Postponed due to COVID-19 precautions. New date coming soon.

In the Shadow of Others: Three Poets on What Helps Them Live & Work

What helps writers navigate life's turbulent waters and find our creativity? Ahmad Almallah, Olga Livshin, and Jenna Le - three poets from three different backgrounds - read from their works and comment on this question with insights about cooking, art, and mother culture/s.

Big Blue Marble Readings for Writers series continues with Noir novelists Jon McGoran and Tony Knighton. They'll be reading from their own work, and from classic Noir, and giving advice on following the now-famous Mamet Memo and the Elmore Leonard "leave out the parts people skip" rule of writing.

Tony Knighton is both an author and a lieutenant in the Philadelphia Fire Department, a thirty year veteran. Born in western Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh, his family moved to Philadelphia when he was seven. With the exceptions of a short stay in Toronto, Ontario, and the military, he’s been in Philadelphia ever since.

His novel Three Hours Past Midnight, as well as his novella and story collection Happy Hour and Other Philadelphia Cruelties, have been published with Crime Wave Press. His story “The Scavengers” is included in the anthology Shocklines: Fresh Voices in Terror, published by Cemetery Dance, as well as in Year’s Best Hardcore Horror: Volume 1 from Comet Press. and his story “Sunrise” is included in the anthology Equilibrium Overturned, published by Grey Matter Press. He has also published short fiction in Static Movement Online and Dark Reveries.

In addition to his work as a fireman, he has also worked on the side as a roofer for many years. Knighton served in the United States Marine Corps, and attends classes sporadically at Community College of Philadelphia, where he met his wife Julie, an associate professor of English.

Jon McGoran is the author of Spliced, a near-future YA science fiction thriller that Kirkus calls, “Timely, thrilling, and more than a little scary.” Splintered, the sequel to Spliced, will be out May 2019. 

McGoran’s other books include the acclaimed ecological thrillers Drift, Deadout, and Dust Up, as well as The Dead Ring, based on the hit TV show, The Blacklist. Writing as D. H. Dublin, he is also the author of the forensic thrillers Body Trace, Blood Poison and Freezer Burn. 

When not writing novels and short fiction or cohosting The Liars Club Oddcast, McGoran works as a freelance writer (samples available here), developmental editor, and writing coach. To learn more, email jon@jonmcgoran.com.

Big Blue Marble’s Readings for Writers Series brings together work and wisdom, with readings followed by talks on writers’ crafts. Poets J.C. Todd and Nancy Mitchell will be reading from their new books and then leading a discussion on World Building In Poetry.

World Building in Poetry

World Building isn’t just for fiction writers. Poets create worlds too.  In The Out-of-the-Body Shop, Nancy Mitchell has imagined a world of people displaced from their bodies. In The Damages of Morning, J. C. Todd has used research and oral history to preserve the personal worlds of Central European women whose lives were uprooted and dislocated by the World Wars. Join Nancy and JC in an exploration of world building as they read and discuss their poems.

"The compelling poems in J. C. Todd’s The Damages of Morning emerge from the “dark matter / of earth, terrestrial and sensate.” Set mostly in Eastern Europe and told largely from the perspective of women whom the World Wars trapped in history’s cul-de-sac, they drill down into the indelible details that bear witness to the struggle to survive—"crop-cabbage stumps,” a bullet’s “powder-burnt dimple / in a rammed-earth wall”—and hold both writer and reader accountable for damages that cannot/cannot not be undone."

Lee Sharkey, author, Walking Backwards

Whether homing in on the “blank, bright/as black lacquer” eye of a dead bird, the “scavenger-scattered/cryptic ghost script across the snow,” or the fireflies she mistakes for the father’s materialized threat “to burn//every single weed/into the goddam dirt,” Mitchell leaves no shade of grief or beauty unexamined. Rigorously crafted, these emotionally evocative poems probe what lies below veneers, beyond smoke screens, beneath the relentless pull of memories. They wrestle with the paradox of being at once “in the body, but not/of the body” and release their energy like the sacred “lit/sweet grass/braid” mourners pass hand-to-hand at a friend’s burial ceremony. The Out-of-Body Shop is transfixing and transformative.
—Mihaela Moscaluic, author of Immigrant Model

We're launching a new author series in 2019: Readings for Writers. Each of these events will feature some of Philly's best writers across all genres sharing both their work and some part of their process - join us to hear great writing AND learn about how great writing is built!

Dawn Drzal and Susan Buckley, authors of two recent food memoirs, share stories and writing tips for how to tell your own food stories and the cathartic reasons for doing so. During this interactive event, you will discover ways to organize what you have to say and how to present it even if you’ve never written anything before. The authors will offer some organizing principles, hints for the writing process, and foolproof suggestions for getting started, which is always the hardest part!

Dawn Drzal, author of "The Bread & the Knife: Life in 26 Bites," is a former cookbook editor and has published articles and essays in the New York Times, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Food & Wine, O, and the Antioch Review. Between 2006 and 2016, she was a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review. Her essays have been anthologized in, among other places, Eat Memory: Great Writers at the Table, edited by Amanda Hesser. She lives in New York City with her son.

Susan Buckley, author of "Eating with Peter," is a New York based writer, editor, and consultant. The co-author of five YA books on American history with Elspeth Leacock, she and Leacock co-authored "Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom" with Lynda Blackmon Lowery. She was the founding editor of AppleSeeds Magazine and is the author of many children’s books.

We're launching a new author series in 2019: Readings for Writers. Each of these events will feature some of Philly's best writers across all genres sharing both their work and some part of their process - join us to hear great writing AND learn about how great writing is built!

Our first event brings poet and teacher Alison Hicks and her student, memoirist Lyndon Back. Both will be reading from their work and sharing their process for creating a manuscript.

Alison Hicks is the author of poetry collections "You Who Took the Boat Out" and "Kiss," a chapbook" Falling Dreams," and a novella "Love: A Story of Images." Her awards include the Philadelphia City Paper Poetry Prize and two PA Council of the Arts Fellowships. She is founder of Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which offers community-based writing workshops.

Lyndon Back was a participant in Alison’s workshops, and also worked privately with her on the manuscript that was to become "Treading Water at the Shark Café." One of the few American women to have lived and worked in the former Yugoslavia before, during, and after the NATO bombing, Lyndon Back recounts her unusual journey in the memoir. Brought up as a Quaker, Lyndon wondered even as a child whether she would ever have the courage to stand up for her belief in nonviolence. In 1998, she quit her job as director of planned giving at the American Friends Service Committee and volunteered with the Balkan Peace Teams in Belgrade, Serbia and Prishtina, Kosovo.