Coffee and Lit

Wake yourself up with a nice essay about books that matter from our new fiction writer, Laura Libricz. 

Can't Live Without You

I came late to the fraternity of humans who can't live without animals.  A few years ago a stray cat staked out our back yard for himself, so technically I was rushed. There's more. Earlier that year two people died and left a crater I couldn't stop staring into--so death came late to me too. After that I was ashamed I ever had the nerve to write about death, and although in the re-reading my writing sounds authentic, I know what I was thinking and, believe me, I had no idea what I was talking about. So then, this cat. Those who have had animals save your sanity, I don't have to tell you. Part of the appeal of animals is they don't talk.  Their physical presence is the magic potion. So, when Jim McGarrah's manuscript came in over the electronic transom and I started it one cold snowy night, planning to read a chapter and go to bed, but then couldn't put it down, I knew I was reading the real thing.  It's the story of a warrior coming home and not having the words to breach the chasm between people who have stared into that particular crater--combat--and those who have not. And then his father buys this horse.  And Jim decides to train the horse.  And the rest is a funny, sad, riotous bout of first rate storytelling.  And the best part?  It's all true.       

Want more?

“I met Ruth, the woman who ran this track for the Ellis’s for three decades when I was a green kid in 1978. My upgrade from groom to trainer was so recent that the Polaroid snapshot on the license hadn't fully developed.  But Ruth was already an icon. 

  I had a stable full of cheap claiming horses with me and I had shipped the horses from a training center in Lexington, Kentucky. It was hot. I was exhausted from the strain of trying to do everything right. The security guard told me no stall space had been reserved for my stable and I couldn't unload. The horses were sweating and thirsty. They stomped and snorted, rocking the van, while I stomped and snorted around the guard shack. I prayed none would throw themselves down and injure a leg. 

A golf cart, groaning under the weight of a huge woman, careened around the corner. There she sat, like a Tahitian queen on her throne, reading the Coggins tests and past racing results on my thoroughbreds.  The guard seemed to shrink inside his uniform as she barked, "Let him unload stupid. We’ve got room and we sure as hell can’t run a race meet without horses." When she spoke, her hand caressed the only other rider I ever saw on that cart, a .357 magnum with an extended barrel. Ruth never once looked in my direction.”—Jim McGarrah, OFF TRACK
Jim's new book, Off Track: Or How I Dropped Out of College and Came to Be a Horse Trainer in the 70's When All My Friends Were Still Doing Drugs is for sale today.   

Catch Him if You Can

The latest dispatch from "Songs of Ourselves" contributor, Jonah Matranga.  He's on the road again.

JonahSaysHi Sep 2015

Hellos and Homes

I've just finished booking a fun run around Germany/France/NL (and my first show in Belgium in way too long), Sep 23-Oct 9. The thing I love most about this particular list of shows is that they're almost exclusively in homes or non-traditional settings (record stores, museums, all sorts). As I've gone on through the last coupla decades, I've learned that this is as good as making music for a living gets, for me at least. It's so simple: A nice, small space filled with enough people chipping in what they can to keep me fed and fueled and on the weird, wonderful way that is my 'career'. #HappyLivinSmall

Anyone that wants info on any of the shows, I'll post as much as I can publicly, and in cases where the hosts want to keep their personal info off of the internets as much as possible, just write to me and I'll send you all the info you'll need to be at the show nearest to you. Please spread the word.

And if you want to make a show/tour happen near you, let's do it. Speaking of which, I'll be around the UK one more time this year, in late Nov - early Dec. Anyone with ideas/offers, let's make more fun stuff happen. For whatever reason, it's proven harder for me to make this stuff happen sustainably in the States, so let's change that, my fellow Americans :)

Sacto sweeties, see you soon for TBD Fest! Proud to be part of it.

Thanks, always.

Jonah

***********

I love ideas. Do you want to too? http://jonahmatranga.com/ideas

http://jonahmatranga.com

http://facebook.com/jonahmusic

http://twitter.com/jonahmatranga

http://youtube.com/jonahmatrangadotcom

UPCOMING STUFF (http://jonahmatranga.com/shows):

SEPTEMBER

Sat Sep 19 - Sacramento, CA - TBD Fest - My set at 1:30pm-ish

Wed Sep 23 - Paris-ish ideas? Lemme know :)

Thu Sep 24 - Paris-ish ideas? Lemme know :)

Fri Sep 25 - Morthomiers (FR) - Festival L'Automne de Morthomiers

Sat Sep 26 - Lille (FR) - House Show

Sun Sep 27 - Utrecht (NL) - House Show

Mon Sep 28 - Tilburg (NL) - House Show

Tue Sep 29 - Dordrecht (NL) - House Show

Wed Sep 30 - Oegstgeest-ish (NL) - House Show

OCTOBER

Thu Oct 1 - Brussels-ish (BE) - House Show

Fri-Sat Oct 2-3 - Rouen (FR)

Sun Oct 4 - Koblenz (DE) - House Show

Mon Oct 5 - Berlin (DE) - Ramones Museum

Tue Oct 6 - Berlin-ish ideas? Lemme know :)

Wed Oct 7 - Stuttgart (DE) - House Show

Thu Oct 8 - Montabaur (DE) - House Show

Fri Oct 9 - Duren (DE) - Record Store Show

Copyright © 2015 Jonah Matranga Dot Com, All rights reserved.

Thanks for wanting to stay in touch. Happy we're here.

Our mailing address is:

Jonah Matranga Dot Com

554 Clayton St.

Unit 170118

San Francisco, CA 94117

Love in the Time of War

 Blue Heron Book Works is thrilled to have Laura Libricz join us with her spell-binding trilogy of love in the time of war--my absolutely favorite kind of tale.   Here's the story:  In 17th-century Germany on the brink of the Thirty Years War, 24-year-old Katarina is traded to the patrician Sebald Tucher by her fiancé Willi Prutt in order to pay his debts. Forced to move into the Tucher country estate, Katarina is met by a crazed archer, Hans-Wolfgang, carrying a baby under his cloak. He tells her a fabulous story of how his beloved was executed by a Jesuit priest for witchcraft right after the birth and makes Katarina swear on her life to protect the child.

I mean, right?

Here's more about the wonderful writer, Laura Libricz:

Laura Libricz is a writer, a mother, a guitar factory worker.  And she loves to write.  Born and raised in Pennsylvania, she moved to Upstate New York when she was 22.  After working a few years building Steinberger guitars, she received a scholarship to go to college.  She tried to "do the right thing" and study something useful, but spent all her time reading German literature.  Most of her writing from that time landed in the fire.

She earned a BA in German at The College of New Paltz, NY in 1991 and moved to GErmany, where she resides today.  Her first novel, The Master and the Maid, the first book fo the Heaven's Ponds Trilogy, is scheduled to be released in 2015.  The second and third books in the series are scheduled to be released in 2016.

How to Stay Married for 54 Years

Jim McGarrah is our blogger today:

My mother may have been the first American practitioner of feng shui.  Before this ancient Chinese philosophy of bringing harmony to the home by moving furniture and other objects to create a balance – sort of an external chi thing – became popular among the trendy, New Age, upper-class, my mother was moving things around our home to restore balance and harmony. During the 1950’s when I was still in grade school, my father had the habit of coming home drunk from the Elk’s Club after a hard night of playing Gin Rummy with his old drinking buddies. If this happened once or twice a month, my mother, being a docile sort, might have let it slide. But, after cooking several meals that got cold on the stove in one week, she refused to go gentle into that good night. It became her habit to wait until around 11PM for my father’s return. That time was his line in the sand. Once it was past, I could hear the surreptitious scraping of chair legs across the living room floor as she rearranged the furniture and created a different obstacle course each night. When Dad stumbled in at whatever time he stumbled in, I always awoke to a distinct pattern of sounds – thump “shit” crack “damn” crunchjinglebangrattle “holy sweet jesus joseph and mary mother of god” and after several nights of bruised shins and stubbed toes and cracked knuckles, my father was home every evening for supper till I graduated high school. Our home had its balance back.

This is a story created about an event that really happened in my childhood and one that will appear in a new book I’m working on right now. After years of writing both poetry and nonfiction, I’ve come to believe that the term, “storyteller,” best fits what I do. Well, it also makes me seem more charming than I really am to women in bars sometimes. That can be useful if you’re a short fat old guy. Sometimes I tell stories about things that really happened in my life, sometimes I write narrative poems about things that really happened but with a healthy dose of invention added to the tale, and sometimes I make things up using my imagination. The point is that no matter what approach I take to the material at hand, I’m always relying on the tools of the storyteller to construct an interesting narrative. If I do it well, the story will also take me to a place in which I know something I didn’t before the telling began. This is how you begin to know you are becoming a writer, when you quit using your writing skills simply to express and begin using those skills to discover.

Of all creatures on the planet, only humans organize their societies and record their cultural histories with myths, legends, yarns, anecdotes, accounts, tales – all forms of narrative. Before words existed, people told stories with cave paintings. If we could travel back in the shadowy realm before these paintings, we would find a community of nomads huddled close to a campfire making gestures and grunts that described the day’s events. The epic of Gilgamesh is the first known written story. 4,000 years before Edgar Allen Poe, the Egyptians wrote short fiction narratives of a type. In some Native American tribes every question asked is answered with a tale of some kind. This is the way we entertain ourselves, pass on wisdom, and sacred philosophies.

One of the most fascinating aspects of memoir writing, which is a very popular and useful form of story-telling, nests in the idea that everyone has a story to tell. I’ve heard complaints from pretentious literary critics that most of our stories aren’t worth recording and I find that statement almost as useless as the critics who believe it. The very fact that you don’t have to be famous or important to the world is an advantage because it allows you to start with a universal bond between yourself and an audience. Your record of life will be similar to a lot of other people. It becomes interesting to a reader for that reason and it remains interesting because of the way you tell it and what you discover in the process. This is why I've already written three and am working on a fourth.

Not only that, but reading memoirs is as good a way to expand your knowledge of the world and your understanding of what it mean to be human as writing them. With that said, I hope you will consider two things. First, consider writing down some stories of your own. Secondly, buy my new book soon to be released from Blue Heron Book Works called Off Track, Or How I Dropped Out of College and Came To Be a Horse Trainer in the 1970's While All My Friends Were Still Doing Drugs. It's a story and it really happened. So, it's also a memoir and I believe you will really like it. Meanwhile, I'll keep working on that new one so you can figure out how my mother and father managed to stay married for fifty-four years.

Songs of Ourselves

We are getting some splendid submissions for the anthology "Songs of Ourselves".  If you keep a journal, write letters or blog, check out the submission quidelines below.  July 15 is the deadline.

Blue Heron Book Works loves stories and we are dedicated to the idea that everyone’s individual story—not just those who live in the glare of the celebrity spotlight—is essential to the bigger story of who are.  

It’s not politically correct to assign characteristics to nationalities, and in fact most Americans wouldn’t consider being American a nationality, claiming that we all come from somewhere else.  And yet, after even one generation here—often sooner—the thing that we all have in common, the thing that makes us American, asserts itself and that is this:  we look at everything with a child-like sense of the new.  Nothing has associations that can’t be reworked or reimagined.  That’s what Americans do:  we reinvent ourselves constantly, create ourselves from scratch because all of us are starting over in some way.  It’s this looking at a situation for what it is without the judgement of generations that make us the most creative people on the planet. 

This quintessential American point of view is captured beautifully in journals and blogs, letters, in unedited and unreflective short bursts of observation and it is what we are celebrating in Songs of Ourselves.

If you have between 10-20 journal entries, blogs, or letters each shorter than 300 words, we would love to hear from you for possible inclusion in this anthology.  If your submission is chosen, we will need non-exclusive rights to what you submit and we will pay you a share of the 50% profits earned from on-line and bookstore sales which will be split among the contributors. We will also send you a print version of the book when it is published. 

The deadline for submissions is July 15.

Please send us your submission via email to editor@blueheronbookworks.com  There is no need to send anything else at this time.