Kentucky floods and wanton drink, the luthier one with the carved grain and sorrowed ballads. In poems birthed from paradox, Austin’s fierce coupling of alto and effervescence infuses and uplifts family and community portraits and tributes to the high lonesome of her upbringing—Jean Ritchie, Bill Monroe, Emmylou Harris. Her own unshakable voice prevails amid the downbeat of wounded genealogy, love’s aching counterpoint and antidote to loss. So put your hands on the radio still warm and faintly glowing, scoot closer to hear Austin’s “damned salvation of sound.” The circle thrums as it bends toward that stubbornly joyful noise, the chord so deep and alive within us.

—Linda Parsons,author of Mother Land and This Shaky Earth

Walt Whitman once advised young poets to “Be outrageous! Be outrageous! But not too damned outrageous.” Lana Austin’s Blood Harmony has exactly that balance of old and new, of the immediate and the distant, of challenge and embrace. Her Kentucky landscape shows as familiar as a family heirloom and the music of her poems is as clear as a harpsichord in a meadow. This first collection reminds us how the soul is always seeking, in its dream of place, the final character of one’s identity, one’s home. The Gospel says abide and these poems are enactments with bold, electric, convincing authority. Lana Austin’s is a new country music worthy of a great readership. Let it be.

—Dave Smith,author of Little Boats, Unsalvaged, The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems,
and Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American Poetry

Attentive to history, place, pitch and character, the poems of Lana Austin’s Blood Harmony find bonds in music that dovetail with chords in family and community. Her lovely and passionate verses interweave precise knowledge of traditional mountain and CW music with marvelous invention which renders a mandolin “an amulet of sound” and describes listeners to Emmylou Harris as “embered… into incandescence.” These poems are handmade and heart-carved with a luthier’s canny expertise. Anyone wishing to go, as her opening poem invites, “In Search of the Wild Dulcimer,” need look no farther than this collection where kindred sounds blend beyond description. In thrall to depths of the spirit, her poems are also sweetly free. Blood Harmony will make you sigh and sob, clap and stomp.

—R. T. Smith, recipient of the 2014 Weinstein Prize in Poetry and author of Outlaw Style

 

About the Poet

Lana K. W. Austin’s poems and short stories have recently been featured in Mid-American Review, Sou’wester, The Chariton Review, Columbia Journal, Zone 3, Appalachian Heritage, The Pinch, The New Guard, Switchback, Bloodroot, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, and others. Austin has been a finalist and semi-finalist in numerous competitions, including the James Wright Poetry Award, the Crab Orchard Review First Book Award, the Zone 3 Book Award, the American Short Fiction Award, and the Machigonne Fiction Award. Born and raised in rural Kentucky, Austin studied creative writing at both Hollins University and the University of Mary Washington as an undergraduate and has an MFA from George Mason University (2008). Her first full-length poetry collection, Blood Harmony, is from Iris Press (2018) and her chapbook, In Search of the Wild Dulcimer, is from Finishing Line Press (2016). Austin has lived in England, Italy, and Washington, DC, but currently resides in Alabama, where she is an adjunct instructor in the English department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Also a journalist, Austin has written for numerous newspapers and magazines. For more information, visit her website. 

Photo credit: Gulf Coast News Today

Alina Stefanescu talks to Mike Burrell about first novels, Elvis, blasphemy, and other sordid stuff.

Since I promised myself not to ask questions about beards in this interview, I'm going to go straight for the jugular. How did you, Mike Burrell, become a writer?

I suspect a therapist could delve into my brain and find some kind of mama issue lurking there.

My mother only had a sixth-grade education, but she was an inveterate reader. She read Hemingway and Faulkner. She read trashy romance magazines and true crime stories. She read Jane Austin and the Bronte sisters. She read comic books and the backs of cereal boxes.  While I’ve developed a little more of a reading filter than she had, there’s no doubt that I caught the reading bug from her. Long before I could call myself a creative writer, I was a shameless imitator of what I had read. In that sense my mother was my main inspiration to write. 

I was twenty or so before I attempted to write any kind of story. For one thing, I thought being a writer was much too lofty a goal for someone like me to pursue. Wasn’t writing for guys with white beards and three names? For another thing, my first year of college demonstrated how poorly prepared I was to write anything even if I had wanted to.  I took English 101 twice and was in the middle of flunking 102 when the instructor gave the class an assignment to write a short story. Every writer out there knows that nothing can make you feel more inadequate than hours of staring at a blank page. Several nights of doing that convinced me that  I had no business trying to write a story or even being in college for that matter.

The night before the assignment was due, I had completely given up and sat with my roommates, drinking beer and listening to Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. After the third or fourth playing of the album, somewhere between “Tombstone Blues” and “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, it Takes a Train to Cry,” I had a vision of a homeless guy watching a wealthy old lady emerge from a Cadillac.  Now, the lady actually shopped at the A&P where I worked, and the homeless guy used to come in to sell us his empty soda bottles. So Dylan didn’t paint them for me completely, he just put them together for me somehow. My buddies laughed at me when I said Dylan was a muse. But I can’t help but notice he just won the Nobel Prize for literature. With Bob Dylan’s help, I stayed up all night writing a story about the homeless guy struggling to retrieve a ring  the lady accidently dropped down a sewer grate.   

After grading all of our papers, the instructor stalked angrily into the classroom. She fairly well dog-cussed the class for not trying. She said everyone got an F on the assignment except one person who earned an A+. While slumped down in my seat, accepting my failure as a college student, she picked up a stack of paper and began to read. I could see visions of being drafted into the army and slogging around a swamp in Viet Nam. If I lived through Viet Nam, I figured I could probably come back and get a job in a sock mill or continue working at the A&P.  When my attention drifted back to the instructor’s voice, I thought the words she spoke sounded awfully familiar. My god! I thought. She’s reading my f***ing story.

Over the years, I suppressed the urge to write because I had been hungry in my life, and I had no desire to be a starving artist or a starving anything else. After ensuring there was little chance of me doing without food through early failure, I took Carolynne Scott’s fiction writing class at UAB. Carolynne encouraged me while I wrote some really bad short stories. Next, I wrote a couple of really sucky novels. I got a few stories published before writing a novella for a thesis in an MFA program. Then I revised the hell out of that novella and turned it into The Land of Grace.

I love knowing that what started as a novella wound its way into a novel. Of course, I have to ask about influence and inspiration. Which five writers do you list when someone (like me) asks for favorites? What do you learn from them? What do you covet or admire in their work?

These are the writers I reread when honing craft. I can’t give you just five, so I’ll sneak a couple more in by grouping them according to the tools I most want to borrow. 

1. Francine Prose and Richard Yates—Great practitioners of the free and indirect style of close third-person narration. In Prose’s Blue Angel and Yate’s Revolutionary Road, a reader is always viewing the world through the eyes of the point-of-view character while moving unnoticed in and out of the character’s voice.
2. George V. Higgins (The Friends of Eddie Coyle only)—Dialogue. Realistic dialogue. Dialogue that develops character. Sadly, in his subsequent books, he leaned on dialogue way too much, substituting it for narrative and leaving his characters to communicate with each other through ponderous shaggy-dog stories. But if I only had only one book in me, hell I’d settle for The Friends of Eddie Coyle in a second. 
3. Graham Greene—Plotting. He’s the master of the plot. He wrote with the movies in mind even the literary masterpieces like The Heart of the Matter, The Power and the Glory and The Quiet American. 
4. Raymond Chandler—The most elegant sentences written by an American (Well, actually he was born in England). Never mind that The Big Sleep really didn’t make a lot of sense—it’s an American classic. 
5. John Kennedy Toole, Joseph Heller and Stanley Elkin—Humor, satire, and in the case of Elkin, an amazing, jazz-like style of prose that cannot be duplicated on this planet.

What do you love most about Alabama? Conversely, what do you find most challenging about being a resident of this state?

I’ll answer this in reverse order. I find it challenging to stay around and watch my state continually come down on the wrong side of history on everything—the civil rights struggle, marriage equality, LGBTQ rights, health care, immigration and on and on. Our schools lag behind most of the country, and it’s a shame that we refuse to adequately support them.   

With all of my complaints, I love Alabama because it’s my home. I can tell it’s my home because sometimes when I’m standing on a familiar piece of dirt, a pleasant childhood memory will pass in front of my eyes behind a whiff of honeysuckle or an autumn breeze rustling through the dry leaves.  And no matter where I go, how long I stay, or whatever good time I’ve had while I’m gone, I’m always flooded with that sweet coming-home feeling every time I return. 

My neighbors may not see the world as I do. They probably think I belong to some kind of liberal cult, and, I’m sure, they’ve never voted for any of the candidates I’ve supported in any election that’s ever been held. But I still like them because I’ve lived around them and people like them all my life. I know there’s a lot more to them than the crap they regurgitate from Fox News. And I suspect they like me. I imagine when I’m not looking, they shake their heads and say, “Ol’ Mike’s got some weird ways of looking at stuff, but he’s a pretty good ol’ boy.” 

“Over the years, I suppressed the urge to write because I had been hungry in my life, and I had no desire to be a starving artist or a starving anything else. After ensuring there was little chance of me doing without food through early failure, I took Carolynne Scott’s fiction writing class at UAB.”

— Mike Burrell

 Your debut novel about Elvis touches so many southern spaces, though some readers might find it irreverent. How does irreverence serve as a literary technique in your fiction (if it does)? And how did you tackle research while writing a fiction novel about the King?

Irreverence is in the eye of the reader.  A blogger recently refused to review my book because, she said, it was blasphemous. That assessment left me with an image of her quietly reading a couple of chapters and suddenly throwing it down as if she’d been holding a big chunk of glowing brimstone.

Being irreverent wasn’t a consideration in writing the book.  I began with these questions:  What would an Elvis worshiping cult look like? Who would be the most susceptible to its charms? How would a cult like that have originated? And what would it ultimately evolve into? 

Of course, I visited Graceland and Elvis’s Tupelo birthplace for perspective. The remaining research for the book consisted, for the most part, of some pretty easy and pleasurable reading. Peter Guralnick’s definitive Elvis bios, The Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love are both riveting. Elaine Dundy’s Elvis and Gladys not only describes the singer’s extremely close relationship with his mother, it also traces the history of his mother’s family. 

There may be some benign, positive and beneficial cults out there. But I didn’t look for any of those because a nice cult wouldn’t make for much of a story. I concentrated particularly on cults like The Branch Dividians, The Children of God and The People’s Temple. Cults of this kind have some common characteristics. They have a charismatic leader and a need to isolate their followers from the outside world. They teach that outsiders are the enemy, and they exercise control through fear of physical violence and fear of excommunication.

I also needed to know something about brainwashing techniques. For this I went back to the kidnapping of Patty Hurst by the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). I always found it fascinating that one day she’s Patty Hurst, heir to more money than I can even count, and a few weeks later she’s Tania, sporting a snappy little beret and waving an automatic rifle around a branch of the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco. If we are to believe the psychiatrists and other experts that her attorney, F. Lee Bailey, put on the stand at her trial, she was isolated in a closet and infantilized.  Her life was constantly threatened, and she was forced to depend on her captors for her welfare, comfort, her very survival. The resulting behavior is called the Stockholm Syndrome, in which the victim comes to sympathize with and even love her captors. 

That was essentially my research.  Then my imagination kicked in.   I imagined that the ultimate Elvis cult would have its own property–remote, isolated and designed in the likeness of Graceland with Elvis’s birthplace tossed in. It would be populated by cult members playing characters from The King’s life. Now, that by itself is a pretty absurd set-up. Add to that my answer to the question of who would be the most susceptible—an Elvis impersonator. Elvis tribute artists (known in the trade as ETAs) are as serious as a heart attack in the practice of their craft. Their fans take them seriously, too. But most people look at a guy who goes around looking like Elvis 24/7, making his living or extra income squeezing into a gaudy jumpsuit and performing Elvis’s clichéd Las Vegas act, and they see a clown. So I didn’t have to do much digging to mine some humor from that combination. In fact, it was pretty hard at times to restrain the humor because the more seriously the characters play their roles, the more absurd they appear.

I suspect that answering those questions I started with, especially the third one—how would it have originated—created the alleged irreverence in that blogger’s mind. I figured my cult needed an authoritative text with myths and rules for living. I came up with the Book of Gladys, a fictional book that is essentially a copycat version of the New Testament, with Elvis as the savior and written by his beloved mother. To those people who insist on being offended by this, I can only point out that if you take a close look at actual religious cults you’ll find that most of them model themselves on interpretations of the Bible or other religious texts. You’ll also find that some of the underlying beliefs of those cults are a hell of a lot wackier than the divinity of Elvis.

Thank you so much for sharing your time and imagination with us, Mike. One last question: who should buy The Land of Grace?

Well, if you can get into a wild roller coaster ride through the land of an insane Elvis worshiping cult that takes a few neck-jerking turns that you won’t see coming, you should definitely buy it.  

---

Mike Burrell's most recent short story is available to read online in the current issue of Still: The Journal.  You can purchase a copy of Mike's novel, The Land of Grace, from Alabama's own Livingston Press. And you should. 

Kirkus Reviews calls it: "An intoxicating tale that’s simultaneously gaudy and exquisite."

Mike Burrell on Mike Burrell

"In 1956, at eleven years old, I was one of the world’s first Elvis impersonators. I was a miserable failure at it. The pompadour didn’t work, and I couldn’t sing, so I wound up looking like a nerdy little kid with greasy hair who kept curling his lip as if he had an over-sized booger hung up in his nose. My only performance, a leg-shaking lip-sync of “Hound Dog” at a school assembly, was a big hit, but not for the desired reason. Instead of squealing girls, I was met with uproarious laughter. Kids laughed and called me Hound Dog till I traded in my droopy pomp for a buzz cut and left my Elvis impersonating career on a barber shop floor. But Elvis had made a life-long impression on me. And that impression, along with an eerie encounter with an Elvis cult in my later life (see my blog) were the inspirations for The Land of Grace.

I have earned my living as a farm laborer, a grocery clerk, a military intelligence analyst, a revenue examiner/manager, and a lawyer. I am a native of DeKalb County, Alabama and a graduate of Valley Head High School and Jacksonville State University. I earned an MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte. My short fiction has appeared in: Still: The Journal; Southern Humanities Review; The MacGuffin; and the Livingston Press anthology, Climbing Mt. Cheaha: Emerging Alabama Writers. I live with Debra, the love of my life, in Birmingham, Alabama."

$35      member registration with catered lunch

$45.     non-member registration with catered lunch

$25.      member registration without catered lunch (bringing your own lunch)

Members and non-members can register for the conference online at the ASPS website. ASPS contest winners and poetry book of the year will be announced. 

Friday night events are free and open to the public. Attendees can bring friends and family to all non-workshop events. For additional information, email the ASPS President at rainscented@gmail.com.

ASPS Poetry Contests are open to members and non-members (with specification). Just download the rules above and get started. Deadline is September 18, 2018.

Let Us Imagine Her Name by Sue Brannan Walker

Reviewed by Charlotte Pence, Director of the Stokes Center for Creative Writing at University of South Alabama

“On a dirt road in Tuscaloosa, red and rutted, a girl turned woman, turned crone, wants a name—not the surname of the father who could not, would not marry the mother, for he already had a wife, this carpenter-papa named William, who said it was best to dispense with the child and hand her off like a sack of new potatoes.”

So begins an early chapter from Let Us Imagine Her Name, a new book by former Alabama poet laureate Sue Brannan Walker. This work is a lyrical, evocative exploration of identity by a writer who wonders about her birth parents.

Walker cultivates a history through invention, imagination, and investigation by entering into imagined conversations with other female figures such as Abigail Adams, Greta Garbo, Esther from Toomer’s Cane, Xue Xinran, Margaret Mead, and, of course, Olive Oyl.  To help situate readers, Walker writes of the book’s unique approach early in the collection: “Often she asked herself who she might be if she could be anyone, if she might give herself a name, and so this account is her own invention, a memoir in the form of an abecedarian—an alphabetical listing—whereby the writer makes determinations about who she might be.”

Unlike those of the Victorian era, few poets today fully use the weight of the direct address in poetry, that pronominal “you,” perhaps because of a nagging sense that we aren’t really talking to anyone. But Let Us Imagine Her Name gains so much of its energy through this direct address, allowing readers to eavesdrop among the great women.

As an adopted child, Sue Walker wondered about her history—which is another way to say she wonders about her present. Part memoir, part poetry, and part something else that I refuse to name as anything other than inspired, this book seeks to articulate how a person comes to build the self.  The authorial “I” in this collection tries on different personas in an attempt at wholeness.

Not only does the book explore personal identity, but also lyrical forms—which one could say is identity in the genre of poetry. One of the many things I love about this book is its gutsiness to play, be it through 43-word titles, a mish-mash of Fanny Farmer recipes and cooking advice, conversations with quotes from Jean Toomer’s Cane, and much more.

Ultimately, the book’s playfulness leads to authority and power, such as the power of naming. “The first step to wisdom… is getting things by their right names,” E.O. Wilson wrote. And yet the act of naming is a process that is never completed, for as we all know, life continuously changes—as have those objects we attempt to define by their names.  While investigating identity, Walker is aware of the elusiveness of such a search with her epigraph from Derrida that states “Give me a name? But why? I don’t know exactly; maybe to lose my own.”

This collection doesn’t attempt to find ‘the whole truth,’ which Walker describes as “green as unmowed grass.” The truth in this book comes as it often does: in fragments that don’t always join but sometimes do, like a jigsaw puzzle made from ten puzzles all thrown into one box. Sue Brannan Walker’s book embraces the fact that we are more than what anyone can see or articulate. The search for self is often as close as one will come to finding any answers.

---

Charlotte Pence's first book of poems, Many Small Fires (Black Lawrence Press, 2015), received an INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award from Foreword Reviews. She is also the author of two award-winning poetry chapbooks and the editor of The Poetics of American Song Lyrics. In August of 2017, she moved to Mobile to become the director of the Stokes Center for Creative Writing at University of South Alabama.

In this week's AWC member feature, Alina Stefanescu talks to author Amos Jasper Wright IV about Birmingham, fiction, maps, music, irony, and southern culture on the skids. All italics are Alina's and the rest is straight from Amos himself. Enjoy.

“Anyone from Alabama inherits the omnipresent culture of the Bible Belt, so Christianity was syncretized in my mind with this early exposure to Native American culture.”

— Amos Jasper Wright IV

Hi Amos. I understand you hail from Birmingham. Tell me about your time in the Magic City. Do you have any favorite places, whether pubs, cafes, or swimming holes? From a distance, what is most salient in your memories and affections?

We often endearingly referred to the Magic City as the Tragic City, and though the city's image is evolving out of the shadow of its previous stigma it will probably always be more tragic than magic for me, though I acknowledge this may have more to do with my perceptions and experiences of the city than anything else. Nevertheless, there's enough magic there to motivate me to write about the city, even today. I'm often disoriented visiting the city now - the skyline is taller and there are investments where there used to be either vacant lots or abandoned properties. There were few condos then, and UAB's campus primarily served commuters as it struggled through the inchoate phases of developing an identity. The transit terminal still had its copper dome. Friends got robbed at gunpoint. Nobody cared about the Birmingham Barons before Regions Field was built by Railroad Park, though we went to the throwback games at Rickwood Field. The glory days of Legion Field were long past when the Crimson Tide played in town, though we went to soccer matches and some downright sad UAB Blazers games there on free tickets. People moving to the city now may find it incredible that Avondale was recently a ghost town, though layered beneath my memory there are those who remember Avondale and 41st Street before its cycle of decline. When I walked by the abandoned Pizitz Building, since repurposed as a food hall and apartments, I thought about my grandmother's memories of shopping there when it was still a department store. I am still processing my time in Birmingham, but the most salient and affective in my memory is the series of lifelong friendships I formed while living in Birmingham. We lived in cheap ratty apartments in Southside and Highland Park and threw house parties several nights a week. I've never found that type of friendship anywhere else. In the narrative we shared, Birmingham and Alabama were places to leave, if you had the means to do so - not everyone does. We congratulated ourselves as pioneers of the first wave of re-urbanization centered around the Phoenix Building where we briefly lived before moving to cities like Seattle, Austin, New York City and Boston. I had pretensions to the visual arts then, and we rented studio space at the corner of 18th Street and 2nd Avenue South, which is now the Railroad Square development. The transformation of this district and elsewhere has been startling and surreal, mostly observed from the sidelines, as Railroad Park was still in the planning stages when I lived there, though I am sure the residents of neighborhoods like Avondale are more startled than I could ever be. We rented the entire second floor of the Railroad Square building when Railroad Park was just an empty lot by the railroad tracks, made Gordon Matta Clark-esque sculptures and paintings, hosted art openings and threw parties on the rooftop. I sometimes feel that I've missed out on the redevelopment of Birmingham, but the world is much bigger than your hometown and maybe the city needed the energy of people from outside of Alabama or natives who did not share this tragic vision of the city. There was also something paradoxically exhilarating and morbid about making art and throwing parties amidst all this urban decay.

In many ways, Birmingham was preserved like taxidermy by neglect because it did not experience the influx of redevelopment capital that wrought Sherman's Second March to the Sea upon Atlanta. Birmingham then was an apocalyptic, windblown aftermath in my imagination. Downtown has since developed the closest thing to an urban renaissance the state has ever seen, but many of the city's neighborhoods are still living this vision. Birmingham is now facing acute equity issues - when has it not? - related to the spatial distribution of the benefits of reinvestment. Anyway, I'm preaching now.

The map of Magic City that Amos made especially for this interview.

Many nights we crawled into the Leer Tower (you didn't have to break in - the building was already occupied by transients) right across the street from the headquarters of the Birmingham Police Department, took photos of the devastation, and climbed the stairs to the roof for the panoramic view of Jones Valley. Those types of experiences were probably the provenance of the vision of Birmingham as this tragic city desolated by suburbanization and white supremacy. We took the MAX transit buses all over the city, into neighborhoods like Woodlawn, Norwood, Ensley, Smithfield. Before the craft beer economy really boomed we often drove over to Atlanta, stocked up on beer and then smuggled forties and high gravity beers across the Alabama-Georgia state line. I blame the state legislature that till the age of about twenty-something the best beer I'd ever had was swill. Only in Birmingham would beer revitalize a dying town. Before Railroad Park the only greenspace in the city was Kelly Ingram Park and Linn Park. I went there on my lunch break and talked to bums or wandered around the Birmingham Museum of Art. Then the good ole boys down in Montgomery, in their infinite wisdom, updated the beer laws and released this untapped boozy potential - it was like the end of Prohibition. Economic development advocates will call this progress; others may call it the "whitening" of the city, but I'll refrain from jeremiads. Most of the bars we frequented, with the exceptions of The Garage, The Nick, and The J. Clyde are now gone. Most nights ended in debauchery and blackouts at the Upside Down Plaza, an underground bar like the last circle in Dante's Inferno. Secondhand smoke and bloody broken mirrors on the bathroom floor. Our less rowdy evenings centered around Bailey's Irish Pub, which was behind Dave's in Five Points and was gutted after I left. Bottletree closed sometime after I moved away. A blur of house parties throughout Southside, Highland Park and the few people then living in lofts downtown. After the Upside Down Plaza kicked us out we got drunk food at Al's Deli and Grill on 10th Avenue South. We unwittingly contributed to the ruination of Gip's Place. To swim, we dipped in cold water quarries in Tarrant or used Google Earth to find pools in the backyards and secret courtyards of apartment buildings whose fences we could jump. Niki's West out on Finley is still a place I try to meat-and-three whenever I'm in town. I would be remiss if I failed to mention Jim Reed Books, which was then on the second floor of a building on 20th Street, since razed for a mixed-use building. I can't thank Jim Reed enough for the oasis this bookstore represented - many of the books which influenced me were purchased from that bookstore. From the Phoenix Building we were around the corner from the 4th Avenue North Historic District. Bare Hands Art Gallery on 21st Street used to host a festival for Dia de los Muertos that everyone anticipated all year and where I first learned of the work of Civil Rights photographer Spider Martin. "Making it" in the Birmingham art scene meant having a show there.

I worked at the downtown branch of the Birmingham Public Library, which introduced me to another aspect of the city, and after work took epic walks, usually with libations, and rambled about the quiet, empty city for hours, debating and arguing, talking with the strangers we encountered on the streets and planning our escape. Birmingham was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: after 5 pm, when all the commuters went home, the personality of the city totally changed - it got weird. Growing up, Birmingham was not a place most white people spoke fondly of - it was a place to work and then escape as quickly as possible to the homogenized safety of the Over-the-Mountain bedroom communities. More tragic than magic. Sloss Furnaces and the legacy of the city's industrial history loom large in my memory. Trips to the Civil Rights Institute left me daunted with the terrifying impression that something historically was very wrong with the city, sick even, but the vague malaise of the city stultified attempts to articulate the nightmare that was police dogs and fire hoses. Leaving gave me some perspective on that nightmare. I go home now and Birmingham, a city to which I owe much, no longer feels like my city, and maybe it never was.

I love hearing your stories about Birmingham--it brings the terrain to life. Some of the spaces and names are so familiar, including Jim Reed, who did his time in service of AWC and the literary community. To narrow everything down now, what is your favorite place in Alabama and why?

In a state with so many places of personal importance and interest, it is difficult to choose one, but I would vote for the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma because it symbolizes so many of the themes that resonate with me  and was a literal battleground between the forces of reaction and those who dreamed of a more perfect republic, and though the bridge doesn’t figure prominently in the current short story collection, it is a place I have returned to many times in unpublished fiction.  

“And who is really guilty? Each of us. Each citizen who has not consciously attempted to bring about peaceful compliance with the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States . . . ev- ery person in this community who has in any way contributed during the past several years to the popularity of hatred, is at least as guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who threw that bomb . . . What’s it like living in Birmingham? No one ever really has known and no one will until this city becomes part of the United States. Birmingham is not a dying city; it is dead.”

— Charles Morgan, addressing the Birmingham Young Men’s Business Club, on the day subsequent to the Birmingham Church bombing that killed four girls.

I couldn't resist adding the epigraph from your forthcoming fiction collection above--the words of Charles Morgan in the context of the historical present-- a brave and poignant introduction to your stories, an earnest engagement with the past that many authors prefer to ignore. Writing from inside the southern space where history plays such a powerful role in politics, we are beholden to the past. 

Some writers have noted that the 2016 election affected their fictional voices. For example, one conversation I keep wandering into laments the loss of irony as a technique or tone. The rise of the alt-right and reality television strain the use of irony in the context of a postmodern presidency. Have you noted any changes in your voice or fictional style since the election? Why or why not?

After the election, I immediately began drafting a “Trump novel,” which I am sure we will see many of in the coming years - I certainly am not the only one who did this. It was conceived as a dystopian political novel in which certain seemingly inconsequential details were altered, but details with momentous consequences when extrapolated out. Anyway, working on this novel at the same time that we were being daily Steve-Bannoned  with randomized ambushes of spectacle events and political theater contrived for maximum whiplash was simply too overwhelming, and I realized the project could benefit from a few years of retrospection to process it all. I managed 30,000 words or so on this “Trump novel” before shelving it. I may never finish it, but at least it was cathartic. At the same time, this project accentuated the need for more direct political action, as writing a novel, even one of dissent, feels a little like  “fiddling while Rome burns,” so to speak. But writers have produced enduring works through times even more tumultuous and disheartening than ours, so the political novel is likely here to stay.

As for irony and tone, I haven’t noticed any dramatic changes in my fictional style, as I’ve always been engaged with social and political issues, even before seriously committing to  writing, though the two novels I have drafted since the election possess an urgency about issues such as environmental catastrophe and race that might be new to me. I think irony and sarcasm are too deeply embedded in my style and voice to be totally suppressed by the shenanigans of the Electoral College - irony and humor have long been defense or coping mechanisms. However, the tone of one of the aforesaid two novels is more earnest, elegiac, lyrical and reflective than anything I’ve attempted before, though whether this is attributable to the current political climate or my maturation as a writer is probably unknowable or moot.

For an off-hand experiment, can you list three of your favorite short stories and pair them with a favorite song and musician? You can explain or not explain. You can quote lyrics or stick to the links.

Although I’ve recently been reading the stories of John Cheever and Clarice Lispector, I offer the couplings below without annotation:

1. Samuel Beckett’s “The Lost Ones”/”Texts For Nothing” paired with XXXtentacion’s “Everybody Dies In Their Nightmares”

2. David Foster Wallace’s “Good Ole Neon” from the story collection Oblivion paired with Chuuwee’s “Lootkemia”

3. Barry Hannah’s “Allons, Mes Enfants” from Bats Out of Hell paired with Pardison Fontaine’s ‘Hooporeerap”

I adore Clarice Lispector--she opened so many doors of permission for me as a fiction writer. Are there any superstitions or folkways in Alabama that spark (or have sparked) your literary attention? How does Southern life enter your writing?

I still contemplate  “non-southern” writing, as I hope to one day write about themes or subjects which are not quintessentially “Southern” (the “Trump novel” was an attempt at that), though who knows if that will ever come to fruition, but in a way Southern life is my writing, as much as I may sometimes balk at that. Being a “southern writer” is both a blessing and a curse, as you inherit a rich legacy and tradition of  archetypes, consciousness, images, metaphors, landscapes, weather, and tropes in which to work, but the curse is that you are compelled to work in the long shadow of this storied tradition which can feel stultifying, and then you get branded as a “southern” regional writer for the sake of book marketing. Who wants to write in the shadow of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor? In that sense, the rich tradition becomes baggage. I lived outside the South long enough to put the South in some perspective, insofar as that is possible.

My grandfather was an archaeologist, so I grew up being exposed to native myths, iconography and symbolism, as well as the myriad artefacts he collected and archived. Because of the materiality of these cultural artefacts, the Creeks for example seemed as tangible and real  as the Methodists or Southern Baptists down the street. Anyone from Alabama inherits the omnipresent culture of the Bible Belt, so Christianity was syncretized in my mind with this early exposure to Native American culture. Even if you grow up in a nominally secular family it would still be a task to escape the influence of the Bible Belt; even the southern atheists I’ve known who resist it become as evangelical and zealous about atheism as the religious fanatics they were spurning. Reliance on this storehouse of hybridized imagery  isn’t even conscious. We had our own miracles: men walked on water, harrowed hell and returned from the dead. Then there were the family stories and folkways, of Methodist circuit rider preachers and the wartime exploits of my grandfather who was a career pilot in World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam - aircraft appear frequently in some of my unpublished work. An uncle who set fire to a field just to see the fire trucks come. My grandmother heard George Washington Carver speak in Camp Hill, Alabama. A house divided by the madness of Alabama and Auburn football loyalties.

The greater context for these familial folkways is the historical memory of the state at large, which did not always affect me directly, but which my family was very aware of as history: the failed Bonapartist experiment of the Vine and Olive Colony down in Marengo County; the Wetumpka impact crater, where a meteorite blasted the earth; the slave ship Clotilde’s illegal voyage from the slave coast of Africa to Mobile; the photo-journalistic forays  of Walker Evans and James Agee in Hale County; the stories about the early industrial tycoons who founded Birmingham; the Tuskegee Airmen; the Free State of Winston; the quilts of Gee’s Bend; the Birmingham Civil Rights Campaign; the Montgomery Bus Boycotts and so on. As a society, we are probably more deracinated than ever, so these folkways have a way of grounding one in the specificity of a place.  

Thank you so much to Amos for taking the time to share his thoughts with us. You can purchase a copy of his forthcoming fiction collection, Nobody Knows How It Got This Good, from Alabama's very own Livingston Press. And you should. 

---

Amos Jasper Wright IV is native to the dirt of Birmingham, Alabama, but has called Alabama, Massachusetts and Louisiana home. He holds a master's degree in English and creative writing from the University of Alabama, Birmingham, and a master's degree in urban planning from Tufts University, but he does not condone educational signaling.His fiction and poems have appeared in Arcadia, Birmingham Arts Journal, Clarion, Fieldstone Review, Folio, Grain Magazine, Gravel, The Hollins Critic, Interim, New Ohio Review, New Orleans Review, Off the Coast, Pale Horse Review, Roanoke Review, Salamander, Tacenda Literary Magazine, Union Station Magazine, Yes, Poetry and Zouch. He is currently working on several novels titled Petrochemical Nocturne, King Cockfight, The Dead Mule Rides Again, In the Basement of the Anthropocene, and When A Good Thing Lasts Too Long. Today he lives and works in New Orleans. His author website can be found at www.amosjasperwright.com

To sample Amos' writing, read "Aubade," a poem published in Gravel magazine. Or wander through his website to find more.

“If you want to know what the American South has become today and how much the people who live here have given up of their souls and money to fix a past that can’t be fixed, then read Amos Jasper Wright’s debut book, Nobody Knows How It Got This Good. Wright’s characters are truth tellers, and every day they create maps to get them through the city of Birmingham, Alabama with its dangerous steam plant and high rise banks, luxury car dealerships and dilapidated buildings. Eventually the maps lead out of town to the last suppers of violent men, an oil spill in the Gulf, and the coal trade in Columbia so the lights in Alabama can be kept on. But no matter how far they get, they come back looking for signs of change. In the title story, a block party in a parking lot marks the opening of a new superstore in an abandoned mall, and a friend says, ‘Nobody knows how it got this good.’ These stories, told with great care, haunt and bite with revelation.”

— James Braziel, author of 'Birmingham, 35 Miles' and 'Snakeskin Road'

This event is free and open to the public as part of the grand kick-off opening up our 2018 AWC Conference. We are so excited that Anne Markham Bailey of Green Bucket Press will be recording a Present Tense podcast during this conference this year. 

It's not too late to register. 

It's never too late to join.

We will discuss long-term planning and big changes at the annual member meeting on Sunday. Although we believe planning and reports are fun, we realize our members might disagree. That's why the meeting will take place on a boat with brunch. We hope to see everyone there. 

Alina Stefanescu chatted with new member, Caleb Johnson, about his roots, his cravings, and his debut novel.

All photos taken by Irina Zhorov

“Touch the manuscript every day, even if you only do so in a seemingly trivial way. ”

— Caleb Johnson on writing a novel

ALINA: I'll start with a confession. You're the only writer I've met who grew up in Arley, Alabama. Tell me about Arley, what you loved most about it, what you miss, what it taught you.

CALEB: Well, my aunt Jessica Sampley is a published poet and my great-grandmomma Gladys Chambless wrote a column for a local newspaper for many years. My momma, of course, likes to claim writing runs in the family, though I'm not sure that's how it works.

Arley is a rural community on Smith Lake, about 1.5 hrs north of Birmingham. It still doesn't have a stoplight or any fast-food restaurants. I loved many of the traditions and rituals of growing up in a small place. Like high-school football games and community dinners and, for a time, going to church. When I was a kid we had this preacher who wore turquoise suit jackets and sweated a lot and used boxing metaphors in his sermons. I liked him. To my mind, he seemed like the kind of guy who might actually speak with God. 

I grew up in the woods on my grandmomma's land, which served as inspiration for the land in my debut novel, Treeborne. Those woods are where I became a storyteller. I'd make up stories for things I saw -- animals bones, trash, odd rock formations -- then go back to the house and tell my family while we ate Sunday dinner.  

I miss Smith Lake itself most of all. It's a beautiful deepwater lake with orange and pink sandstone shores. There's no better place to swim.  

ALINA: In your Alabama history lies the Druid City. Any special experiences, organizations, individuals, places that left their mark? If so, describe. If not, pretend I didn't ask.

CALEB: Tuscaloosa will always be special to me. There I met some of the best friends I have in this world. We spent many late nights at Egan's. During summer, after the bars closed, we'd often wander to a pool outside some apartment complex or down to the Black Warrior River and swim until the sky lightened with dawn. 

A lot of folks I know have moved away from Tuscaloosa. I feel a particular sadness, a loss, when I go back. I reckon that's just getting older, maybe. I try to go back every year for a football weekend. Saturdays in the fall I refuse to write. Those are my days off. I cook and watch however much college football I can stand. My buddy Bo Hicks still holds it down in Tuscaloosa. Go check out his place, Druid City Brewing, when you're in town. 

ALINA: I do love the one and only Bo Hicks. Your debut novel, Treeborne, is forthcoming from Picador this June. What inspired it? How long did it take to write? In the process, did you make any big structural changes or was this something that came fully formed? Explain.

CALEB: I started writing Treeborne in 2011. I'd just moved to Laramie, Wyoming to attend graduate school. I knew I wanted to write a novel during my two years there. I'd tried to write one already and it stalled somewhere about halfway through. This was my first time living outside the state of Alabama. I thought I'd come right back home after I graduated, but life has a way of surprising you. I met someone and I fell in love, we got a dog, and now here we are living in Philadelphia for the time being. 

In Laramie I tried to write a straight historical novel and that just wasn't working. I don't like to do the kind of research required for such a project. I just kept writing though. I was homesick, which certainly influenced what I was doing on the page. Eventually, characters and settings emerged. I didn't have a plan, really. I knew when I had Janie and Maybelle Treeborne that I was on to something though. All I had to do was watch and listen-- not so different from what I'd do in those woods as a kid. 

ALINA: If you had only had five music albums to play until the end of your time on this planet, what would they be?

CALEB: Rather than albums, let me name five artists in no particular order--

1. Elvis Presley

2. Hank Williams

3. Lee Bains III

4. Alabama 

5. Loretta Lynn

ALINA: I absolutely agree with you on Lee Bains III--he's the only musician I know that 1) gave the Bryce Asylum its due as a liminal space in Tuscaloosa 2) mentions Walker Percy in a lyric 3) strings the pulse of southern rock. Speaking of pulse, I first heard your name earlier this year when I read your beautiful essay, "Gabriel García Márquez’s Road Trip Through Alabama" in The Paris Review. How did that piece happen? Any interesting tidbits or facts that you left on the cutting room floor? Any other writers that (surprisingly) evoke Alabama for you? Why or why not?

CALEB: I was reading some magazine pieces published around the time of Márquez’s death and in one I saw mention of this Greyhound ride he and his family took through the South. There were maybe two sentences on the subject before the writer moved on. I'd never heard this before, nor had I considered Márquez would've set foot in the region. I'm a sucker for literary pilgrimages and biography, so I had to know more. One thing led to another and there I was on the phone with Gabo's best friend, the writer and diplomat Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, hearing stories just once removed from Márquez himself. I knew I'd have to write about this experience and that time in Márquez's life. I'm glad The Paris Review published the piece on its website. They do great work. 

ALINA. In his essay, “100 Things About Writing a Novel”, Alexander Chee said: The novel is the most precise analogy the writer can make to what was seen in the rooms and trains and skies and summer nights and parties where the novel was written, as the writer walked in moments with the enormous imaginary friend, before returning to the others, which is to say, the writer’s life.

If you could made a list of "5 Things About Writing a Novel," what might you include? 

CALEB: 

1. Touch the manuscript every day, even if you only do so in a seemingly trivial way. 

2. Don't be afraid to write badly and throw out pages later.

3. Have a routine-- whatever works for you. Ignore writing advice, unless you're reading it to make yourself feel better about your own work habits.

4. It's okay to step away from the computer for a minute. Keep a big plastic cup -- if possible, the kind you overpay for at sporting events -- filled with water beside you desk (not on; you will spill). Drink, get up to pee, refill, repeat. 

5. Adopt a dog. No other living thing will love you unconditionally. 

ALINA. What writers are you currently reading and loving? Why?

CALEB: I just finished Things We Lost in the Fire, a short story collection by the Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez. The stories in this book are flat-out disturbing and beautiful. Enriquez puts realism and the supernatural side-by-side to great effect her stories about murdered children and stoned teenagers and police brutality and abused women. The details she includes will have you just slack-jawed on every page. 

ALINA. Take us back to 7-year-old Caleb. A neighbor asks him what he wants to be when he grows up. What does he say? Is this different from 12-year-old Caleb's answer? When did you realize you wanted to be a writer? What does that even mean?

CALEB: I probably said I wanted to play basketball at The University of North Carolina-- Chapel Hill, then for the Chicago Bulls. I loved Michael Jordan and the colors of those teams' uniforms. This dream ended as my growing did and I was forced to reckon with my athletic limitations. 

At some point in my childhood I remember reading a Michael Crichton novel my momma'd bought me at Walmart. I told my folks I wanted to be an author when I grew up and they said something like, "That ain't a job. You can't make a living at it." They weren't wrong, but they're supportive of my pursuits-- no matter how fool-headed some have been. They told me I could be anything I wanted to be, which, since I took it to heart, has led to disappointment and to joy. I'm grateful they've never pressured me to pursue a certain career. I know that must not be easy for parents, because they're afraid of what'll happen if things don't work out. 

ALINA: You currently live and teach in Pennsylvania. What do you miss most about living in the South? What do you not miss at all? 

CALEB: I miss the food, of course. I miss the landscape. I miss my family and friends. I miss the voices and the way folks interact with each other. I'll never get over what I perceive as a kind of rudeness that the a big city like Philadelphia seems to encourage in folks. I think it has to do with the competition for space and for resources and inequality when it comes to accessing both. I'm not a Southerner who left because he did not love his home. I left to accomplish some things. I'm not done yet, but I fully intend to return to the South and give back to the place that has given me so much. 

ALINA: Finally, because I'm hungry and dreaming of lunch, describe the food and drink of your favorite meal. Do you have a favorite vegetable? If so, which one and why?

CALEB: Cold fried chicken, mustardy potato salad, bread and butter pickles, a fresh-sliced tomato just covered in salt and pepper.

---

Caleb Johnson is the author of the novel Treeborne. He grew up in Arley, Alabama, studied journalism at The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and earned an MFA from the University of Wyoming. He has worked as a small-town newspaper reporter, an early-morning janitor, and a whole-animal butcher, among other jobs, and has been awarded a Jentel Writing Residency and a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship in fiction to the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Currently, Johnson lives with his partner, Irina, and their dog, Hugo, in Philadelphia, where he teaches while working on his next novel. 

Booking-- To book Caleb for an event, use this form on his website, or email--

Publicist: Sara Delozier, sara.delozier@picadorusa.com

Literary Agent: Amelia Atlas, aatlas@icmpartners.com

All photos taken by Irina Zhorov.

Upcoming Treeborne events in Alabama:

June 13: The Alabama Booksmith - Birmingham, AL - 5pm

June 14: Arley Public Library - Arley, AL - homecoming event feat. homemade peach desserts and coffee, 5pm

June 20: Page & Palette - Fairhope, AL - 6pm

June 23: Druid City Brewing - Tuscaloosa, AL - in conversation w/ Blaine Duncan, feat. music by Doc Dailey, and smoked meats by Bo Hicks and Turkey and the Wolf's Nate Barfield, 6pm

Do you need hands-on attention to a particular manuscript? Are you tired of trying to guess what publishers want from a pitch? If you're attending the AWC Conference in Orange Beach this June, you have the opportunity to book a 10-minute pitch session with Misty Williams, publisher of Fiery Seas Publishing. Misty will also be doing 10-page critiques, where you will be given feedback on the first 10 pages of your manuscript.

“Founded in 2014, Fiery Seas Publishing thrives in putting out high-quality books for men, women, and young adults to enjoy long after they close the cover. ”

Learn more about Fiery Seas Publishing from their blog.

Use the "Register Now" button below to book a Pitch Session or Critique with Misty Williams for the 2018 Alabama Writers Conclave Conference between Jun 15, 6:00 PM – Jun 17, 7:00 PM.

Limited spots available so register soon.