DJ Lady DM kicks off the night at 6:45pm. Reading begins at 7:15pm. Happy hour until 8:00pm. Second set at 8:15pm. Come shake off the cold with us in the heart of Harlem.
The FPP Interview: Michael Thomas
FPP asked acclaimed novelist Michael Thomas about the risk of memoir, who is mad about his forthcoming book, and what urgent advice he’s given young writers.
Photo by Angel Franco.
Please tell us about your forthcoming memoir The Broken King. It’s a 6-part memoir about Thomas men. Each section contains a central event, commentary, and meditation.
Are their risks in telling these stories? Yes: you could hurt those you love, or, simply, tell the stories poorly and injure your readers.
How would you describe the memoir-writing experience? Awful. It nearly ruined me.
To read more of this interview, go here.
The FPP Interview: Stacey D’Erasmo
Renowned novelist Stacey D’Erasmo will take the FPP Harlem stage next Monday at Shrine (event begins at 6:45 with DJ Lady DM). We talk to her about her visual arts influences and her love of (NY) city life.
You published first as a critic. What effect did that training have on your first novel? And now? It was actually pretty liberating. For one thing, when I was first writing reviews, primarily for the Village Voice Literary Supplement, I was writing for a very smart, very welcoming and open-minded audience, so I truly felt that I could express myself without reservation. Also, I was writing on deadline, which meant that self-consciousness never had the time to overtake me. I got accustomed to taking risks. To read the rest of the interview, go here.
The FPP Interview: Monica Ong
Monica Ong was trained as a visual artist but poetry has long been a part of her creative process. She joins FPP on January 28 to share her work, and we asked her a few questions about her influences, the act of translation, and cultural silence.
Monica in the group exhibition Narrative / Identity at the AC Institute in Chelsea. NYC, 2011.
What kind of connection exists between your poetry and visual art? I love writing within a visual context. The visual space and prompts I create give me something to write “against”, just like a designer receives a set variables in a design brief to create a campaign from. I have never really considered them separate as we often experience them together anyhow – even language by itself is still represented with typography, which carries aesthetic meaning. The context where we might encounter a text is also inherently significant, whether you’re reading a cereal box, a novel, or a prescription. To read more of this interview, go here.
Stacey D’Erasmo on “The Unsayable”
“What is unsayable? And why does it matter? There are several meanings of the word, and we might begin with where we each draw the outer limits in our own work. I’ve asked this question in several workshops—what is unsayable for you? What would you, I ask, never write about? What scene, event, relationship, philosophical or political quandary, moral dilemma, action would you never attempt to explore on the page?” Stacey D’Erasmo asks these questions in a lecture on writing the unsayable; read the rest of the article here.
The FPP Interview: Mackenzie Largie aka Lady DM
January 28 marks the first night we will open and close our reading with music, and spinning for us will be Mackenzie Largie, aka Lady DM. We spoke to her about being a DJ’ane, Europe v America for black girls, and the Norwegian night she made headline news.
Zurich, Switzerland 1999
Would you share the origins of Lady DM? Lady DM stands for devotee of the Divine Mother. My guru is Amma. My vision is to heal people through music, as I’ve been healed as a kid growing up under very unfortunate circumstances. Music and dancing saved my life. To read more of this interview, go here.
Read “The End of Sexual Identity” by Stacey D’Erasmo
“We’ve come to the end of sexual identity. Not, that is, in the real world, where sexual identities of all sorts still roam, both free and fettered, privileged and disenfranchised; love is still exciting; sex still matters. Real people still come out, or don’t, and consequences still attach to those choices. In art, however, the sturdy house of the novel of sexual identity, with its secret passageways and walk-in/walk-out closets and tempting garden paths and labyrinths, lies in ruins. We don’t really care who enters or leaves it; we pretty much know what goes on inside; we are not trying to peep through the windows.” Read the rest of the article here.
Monica Ong’s “Metal Lungs” on Drunken Boat
“This artist book begins with a diagram of the lungs, which open to reveal corresponding images and text. Using anatomy as an entry point, a narrative unfolds about the silent body of the “daughter”, dutiful but devastaed in the context of cultural obedience. The lungs, as the origin of voice and breath, become the landscape of suppressed histories, longing for shift.”
Digital collage and writing on archival paper, plywood. 2011. Look at the rest of book published on Drunken Boat, here.
Man Gone Down is Michael Thomas’s “luminous debut novel”
‘I know things aren’t going well,’’ begins the narrator of Michael Thomas’s debut novel, bracing himself for a downward journey. Broke and bile-infused, Harvard-educated, now jobless and down on his luck in New York, he is estranged from his wife and three children. It is the eve of his 35th birthday, and he has four days to somehow scrape together $12,000 to keep his family afloat.
Read the rest of Lucy Daniel’s review of Michael Thomas’s first book, Man Gone Down, here.
Announcing the Lineup for Our January 28th Reading!
The next event in the First Person Plural Harlem Reading Series will be January 28th at Shrine. Note that while we usually start at 7pm, we will begin at 6:45pm on the 28th since we have a special guest, international DJ Lady DM. Lady DM will spin for 30 minutes, followed by readings by novelists Stacey D’Erasmo and Michael Thomas, and a performance by poet and multi-media artist Monica Ong. Lady DM will close out the evening with another half hour set. We’re excited to host such an artistically rich group!
With roots stemming from the legendary musical island of Jamaica in the Caribbean, Mackenzie Largie a.k.a. Lady DM describes herself as a ‘musical expat’, an apt description for her take on crossing genres of dance-able music. Lady DM’s story begins in 1995, in NYC as a host on FIT’s radio station, by day; and avid regular at parties like Theo Parrish’s SugarBabies by night. Two years later, she begins her ascent of the city’s DJ circuit proper, a regular at venues like the Limelight, Orchard Bar, and The Cooler. While based in Europe from 99’-10’, Lady DM regularly hosted radio shows in Zurich, and Berlin, while jetting around entertaining crowds at legendary parties like Amsterdam’s Mazzo Club, Zurich’s Lethargy festival, Milan’s Cox 18, Munich’s Muffathalle, and Berlin’s WMF. http://djladydm.tumblr.com/
Stacey D’Erasmo is the author of the novels Tea, A Seahorse Year, and The Sky Below, and the nonfiction book The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in July. She is a former Stegner Fellow and the recipient of a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. Her essays, features, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Review , Bookforum, The New England Review, and Ploughshares, among other publications. She is an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University. Her fourth novel, Wonderland, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in spring 2014. http://www.staceyderasmo.com/
The work of artist-poet Monica Ong investigates cultural silences in the context of public health. The silence of the daughter, the fear of losing face, and untranslated trauma, are aspects of the medical-emotional landscape that her work evokes. Monica completed her MFA in Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her research has included fellowships at the Oral History Summer Institute at Columbia University, and the Writing the Medical Experience Workshop at Sarah Lawrence College. She is also a Kundiman poetry fellow. Her experimental image-poems have been published in the Lantern Review, The New Sound: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Art & Literature, Drunken Boat, Tidal Basin Review, and will be featured in the forthcoming issue of the Glassworks Magazine. She was recently nominated by Tidal Basin Review for the 2012 Pushcart Poetry Prize. Her narrative installations have been featured in exhibitions at the AC Institute in NYC, WomanMade Gallery of Chicago, and the Parachute Factory of New Haven, where she curated the exhibition Critical Condition, which collects medical narratives from diverse cultural communities. http://monicaong.com/
Michael Thomas is the author of Man Gone Down (Grove/Atlantic, 2007), a novel that follows a 35-year-old African-American man, broke and estranged from his white wife and three children, who has four days to keep his family afloat and reclaim his stake in the American Dream. The book was selected as one of the The New York Times Book Review’s top five novels of the year, as well as a New York Times Notable Book, and a San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book. In June 2009, Thomas was awarded the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award—his novel was selected from 145 books nominated by libraries around the globe, of which four were from the US. In 2013, Thomas will publish a memoir, The Broken King, about four generations of men in his family. http://www.blueflowerarts.com/michael-thomas
Venue: Shrine World Music Venue
(in Black United Fun Plaza)
September 10, 2012 @ 6:45pm
2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd.
http://www.shrinenyc.com/