ART CRAFT HOLIDAY OPEN HOUSE AND HOLIDAY SALE DECEMBER 5TH AND 6TH

The LIT is proud to participate in the 22nd Annual ArtCaft Building Open Studio Holiday Sale. Open from 11am to 8pm on Saturday, December 5th and 11am to 5pm on Sunday, December 6th at 2570 Superior Avenue. A wide variety of local vendors will be selling their wares, here and throughout the building which will make thoughtful, terrific holiday gifts.

Featuring works by ABC (Art Books Cleveland), Bottom Dog Press, Drinian Press, The Wick Poetry Center, Mac's Backs, Wonder T-Shirts, Hats and Scarves by Marian Fairman, Visual art prints by Tim Lachina and by Donald Black, Jr., and of course all of our LITtle things. Come on by and support your area arts community by purchasing locally this holiday season. There is indeed something for everyone here!

Amy Whitaker's LITerary Debut!

On Wednesday, December 2nd The LIT joins forces with Mac’s Backs Books on Coventry in bringing Amy Whitaker to The LIT as she reads from and signs copies of her debut book, “Museum Legs: Fatigue and Hope in The Face of Art.” This funny and engaging look at the history and politics of museums will challenge the way people think of art and creativity in their own lives. Check out a sample of the book here.

For Closure: Visions of Reality, Words of Promise

   
                                                           FOR CLOSURE:
                                                              A BENEFIT
                                                          CELEBRATING
                                                      35 YEARS OF THE LIT

                                              Saturday, November 7  @ 6:30pm

                                                      Convivium 33 Gallery
                                                         1433 E. 33rd Street
                                                       Cleveland, OH 44114



For 35 years, The LIT, founded in 1974 as The Poets’ League of Cleveland, has been Northeast Ohio’s only independent, nonprofit organization dedicated solely to literature and literary artists. Marking its milestone 35th anniversary, The LIT has collaborated with Convivium 33 Gallery and artist Donald Black to revisit the very popular Mirror of the Arts program with For Closure: Visions of Reality, Words of Promise; An Exhibition of Photography, Words, and Found Materials to honor seminal and visionary figures whose early influences shaped The LIT’s mission. Featuring provocative, large-scale photographs by Donald Black, the series captures Cleveland’s foreclosure crisis and provides inspiration for words that speak to our city’s ability to survive in the face of adversity.

The LIT proudly honors John Gabel, Bonnie Jacobson, Robert McDonough, Leonard Trawick, and the late Cyril A. Dostal. Lifetime membership is awarded to Mary Chadbourne, Christopher Franke, Nina Freedlander Gibans, Diane Kendig, Joan Nicholl, and John Stickney. Words of Promise are contributed by Kazim Ali, Eric Anderson, Grant Bailie, Kelly Bancroft, Mary Biddinger, Giao Buu, Eric Coble, Cavana Faithwalker, Shurice Gross, Michelle Rankins, Kristin Olsen, and Erin O’Brien.  Featuring hors d’oeuvres and cocktails set to the soundtrack of the Vince Robinson Jazz Poets, the evening will mark The LIT’s rich history and fertile future.

Tickets: $35 or $95 (Limited Edition Print Catalogue & Gift Bag Included) Valet service will be provided.



To purchase tickets, inquire about sponsorship or advertising opportunities, an find out more about this historic celebration, contact Judith Mansour at 216.694.0000 or Judith@the-lit.org.

FALL 2009 Workshop Schedule

The Memoir and The Memoirist, with Thomas Larson

Saturday, October 31, 1-3pm @ The LIT
$55 for Members; $75 for Nonmembers


"Writing the Memoir" ~ A memoir is a story that focuses on the meaning and intensity of a singular relationship in the author's life - unresolved feelings for a parent, a child, a sibling, a friend; coming to terms with a loss, an illness, a death; remembering a significant phase like childhood or adolescence or a period like college in which the writer was challenged or changed.


Join Thomas Larson, author of The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative, for a two-hour workshop in memoir writing. We begin by discussing the significant differences between traditional autobiography and contemporary memoir. Next we explore memoir?s demanding questions: Where do I begin? What is my focus? How do I discover the emotional truth of my story? How do I write about the living? With numerous writing prompts, we look at the mainstays of the memoir form: truth-telling and self-disclosure; sudden versus long-ago memoir; good and bad therapeutic writing; and the importance of metaphor and myth in the personal life.
                                                     

LIT Public Fiction Workshop with Paula McLain

Third Thursday of Every Month, Beginning September 17, 2009

6:30 - 9:00pm @ Trinity Commons: 2230 Euclid Ave.

Cost: Suggested Donation of $5/session with current LIT Membership ($35/year)

This workshop features Paula McLain, author of 2 collections of poetry, a memoir about growing up in foster care, Like Family: Growing Up In Other People’s Houses, 2003 and the novel, A Ticket to Ride, published by Ecco/HarperCollins. A second novel, which fictionalizes a portion of Ernest Hemingway’s life, will be published by Ballantine in 2011.

In these two-and-a-half-hour monthly workshops, time will be divided between becoming familiar with the tools of fiction writing, and discussing your work (stories, partial novels or novellas, exercises) in a workshop format. Each session will be organized around an element of craft—description and detail, characterization, scene building, dialogue, point-of view, fictional place and time, the balance between summary and scene, etc.—with assigned readings, class-discussion, writing exercises and prompts tailored for each element. Over the course of the year, we’ll be building on what we’re learning, pushing exercises into scenes, scenes into full-length stories and chapters of novels, and then discussing these pieces as a group. Participants can hope to leave the experience with an increased appreciation for and knowledge about what it means to write fiction, considerable material for individual fiction projects, and a real-sense of a nurturing writing community.


PUBLIC Fiction @ The LIT is presented with the generous support of Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.



Prose Poetry with Robert Miltner

 

Thursdays: October 1, 8, 22, and 29 @ The LIT; 6:30-8:30pm
$155 Members; $175 Nonmembers.

 Prose Poetry is hybrid genre of literature where poetry and short fiction intersect. Students will read examples of different types of prose poems, discover the historical origins, consider the literary contexts of the genre, examine the theory and practice the genre, and write prose poems. More than just a poem formatted into a “blockhead” paragraph, the prose poem relies upon an interior logic of associations and leaps, tends toward the surreal, allows for fugitive content, and yet still requires the attention that readers give to general poetry. Students will write prose in various categories of prose poems, including lists, landscapes, places, travelogues, objects, characters, narratives, surrealist, hyperbolic, journalistic, meditative, and combinations of some of these categories. Students will consider the relationship between form and content, prose and poetry, what gets in and what gets tossed out, and discover the exciting tricks this mongrel genre can perform. The first week will be an introduction to the prose poem and an overview of the course. Weeks two, three and four will be devoted to workshopping student work.



Personal Essay/Memoir:Writing The Self
with Neal Chandler

Saturdays: September 12, 19, 26 and October 3, 10, 17
9am-12pm @ Trinity Commons, 2230 Euclid Avenue; Cleveland 44114
$185 for Members; $225 for Nonmembers

Readers love writers who tell their own stories with the energy and vividness of great fabulists, but with the candor and self-transparence of a penitent saint. Each requirement is, for its own reasons, daunting, not least of all because each may run counter to the other. In this course, students will be assigned reading of relevant texts, will participate in in-class writing assignments, and will by course end, have a solid completed draft of a personal essay or a chapter from a larger work.

Learn the delicate art of essay as memoir from Neal Chandler, PhD., North East Ohio MFA instructor. Participants will generate new writing “based on experience, research, and reflection” to submit to the class for response and feedback. The goal over the six weeks is to generate a finished essay or chapter.


Writing Poetry: Rhyme, Reason and rhythm
with Robert Flanagan

ONE-DAY Intensive

Saturday, 26 September; 1-4pm @ The LIT

$75 for LIT Members; $95 for Nonmembers

 Why is poetry not prose? Because it has a different visual shape, a more auditory appeal, and a logic of image and metaphor. Poetry is more song and dream than prose, moving by associational leaps to a discovery. In the first half of the workshop we will cover the voice of poetry (diction, rhythm, pause, speed, tone) and the structure of verse (meter, rhyme, line length, stanza shape), do exercises in image and metaphor, and write a few chain poems as a group. In the second half we’ll workshop members’ submitted poems.


How to Write a Ten-Minute Play with Christopher Johnston

Saturdays: October 3, 10, 17, and 24; 1-3pm @ The LIT
Cost: $155 for Members; $175 for Nonmembers

The intention of this four-week course is to define what works well in the ten-minute format and develop the building blocks to write a ten-minute play – character, plot, dramatic action – in a more distilled form than a full-length play. The course will draw from life experience, subjects pertinent to the individual writers, as well as writer-interaction in the sessions to identify and shape the characters and the play. By the end of the course, writers should have a solid ten-minute play in their hand or at least a character of interest or the kernel of a longer play that they can continue to create.


Ongoing:

4 x 4 Local Perspectives

LIT Book Club @ Mac's Backs
4th Sundays of Every Other Month
4-6pm
Free for Current LIT Members

The only thing better than reading a good book is having a group of friends who want to discuss it. The LIT, in conjunction with Mac’s Backs on Coventry, is hosting one such group. Every month, beginning on Sunday, Sunday September 27th, with a guest appearance by Cleveland Author Dan Chaon, 4 X4 Local Perspectives: will meet at Mac’s Backs on Coventry to read and discuss fiction, poetry and non-fiction written by Ohio authors. Upcoming authors include David Giffels, Thrity Umrigar, Paula McLain, Kazim Ali, and others.


MARK YOUR CALENDERS!
Local Perspectives meets the fourth Sunday of every other month at Mac’s Backs on Coventry (1820 Coventry Rd., Cleveland Heights, 216/321-2665) at 4 pm, beginning Sunday, May 31st. If you have questions or to sign up, please contact facilitator Lee Chilcote at leechilcote@gmail.com.


LIT Public Poetry Workshop

Third Friday of Every Month

7:30pm @ Mac’s Backs on Coventry (www.macsbacks.com or 216.321.READ) Class Size: Maximum 30
Cost: Suggested donation of $5/session with current LIT Membership ($35/year)

For over thirty-five years, The LIT Public Poetry Workshop has offered Cleveland-area poets the monthly opportunity to bring in a poem and receive useful suggestions for its improvement and to offer the same kind of help to peers in writing. We attract a diverse group of serious, friendly poets, ranging from teenagers and young adults to poets with decades of experience. Come once or come every month: All are welcome!

About the Instructor:
Robert E. McDonough, one of the LIT”s founders, has been named one of the forty important Cleveland poets since the Second World War in Cleveland Poetry Scenes. His poems have appeared in his book, No Other World (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1988), his chapbook, Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2009), and numerous anthologies and little magazines.

Book Launch and Reading

Book Launch & Reading

Saturday, October 10, 7pm at The Lit

Kazim Ali, critically acclaimed author of The Disappearance of Seth, & Ted Mathys, poet praised for lyricism in The Spoils will sign first edition copies and read this coming Saturday night.
This event is free and open to the public!

Robert Flanagan and Larry Smith

Saturday, Sep. 26th, at 7pm,

Join The LIT to celebrate the launch of Robert Flanagan’s punch packing new collection of poetry, Reply to an Eviction Notice. Flanagan’s journey as a fighter, educator, poet, and father come together in a confluence of lyricism and wit.
 
Ohio literary booster, author, poet, and publisher Larry Smith will read from his most recently launched novel, The Long River Home, a masterful work of fiction that chronicles an Ohio family’s struggles to survive and prosper. Heralded as the voice of Ohio, Larry Smith’s recent release is a must read.


Two of Ohio’s finest literary voices come together for this evening of reading, discussion, LITerary hob-nobbing!
Cocktails and Book Signing at 7pm
Readings at 7:30

What We Publish

We publish MUSE, a celebration of inspiration for literary artists.  MUSE is a quarterly publication of The Lit, dedicated to providing Ohio-based writers a platform to showcase superior craftsmanship, to supporting and promoting writers in their craft, to spotlighting news of interest in the literary community, and to elevating the overall literacy of the region.  MUSE seeks to delight, entertain, educate, and inspire its readers. We further aspire to elevate local, national, and we hope – some day, international awareness of Ohio as a literary arts epicenter.  MUSE publishes all genres of creative writing – including but not limited to poetry, fiction, essay, memoir, humor, lyrics, and drama; political essays; satire; profiles; book reviews; anything to stimulate public interest in reading and writing. Preference is given Ohio-based authors.

 Submissions may be sent electronically to info@the-lit.org, with MUSE Submission in the subject line. We prefer electronic submissions, but if you prefer hard mail, please include SASE to MUSE, c/o The Lit, 2570 Superior Avenue, Suite 203, Cleveland, OH 44114. We reserve the right to print or not print any and all submissions.