(downtown) omaha lit fest 
Welcome to the 2012 (downtown) Omaha Lit Fest. Scroll down to explore.
According to the newspapers, women are behaving badly nationwide. So we’ve devoted this year’s lit fest to examining the manners and conduct of contemporary women writers and editors.
We’ll hear new work, and we’ll ask questions such as: Does “the woman’s novel” exist, and if so, what is it and what does it do? Can women write convincingly about male characters, and can men write convincingly about female characters? Is literary publishing friendly to women (see: the annual VIDA Count that surveys the publication rates of women in prestigious literary outlets)?
Please note: members of all genders (and those of no gender) are encouraged and expected to attend. There’s something for everyone.
Featuring:
Your Guide to Women’s Work: the professional aspects of writing/editing/publishing.
Your Guide to the Literary Thriller: Joy Castro reads from Hell or High Water, and discusses the maps and plots of her New Orleans-set novel.
Your Guide to Literary Fame: Rhonda Sherman discusses the New Yorker Festival, the New Yorker magazine, and the art of the literary spectacle.
Your Guide to Family Dysfunction: Elizabeth Crane reads from her portrait of a family, the novel We Only Know So Much.
Your Guide to Unladylike Demeanor: women writers making people nervous.
Writers, editors, and literary entrepreneurs discuss the challenges and benefits particular to women seeking careers (paid, unpaid, or otherwise) in writing and publishing.
Joy Castro is the author of two books of nonfiction: The Truth Book: A Memoir (published in 2005 and reissued recently with a new introduction by Dorothy Allison) and Island of Bones. She recently published her first novel, Hell or High Water, which has been optioned for film. Dennis Lehane called Hell or High Water a “terrific thriller”; the novel, set in post-Katrina New Orleans, features a young Cuban American reporter tracking the registered sex offenders who disappeared during the hurricane evacuation. Castro, a professor in the creative writing program at UNL, is at work on her second novel.
Liz Kay is a founding editor of Spark Wheel Press and the journal burtdistrict. She holds an MFA from the University of Nebraska, where she was the recipient of both an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Wendy Fort Foundation Prize for exemplary work in poetry. She has also received the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize for excellence in lyric poetry, and her poems have appeared in Nimrod, Willow Springs, The New York Quarterly, and other journals.
Lisa Knopp is the author of five collections of essays, each of which explores the concepts of place, home, nature, and spirituality. In her most recent book, What the River Carries: Encounters with the Mississippi, Missouri, and Platte, Knopp writes of Nauvoo, Illinois, the site of two nineteenth-century utopias, one Mormon, one Icarian; Muscatine, Iowa, once the world’s largest manufacturer of pearl (mussel shell) buttons; Little Dixie, Missouri’s slaveholding, hemp-growing region, as revealed through the life of Jesse James’s mother; among other places. What the River Carries asks readers to consider their own relationships with landscape and how one can most meaningfully and responsibly dwell on the earth’s surface.
Rhonda Sherman is the Founding Director of The New Yorker Festival—now entering its thirteenth year—a weekend-long series of more than fifty events in New York City, produced by The New Yorker magazine every October. As Director of Editorial Promotion for the magazine, she also produces the magazine's monthly Big Story event, and has in the past produced The New Yorker College Tour, The New Yorker Conference, The New Yorker Speakeasy, and Fiction Live, among other programs. She joined the business staff of The New Yorker in 1986 as Promotion Director. She was then promoted to Vice President of Advertising Promotion and New Business Development. In 1995, she joined the editorial staff. Previously, she worked at Esquire and Gentlemen’s Quarterly, and was on the launch team of Spin.
Joy Castro is the author of two books of nonfiction: The Truth Book: A Memoir (published in 2005 and reissued recently with a new introduction by Dorothy Allison) and Island of Bones. She recently published her first novel, Hell or High Water, which has been optioned for film. Dennis Lehane called Hell or High Water a “terrific thriller”; the novel, set in post-Katrina New Orleans, features a young Cuban American reporter tracking the registered sex offenders who disappeared during the hurricane evacuation. Castro, a professor in the creative writing program at UNL, is at work on her second novel.
With (downtown) omaha lit fest director/founder Timothy Schaffert.
Rhonda Sherman is the Founding Director of The New Yorker Festival—now entering its thirteenth year—a weekend-long series of more than fifty events in New York City, produced by The New Yorker magazine every October. As Director of Editorial Promotion for the magazine, she also produces the magazine's monthly Big Story event, and has in the past produced The New Yorker College Tour, The New Yorker Conference, The New Yorker Speakeasy, and Fiction Live, among other programs. She joined the business staff of The New Yorker in 1986 as Promotion Director. She was then promoted to Vice President of Advertising Promotion and New Business Development. In 1995, she joined the editorial staff. Previously, she worked at Esquire and Gentlemen’s Quarterly, and was on the launch team of Spin.
Elizabeth Crane is acclaimed for her innovative, sublimely comical, and gently subversive short fiction; her first novel, We Only Know So Much was released this summer and received high marks from LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Interview, CBS News, and others. Crane is the author of three collections of short stories: When the Messenger is Hot, All this Heavenly Glory, and You Must Be This Happy to Enter. Her work has also been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts and adapted for the stage by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater company.
[Read Elizabeth Crane’s interview in Interview magazine]
Fiction writers, poets, and essayists discuss the challenge of writing honestly about touchy subjects. What happens when women writers explore controversial topics (either willingly or inadvertently)? Are the rules of propriety different for women writers than they are for men?
Elizabeth Crane is acclaimed for her innovative, sublimely comical, and gently subversive short fiction; her first novel, We Only Know So Much was released this summer and received high marks from LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Interview, CBS News, and others. Crane is the author of three collections of short stories: When the Messenger is Hot, All this Heavenly Glory, and You Must Be This Happy to Enter. Her work has also been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts and adapted for the stage by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater company.
[Read Elizabeth Crane’s interview in Interview magazine]
Marilyn June Coffey grew up in the small town of Alma, Nebraska; after falling in love with the Beats, she went on the road, eventually finding her way to a job reading from the slush pile at Good Housekeeping magazine in New York City, before taking a job teaching English at the Pratt Institute. This led to a long career writing and publishing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including a cover story in Atlantic Monthly on the Starkweather murders in Nebraska. Her controversial novel, Marcella, published in 1973 and recently reissued, was reviewed in the New York Times under the subhead “Learning about sex, sin and guilt.” She is also the author of Great Plains Patchwork, which the New York Times called “an entertaining, insightful collection of stories,” Mail-Order Kid: An Orphan Train Rider’s Story, and others.
Katie F-S is a poet and founder of the Epicene Furies, a troupe dedicated to startling choral performance. She just completed her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, and she hosts the Encyclopedia Show: Omaha, a monthly literary variety show. She has performed across the country, from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe to Austin's Paramount Theatre to LA's Electric Lodge to Cafe Deux Soleil. At TEDxOmaha, she presented “I=We: Many Voices Making Empathy.”
Stacey Waite has published three collections of poems: Choke (winner of the 2004 Frank O'Hara Prize), Love Poem to Androgyny (winner of the 2006 Main Street Rag Chapbook Competition), and the lake has no saint (winner of the 2008 Snowbound Prize from Tupelo Press). Waite's first full-length collection, Butch Geography, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in December 2013. She is an assistant professor of English at UNL, and is the cohost of Air Schooner, a literary podcast produced by Prairie Schooner. Waite’s work is discussed in the Los Angeles Review of Books: Who is Who: Pronouns, Gender, and Merging Selves.
Marge said she didn't care to go with them to San Remo. She was in the middle of a 'streak' on her book. Marge worked in fits and starts, always cheerfully, though it seemed to Tom that she was bogged down, as she called it, about seventy-five percent of the time, a condition that she always announced with a merry little laugh. The book must stink, Tom thought. He had known writers. You didn't write a book with your little finger, lolling on a beach half the day, wondering what to eat for dinner. But he was glad she was having a 'streak' at the time he and Dickie wanted to go to San Remo.
—From The Talented Mr. Ripley, by the nefarious Patricia Highsmith [note: Patricia Highsmith was infamous for bringing her pet snails along to cocktail parties; and when she was a child, her mother boasted that she'd tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. "It's funny you adore the smell of turpentine, Pat," her mother once remarked.] Here's a picture of Patricia Highsmith:
While in San Remo, Tom Ripley fatally brains Dickie with an oar. Meanwhile, Marge continues to guzzle gin martinis in her rented villa, and effortlessly arouses interest from a publisher for her book about the little Italian town of Mongibello. ("Now if I can only finish the damn thing!" Marge says blissfully.)
Highsmith presents a precise and telling portrait of the writer's life (martinis at noon, extended Italian vacations, overwhelming unproductivity, compulsive acts of homicide), but an even more accurate one can be had at the (downtown) omaha lit fest, held annually in various venues. We've been whoopdeedooing it since 2005, and we're always threatening to quit. (They're idle threats, calculated to make us sound blissfully indifferent and sophisticatedly blasé .) Our first year, the loosely applied theme was banned books, and also included panels on crime writing, screenwriting, and telling secrets in memoirs; for 2006's festival, the theme was the literary fringe, with panels on blogging, literary sex, death on the plains, and stretching the truth in memoir, among others. We also saluted the vanished poet, cult figure, and Nebraska native Weldon Kees, and showed his rarely screened experimental short film, "Hotel Apex."
In 2007, we paid tribute to "Depraved Women Writers & Others," and also partnered with Film Streams for "Adaptations," a repertory series of films with literary origins, which included East of Eden, The Shining, Masculin Feminin, and the panel discussion "Liquor, Junk, Madness, and the Underwood Portable: The Portrait of the Author in Film," following a screening of David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch. The festival also served as the Nebraska premiere for Chicago's renowned reading series "The Dollar Store Show" and kicked off the Lit Fest Print Series, with limited edition prints by area artists.
"Plagiarism, Fraud & Other Inspiration" was the theme for 2008, and included panels on music and the visual arts as literary influence, and discussions of the art of gentle creative thievery. The art exhibit TXT:ART included work by local and national artists that incorporated text. And in recognition of the 70-year anniversary of the banning of Mari Sandoz's classic novel Slogum House from the Omaha Public Library, the book was re-banned for the weekend following a public reading of some of its more objectionable parts.
In addition to Nebraska authors, the fest has hosted novelists, short-story writers, nonfiction writers, and poets from New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Kansas City, Portland, Washington DC, and Topeka (and beyond). The (downtown) omaha lit fest has received mention in the travel section of the LA Times, in such international publications as Library Journal, Poets & Writers, and Prestige Hong Kong, and was spotlighted as "a particularly good time to visit" Omaha in the New York Times Style Magazine. The Omaha World-Herald cited the fest as "another strong indication of Omaha's continuous cultural growth and expansion of diverse activities" and an "impressive part of the landscape." In an editorial, Elizabeth Currid of the University of Southern California and author of The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City, wrote, "While Omaha is small compared with other metropolitan areas, the Lit Fest is on the radar of those in the cultural know... While Lit Fest is ephemeral, what it can teach us about the vitality of city life is not. Creativity — particularly, arts and culture — is a central part of the growth and success of metropolitan areas and needs to be taken more seriously as a part of any city's economic development scheme."
Click to see more panels and panelists!