I haven’t forgotten about my internet family!!!! Fbomb NYC via Zoom, baby! Everyone invited! Book giveaway!
Big FBomb! Friday, April 7th, Featured Reader Nancy Stohlman with her new book After the Rapture. Other readers: Kathy Fish, Craig Fishbane, Rob R Geisen, Len Kuntz, Jonathan Montgomery, Kona Morris, Sally Reno, Karen Schauber, Zvi A Sesling, Meg Tuite, Robert Vaughan, Jomil Ebro, Francine Witte and Paul Beckman.
Friday, April 7 at 6 pm EST/3 pm PST
Email paul@paulbeckman.com for link (please do not share link directly to social media)
Join award-winning authors and teachers Nancy Stohlman and Kathy Fish for a breakthrough gathering of inspiration, creation, and transformation in beautiful Colorado. Gather with the hummingbirds at our secluded vantage point in the clouds and experience High Altitude Inspiration for yourself. The spirit of the West has always attracted the bold and pioneering, the dream seekers among us, and Colorado in the summer is a special sort of magic. Whether it’s your first or hundreth time, being in the Rocky Mountains is nature at her finest, and Grand Lake is the quintessential Colorado experience, complete with stunning mountain views and a deep natural lake. Walk one direction and end up on the rugged trails of Rocky Mountain National Park. Walk less than a mile down the hill and drink some local Colorado whiskey in the historic town of Grand Lake.
OPEN YOUR ART High Altitude Inspiration in the Colorado Rocky Mountains AUGUST 15-20, 2023
Back In Person! ACC’s Annual Spring Literary Festival.
The Writers Studio at ACC provides a full-day writing conference for students and community members that is the most affordable, quality-laden literary festival you’ll find, for writers of all levels and ages.
Included with the registration fee:
One complimentary copy of the “Progenitor Art and Literary Journal”, v. 57, 2022
Continental Breakfast, including coffee and tea
Lunch
Author reading and book signing during lunch
Open Mic opportunity for registrants at the end of the day (approximately 5 minutes per person)
Registration fees: $25 student rate* $30 CCCS employee rate $40 Senior rate $55 community member rate *Students of any college or high school. Please show Student ID at check-in.
SCHEDULE 8:30-9:15 Sign-in and continental breakfast 9:30-10:45 Session 1 (registrants choose from 2) 11:00-12:15 Session 2 (registrants choose from 2) 12:30-1:30 Lunch and author reading (I WILL READ FROM AFTER THE RAPTURE) 2:00-3:15 Session 3 (registrants choose from 2** I WILL BE PRESENTING IN SESSION 3 3:30-4:15 Festival concludes with an Open Mic reading for registrants—time limit of five minutes per reader 4:30 campus closes
SESSION 3: 2:00-3:15 pm
Write a Flash Novel: All Meat and No Fat Workshop Description: Do you have a Big Story Idea brewing but you don’t know where to begin? Have you been working on a traditional novel/creative nonfiction book, but you find yourself hitting a wall? Maybe you need a total perspective shift, a radical re-visioning of how to write a book? Meet the “Flash Novel”, a breakout genre that draws on the skills of flash fiction to tell a large-scale story in a compact space. Existing at the intersection of the novel and flash fiction, the flash novel has both the scope and complexity of a novel and the ingenuity of flash fiction, delivering a sophisticated reading experience to a contemporary audience. In this workshop, we will envision, draft, collage, and create momentum on your Big Idea. We’ll begin breaking it apart and making friends with the scope of it. For 90 minutes, we’ll get out of our own way, and you will discover the bones of your project as well as the enthusiasm and insight to know where to go next. Open to all writers, whether you have already started writing or the idea still lives in your head and heart. Come ready to play and rethink what you know about writing a book.
I wrote this book between 2016 and early 2020, finishing it the same week the world went into quarantine. For the next year I watched as the line between truth and satire began to merge, and in the continuing aftermath it’s now impossible to separate the two…
***Signed copies will be available beginning March 15!
AFTER THE RAPTURE:In a world just slant from our own, the people are waiting for the Rapture. But what they get is not at all what they thought it would be. Whether they’re pilgrimaging to the Very First Kentucky Fried Chicken, living in life-sized Barbie houses, taking the Marriott staff hostage, trading Candy Corn on Wall Street or draining Loch Ness to “find out the goddamn truth once and for all,” there is a familiar sort of desperation in this post-Rapture existence. In moments you will laugh at the absurdity of their world, and in other moments the darkness will feel all too familiar…
What people are saying:
“In this world of Walmarts, Barbies, Kens, orgies/time-shares, 7-11s, clones, a red Lake Michigan, and dreams, Nancy Stohlman’s humor and talent shines. The rapture becomes more than just a rapture: it’s a world turning on its head, acceptance, and then finding a new normal. Redeeming and heart-felt, this dystopian novel-in-flashes is one not to forget. After the Rapture is a rapture!” Kim Chinquee, three-time Pushcart Prize winner, author of seven collections and the novel, PIPETTE
“After The Rapture is a startling, rhapsodic, brilliant tome. Stohlman dares to venture into an intricate mosaic of layered, futuristic identities, individualities, and lives both wasted and yet fully explored. A dazzling oscillation of scintillating prose, on the threshold between the ephemeral and the eternal. After the Rapture is a book full of surprise and wonder, a compelling and majestic book.” Robert Vaughan, author of Askew, Funhouse and Addicts & Basements
“Mesmerizing, challenging, funny, awesome, entertaining, bewildering, full of doom, wisdom, absurdity, and heart. I love how gigantic and scary Biblical personages and events are swallowed up by commercial / pop culture. It’s ridiculous, genius, and moving, all at the same time.” Robert Shapard, co-editor of the Norton Flash Fiction anthologies Sudden Fiction, Flash Fiction Forward, and Flash Fiction International
“Nancy Stohlman’s After the Rapture is the most raucous, innovative–and ultimately moving–disappearing act you’ll ever read. Brilliant!” SmokeLong Quarterly
image by Lynn Hough
AFTER THE RAPTURE is a flash fiction hybrid book written at the intersection between flash fiction and the novel. A leader and innovator of the form, Stohlman fragments the long form narrative into the distilled intensity of micro and compressed fiction while still maintaining a larger story arc. Nancy Stohlman has authored four previous books of flash fiction including The Vixen Scream and Other Bible Stories, The Monster Opera, and Madam Velvet’s Cabaret of Oddities, which was a finalist for a 2019 Colorado Book Award. Her flash fictions have been anthologized in the W.W. Norton anthology New Micro: Very Short Stories and in Macmillan’s The Practice of Creative Writing: A Guide for Students. Her flash fiction craft book, Going Short: An Invitation to Flash Fiction, won the Readers View Gold Award and was re-released as an audiobook in 2022.
Live from The Bunker: An Absurd Afterlife? A Barbie Rapture? Live TV broadcast interview with Nancy Stohlman
UPCOMING LIVE & VIRTUAL APPEARANCES
March 25: Arapahoe Community College Lit Fest presenter
March 30: In-person reading/signing at The Bookworm, Omaha NE
April 7: (Virtual) Fbomb NYC, 6 pm EST featuring Nancy Stohlman with guests Paul Beckman, Meg Tuite, Robert Vaughan, Len Kuntz, Kona Morris, Jonathan Montgomery, Rob Geisen, Sally Reno and Kathy Fish
April 29: The Mercury Cafe for the double book release (Nancy Stohlman and Johnathan Montgomery) “Nine Raptures at Once”. Details coming.
April 17: (Virtual): Shorter is Better: April Book Club Guest
May 18: (Virtual) Hundred Pitchers of Honey Reading Series with Courtney LeBlanc, Yael Aldana, Nancy Stohlman. 7:30 PM EST time.
June 1: In person: Rally Reading Series Pete’s Candy Store, NYC. Full lineup TBA
June 19: In person: Featured Reader, Spoken Word Paris. Full lineup TBA
June 22: In person: Featured Reader, Paris Lit Up. Full lineup TBA
July 14-16 Reader and Workshop Leader, Flash Fiction Festival in Bristol, UK
August 15-20: Open Your Art: High Altitude Inspiration in the Rocky Mountains Writing Retreat (www.flashfictionretreats.com)
Nancy Stohlman 