Jim McGarrah @jmcgarra offers #Memoir Workshop at the TYCA-SE #Conference Feb 22

February 22, 2018: Blue Heron Book Works author Jim McGarrah will offer a memoir workshop at the TYCA-SE (Two-Year College Association) 

Marine, social worker, carpet layer, janitor, bartender, race horse trainer, and college professor, Jim McGarrah lives in Louisville, Kentucky, close enough to Churchill Downs to hear the crowd roar each year at the Kentucky Derby.  His memoir of war, A Temporary Sort of Peace (Indiana Historical Society Press, 2007) won the national Eric Hoffer Legacy Non-Fiction Award, and the sequel, The End of an Era, was published in 2011.  He is editor, along with Tom Watson, of the anthology Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana and the former managing editor of Southern Indiana Review.  His most recent memoir, Misdemeanor Outlaw: A Confession of Life, was published in June 2017.

Jim is also a poet and author of three award-winning books of poetry: Running the Voodoo Down (Elixir Press, 2003); When the Stars Go Dark(Main Street Rag, 2009); and Breakfast at Denny's (Ink Brush Press, 2013).   His poems, essays, and stories appear frequently in literary journals such as Bayou Magazine, Breakwater, Cincinnati Review, Chamber Four, Connecticut Review, and North American Review.

For more information, please visit the conference website: http://www.tycase.org/2018-conference-info

Or visit the event's Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/events/514318808952575/

Available here!

Nothing cozy about this #cozymystery by #BHBW author @BathshebaMonk

 

 

 

AVAILABLE HERE!

 

 

I don't like cozy mysteries and I don't like amateur detectives, which is why I did like Bathsheba Monk's DEAD WRONG, her first Swanson Herbinko crime novel. The Swedish and the French, with their absolutely gruesome fictional mysteries, have shown us, once and for all, that murders never are cozy, and only the British still believe that gentlemen (or gentlewomen) operatives can ever get anything done, which may explain why they lost their empire to the Cambridge Spies. Ms. Monk's surprisingly good-natured (and funny) book has crimes gruesome enough to be Scandinavian, but her investigator, a neophyte divorce lawyer who doesn't see herself as a detective, wisely employs a proper ex-cop (the multi-purpose Dick) to do her sleuthing. Which is a good thing because the book's central skullduggery is slowly revealed as a complicated tangle, and so the breathless reader is genuinely grateful to have Ms. Herbinko along as a tour guide for the bumpy, surprising ride. Swanson's job is to share the reader's dumbfounded reaction to the book's felonious gumbo even as her smart mouth and wicked sense of humor function to take the edge off a series of bloody murders committed by a set of comic opera villains. The intestinal respite this amusing-yet-frightened voice provides from the drippy mayhem is a service to the reader that Henning Mankell might consider adopting as he moves forward.

As I read DEAD WRONG, I thought of Janet Evanovich and Jennifer Weiner and their sassy female PIs, but now, with the mayhem and revelations over, I think of the book as the print incarnation of Gosford Park, the wonderful country house murder film by Robert Altman and Julian Fellowes. Both pretend to be murder-filled cozies. Both have intriguingly messy plots with dozens of quirky characters. And both of them are stage-managed by an inept police officer who simply joins the agog reader for the ride through the thicket of man's inhumanity to man. The cop in Gosford Park is a bumbling Lestrade-like detective played marvelously by Stephen Fry, while the often clueless mistress of ceremonies in Ms. Monk's book is her heroine, Swanson Herbinko, who claims she got her name from a TV dinner and who sometimes seems more worried about her expansive waistline and her nicotine habit than she is about the bodies dropping around her. I enjoyed Fry's performance in the Altman movie immensely, and I was just as pleased with Ms. Monk's use of Swanson as an everywoman, who should be told--by the way--that a size i2 is undoubtedly smaller than the dresses worn by most American women. Give yourself a break, Swanson.

Bathsheba Monk is the author of 7 novels, three plays, editor at Blue Heron Book Works and the creator of the popular Swanson Herbinko Mystery series which is being written by Andrew Sloan, Joe Taleroski, and Paul Heller. She writes young adult novels under the pen name, Maddy Wells.

#BHBW author Nicholas Digiovani is awarded @VCCA fellowship @nidigiovanni

https://nicholasdigiovanni.com/

Nicholas DiGiovanni, author of the essay collection “Man Has Premonition of Own Death,” published in June by Blue Heron Book Works, has been awarded a month-long fellowship and writing residency at the prestigious Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

VCCA fellowships aim to intensify creativity by freeing more than 350 artists a year, up to 25 at a time, from the disruptions of everyday life. Fellows have a private room and studio, with three meals a day.

Fellowships have been awarded to more than 4,000 writers, composers and visual artists nationwide and from 63 different countries since 1971. Honors accorded VCCA Fellows have included MacArthur genius grants, National Book Awards, Pulitzer Prizes, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy in Rome, and the Guggenheim and Pollock-Krasner Foundations.

Admission to VCCA is highly selective, based on a review of applications by panels of professional artists. There are separate panels for each category (poets, fiction writers, nonfiction writers, playwrights, performance, film and video artists, painters, sculptors, photographers, installation artists, composers and cross-disciplinary artists) with over 50 panelists serving at any one time.

DiGiovanni plans to work on a new novel while in residence at VCCA.

Available here!

"How strange that a book so unrelentingly about death should contain so much life. But that’s what we have in Man Has Premonition of Own Death, which stands athwart decay and demands to know why."