Featured Writer: Benjamin Percy

On Thursday, October 5, Benjamin Percy visits Bowling Green State University as the 2023 guest for the Edwin H. Simmons Creative Minds Series. He will read from his work at the Donnell Theatre of the Wolfe Center, 7:30 pm.

https://events.bgsu.edu/event/creative_minds_residency_benjamin_percy_keynote_address

Benjamin Percy is known for world-building, but in some ways that term is misleading. He does build worlds, but most commonly it’s our world advanced past a circumstance—sometimes horrific, sometimes nebulous—that has irrevocably shifted its mores, practices, and structures. The speculation inherent requires not so much building as re-building, blending the familiar with the jarringly different. At the same time, that speculation reveals often unpleasant truths about who we are as humans, and how we treat those who stray from our tight definition of human.

Red Moon provides an early example, one that turned out to be uncomfortably prescient. The story sparks from a prion virus that causes lycanthropy. Some with the virus take medication and try to live as invisibly as possible to protect themselves and their families. Others, reacting to anti-lycan laws and violence, are building a war. The general populace of uninfected citizens does not come off well, treating the infected with hostility regardless of circumstance. That we have now, a decade later, seen some of this same level of disgust and suspicion toward the ill through a pandemic is not at all reassuring, but it does underscore the insight of Ben Percy’s writing.

The Comet Cycle shows similar perception. In The Ninth Metal, a meteor fall—less a shower than a hailstorm—has embedded a new metal into the earth of a northern Minnesota town. The discovery offers a new energy source, but produces in its wake a dysfunctional boomtown, delivering, as one character puts it, “a millionaire a day.” That “omnimetal” also produces a new narcotic, potential weapons, and a ferocious land rights battle pushes the dread to the forefront. We—humanity—will not handle it well. The Unfamiliar Garden moves to Seattle, and sets its protagonists against changes in climate, a dangerous fungus, and murder. The Sky Vault heads north to Fairbanks, Alaska, and blends the current questions with an ominous WWII secret. Each novel in the cycle thus builds a new world out in time and place from the central event, the comet’s debris, while allowing its characters to make choices in response to those changes, to each other, and to an ever-morphing concept of “familiar.”

Following Benjamin Percy’s oeuvre could be likened to a choose-your-own-adventure, a trait very much in keeping with his writing itself. He has published three short story collections, and his short stories have appeared widely in such publications as Esquire, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and Orion. He has also now published seven novels; his first novel, The Wilding, appeared from Graywolf Press in 2010, and his second, Red Moon, came in 2013 from Grand Central. His current project in longform fiction, the Comet Cycle, closed with The Sky Vault, published this month by William Morrow.

On another path, Percy is writing for comics at DC, Marvel, AWA, and Dynamite, with his best known projects including Green Arrow, Ghost Rider, X-Force, Teen Titans, Nightwing, and Wolverine. For the latter, he also wrote two podcast series, The Long Night and The Lost Trail. Continuing into further media, Percy is writing screenplays and adapting stories for TV, both his own (The Ninth Metal, Summering) and others’ (Urban Cowboy).

And, as a generous and varied craftsman, it only makes sense that that Ben Percy would offer what he knows to the public, this time in the form of Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction (Graywolf, 2016), a collection used widely in the classroom, including at BGSU. 

In all of his work, Benjamin Percy has much to teach us about writing, about building stories, but also about the myriad ways in which we cope with disaster, with change, and with each other.

—Abigail Cloud, Editor-in-Chief

On Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black

Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. New York, NY. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. 2018. 192 pages. $14.99. Paperback.

Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s Friday Black contains no shortage of absurd realities, and yet not one of them feels distant from our own. The stories in this collection are ultra-violent. Their characters are either on the brink, in the commission, or sweating through the aftermath of vicious acts of cruelty. They frequently explore the conflation of justice with violence in the United States and the necessity of violence to achieve justice that won’t be granted otherwise. In one story, five black children are grotesquely beheaded by a white father who claims they endangered him and his family. He is subsequently exonerated. This leads various black individuals across the nation to repeat the violence suffered by the innocent “Finkelstein 5” against white people who, for the first time, must associate fear with their skin color. Another story depicts a theme park called “Zimmerland” that allows its guests to practice their “problem-solving, justice, and judgment” by exposing them to real world conflicts. However, instead of practicing justice, Zimmerland’s guests return again and again to practice violence, especially racially-motivated violence, and they can’t be banned because they’ve made the whole endeavor profitable by their constant patronage. That is perhaps the most insightful throughline in Adjei-Brenyah’s stories; even when individuals don’t want to commit or enable acts of violence, the incentives of capitalism make it too enticing.

This phenomenon is most evident in the collection’s three connected stories: “Friday Black,” “How to Sell a Jacket as Told by IceKing,” and “In Retail.” The first depicts an outdoor apparel outlet in a mall on America’s famously gory holiday, Black Friday. Customers become zombies, unable to communicate and willing to kill anyone between them and their half-price fleeces. Employees are no better; though they retain normal speech, they’ve become unfeeling in their competition to sell the most jackets. The narrator uses an eight-foot metal pole to “smack down Friday heads” and to push trampled bodies out of the aisles. The second connected story is less violent, but it reveals another sick aspect of capitalist transactions: the corruption of empathy. The same narrator snickers with a female customer as they watch her husband struggle out of a jacket, and when she turns around he looks at the husband “like, Women, am I right?” He makes each of them feel understood while inside, he only sees them as another sale. The final of these three stories begins with a mode of escape from the hell of the mall: a cashier at “Taco Town” leaps from the fourth floor balcony. Adjei-Brenyah’s stories are not always hopeless. His characters tell jokes in literally humorless worlds. They work together to prevent a mass shooting. But they rarely achieve hope, nor justice, without violence along the way.

––Dan Marcantuono, Fiction editor, Mid-American Review

Winter Wheat 2016: Odds & Ends Panels Part II

Winter Wheat is only two days away! Here’s the last of our panels:

 

“Hermit Crabs, Lyric Essays, and More: Alternatives in Nonfiction,” with Nicole L. Reber

This workshop will explore hermit crab essays, braided essays, listicles, and other fun forms that can have the added benefit of helping you be more productive and turn the heads of editors and contest readers. Use these alternative forms to push the boundaries of nonfiction. We’ll set aside two writing periods for exploring how you can tell your stories in the form on a prescription bottle, a recipe, or other curious ways. We’ll also discuss publications and contests that favor this type of writing.

Nichole L. Reber’s nonfiction, prose poetry, and lit crit have been in Entropy, Fanzine, World Literature Today, PANK, and elsewhere. She writes monthly on nonfiction, Asian lit, and world indigenous lit for the Ploughsharesblog. She won LunchTicket’s Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction this year.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 1:30-2:45pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select E7 when you register!)

 

 

“From Pen to Page to Stage: Secrets to Song Writing,” with Benji Katz and Mark Wierzbowski

Participants will learn about components of contemporary songwriting, including harmony, rhythm, and lyricism. We will talk about strategies for generating new material and dissect notable songs, figuring out what makes them successful in capturing the attention of an audience’s ear and imagination. Workshop members will then have the opportunity to employ these techniques in a lyric writing exercise and collaboration on a song at the end of the session.

Benji Katz is a member and songwriter of the band Indian Opinion. He is a poet in the MFA Program at BGSU.

Mark Wierzbowski is a member and primary songwriter of the band Indian Opinion. He is a senior music education major at BGSU.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 3:00-4:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select F4 when you register!)

Winter Wheat 2016: Lit Techniques and Ideas Panels

Check out these great workshops at Winter Wheat!

“Writing Respectfully and Accurately about Characters with Disabilities,” with Sheri Wells-Jensen, Tex Thompson, Jason Wells-Jensen and Abberley Sorg.

Being inclusive means more than choosing to designate one of your characters as disabled. It means (1) asking yourself why you want to include that character, (2) doing the research to make sure you are able to portray that character with accuracy and respect, and (3) taking steps to follow through to make sure your depiction does no harm. This workshop provides guidelines and hands-on activities to practice these skills.

Jason Wells-Jensen was the “language architect” for Tex Thompson’s Children of the Drought series of rural fantasy novels. He has taught linguistics and ESL in Puerto Rico and on the mainland, and also has degrees in library science and music.

Sheri Wells-Jensen is a linguist at BGSU who specializes in teaching English to speakers of other languages. She has worked as a language creator for Scholastic Books and writes about disability with special emphasis on blindness.

Look for her internationally published epic fantasy Western series, Children of the Drought (Solaris), and find her online at www.thetexfiles.com!

Abberley Sorg is a student in the Literature and Textual Studies MA program at BGSU. Prior to this, she attended the University of Toledo’s Sociology MA program. Her research interests include representation of disability in media and literature and societal perceptions of individuals with personality disorders.

(this workshop will be held on Friday, November 4th from 4:30-5:45pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select B8 when you register!)

 

“Let’s Deal With This Thing Called Family,” with Marissa Medley

Families can be a source of inspiration for writers. Whether good or bad emotions flow from these relationships, they can give us much to write about. Here we can take a look at how to write about families and explore why we do this as writers. We’ll also look at writers like Sylvia Plath and Rita Dove. And, of course, we’ll have some writing time to get our emotions on paper.

Marissa Medley is a senior at BGSU studying arts management and creative writing. She is the poetry editor of BGSU’s Prairie Margins. She enjoys playing steel drums and working at the local record store.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 9:30-10:45am. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select C6 when you register!)

 

“Giving Snow White the Heimlich Maneuver and other Tales: Using Classic Tropes and Characters in Original Writing,” with Erika Schnepp

One of the strongest techniques a writer (of any genre) can employ is drawing on the common chords and tropes we as readers have seen since we were little: tropes like religious figures, characters from fairytales, and literary and pop culture figures who have managed to stand the test of time. Also increasingly popular is the updating of these characters for the modern era, introducing the figures and themes to new generations and even subverting outdated messages to better represent the lessons we want to pass down now versus generations ago. It is just as important that the stories are used in a fashion that increases a new theme and that the same story isn’t merely retold. This workshop will explore ways common tropes and characters are currently being updated and played with in prose and poetry, as well as methods to revitalize the tropes for your own work without being bogged down in their shared history.

E.B. Schnepp is a poet from rural Mid-Michigan who’s found herself in the flatlands of Ohio with an MFA from BGSU and a bad procrasti-baking habit. She is currently the Director of the Learning Center and Retention Coordinator at OSU Lima. Her work can also be found in Crab Fat, pacificREVIEW, and Paper Nautilus, among others.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 9:30-10:45am. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select C7 when you register!)

 

“Do Tell: 100 Facts for Writing Sensory Details,” with Laurin Wolf

Thanks to William Carlos Williams, we know, “There are no ideas but in things.” Thanks to the glittering handbooks for writers, we know that concrete details are what make writing powerful. We know we need more grit and gusto in our details. But how do we get at those precious details? If your prosody engine needs a jump-start on the details, do tell. In this workshop, we will look at examples from poetry, fiction, and nonfiction that rely on objects to tell a narrative. The workshop culminates in a fact-finding exercise using random objects to generate narrative.

Laurin Wolf has an MFA from Kent State in poetry. Her poems have appeared in Pittsburgh Poetry Review, PoetsArtists, Rune, Scholars & Rogues, PMS, and Two Review. She hosts the monthly reading series MadFridays and guest hosts the radio program Prosody on WESA. She teaches at Robert Morris University.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 11:00-12:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select D7 when you register!)

 

“Collars, Capes, and Chantilly Lace: Learn to Describe Clothing,” with Anne-Marie Yerks

Clothing is the costume of life and creates identity. What are your characters wearing? Lend a layer of realism to your fiction, poetry, and nonfiction with precise descriptions of fabrics, seams, and shapes. We’ll go over a fashion vocabulary list then swatch out a sample of fashion-forward prose.

Anne-Marie Yerks is the author of a novel, Dream Junkies (New Rivers Press, 2016), and lives outside Detroit. She has work forthcoming in Modern Memoir (Fiction Attic Press) and in Juked. She is a blogger for Sewingmachinesplus.com and is working on a BA in fashion. Find her @amy1620 and at www.annemariewrites.com.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 11:00-12:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select D8 when you register!)

 

“Making Details Matter,” with Christi Clancy, Alicia Holliday, Miette Muller, Lexi Schnitzer, and Alby Leonardi

A well-chosen detail has the power to reveal character, advance plot, convey social and economic status, and establish a sense of place. Think of the kielbasa and rosaries hanging from the car mirror in Stuart Dybek’s story “We Didn’t.”

This workshop will focus on some strategies I’ve employed to help writers make effective use of details, including classroom exercises and writing prompts. I also leverage the campus and surrounding community as fertile ground for quirky, surprising, and sometimes heartbreaking details. The trick is to move away from Google searches and out of our comfort zone; we are more likely to notice details when our senses are on alert in unfamiliar (but safe) spaces.

We’ll discuss activities like the “battle of the details” to architecture hunts, and field trips to quirky museums and strange auctions. We’ll engage the workshop in several short detail-writing exercises.

Christi Clancy teaches English at Beloit College. Her work has appeared in The New York Times and Chicago Tribune, and in Glimmer Train Stories, Hobart, Pleiades, Midwestern Gothic, the minnesota review and elsewhere.

Alicia Holliday, Miette Mueller, Lexi Schnitzer, and Alby Leonardi are all students at Beloit College.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 3:00-4:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select F2 when you register!)

Winter Wheat 2016: Publishing Panel Features

 

Winter Wheat is only two weeks away! Interested in the field of publication? Check out these panels on publishing at this year’s writing festival!

 

“Market Yourself as a Writer,” with Nicole L. Reber

Marketing starts long before your book is published. It should start before your book is even written. Springboarding from the FUSE conference’s theme of literary citizenship, this workshop will talk about how helping other authors, getting free books, and the very act of writing are just some of the many free ways to market yourself. Starting early also helps build a better platform, which leads to quality agent contracts and publishing deals. We’ll set aside some time to generate ideas for marketing yourself, then more time for a Q&A.

Nichole L. Reber’s nonfiction, prose poetry, and lit crit have been in Entropy, Fanzine, World Literature Today,PANK, and elsewhere. She writes monthly on nonfiction, Asian lit, and world indigenous lit for the Ploughsharesblog. She won LunchTicket’s Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction this year.

(this workshop will be held on Friday, November 4th from 3:00-4:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select A6 when you register!)

 

“Beginning Copyright for Writers,” with Scott Piepho

This workshop will offer an overview of basic copyright law concepts that writers need to know. Participants will learn about negotiating contract terms to protect their continued access to their work. The session will also cover the basics of fair use—when a writer can use a snippet of someone else’s work. A writing prompt will consist of song lyrics that participants must work into a piece of writing while staying within fair use.

To offset his law degree, Scott Piepho is studying creative nonfiction in the NEOMFA program. His award-winning biweekly column “Cases and Controversies” appears in a number of Ohio legal newspapers. His work has also appeared in the Akron Beacon Journal, The Devil Strip, and Catalyst Ohio.

(this workshop will be held on Friday, November 4th from 4:30-5:45pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select B7 when you register!)

 

“Bookbinding Basics,” with Suzanna Anderson

Presenter Suzanna Anderson will demonstrate basic bookbinding techniques and forms, including the X-Book, Snake Book, and a Basic Sewn Signature. The session will include a writing period to write in the new books. Attendees will make three books to take home and write in. Writing exercises will approach writing from a new angle using unconventionally sized paper.

Suzanna Anderson studied creative writing at BGSU. She participates in National Novel Writing Month every year. Currently, she is the editor-in-chief of The Magnolia Review and the review editor at The Odd Ducks. She blogs about her graphic novel progress at Ashes: The Graphic Novel.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 11:00-12:15pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select D1 when you register!)

 

“Book Design & Typesetting Techniques for Small Presses,” with Nikkita Cohoon

This workshop will provide an overview of a typical typesetting workflow for InDesign, with tips for file placement, document setup, creating paragraph and character styles, selecting typefaces, and other design considerations. Best practices will be discussed, with recommendations for creating a house style guide, as well as suggestions for streamlining workflow and preparing a book for print.

Nikkita Cohoon is a graphic designer specializing in book and document design as well as web branding for creatives. She has done typesetting and design for Black Ocean, Tinderbox Editions, and Futurepoem. She also collaborates with writers and artists to design websites to complement and provide a platform for their writing. She holds an MFA in creative writing from BGSU.

(this workshop will be held on Saturday, November 5th from 1:30-2:45pm. If you’re interested in attending this workshop, select E4 when you register!)