Mike Scalise

Real quick: just want to send out congrats to excellent PIK Patricia Engel, who The Roving Editor reports just signed a two book (story collection/novel) thing with Grove/Atlantic, which is tremendous news for people who like good writing. Patricia’s stories are relentlessly readable, and her characters tend to be bound by a kind of simmering wickedness and regret that they’re either trying to distance themselves from or confront honestly. See “Dia,” published recently in Geurnica:

I ask what brings him to town and he’s agitated, looking to the dark clouds for the right words.

“You’re not going to like it,” he says.

“Just tell me.”

I think it can’t be that bad because Día was never one for drugs. He managed a bar for years without drinking, spending the slow afternoons before the happy hour crew rolled in reading history books on a stool in the corner. That’s how we met. One day I asked what he was reading.

“I’m a professional gambler,” he says.

I can’t help it, my whole forehead lifts like strings are pulling.

Last time I saw Día, he was studying for the Foreign Service exam. Spoke six languages and could talk politics and literature in any of them, always on my back to study, asking what grades I was pulling since I was majoring in screwing around. He’d yell at me on the corner of 14th, tell me a smart girl like me was throwing it all away. Call me an ingrate, a brat, a blind fool for running around with Malik, who Día said spent more time in the bathroom snorting the amputated limbs of my compatriots than being a boyfriend to me.

“Gambling?”

Patricia’s been knocking on the door of some major awards and recognition as of late–and has been getting robbed as far as I’m concerned–so its nice to see some overdue recognition for just an absolute monster of a writer I really admire (and like). Good work, PE.

Guernica: “Dia” (link)

Boston Review: “Lucho” (link)

The Roving Editor: Patricia Engel Debut Coming in 2010 (link)

Today marks my third, smoke-free month–I quit over spring break this past semester–and in honor of the milestone I received in the mail a nice little gift from my buddy Gerald, currently on a West Coast excursion: an empty pack of Taiwanese, Longlife cigarettes, complete with duel warning labels depicting a mother and child dying of secondhand smoke on the front, and a set of tarred, bruised and bloody chompers on the back. The irony of it all is baffling and excellent, but I think Gerald gets it right when he says: “All I know is that it makes [people in the US] look like lightweights.” A nice reminder of a habit I don’t miss as much as I thought I would.

In other, less morbid news: along with tremendous poet buddies Kevin Stoy and Nicole Foreman Tong, I’m reading at this year’s Artomatic, where for a month every year a bunch of people take over an office space, paint on the walls, and use it as a hub for peddling both overpriced beer and artistic expression. Details:

Wed Jun 17 - 8:00pm-9:30pm
Poetry Room (9th Floor)

This reading will feature three recent graduates of Mason’s MFA program.

Nicole Foreman Tong is a poet whose writing has appeared in the American Book Review. Her poems “Address for My Sister,” “Pentimento,” and “Thoughts Before Self-Portrait, 1981″ just won a Dorothy Rosenberg award for Lyric Poetry.

Mike Scalise’s essays have appeared in Ninth Letter and Post Road, among others. He recently edited The Way We See It, a collection of D.C. student writing published by the Capitol Letters Writing Center. Scalise, the recipient of a work-study scholarship at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, was recently named the Fall 2009 Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University.

Kevin Stoy is a poet whose work has appeared in the Boxcar Poetry Review and 42opus, among others. His work is forthcoming this fall in Phoebe. Please join these three local writers as they read from their work.

We’re on just after the Sarah Palin Tribute Band and just before the screening of “In Search of Elusive American Fuels” in the “SunTrust Film Screening Room.” I’ll probably read something that features cigarettes.

Link to the Facebook event.

I’ve been waiting for about a week to post this, but PIK Ryan Call has put together–with the help of Gene Morgan’s “Twitter feed press”–RESEARCH-BASED ARGUMENT ESSAY: COLLAGE TEXTS, an online chapbook of poems constructed entirely (and anonymously) from students’ essays for Call’s composition courses at the University of Houston. The result is something familiar and kind of attractive, but ultimately unnamable. The pieces are at once hilarious, ghostly and cathartic, but never once betray the good, earnest spirit behind the students’ intentions for their work.

Best to let the things speak for themselves I think:

Incentives are a great way to foster enthusiasm in the workplace.
For example, if you have an extra finger
you can perfectly work like any person with five fingers.
You could type the same way
a person with five fingers does.
You could eat the same way;
you could do all the household chores
the same way as a person with five fingers.
A clean and sterile hospital will be of use.
My proposal has the interest of the people in mind.

Or:

I thought if I made a mistake,
I could simply do things over and over as I pleased,
but I soon came to find out that I was wrong.
She told me she had already shopped for some clothes for the baby
without even knowing the sex of the baby.
One time I looked down a hole that was in a stall
and I could see the person
sitting on the toilet below me.
Some couples pretend that their abortion was a miscarriage
to escape from people’s judgment.
To this day she carries around a hairdryer
outside with her
while riding around in her car
for protection against potential homeless attackers.
Now if you ask me
that defense is inadequate.

Either way, I caught a look at the whole collection last week and have been itching to pass it along to my teacher friends. Download the whole thing here (PDF) if you want. Enjoy.