Haitian author and editor, Beaudelaine Peierre is visiting Drexel today. The reception will start at 3:00pm followed by a reading at 3:30 in Stein Auditorium, Nesbitt, 33rd and Market Street.

Doors part with a hydraulic hiss. Steam billows. Behold! The emerging voices of the nation have arrived… from the future.

Author Dani Shapiro, perhaps best known for the best-selling Slow Motion, her memoir of decadence and death, sits in as editor in the tenth entry in the Best New American Voices series: the 2010 edition.

How I am reading the best voices of 2010 while sitting a 2009 living room is beyond me. Perhaps the suggestion is that these time-traveling voices are the ones we ought to watch for in the new year. I was never much good at science.

At any rate, a leisurely 8-hour bus trek from Massachusetts to Philadelphia (including the obligatory breakdown at the side of the highway, but the extent of literature I could make out in the darkness were terse text messages) provided me with plenty of time to chisel my way through Shapiro’s selections, gleaned from writing programs and summer conferences such as Bread Loaf and Sewanee. So far the memorably named Boomer Pinches has underwhelmed, David James Poissant writes of broken father-son relationships with the same exterior grit and interior sentimentality of a Bruce Willis character, Claire O’Connor tackles cancer and great white sharks, and Christian Moody of the University of Cincinatti outdoes his peers with the truly original “Horusville,” a place where trees have eyes and record the lurid private lives of the town residents.

The Best New American Voices series first came on the scene in that dastardly year 2000 (remember stocking up on water and canned green beans? I know you do) and has since been edited by, in addition to the changing yearly guest editors, executive editor John Kulka and writer and critic Natalie Danford.

As a writer, there are a few tiers you may find yourself falling onto. Being a non-confrontational sort of person (oh, those Pisces — just so sensitive, you know?) I’ll refrain from ranking said tiers, but I will do the bare minimum and differentiate.

There are two types of Household Names. Strain A of Household Names are so pervasive that even a young Hellen Keller would have a hard time escaping them: Stephen King, Nora Roberts, Danielle “superfluous use of adjectives like ‘velvety’ or ‘dazzling”” Steele.

Then there is Strain B of Household Names, subtype Not-Really-Indie-Indies, the literary equivalent of films like I Heart Huckabees or Little Miss Sunshine. Hollywood? Not quite. But art house? I don’t think so. These writers are more often known by their works than their names — The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera), What is the What (Valentino Achak Deng), A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Dave Eggers).

Then, we have those writers who are not exactly obscure, for no writer, published, in print, read by eyes not belonging to friends and family and exes who cock their heads and wonder, Is that character me? is ever really obscure. But they are not household names, not even in the homes of self-styled intellectuals who make lots of references to Camus or Colette.

Kate Braverman is one of these not-exactly-obscurities. Born in 1950 and based in L.A., I feel Braverman deserves a bit of applause for her ventures into experimental hybrids of prose and poetry. Her short story “Vanishing Acts,” featured in the Spring 2004 issue of the Mississippi Review, goes out on a limb — out on a tightrope — and dashes plot and character to the ground in favor of sheer atmosphere. How lazy, bitter aspiring writers may be tempted to think — but “Vanishing Acts” is anything but. Braverman successfully takes an abstract concept and manages to conjure up exactly what she means while never directly explaining herself.

“This is how to vanish,” her — story? poem? essay? — begins. “[Vanished women] wear boots because they prefer walking,” she writes. “It’s the only way to become intimate with a city. You must kiss each brick, each cobblestone with your feet.”

We are never allowed to know explicitly what a vanished woman is. But we feel it. The writing is heard with the bones, not the eyes.

I wanted to give a quick recommendation to Sam Shepard’s stories in Fall 2009 issue of The Paris Review.

Anne Lamott, author of novels like Joe Jones (1985, North Point Press) and more recently Blue Shoe (2002, Riverhead Books), is perhaps best known for her fiction. But her greatest contribution to the literary scene may be her 1994 work of nonfiction, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

Hailed as “inspirational” and “timeless,” by San Francisco-based writer  Robin Dutton-Cookston, and described as being “so much better than what I can describe” by Christine Zibas, a columnist for Associated Content, Bird by Bird is a hybrid of self-deprecation, humor, tough love, and flowery metaphors that all coalesce into colorful writing advice. You won’t find any straightforward exercises, prompts, or methodologies. What you will find is a shoulder to lean on in the darkest depths of writer’s  block. Lamott deploys an army of anecdotes to illustrate just how hard writing is. She offers empathy without coddling the would-be writer and demands that you sit, think, and write.

Sound easy? Try it. And when your 10,000 page novel is eluding you? Grab Bird by Bird. In the words of her father, Anne Lamott will tell you: “‘Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.’”

The Paris Review is known for its literary interviews with renown poets and authors.  I didn’t realize that they have most (if not all) of their interviews available online for free. This is great resource for students and authors who want to read in-depth literary interviews on their favorite authors/poets. The Paris Review’s interview series turned me on to the amazing Marilynne Robinson.

Poetry readings present a variety of great opportunities to a diverse assortment of people.

• Average Guys: Impress your bleeding-heart girlfriends!
• Wannabe Poets: Get tips on how to darken your blacker-than-black wardrobe!
• Angsty Teens: Jot down lines you like and use them to protest your parents!

Furthermore, people who are — no! — legitimately interested in the simple pleasures of a nice, grandmotherly-cum-trendy cup of tea and/or fabulous poetry will enjoy themselves.

On November 10 — that’s tomorrow, for those among you who grope blindly at thin air like angry babies deprived of their Blackberries and iCal organizational tools — Painted Bride Quarterly is very pleased to present count ‘em 2! poets at Bubble House.

To get all the W’s out of the way in one fell swoop:

• What: Poetry reading.
• When: November 10, 7:30 p.m.
• Where: Bubble House, located at 3404 Sansom St. in good old Philadelphia
• Who: Lynn Levin, Ernest Hilbert
• Why: To spread great literature and all that good lofty stuff.
• How: Magic.

I wanted to take a minute to recommend Brian Evenson.  I’ve come to admire his writing because Evenson’s fiction is stripped of excessive narration. Evenson leaves out description of physical appearances of characters and settings of his stories. Evenson focuses on exploring how setting can effect the moral decisions that his characters make. Evenson was once a member of the Mormon church and received his BA degree from the Mormon affiliated Brigham Young University (BYU).

Evenson won an O. Henry award for his story “Two Brothers” in 1998.  He has published numerious collections of short stories, including The Wavering Knife and Altmann’s Tongue. Interestingly enough, Evenson even wrote a media tie-in novel for the Aliens franchise under B. K. Evenson entitled Aliens: No Exit, 2008.

As you, my lovely little reader of DPGOnline, may already be aware, Drexel University publishes a quarterly literary magazine. Nothing big, y’know… just a little mag that’s been around for nearly 40 years, receives submissions from all over the world, and has an odd tendency to discover literary gems that find their way into places like The Best American Poetry. It goes by Painted Bride Quarterly, in case you were wondering. (And you can order a copy here!)

But what is a literary magazine? And why do you need to know?

Most people have the wrong idea. They’re surprised to see a real, bound, book-thick “magazine.” Dump the image of some shlocky glossy number that’s stapled together and is full of the local creative writing teacher trying frantically to endorse himself. (Or herself, sorry.)  9 times out 10 — heck, 9 times out of 100 — that’s the wrong idea. While tragically (tragically!) little-known to the general non-literary public, lit mags are actually a fabulous starting point for any aspiring writer.

I don’t want to shatter your precious, harp-scored dreams of overnight success with the To Kill A Mockingbird of 2009, but chances are, in the cruel, cold world of publishing, it’s just not gonna happen. Don’t trash your manuscript, of course — but I can’t stress enough that it’s (imagine me saying this slowly and pounding my fist for emphasis) a very good practice to hone your skills and rack up credentials on smaller pieces, like short fiction and poetry, by winning the hearts of literary magazines.

Some carry more weight than others, and each one has its own editorial voice (i.e. preference) in terms of the material they publish. Some are in distribution of greater than 10,000, and some drop into obscurity at the opposite end of the spectrum.

A few great resources for lit mag beginners are NewPages, Poets & Writers, and Webdelsol. Check out lit mags like The Paris Review, Tin House, and AGNI. Poke around. Read some material from the archives, check out their links, and definitely look into submitting your own work! You can put yourself out there — you just need to know the right steps to take.

…Herta Müller!

A Romanian-born German, Müller, who suffered through the notorious reign of dictator Nicolae Caeucescu and the cruelties of an alcoholic father, draws upon her tumultuous life for inspiration in her acclaimed works.

She made her literary debut — to many a censor’s dismay — in 1982 with Niederungen, a collection of short stories. In the nearly thirty years to come, the prolific Müller churned out some two dozen works of poetry, essays, novellas, and novels.

Past winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature include Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, and John Steinbeck. “Müller” may not be such a household name — yet. But take a peek inside any of her works, and that just might change.