I will be reading at the Kozo Reading Series at The Morgan Conservatory this Friday, May 13 alongside a fabulous lineup including Barry Graham, Clarissa Jakobsons, Adam Hughes, and Leo Jarret!

Friday, May 13 at 7:30
The Morgan Conservatory
1754 East 47th Street Cleveland, OH 44103

This is also a gallery opening night, so parking may be limited, but the far back lot off 45th street should be open to accommodate.

The Morgan Conservatory is the largest arts center in the United States dedicated to every facet of papermaking, book arts and letterpress printing and to cultivating the talents of established and emerging artists. An international destination that is free and open to the public, the Morgan Conservatory is a working studio, gallery, gathering place for the community, educational hub and purveyor of some of the finest handmade papers in the world. Find out more!

Nancy Stohlman’s books include The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories, The Monster Opera, Searching for Suzi: a flash novel, and four anthologies including Fast Forward: The Mix Tape, a finalist for a 2011 Colorado Book Award. She is the creator and curator of the Fbomb Flash Fiction Reading Series in Denver, and her work was nominated for a 2016 Pushcart Prize. Find out more about her at http://www.nancystohlman.com

Barry Graham is the author of various things, including his latest, American Guerrillas: Manifesto. He is a four time National Tic-Tac-Toe Association champion, spiritual adviser, horror junky, food critic, conspiracy theorist, and nomad. He is the founding editor of DOGZPLOT, and currently, along with Leo Todd Jarret, runs the poetic and artistic spectacle known as the Madhouse Sessions.

Artist – instructor, Clarissa Jakobsons was twice featured poet in Paris, France at “The Shakespeare and Co. Bookstore” and was winner of the Akron Art Museum New Words Competition. She has read and published widely. Five-year Associate Editor of the Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal, she holds a B.F.A. in Visual Arts and recently had a solo art exhibition at Western Reserve Academy. She instructs creative courses at Cuyahoga Community College. Clarissa also weaves one-of-a- kind artist books, exhibited internationally as well as at the Cleveland Museum of Art Ingalls Library and the Morgan Conservatory. She writes, “Don’t be surprised to see my inner artist kicking sandcastles, climbing Mount Diablo, painting Provincetown dunes, or walking under an Ohio crescent moon.

Adam Hughes is the author of Petrichor (NYQ Books, 2010) and Uttering the Holy (NYQ Books, 2012). His collection Allow the Stars to Catch Me When I Rise is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry. He was born in 1982 in Lancaster, Ohio. He still resides near there on a farm with his wife and daughter, two dogs, four cats, and four horses. Should you google him, he is not the Adam Hughes who draws near-pornographic depictions of female superheroes. He cannot draw.

Leo Jarret is an Itinerant poet and fiction writer. He founded The Madhouse Sessions, which is a poetry, music and live art series staging events all over the region, in September of 2011. He currently runs The sessions with Barry Graham.

I’m going to be part of the illustrious line-up of Denver Creatives at the 27th Annual Podeo (Poetry Rodeo) this Friday, April 22. Joining me will be my creative collaborator the infamous Nick Busheff–together we are creating a little musical/theatrical preview of my upcoming book Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities. You will be our test audience. There will be costumes!

Free admission before 7. (We will go on the 9 o’clock hour). Open mic at the end of the night!

I hear a lot of authors asking for advice on ordering their collections. My first question to them is: Are you ordering an anthology or a collection?

Having done both, I believe what is required is very different.

First let’s get our terminology straight. By anthology I mean a book of stories written by many different authors. The editor of the anthology conceives, solicits, judges, and orders the pieces into the final product. By collection I’m referring to a single-author collection where the author is putting their own stories into one book.

Ordering an anthology is a little bit like taking a 3^rd grade class photo: you gotta get everyone in the picture. You might have pieces that are wildly different. You might have four kids wearing green sweaters. Your job is to make everyone look good. Whether you decide to put all the talls in the back or go boy-girl-boy, you are working with a lot of disparate pieces and are ultimately limited by your materials–your job is to try and place them in the most interesting and pleasing order, showcasing each and creating a solid whole.

When I edited Fast Forward: The Mix Tape back in 2010, I channeled the 1980s “mixtape” style (and we even had reader flip the book halfway through: Side A, Side B). It’s of course not the only way to order an anthology. You might put your most famous authors first. You might chunk the stories by theme, or style or even size (The Incredible Shrinking Story was organized largest to smallest).

But if an anthology is a little bit like a Greatest Hits Collection, then the single author collection is The Concept Album.

I’ve edited four anthologies, so I thought I was all set to order my own collection. But right away I realized there was a far more potent and more dangerous power available to me now. Now I didn’t just have artistic license over the order—I had artistic license over the whole thing. Now I had the possibility of manipulating the actual stories as I built the collection—something that would be a cardinal sin in an anthology. And this is why I’ve come to the conclusion that the mixtape or any other approach that works for an anthology might fall short in a single author collection. In a collection you are also manipulating the vibrations of story next to story to create a greater whole.

Think about it: Anthology readers have no qualms about reading the stories out of order—in fact, we almost expect them to go straight for the Table of Contents, look for their favorite authors, and start there. But the reader of a collection will often enter the book with story #1, and in this way a collection must behave like a novel, enticing the reader to keep turning pages in a way that an anthology doesn’t have to.

I ended up spending nearly as much time ordering my collection as I did writing the pieces themselves, and as I continued to shift and flip my stories, watching for the telltale vibrations to jump the synapses, there was a pliability that had never been available to me when creating an anthology; I now had the creative permission to write the gaps, change the tenses, sync the characters, manipulate the narrators, and otherwise match or contrast the stories as needed. And they began to take on second and third layers of subtext–no longer just individual stories but part of a greater symphony telling an even bigger story that I had never even considered.

A friend of mine told me for her collection she threw all her stories on the floor, picked them up, and that was the order. And I must admit that part of me likes the simplicity and divine randomness of that method.

But I’d like to propose that the act of ordering a collection is as precious as the act of writing it. Writers who are too quick to “get the ordering over with” in their collections might miss a lot of untapped potential in their work. I believe the work of ordering  is just as delicate, just as nuanced. And can be just as revealing.

Nancy Stohlman’s books include The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories (2014), the flash novels The Monster Opera (2013) and Searching for Suzi: a flash novel (2009), and three anthologies of flash including Fast Forward: The Mix Tape (2010), which was a finalist for a 2011 Colorado Book Award. She is a founding member of Fast Forward Press, the creator of The F-Bomb Flash Fiction Reading Series in Denver, and her work has been included in The Best of the Web.