Greetings from the Capital Region, 800,000- and four counties-strong. We're north of the Hudson Valley, south of the North Country, west of Western Massachusetts, east of Central New York. So now you know where I come from (or from where I come).
Anyway! Stacey invited me to post here once in awhile to pass along news of events going on and stuff that goes on. So here goes.
Frequency North: The Visiting Writers Reading Series at The College of Saint Rose, is my little series, and starts up this Thursday, October 27, with two super novelists, Dana Spiotta and Tobias Seamon. Spiotta has been racking up quite a critical round of applause for her new novel Stone Arabia. Seamon's latest, The Emperor's Toy Chest is a follow-up to The Magician's Study. I published a sestina of his over at McSweeney's. I just came across this piece of his on that site as well.
On November 10, Megan Abbott, a mystery-noir master, comes to the series, which should be a blast.
The Nitty Gritty Slam is the first proper poetry slam round these parts in over a decade. I've been keeping score and generally putting Frequency North support behind it. It's a combined effort with Albany Poets and Urban Guerilla Theater. We started last month, and it's been a real hoot. It's held at Valentine's, a rock club/bar that hosts lots of what has been called alternative music for quite some time now. Slams happen on the first and third Thursdays, and what's been interesting, for me at least, is that since there has been no set-in-stone slam here for so long, the work is quite strange, quirky. People read off the page. They're not overly rehearsed, as is often the case with slammers. It's hosted by a man named Dain Brammage (on right). Think about it. OK. Let's move on.
The New York State Writers Institute has an excellent line-up of writers, all top-notch, many familiar to those on the poetry world: Wayne Koestenbaum, Philip Shultz, not to mention Colson Whitehead and events sponsored by Fence magazine. Most events are held in the white concrete moon colony that is the SUNY-Albany campus, which only makes arriving at a warm room and a reading all the more miraculous.
That's it for now. More soon.
