OCWW Workshop Description: Parties, meetings, funerals, and weddings. Well populated scenes are some of the most rewarding, and notoriously difficult, to write. Not only can social gatherings allow us to depict wider cultures and histories without resorting to pages of passive summary, they can also energize plots and add intrigue. But how many characters are too many, and how does one introduce groups of disparate characters without overwhelming or confusing the reader?

In this workshop, we will examine a few rich examples from literature and discuss ways to handle the potential chaos. If there is time, we will apply these strategies to the opening of a scene of our own.

When: December 5, 2024 / 9:30 AM to Noon

Where: The Off-Campus Writers Workshop, Winnetka Community House, Winnetka, IL

Format: In-Persona and via Zoom

For more info, visit OCWW online.

The Gift Theatre will be presenting 10 new short plays, as well as readings from local authors. I’ll be reading on the 16th, but please come to any of the performances to support one of Chicago’s best theatre groups.

Jeremy T. Wilson launches his new novel, The Quail Who Wears the Shirt, in conversation with Rachel Swearingen.

Jeremy T. Wilson's The Quail Who Wears the Shirt is a magnificent Southern-fried meditation on guilt and karma, a fantastic and truly memorable work about the lies we tell ourselves and the truths that seep through despite our best efforts, a darkly comedic satire as strange and surreal as an onion pie.

Jeremy T. Wilson grew up in the South but now lives near a great lake. He is a former winner of the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren Award for short fiction and the Hessman Trophy, presented by legendary principal Durward U. Hessman to the fifth grade student who could eat the most corn. He is the author of the short story collection Adult Teeth; his work has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, The Florida Review, Jet Fuel Review, The Masters Review, Sonora Review, Third Coast, The Best Small Fictions 2020, and other publications. He prefers pie over cake, bourbon over scotch, and R.E.M. over U2.

Thursday, November 9, 2023,
6:30 pm
Bookends and Beginnings
1620 Orrington Avenue, Evanston

From the Oil Lamp Theatre:

Join us for craft cocktails and TELLING STORIES for this edition of Oil Lamp Theater's Speak Easy Nights.

Description: Telling Stories is back with a whole new set of stories sure to make you double over with laughter and touch your heart. If you enjoy enthralling stories - this event is your cup of tea (or wine).

Tickets:
Theater Seating: $20
Bar/Lobby Seating (audio only): $12

All seating is General Admission
Bar opens 1-hour before the event starts

To purchase tickets visit: https://app.arts-people.com/index.php?show=167766

In-person reading event with Cris Mazza (Nonfiction), Rachel Swearingen (Fiction), Dina Elenbogen (Poetry), Amy E. Casey (Fiction), and Lois Baer Barr (Poetry). They will be reading from their recent writings and/or published works.

Curated and emceed by Ignatius Valentine Aloysus.

Where: Roscoe Books / 2142 W Roscoe St, Chicago, IL

When: May 28, 2023 / 7 PM CST

No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader, or so the adage goes. Easier said than done. The process of drafting is filled with uncertainty that can cause us to reach for easy solutions that later ring false. 

In this course we will explore what it means to give our work our courageous attention, and how to open our creations to more risk and delight. By turning toward the mysteries inherent in our early ideas and drafts, we can strike our best material sooner, and write our most original, authentic stories. 

When April 27, 2023 / 9:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Where ONSITE - 620 Lincoln Avenue, Winnetka, IL /REMOTE

On the second Tuesday of of each month, Black Lawrence Press offers free single-session workshops. Registration on Zoom is required for attendance. Can’t make it? Catch up on past events with captioned readings on their YouTube Channel. For more information and to register, visit Black Lawrence Press Virtual Readings and Workshops.

Free and open to the public. For more information, please visit the Penn State - Behrend Smith Reading Series Page.

Date: Thursday, January 12

Time: Doors at 7:00, readings from 7:30

Location: Hallesches Haus  (Tempelhofer Ufer 1)

Entry: €3

Angela Ajayi and Keith Lesmeister will read from works in progress to open the Cornell College's Winter 2022 MFA Program Residency. They will be in conversation with Rachel Swearingen.

ANGELA AJAYI’s first story, “Galina,” published in Fifth Wednesday Journal, won the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her essays, book reviews and author interviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Common
Online, Wild River Review and the Minneapolis Star Tribune where she is a contributing book critic. A former book editor, she also teaches writing classes at the Literary Loft Center. Her short story, “Our Beautiful Ukrainian Mothers,” recently appeared in Pleiades. She's at work on her first book, a novel-in-stories that explores her roots in Nigeria and Ukraine.

KEITH LESMEISTER is the author of the story collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here. His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Gettysburg Review, New Stories from the Midwest, North American Review, Redivider, SLICE, Terrain.org, and many others. His nonfiction has appeared in The Good Men Project, River Teeth, Sycamore Review, Tin House Open Bar, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. He received his M.F.A. from the Bennington Writing Seminars and serves as editor of Cutleaf. He lives in Iowa’s Driftless region.

Please email lnieman@cornellcollege.edu for a link to the Zoom event.

Love in the Time of Time’s Up: A Short Fiction Anthology

Author Talk and Book Release 

What does it mean to be a woman in the time of #metoo and #timesup?

Please join us at Bookends & Beginnings for readings from Love in the Time of Time’s Up: A Short Fiction Anthology edited by Christine Sneed.

From the fraught, sexually charged groves of academia and elevators of corporate America, to the imaged diary entries of Brett Kavanaugh and the tragicomic travails of a woman swiping right on Tinder in order to dispense advice to men whose profiles she finds lacking, these stories offer a blend of humor and horror, victory and heartache, righteous anger and rueful recrimination. It's a collection that's sure to leave a mark on readers' minds--and earn a place in their hearts. 

We are delighted to welcome Christine along with six other contributing authors—Rebecca Entel, Gina Frangello, Melissa Fraterrigo, Amina Gautier, Cris Mazza, and Rachel Swearingen—from the anthology for an engaging reading and timely conversation.

For more info, visit: https://www.bookendsandbeginnings.com/event/love-time-times-person-author-talk-and-book-release

Please join me in celebrating the launch of Christine Sneed’s hilarious fifth book, Please Be Advised, at Women and Children First in Chicago.

About the book:

Please Be Advised is award-winning author Christine Sneed's bright, irreverent send-up of corporate America in the 21stcentury. Mixing cultural critique and formal inventiveness with wicked laughs and the sort of surrealistic mysteries only a novel about the corporate world could give us, Please Be Advised tracks the decline, fall, and possible resurrection of Quest Industries, one of the world's foremost purveyors of collapsible, portable, and (occasionally) dangerous office machines. Featuring a rogue's gallery of corporate cogs from drunk, womanizing, and often-delusional CEO Bryan Stokerly, Esq. to his executive secretary, the brainy, libidinous Hannah Louise Schmidt and his soon-to-be-rival, new office manager and disgraced former coroner, Dr. Ken Crickshaw, Jr., Please Be Advised will leave you laughing at a work world more like our own than most of us would care to admit.

About the Author:

Christine Sneed is the author of Please Be Advised: A Novel in Memos (7.13 Books, 10/18/22) and the editor of Love in the Time of Time's Up (Tortoise Books, 10/4/22), a short fiction anthology, to which she is also a contributor. Her four previous books include Little Known Facts and The Virginity of Famous Men. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, the New York Times, O Magazine, New England Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, New Stories from the Midwest, Glimmer Train, and many other periodicals. She has received the Grace Paley Prize, the Society of Midland Authors Award, the Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, among other honors. She teaches for the MFA programs at Northwestern University and Regis University.

Exile in Bookville Authors on Tap: Peter Geye and Rachel Swearingen

Monday Sep 19 2022 7:00pm - 8:00pm

From Exile in Bookville:

Please join us IN PERSON on Monday, September 19th at 7:00pm central to help celebrate Peter Geye's new novel, The Ski Jumpers. Peter will be in conversation with Rachel Swearingen!

About the book:
A brilliant ski jumper has to be fearless--Jon Bargaard remembers this well. His memories of daring leaps and risks might be the key to the book he's always wanted to write: a novel about his family, beginning with Pops, once a champion ski jumper himself, who also took Jon and his younger brother Anton to the heights. But Jon has never been able to get past the next, ruinous episode of their history, and now that he has received a terrible diagnosis, he's afraid he never will.

In a bravura performance, Peter Geye follows Jon deep into the past he tried so hard to leave behind, telling the story he spent his life escaping. It begins with a flourish, his father and his hard-won sweetheart fleeing Chicago, and a notoriously ruthless gangster, to land in North Minneapolis. That, at least, was the tale Jon heard, one that becomes more and more suspect as he revisits the events that eventually tore the family in two, sending his father to prison, his mother to the state hospital, and placing himself, a teenager, in charge of thirteen-year-old Anton. Traveling back and forth in time, Jon tells his family's story--perhaps his last chance to share it--to his beloved wife Ingrid, circling ever closer to the truth about those events and his own part in them, and revealing the perhaps unforgivable violence done to the brothers' bond.
 

The dream of ski jumping haunts Jon as his tale unfolds, daring time to stop just long enough to stick the landing. As thrilling as those soaring flights, as precarious as the Bargaard family's complicated love, as tender as Jon's backward gaze while disease takes him inexorably forward, Peter Geye's gorgeous prose brings the brothers to the precipice of their relationship, where they have to choose: each other, or the secrets they've held so tightly for so long.

Peter Geye is author of the award-winning novels Safe from the Sea, The Lighthouse Road, Wintering (winner of the Minnesota Book Award), and Northernmost. He teaches the yearlong Novel Writing Project at the Loft Literary Center. Born and raised in Minneapolis, he continues to live there with his family.

Rachel Swearingen is the author of the story collection How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, which received the New American Press Fiction Prize and was named the 2021 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year. Her stories and essays have appeared in Electric Lit, VICE, The Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Off Assignment, Agni, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere.

About the event:
This event will take place in our beautiful outdoor courtyard located on the forth floor of our building! 
 

You can purchase their books through the respective links and Peter and Rachel are happy to sign or personalize copies! If you can't make it to the event, signed copies will be available and we ship nationally! 

Please note the following COVID protocols for those attending IN PERSON: 

• Attendees must present a physical copy or a photo of their COVID-19 vaccine card along with a valid photo ID (state, government, or school ID); or

• Provide a time-stamped printout, photo, or email of a negative PCR test taken within 48 hours of the event or a negative Rapid Antigen Test taken within 36 hours of the event, along with a valid photo ID (state, government, or school ID).

• All persons must wear a mask for the duration of their time in the Fine Arts Building, regardless of vaccination status in accordance with our current COVID policies

Please email us at books@exileinbookville.com or phone us at (312)-753-3154 if you have any questions or concerns. 
Click here to register for free!

Rebuilding a Life - With Authors Ann McGlinn, Alex Poppe, and Lynn Sloan

(moderated by Rachel Swearingen)

Date: Saturday, September 10
Time: 3pm
Location: Grace Place (637 South Dearborn Street), 1st Floor

Born in South Bend, Indiana, Born in South Bend, Indiana, Ann McGlinn has lived throughout the United States as well as abroad. In addition to her novels El Penco and Ride On, See You (Cuidono Press), her poems and short stories have appeared in Art/Life, Cutbank, Poem, Rosebud, Quarterly West, The Flexible Persona, and The Ekphrastic Review. She lives with her family in Chicago, Illinois. has lived throughout the United States as well as abroad. In addition to her novels El Penco and Ride On, See You (Cuidono Press), her poems and short stories have appeared in Art/Life, Cutbank, Poem, Rosebud, Quarterly West, The Flexible Persona, and The Ekphrastic Review. She lives with her family in Chicago, Illinois.

Alex Poppe is the author of four works of fiction: Duende by Regal House Publishing (2022), Jinwar and Other Stories by Cune Press (2022), Moxie by Tortoise Books (2019),and Girl, World by Laughing Fire Press (2017). Girl, World was named a 35 Over 35 Debut Book Award winner, First Horizon Award finalist, Montaigne Medal finalist, short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize and was awarded an Honorable Mention in General Fiction from the Eric Hoffer Awards. Her short fiction has been a finalist for Glimmer Train’s Family Matters contest, a nominee for the Pushcart Prize and commended for the Baker Prize among others. Her non-fiction was named a Best of the Net nominee (2016), a finalist for Hot Metal Bridge’s Social Justice Writing contest and has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, the Laurel Review, Bust, Medium’s The Startup, and Bella Caledoniaamong others. She is a staff writer at Preemptive Love Coalition, and completed her third and fourth book of fiction with support from Can Serrat International Art Residency and Duplo-Linea De Costa Artist-in-Residency programs. She was thrilled to have been an artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in spring 2021. When she is not being thrown from the back of food aid trucks or dining with pistol-packing Kurdish hit men, she writes.

Lynn Sloan is a writer and photographer. Her second novel, Midstream, called “luminous” by Foreword Reviews,appeared in 2022, and her first novel, Principles of Navigation, was chosen for Chicago Book Review’s Best Books of 2015. She is the author of the story collection This Far Isn’t Far Enough. An art book featuring her flash fictio, titled Fortune Cookies, was produced by Lark Sparrow Press in 2022. Her short fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, Shenandoah, American Literary Fiction, and included in NPR’s Selected Shorts. She graduated from Northwestern University, earned a master’s degree in photography at The Institute of Design, formerly the New Bauhaus, and exhibited her work nationally and internationally. For many years she taught photography in the MFA program of Columbia College Chicago, where she founded Occasional Readings in Photography and contributed to Afterimage, Art Week, and Exposure before turning to fiction writing.

About the Cynthia Newberry Martin’s novel Tidal Flats:

In this elegant and honest novel, a young couple must navigate that fine line between the things they want for themselves and the things they want together, and it appears each will have to make a choice―the person they love or the life they want.

Mary Cassatt Miller, the director of an Atlanta home for older women, and famous photojournalist Ethan Graham want a life together. Despite Ethan's work taking him to the streets of Afghanistan, he agrees that after three years, he will stop traveling.

But, nine weeks before their third anniversary, Cass is unsure whether Ethan will ever give up the work he loves. As the clock counts down, it doesn't help that Singer, the artist-bartender, is always in Atlanta, and the enthralling Setara, the subject of Ethan's most famous photograph, is also his business partner.

A new danger in Afghanistan changes everything.

About the Author:

Cynthia Newberry Martin writes from her soul. She mainly writes about how characters can navigate between separateness and togetherness in a healthy way. Her stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Hunger Mountain, Brevity, Gargoyle, Contrary Magazine, Clapboard House, Storyglossia, Numéro Cinq, etc. For a number of years, she served as the Review Editor for Contrary Magazine and the Writing Life Editor for Hunger Mountain. In 2012 she graduated from Vermont College of Fine Arts with an MFA in Creative Writing. Later that year, she was awarded a residency at Ragdale. In 2013, she became a founding board member of the literary nonprofit Writing by Writers. She spends her days in Columbus, GA, with her husband, and in Provincetown, MA, in a little house by the water. For more about Cynthia and her writing, please check out her website at www.cynthianewberrymartin.com.

For more info and to register for the event, visit The Book Cellar Event Page.

Where: Metropolitan Cafe, 1039 Granville Avenue, Chicago

When: May 14, 2022 at 6:30 PM CT

Jeremy T. Wilson is the author of the story collection Adult Teeth. He is a winner of the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, and his stories have appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, The Florida Review, Sonora Review, Hobart, Third Coast and others. He holds an MFA from Northwestern University and teaches creative writing at The Chicago High School for the Arts. He lives in Evanston with his wife and daughter.

Aarti Monteiro is a fiction writer and educator. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Rutgers University-Newark, and her stories have appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue, Epiphany, wildness, and Kweli. She is currently working on a novel in stories that explores the effect of a double migration, the loss of home, and the stigma of mental illness on a multi-generational family. She lives in Chicago.

Christina Drill is a writer from New Jersey. She holds an MFA from the University of Miami, where she was a Michener fellow. Stories from her in-progress collection, The Most Anonymous State, have been published by Triangle House Review, Hobart, Chicago Quarterly Review, and The Florida Review, and her work has received honors from Glimmer Train, Southampton Writers Conference, and the Miami Book Fair. Her non-fiction has been published in New York Magazine, VICE, and others. She is the former production editor for The Miami Rail and current social media editor at the Chicago Review of Books. She lives in Chicago.

COVID-19 Info: Please continue to wear a facemask during the event when not actively eating or drinking.

For more info: https://an-inconvenient-hour.mailchimpsites.com/may-14-2022

The Book Cellar (Chicago) joins author Colleen Kinder to discuss her LETTER TO A STRANGER, accompanied by 7 authors who contributed essays to the collection; Rachel Swearingen, Howard Axelrod, Sheba Karim, Amber Meadow Adams, Keija Parssinen, Sally Franson, and Aviya Kushner.

Wednesday, April 13th at 7:00PM CT / 8:00PM ET – please plan to login by 6:45PM CT / 7:45PM ET

About the Book: When journalist, essayist, and world-traveler Colleen Kinder founded Off Assignment, an intimate, renowned online travel magazine, she began with a prompt that challenged her peers to “write a letter to a stranger who haunts you.” The outpouring of responses showcased a new kind of travel writing centered on raw, personal stories that celebrate the digressions inherent in every journey. Now, Algonquin is proud to present Kinder’s LETTER TO A STRANGER: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us, a collection of these poignant missives to the nameless, authored by a diverse cast and set all over the globe. Featuring contributions from some of the most influential and innovative writers of our time, including never-before-seen essays from Faith Adiele, Gregory Pardlo, Maggie Shipstead, Elizabeth Kolbert, Pico Iyer, Peter Orner, Vanessa Hua, and more, the 65 essays in this collection carry readers from a train in Berlin to a rickshaw in Mandalay, from a Grand Canyon hiking trail to the Rwandan border, and remind us how a stranger’s loaded glance, shared smile, or even just a question posed can change everything. 

To RSVP, visit: https://www.bookcellarinc.com/event-rsvp?

For more info on the book and panelists, visit: https://www.bookcellarinc.com/letter-stranger-author-panel

Number: F208
Date/Time: 1:45pm - 3:00pm ET on Friday March 25, 2022
Location: 125, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

From social realism to speculative fiction, from American tales to immigrant lit, from heterosexual narratives to LGBTQ stories—Caroline Kim (the 2020 Drue Heinz Literature Prize), Michael X. Wang (the 2021 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize), Rachel Swearingen (the 2018 New American Fiction Prize), and Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry (the 2020 Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction) will read from their award-winning collections on themes of love, loss, and cultural identity.

Showcasing the rich diversity of the short story landscape, four writers of different ages, races, genders, and cultural heritage (Asian, American, and Russian-Armenian) will read from their work and discuss how their diverse backgrounds and life experiences have shaped and sharpened their artistic vision. Winners of prestigious national story-collection prizes, the authors will highlight the differences and similarities in their work, as well as comment on their publication journeys.

Publishing Your First Story Collection

(Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry,Matthew Lansburgh,Caroline Kim,Rachel Swearingen,Jen Fawkes)

Finding a publisher for a collection of short stories continues to be a daunting task. Five prize-winning authors lead a discussion detailing their journeys to publishing their first books. They will talk about how they landed their first publications, how they developed and shaped their short story collections, how they began to look for publishers, and other related topics such as submitting fiction to journals and national contests, querying agents, and overcoming rejection.

Day: Thursday, March 24, 2022
Time: 9:00 AM–10:15 AM ET
Scheduled Room: 119AB, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

New American Press will host a reading event at the Philadelphia Center for Architecture and Design on Thursday, March 24, from 5:30pm until 10:00pm. The event will be held in conjunction with the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Conferences. Entry and refreshments are free.

We will celebrate the launch of Erica Plouffe Lazure’s debut story collection, Proof of Me and Other Stories. Also reading at the event will be New York Times bestselling novelist Kristen Arnett, Iowa Review Fiction Award-winner and translator Maija Mäkinen, poet and essayist Sara Fetherolf, Lauria/Frasca Poetry Prize-winner Janine Certo, New American Fiction Prize winners Amy Neswald and Rachel Swearingen, MAYDAY Poetry Prize-winner A. Shaikh, Lena-Miles Wever Todd prize-winner Jacques Rancourt, Pushcart Prize-winner and Moon City Review editor Michael Czyzniejewski.

Center for Architecture and Design
1218 Arch St.
Philadelphia, PA 19107
(215) 569-3186

For more information, please email david@newamericanpress.com.

From social realism to speculative fiction, from American tales to immigrant lit, from heterosexual narratives to LGBTQ stories—Caroline Kim (the 2020 Drue Heinz Literature Prize), Michael X. Wang (the 2021 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize), Rachel Swearingen (the 2018 New American Fiction Prize), and Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry (the 2020 Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction) will read from their award-winning collections on themes of love, loss, and cultural identity.

Event Information
Number: F208
Date/Time: 1:45pm - 3:00pm ET on Friday March 25, 2022
Location: 125, Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level

11th Annual Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Awards

About this event

Join us on January 22, 2022, at 7:00 pm on Zoom to celebrate the winners of CWA's 2021 Book of the Year Awards.

Mark your calendar! The Zoom link will be emailed on January 22 by 3:00 pm. 

Winners:

Rachel Swearingen

Andrea Friederici

Libby Hellman Fischer

Gary Johnson

Honorable mention recipients:

Dean Jobb

Sarah Chadwick 

Steve Gnatz

LC Fiore

EventBrite Registion: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/11th-annual-chicago-writers-association-book-of-the-year-awards-tickets-243297849417

Rebecca Entel’s short stories and essays have appeared in such journals as Guernica, Joyland, Cleaver, Literary Hub, Catapult, andElectric Literature. She is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Cornell College, where she teaches courses in creative writing, U.S. and Caribbean literature, and the literature of social justice. Fingerprints of Previous Owners is her first novel.

When: Wed. Jan 5 7 pm CT.

Email mfa@cornellcollege.edu for a zoom link. https://facebook.com/events/3039502099633050/… #virtualevents #cornellcollege

From the Book Cellar:

Join us in celebration of the new collection Letter to a Stranger edited by Colleen Kinder! Colleen will be joined by local authors Rachel Swearingen and Aviya Kushner, among other panelists TBA!

Event is free, but pre-registration is required. Please e-mail words@bookcellarinc.com with the subject line "Colleen Kinder RSVP" to reserve your spot. Event access links will be sent day of, and all start times are in US Central Time.

About Colleen Kinder: Colleen Kinder is an essayist and editor whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, National Geographic Traveler, Salon.com, and The Best American Travel Writing. She has taught writing at Yale University, the Chautauqua Institution, and Semester at Sea. A Fulbright Scholar, Kinder received her MFA at the University of Iowa and is the author of Delaying the Real World and the cofounder of the online magazine Off Assignment.

About Letter to a Stranger: When Colleen Kinder put out a call for authors to "write a letter to a stranger who haunts you," she opened the floodgates. The responses--intimate and addictive, all in the form of letters, all written in the second person--began pouring in. These short, insightful essays by today's best literary minds are organized around such themes as Grati­tude, Wonder, and Farewell, and guide us both across the globe and through the mysteries of human connection.

Bestselling author Leslie Jamison, who provides the foreword, reveals she has been haunted for years by a traveling magician she met in Nicaragua. Journalist Ted Conover writes his missive to a stranger he met on a New Yorker assignment in Rwanda. From the story of Vanessa Hua's shoe shopper in China to the tale of Michelle Tea's encounter in a Texas tattoo parlor, these pieces are replete with observations about how to live and what to seek, and how a stranger's loaded glance, shared smile, or question posed can alter the course of our lives. Moving and unforgettable, Letter to a Stranger is an irresistible read for any literary traveler and the perfect gift for anyone who is haunted by a person they met once but will remember forever. 

Event date:

Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - 7:00pm

Event address:

ZOOM (email for RSVP link)

From the Gift:

You are cordially invited to join us for our second *in-person* giftLIT. of 2021! We've planned an incredible evening of live literature featuring a few of our favorite writers and musicians. So grab a mask and a sweater (just in case), and come spend an evening with us at one of the best outdoor patios in Chicago.

Stories by: Rachel Swearingen, Jennifer Rumberger, Sandra Delgado, Archy Arch J, and Jayson Avocado Acevedo.

Music by: Clamor & Lace Noise Brigade

Tuesday, September 14th, 7-9pm

Chief O'Neill's (Garden)

3471 N. Elston Ave., Chicago, IL 60618

RSVP: boxoffice@thegifttheatre.org

***

Curated by ensemble member Maggie Gawlik, giftLIT is the literary extension and iteration of The Gift Theatre. GiftLIT offers two programs: 

*The Reading Series - a forum for playwrights to hear and refine their work in front of a friendly audience at The Gift Theatre.

and

*The Salon - where literary artists come together to tell their stories in Jefferson Park bars & restaurants (inspired by the themes of The Gift’s current season).

We believe a play ignites a conversation with the audience, and that a play never really ends until everyone who saw it stops dreaming and thinking about it. 

GiftLIT goes beyond merely supporting writers—it keeps our oral traditions alive. It keeps the conversation buzzing. It keeps the lights burning, and makes everyone’s stories important.

Get Gift. Get Lit. giftLIT.

Join this free online writing workshop with Rachel Swearingen by registering here. After you register, the Zoom link will be automatically sent to you. Everyone’s welcome!

What are the Free Generative Writing Workshops?

The Free Generative Writing Workshop provides a space for career writers, curious beginners, writers of all income levels and stages of life. Our goal is to make it easy to meet and learn from some of the most talented writer/teachers living in or passing through Iowa City. Every month a new writer leads a generative workshop, presenting a prompt inspired by their own preoccupations, passions, or interests. Prompts have run the gamut of writing from Tarot cards, to finding inspiration in the villanelle; from ekphrasis to open letters of resistance to government officials. It has been an adventure, and we are continually inspired by the creative concentration of participants, and the powerful beginnings the workshop generates.