The temperature at which e-books burn
Wow. Fahrenheit 451 is now an e-book. Read more here.
Donate to Spout on Give to the Max Day
Give to the Max Day returns on Wednesday, November 16, 2011. Wake up your neighbors and honk your horns, this is the annual day where high-minded, philanthropic folks (like yourself) choose to donate generously to their favorite charities and non-profits. Give To The Max Day is the “Great Minnesota Give Together” - a wonderful opportunity for you to give to your favorite non-profit, and double your dollars for 24 hours. If Spout Press, or any members of Spout Press have made you smile, think, or shake your head in disbelief, please consider donating. Click here if you would like to make a donation. Another way to donate is to become a member of Spout.
We at Spout dislike the analogy that if you were to discontinue purchasing that daily $4.00 Starbucks Coffee for entire year, and instead divert that money to a Spout donation, that you could pay for an entire press run of one of our titles. That analogy would be true of course. It also makes one pause to reflect, so consider how Spout press has touched your life this year. Please give. More than ever we depend on individual donations to survive, so we really appreciate it!
Blink Again Reading November 3
Join Spout Press as authors read from the new sudden fiction anthology Blink Again at Micawber’s Books 2238 Carter Ave. St. Paul, MN
Thursday, November 3 at 7pm
Readings from contributors Dessa, Sun Yung Shin, Pat Cumbie, Maureen Aitken, and Lon Otto, and more!
Spoutstock is almost here!
Dear people of superhuman love,
You must realize that the wait is nearly over – it’s almost time for
Spoutstock. We quiver.
For newcomers, Spoutstock is our annual fundraiser/cover song
contest/good-time party. We get some of our favorite local rock stars
to come down to the cool, thirsty basement of Mario’s Keller Bar and
compete for your approval by playing a cover song.
It’s such a guaranteed good time.
This year’s action will commence on Thursday, July 28, at 8:30. The
location: Mario’s Keller Bar, 2300 University Avenue NE in Minneapolis(lower level of the Gasthof).
Our panel of celebrity judges is set:
Lori Barbero (Babes in Toyland)
Jacquie Fuller (host of 89.3′s “Teenage Kicks”)
Peter Scholtes (City Pages music writer and beyond)
Sure they are high-powered scenesters and they will decide the judges’ award – but only your votes can bestow the legendary ‘audience choice’ trophy to some lucky rock star. This year’s contestants include members of Nice Purse, The Fontanelles, Pilla, and Long Straight Forever plus Little Man, Paul Metsa, Jerome Mayne, Natalie Lovejoy and more secret big-time players.
We only have one fundraiser a year, and this is it. All you have to do
is come on down, listen to some music and enter visionary space. With your help we can publish more local authors and create more local events. Spout Press is a collective – no one gets paid and we fight corporate tyranny by having no bosses. Don’t you want that?
It’s our ninth-annual Spoutstock, so trust us, we know what we’re
doing. We’ve seen many amazing covers over the years – Bjork to Otis Redding, Willie Nelson to the Misfits, Outkast to Burt Bacharach. It could be anything. And new this year – the Spout Press ‘draw our cover’ competition. You can draw the next cover of Spout Magazine! Materials provided. Plus we reveal the winner of last year’s Spoutstock poetry contest, and you can get a first look at our latest book – Blink Again: Sudden Fiction from the Upper Midwest.
Dancing time will follow the contest.
All this for 7 bucks? It’s grassroots arts activism. For one night,
let’s set aside our partisan differences. No shutdown at Spout Press -
we’re here, we’re ready.
Livin’ easy, livin’ free.
In loving, enthralled solidarity,
Spout Press
Good News!
Last year, Spout Press poet Kirsten Dierking won a McKnight Fellowship for poetry. This year, Spout Press editor John Colburn is a recipient of a 2011 McKnight Artist Fellowship for Writers, Loft Awards in Creative Prose. Learn more here.
In addition to his writing and teaching, John is busy working with our other editors on the final touches for the forthcoming Spout Press title blink again as well as the new issue of Spout magazine. In the new issue, look for poetry by Lightsey Darst, recent winner of the Minnesota Book Award for poetry. Congratulations, Lightsey!
To learn the latest on blink again and other Spout titles, don’t forget to check out our website and our Facebook page.
Art in Teaching
Many great poets are also great teachers. This is certainly true of Kirsten Dierking, author of Spout Press title Northern Oracle and humanities instructor extraordinaire. Kirsten’s article “From Whitehall Palace to Burger King: Teaching the Humanities,” which appeared in the 2010 issue of Thought & Action, has been chosen by the NEA Thought and Action Review Panel for the 2010 National Education Association Excellence in the Academy Award in the Art of Teaching category. The full text of the article can be found here.
Bosso Poetry Company
The Minneapolis publication Downtown Journal recently published an article about Bosso Poetry Company, a group that features Spout friends and contributors. Check it out!
Resource for writers and writing teachers
Mark Polanzak and Rachel Yoder are launching their draft journal blog site where they’ll post revision exercises, thoughts on the writing process, and other literary babble. Hope you’ll follow them (especially if you teach creative writing. They’d love for you to use this in the classroom). Also, if you have the hankering, check out their site at draftjournal.com for more info about the journal and its concept.
Give to the Max
Give to the Max day is happening on November 16, 2010. This “Great Minnesota Give Together” is a wonderful opportunity for you to give to your favorite non-profit, and double your dollars for 24 hours.
If you can, Spout Press would really appreciate any gift in any amount. We can be found here. As you know, Spout is committed to publishing the best in new, experimental writing as well as young and/or underappreciated writers. We can’t do it without your help. Thanks.
Congratulations Coffee House Press!
We are thrilled for our friends at Coffee House Press, who today learned that the novel I, Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita was nominated for the National Book Award! Read more here. We have long known that the Twin Cities is home to some of the finest literary publishers in the country. It is so gratifying to see the efforts of Coffee House recognized.
