David Shields Reading This Week!

The Inland Northwest Center for Writers and Get Lit! Programs, in cooperation with Gonzaga University, are pleased to announce to upcoming author events. Visiting author David Shields will be conducting a Q&A session and a reading on Friday, November 30th.

1-2pm
Author Q&A with David Shields
Foley Teleconference Room (Library)
Gonzaga University

6pm
David Shields Reading
Wolfe Auditorium--Jepson Center
Gonzaga University


David Shields is the author of thirteen books, including Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010) and the NY Times bestseller The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (2008). His most recent publication is Fakes (2012), a collection of short fiction in the form of itineraries, instruction manuals, forwarded emails, and other seemingly mundane artifacts, written by today's best writers and compiled and edited by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer.



Reviews for Reality Hunger: A Manifesto...

"David Shield's radical intellectual manifesto, Reality Hunger, is a rousing call to arms for all artists to reject the laws governing appropriation, obliterate the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, and give rise to a new modern form." --Vanity Fair

"This is the most provocative, brain re-wiring book of 2010. It's a book that feels at least five years ahead of its time and teaches you how to read it as you go." --Alex Pappademas, GQ

"...I don't think it would be too strong to say that Shield's book will be a sort of bible for the next generation of culture-makers." --David Griffith, Bookslut

Mortal Geography: Alexandra Teague at EWU

 
The Inland Northwest Center for Writers and Get Lit! Programs are proud to present the first event in the 2012-2013 EWU Visiting Writer series, featuring poet Alexandra Teague. 

Tomorrow evening, on Friday, October 26th, Teague will be reading from her collection Mortal Geography at the EWU Riverpoint Campus, in the Phase 1 Auditorium, at 7pm.  

If Spokane's been getting too frosty for you, a reading is the perfect place to thaw. And remember, nothing inspires brilliant poetry like bleak weather.


The Heartland

In the beginning was snow, fluffy and colored
like cabbage. Pale green leaves of light
folded in toward the ground.

We who were from nowhere
changed zip codes often, moving
into uncertain weather. The sameness of change

never ceased to astound us. Blocks away,
the American Ice Company’s red bricks
melted to white. It was possible to believe

a whole city’s snow came from inside.
Sidewalks turned into tightropes. The sky waited.
We all had something we’d rather stayed buried.

We all had something staked on the thaw.
One morning, the mailbox backed up
with forwards, which overflowed

down the steps. We’d been located by names
that chapped our lips when we said them.
Ice hung from the gutters of the art museum

like sculptures. People paid to stay outside.
Shovels made soft sweeps, brushes
across the unalterable, as men poured salt

to our doorstep, a great evaporated sea.
The papers tallied up deaths
and reported freezing was variable.

In Houston, people start dying
when the temperature drops below thirty,
while in Anchorage, death starts

at minus five. We had become
the midpoint of a mortal geography.


From Alexandra Teague's Mortal Geography