The new Ninth Letter is finally out (vol. 8, #2), and it’s a doozy. It’s perhaps our best-designed issue in quite some time, and that’s saying a lot. The designers seem to be challenging one’s notion of how a literary magazine is supposed to be organized, and a reader enters into these pages through unusual paths. And there are plenty of surprises, including “Distribution of Intelligibility” and “Emotional Rollercoaster” charts.

There are also video supplements to complement your reading experience here.

I can also vouch for the prose and poetry inside, particularly the nonfiction, as this issue marks my first stint as the Ninth Letter nonfiction editor. Michele Morano’s “Crushed” expertly balances the innocent/dangerous sturm und drang complexities of a writing instructor’s attraction to her barely adolescent student; Sue William Silverman’s “Prepositioning John Travolta” is a brave—and darkly funny—investigation of language, desire, and a damaged past; Monica Berlin, in “On Beds, Or Where We Sleep,” examines the rectangular landscape that often escapes our careful attention, the place where we conceive our children, the place “where we learned to be most alone”; in the essay “The Waiting Place,” Jacqueline Saint-Pierre takes the reader to a different landscape, where time resonates with uncomfortable clarity as one awaits the results of a crucial medical test; and finally, Eric Dean Wilson’s “Mephisto: Scenes from the End,” gives us a personal portrait through the lens of Memphis, Tennessee (which lies close to the currently dormant New Madrid fault line), in an essay structured like the different stages of measuring earthquake intensity. Excellent and original essays all!

I’m also proud of have had a role in bringing Kyle Minor’s novella, “In a Distant Land,” to the Ninth Letter website. This novella is a series of six letters written by different characters and sent from Haiti during an increasingly chaotic time in that country’s history, six letters that limn the mystery of a young woman whom we never otherwise see directly. We’re offering this intriguing and powerful work as a serial, one letter a week, for the next six weeks, here. Please drop by periodically to take in this unusual publishing event.

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I was delighted to be nominated for the 2012 Above and Beyond Mentor Award, hosted by the Beyond the Margins website. What an honor, to be on a list of nominees that includes (among many others) the estimable Erika Dreifus. My many thanks to former student Jodi Paloni (explore her website here) for nominating me, and my congratulations to the winner, Johanna Harness.

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I was recently interviewed by David Inge, on his radio show Focus 580 on the NPR affiliate WILL, about my recent favorite books. These include The Weather Fifteen Years Ago, by Wolf Haas, Music for Silenced Voices, by Wendy Lesser, The Solitude of Prime Numbers, by Paolo Giordano, The Least Cricket of Evening, by Robert Vivian, The Boys of My Youth, by Jo Ann Beard, and others. If interested, you can listen here.

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I recently appeared as a guest on WEFT’s Rock Geek Chic, joining hosts William Gillespie and Cristy Scoggins in an exploration of Radiohead b-sides and other obscurities, ranging from the pre-Pablo Honey era right up to and beyond King of Limbs. With over 40 worthy songs to play, we had to do two two-hour shows, so if you’re a Radiohead fan and don’t know these songs, you can kill an entire afternoon here.

William and Cristy are quite accomplished “rock scholars,” though for some reason they keep inviting me to their fine show. I’ve done programs on The Byrds, Gene Clark, Procol Harum, John Martyn, and the remarkable Portuguese new-wave band Rádio Macau. If curious, you can listen by clicking on the bold-faced band names above.

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The Knox Writers’ House Recording Project is now online, and I’m honored to be a part of this grand endeavor: recordings of writers from around the country reading from their own work and the work of other writers who have inspired them. So, I somehow find myself in a stellar group that includes Michael Martone, Carl Phillips, Eula Biss, Kellie Wells, James Tate, Tom Franklin, Brian Evanson, Mary Jo Bang, Peter Orner and many, many others. You can find ‘em all here. And you can find the page devoted to me and my work here, where I read from five of my books, as well as the work of James Baldwin and Fernando Pessoa. There’s also a line drawing based on a photo of me flanked by my wife Alma and daughter Hannah. Thank you to whoever darkened my hair to make me look twenty years younger!

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I’m just back from Montreal, Canada, where my wife and co-author, Alma Gottlieb, and I read from the manuscript of our forthcoming book Braided Worlds (the second volume of our memoir of Africa) at the 2011 American Anthropology Association conference. We read as part of the panel “Writing Ethnography: Experimenting on Paper, Experimenting Online,” and what an honor to appear with such excellent fellow panelists: Sophia Balakian, Ruth Behar, Susan Lepselter, Antonio Medeiros, and Kirin Narayan.

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I have recently been invited to the faculty of the Dzanc Books/CNC DISQUIET International Literary Program, which will he held in July 2012 in Lisbon, Portugal, and I can’t adequately describe how excited I am about this. The schedule hasn’t been set yet, but I’m guessing that I’ll probably offer a workshop on literary travel writing, be on a publishing panel (representing Ninth Letter), and present a combined lecture on the poet Fernando Pessoa/walking tour of Lisbon. If you’re interested in a summer literary program held in one of the world’s greatest cities, you can check out more on the Disquiet program here, and you can read about my Lisbon creds here at the Disquiet blog.

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“8:46,” my 9/11 short story (inspired in part by my volunteer work near ground zero in 2001 and 2002), has been reprinted at the literary website Numero Cinq, on the occasion of the impending tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks (the story was originally published by the Los Angeles Review in 2007). “8:46,” which follows the paths of eleven doomed souls making their way to work at the towers in the early morning just before the attacks, is an excerpt from a novella-in-progress, Dreaming the Towers. You can read the story here.

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My many thanks to Camden Luxford for her sensitive interview with me, about The Moon, Come to Earth and the trials and pleasures of living abroad; it’s the latest interview on her superb The Brink of Something Else, a website that should be an essential stop for any would-be or experienced traveler. She has also recently posted a review on her website of The Moon, Come to Earth, one of the most insightful (and beautifully written) my book has yet received.

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“Mad to Be Modern,” an extended excerpt from a second memoir of Africa co-authored with Alma Gottlieb, Braided Worlds (forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press, Fall 2012), has just been published in the anthology Being There: Learning to Live Cross-Culturally (edited by Sarah H. Davis and Melvin Konner), by Harvard University Press.

You can read a portion at the bottom of this website’s Anthology Excerpts page.

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The library of the City University of Hong Kong has named The Moon, Come to Earth as a book of the week, for the week beginning July 11, 2011.

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I’m just back from the ten day summer residency at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where I serve as a core faculty member. While there, I delivered a craft lecture, “To Kill a Great Gatsby in Cold Blood, or, A Good Title Is Hard to Find”; gave a reading from “My Father’s African Afterlife” (an excerpt from the forthcoming Braided Worlds); had a grand time co-teaching a sequence of fiction workshops with novelist and short story writer Abby Frucht; and had the undeserved honor of introducing the visiting writer Dan Chaon.

Every Vermont residency is filled with abounding excellence, and some of the highlights for me were Douglas Glover’s craft lecture on deconstructing the peculiar pleasures of reading Thomas Bernhard, and Connie May Fowler’s moving and personal lecture on transferring one’s writing voice into speech when giving a public reading. Other fine craft lectures included Larry Suttin’s “Why Do Memoirs Need Defending?” and Robert Vivian’s “Writing as an Act of Erasure.”

Other stand-outs included William Olsen’s electrifying reading from his new book, Sand Theory, as well as fine readings by Jess Row, Sue Silverman, Kurt Caswell and Rigoberto Gonzalez, among many others, and a moving tribute to poet Jack Myers and his posthumous collection, The Memory of Water.

And congratulations to my recent advisees Corinne Lincoln-Pinheiro, Jodi Paloni, Anne Penfield and Mary Stein, graduating students this residency who delivered first-rate lectures and readings of their work!

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My review of Roy Kesey’s wonderful new novel, Pacazo, appears on Inside Higher Ed’s “The Education of Oronte Churm” blog, which you can see here.

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The new issue of Ninth Letter, the University of Illinois’ literary/arts journal, is out (Vol. 8, No. 1, Spring/Summer 2011), and once again I stand by our round-up of superlative fiction.

“Water Festival,” by Jensen Beach, begins as nonfiction and then slyly, artfully crosses the border into fictional territory. “Again St.” by Jimmy Chen leaps unexpectedly from perspective to perspective (human and nonhuman) in a poignant story about endings. In “Dad Stuff,” by Benjamin Rybeck, a voice from the afterlife regards the mysteries of love, loss and fathers. William Wall gives us, in “I Bought a Heart,” the backdrop of the devastated Irish economy and two strangers who are briefly drawn to each other’s unexpressed anger. Kellie Wells constructs a strange world in “The Sorrows,” where people are defined and fated by the year of their birth; as you might imagine, those born in The Year of Sorrow endure much more than those born in The Year of Guarded Optimism. Naomi J. Williams offers a haunting journey of discovery from the 18th century, when a crew of French sailors scoured the Pacific in search of uncharted islands, in “Folie à Plusieurs.” Finally, “The Human Element in the Machine Process,” by Kevin Wilson, is a powerful story about two parents’ “stinging embarrassment of hope” as they care for a child whose “entire body was hidden inside the apparatus that kept him alive.”

As for the new issue’s design, it maintains our cutting edge efforts, and as you can see from the spread below, we ask the reader to bring two separate sections of the magazine together, in order to see the interaction of text and art!

This was my last issue serving as fiction editor, and I’ve embarked on a stretch as Ninth Letter’s nonfiction editor. We’ve already chosen the essays for the next issue, which include lovely work from writers such as Michele Morano and Sue Silverman. More on this later!

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I was recently interviewed, along with Martin Riker, Associate Director of Dalkey Archive Press, by David Inge of WILL-AM radio on his Focus 580 show, about e-books and the future of book publishing. You can listen to our back and forth here.

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My many thanks to Ben Taylor, of the website movingtoportugal, for an interview that we conducted in real time via Skype, in which I confess just how much my Portuguese-English dictionary is disappointed in me.

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Author Jo Parfitt, at her website Become an Expat Writer, kindly interviews me about The Moon, Come to Earth, the vagaries of the writing life, and inspiration. Her review of my book can be found here.

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Go Lisbon features a short article by me about one of the off-the-beaten-path pleasures that can be found in the otherwise heavily-touristed area of Chiado, in Lisbon. This post has also been reprinted at the Lonely Planet website.

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More news for The Moon, Come to Earth:

The website bestinportugal, which offers a comprehensive look at everything you’d like to know about Portugal, features an interview with me about the writing of my book of Lisbon dispatches. Many thanks to Alberto Rouiller for an engaging set of questions.

Meanwhile, Carlos Ceia has written an appreciative and well-researched essay titled “O Miroadouro Intercultural: The Moon, Come to Earth de Philip Graham” in the Revista de Estudos Anglo-Portugueses (#19, 2010), available as a pdf.

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Ben Taylor, at the engaging website movingtoportugal, where he recounts the tribulations and joys of his family’s new life in Portugal, has written a positive (thank you) and movingly personal review of The Moon, Come to Earth.

Meanwhile, Bjarne Mouridsen, at the website Portugal-mit andet hjemland (Portugal–My Second Home) has also written a quite generous review of The Moon, Come to Earth (at least, according to the Google translation function!). Again, my thanks.

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At the website, an unperfect, my book The Moon, Come to Earth was used to help form a “stackable poem,” titled “The Shadow of the Sun.” There are many more such stackable poems (composed from the titles of books) featured on the website, worth checking out. A very cool idea. Thank you, Saundra.

The Shadow of the sun

a trick of sunlight
the moon, come to earth
limousine, midnight blue
the lost lunar baedeker

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The new issue of Ninth Letter ( Fall/Winter 2010-11) is now out, and once again as fiction editor I’m prepared to take a stand for our latest marvelous fiction roster, beginning with “Sushi for Fish,” a story by Graham Arnold about a young man who becomes a sushi master because of his ability to speak with fish. The issue is also graced by a haunting trio of shorts of families struggling through a slowly unwinding apocalypse, by Matt Bell. Jedediah Berry (author of the remarkable and dreamy steam-punkish detective novel The Manual of Detection), in “Ghost 7, Prince 9,” serves up a world worth getting lost in, of character archetypes and their endlessly mirroring simulacra. Michael Czyzniejewski (or as we call him, “Mike C”) loses his forgetful main character in a Midwestern corn maze in “The Amnesiac in the Maze,” a story that can give you the creeps because corn mazes, as everyone knows, are only slightly less scary than clowns. Roy Kesey, who perhaps qualifies as a regular here at Ninth Letter (this is his third appearance in the magazine), gives us an excerpt from his first novel Pacazo, set in Peru, which is garnering enthusiastic critical attention every which way. Finally, Mary Miller, in “Eureka, CA,” offers a poignant story of a woman trying to fit into the life of a man who has a hole inside him the size of his dead child.

Next issue, I’ll be lauding the nonfiction selections of the magazine, as this semester I’ll be serving as the Nonfiction editor of Ninth Letter. In the meantime, feel free to give a listen to a podcast of our editor Jodee Stanley speaking with various Ninth Letter editors (including yours truly) about the collaborative process of putting together an issue of our magazine, which can be found here at Inside Higher Ed (thank you, Mr. Oronte Churm). Learning how sausage is made was never so worthwhile.

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My many thanks to Ryan Teitman for his enthusiastic review of The Moon, Come to Earth, in the Winter 2010 issue of Indiana Review. Here are some selected quotes:

“The genre of the dispatch–those brief, quickly composed messages meant to travel the world with utmost haste–lets Graham do the work he describes in the title. He can keenly describe the life and culture of Portugal, but he can also order us to come along for the voyage. And while these essays are brief (most are around five pages long) they are by no means slight . . . Graham is an astute observer of the idiosyncrasies of place, and his feel for people–especially his own family–is equally honed . . . Graham is just as wiling to look inward at his own family as he is willing to look outward and observe daily life on the streets of Lisbon . . . And while we can never fully understand Lisbon from a book, Graham makes us realize what’s special to him and his family–a prize that’s just as rewarding.”

The full review can be found here.

In related news, The Moon, Come to Earth is now available on the Nook.

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I’m still basking in the glow of the latest Nonfiction Now conference, held in Iowa City this November, which displayed, over three days, the vibrant diverse energies of creative nonfiction. Where to start? John Edgar Wideman gave a great talk on the story behind Romare Bearden’s collage, Farewell Eugene; Alison Bechdel (seemingly impersonating a youthful K.D. Lang), offered an intimate, multimedia look at the creative process behind her graphic memoir Fun Home and its forthcoming sequel; and Marilyn Freeman, John Bresland and Joseph Squier (a fellow co-founder of Ninth Letter) led perhaps my favorite panel, on the video essay.

Not that there wasn’t an excess of back-to-back excellent panels, from women travel writers, to Australian nonfiction, to a panel discussion of David Shield’s notorious Reality Hunger, and I had a fine time serving on two panels, “Containing Multitudes: The Discovery of Voice in Nonfiction,” and “When the World Changed.” Kudos to Robin Hemley for another first-rate, well-oiled conference.

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The September 2010 issue of Brevity is now online, and it includes a lovely review, by the very kind Dinty W. Moore, of The Moon, Come to Earth. He writes, “Philip Graham shows us how to write honestly and well about an unfamiliar culture . . . [W]ritten like a poem, and full of the poignant details one only notices when embedded in a new culture, not just passing through . . . The Moon, Come to Earth should be required reading for all those about to travel abroad, especially if they plan to pack along pen and paper.” Thank you Mr. Moore!

The issue also includes essays by David Huddle and Lia Purpura (author of the fabulous On Looking), as well as many other fine writers, and a review of my Vermont College colleague Sue Silverman’s Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir. All worth looking into . . .

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The Daily Illini, the campus newspaper of the University of Illinois, featured a report on my fiction and non-fiction that have been influenced by my experiences volunteering near Ground Zero after 9/11, in an article titled “Literature Explores a Post-9/11 World.” May all restless souls find peace.

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It’s hard to fully express what an honor it is to have my pre-obituary posted on the website Boomer Death Counter (“Tracking the quickening demise of the ‘Me’ generation . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . Gone!”). If I have one complaint, it’s that the informational paragraph on my nasty, brutish and short life is just a touch skimpy on specific details.

I should also note that the website also offers this bright red cavil: “NOTE: Philip Graham (writer) has not yet died.” Whew.

Meanwhile, two bloggers have recently posted kind mentions of their reading The Moon, Come to Earth, at Materfamilias Reads, and Martin in the Margins, the latter too generously comparing me to Adam Gopnik. Thank you both.

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Harmony Neal, one of my Illinois MFA advisees from a few years back, recently published her nonfiction piece, “Serendipity,” in the literary journal Gulf Coast, and now an excerpt from that essay appears online at Harper’s. Congratulations, Harmony! You can read the excerpt here, which should prime you for reading the entire essay here.

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I’ve recently returned from teaching at the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA summer residency, where I also presented a craft lecture and gave a reading from my forthcoming (fall 2011) book of nonfiction, Braided Worlds.

I was delighted to attend the graduation craft lectures and readings of three of my former advisees, Renee Giovarelli, Kate McCahill, and Mayumi Shimose Poe–each presentation an exhilarating example of what a Vermont College degree can inspire. Bravo, everyone!

I go to Vermont College not only to teach but to learn, and this residency was no exception. A writing exercise that Sue Silverman offered during her craft lecture on Flash Nonfiction unlocked for me a scene that I’d been struggling to revise for weeks; a lecture by Trinie Dalton, “How Easy It Is To Enter,” introduced me to the work of Can Xue; a lecture on the writing of memoir by Sara Mansfield Taber mixed humor and insight to great effect in her description of the squalling babies of memory; and the lecture on graffitti as poetry and art by Nance Van Winckel was a multimedia revelation (and you can view her video on the subject here).

I attended more excellent readings of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, by faculty and graduating students, than anyone would dare shake a stick at. Perhaps the highlight was visiting poet (and Pulitzer-Prize winner) Claudia Emerson, who topped off her reading by singing (accompanied by her husband on guitar) a country blues tale of revenge!

Already, I have saudade for my colleagues and the campus. Until next summer . . .

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I’m just back from Toronto, Canada, where I attended the 11th International Conference on the Short Story in English, “The Border as Fiction.” I participated in the panel “In A Land Far, Far Away: Travel and the Short Story Writer,” reading four brief selections from my short stories that have been influenced by my various travels. A real pleasure to share the podium with the writers Michele Morano, Christine Sneed and Xu Xi.

I returned home with more international news: the Portuguese publishing house Editorial Presença will publish a translation of my book The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon, in April 2011. I’m looking forward to reading what the Portuguese equivalents might be for “whatchamacallit,” “yukking it up,” and “jitters,” among others.

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My dispatch “I Don’t Know Why I Love Lisbon,” about the pleasures of eating grilled sardines in a Portuguese tasca while watching a World Cup game, has been reprinted at Leite’s Culinaria, the website of chef and writer David Leite, author of the fabulous cookbook The New Portuguese Table. It’s the World Cup season! And as for eating grilled sardines, well, that’s forever.

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The latest issue of Ninth Letter is out (Spring/Summer 2010), and though I’m semi-famous in the magazine’s offices as the guy who always says, “This is our best issue ever,” I’m gonna have to say it again: this is our best issue, ever.

I’m especially proud, as fiction editor, of our newest roster of writers. Angela Woodward, in “The End of the Fire Cult” (an excerpt from her forthcoming novel), introduces us to the complex border disputes between the two countries that a wife and husband have imagined and continually, strategically revise; Sheila M. Schwartz somehow managed the small miracle of combining harrowing honesty with humor–however dark–in her story “Critical Mass,” which channels the intricate resolve of a growing cancerous tumor; “What Rough Beast,” by Stephen Marche, explores the worldwide reaction to the startling discovery that the radiant face of God has been revealed (in the corner of the screen) during a busy moment in a porn video; in “Below the Salt,” an excerpt from a novel-in-progress by Katherine Vaz, a starving mother and son, imprisoned for their religious beliefs on the Portuguese island of Madeira, learn how to eat the music of birds; Douglas Glover demonstrates just how lonely it can be at the top when you’re a “wealthy and famous forensic archeologist” in his story “The Sun Lord and the Royal Child”; finally, the eponymous hero of the story “Paint,” by Whit Coppedge, navigates through his adolescence in an awkward body that may or may not be two-dimensional.

Our new issue abounds in terrific poetry and nonfiction as well, and the art and design folks have outdone themselves this time—I don’t think anyone will contradict me when I say that this is the most gorgeous issue we’ve ever produced. But don’t take my word for any of this. We’re already running teaser excerpts from the issue’s contents, which you can check out here, and here.

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My essay “Traveling with Children” (a much revised version of a panel presentation I delivered at last month’s AWP conference in Denver) has been published at Chantal Panozzo’s excellent website Writer Abroad.

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Last night I discovered (okay, by accident, I admit) how to display a favorite website as a hovering icon on the screen of my new iPad. Immediately, I applied this nifty transformation to 3 Quarks Daily and The Millions and placed them right next to the Settings icon. Then this morning, soon after waking up I pressed the icon for The Millions, and–surprise!–what should pop up but the front page featuring a sweet and generous review of The Moon, Come to Earth, by the eloquent but apparently internationally clumsy (like me) Andrew Saikali.

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At Writers Read, I offer reviews of four of my favorite books that I’ve read recently, by Wolf Haas, Kyle Minor, Midge Raymond, and Lori L. Tharps (and a brief nod to Hillary Mantel and David Kirby, authors of books I’m currently in the middle of reading). The round-up is also available at Campaign for the American Reader.

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My essay about the secret histories behind a love of books, “Every Day I Open a Book,” has been published at the marvelous literary/book reviewing website, The Millions.

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At Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle, I confess in a guest post my history of either kissing or (more rarely) throwing books, and how these impulses won’t adapt well in a future world of e-books.

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One of my advisees this past fall at the Vermont College of Fine Arts low-residency MFA program, Sheila Stuewe, has won an AWP Intro Award in Creative Nonfiction, for her essay “Residual Value.” Congratulations, Sheila! Meanwhile, another of my Vermont advisees from the fall semester, Kate McCahill, has won a Mary Elvira Stevens Traveling Fellowship, which will finance a writing trip from Guatemala to Patagonia. Bravo, Kate!

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Writer and editor extraordinaire Dinty W. Moore offers some gracious words about The Moon, Come to Earth at the Campaign for the American Reader website: “I am currently reading Philip Graham’s The Moon, Come to Earth, a fascinating blend of travel writing and family memoir set in Lisbon. I love the way the book refuses to limit itself to one mode or the other, and how Graham’s various turns and twists eventually combine to make a whole much greater than the sum of the parts. He is also just a clear, enjoyable, funny writer.”

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My recent reading in Tallahassee, at The Warehouse (sponsored by the creative writing program at FSU) is now available at The Southeast Review as a podcast.

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Writer, editor, and my former student John Warner interviews me for The Morning News, inducing me to talk about consulting a diviner in Africa for writer’s block, feeding my mentor Grace Paley one of her last meals, the experience of having an issue of the New Yorker (with one of my stories inside) stalk me across three continents, and my family connection to the iPad. You can read all about it here.

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Two literary websites have kindly featured interviews with me about The Moon Come to Earth: Miriam’s Well and Writer Abroad.

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Luso-Americano, the national circulation Portuguese-American newspaper, has a full-page feature on The Moon, Come to Earth, complete with an article and review, interview and photos, in the February 26 issue.

Maria do Carmo Pereira writes: “Conseguiu captar a essência dos portugueses e transmiti-la para um livro onde nos podemos ver ao espelho, como um reflexo. Estamos, ali, retratados por um observador imparcial, que consegue interpretar exactamente o que nos diferencia, e captar a beleza das coisas mas simples que nos passam despercebidas no corre-corre diário.”

Or, in my unbiased attempted translation, “he was able to capture the essence of the Portuguese and transmit it to a book where we are able to look into a mirror’s reflection. We are, there, portrayed by an impartial observer who can interprete exactly what differentiates us from others, and he captures the beauty of the simplest things that we pass by unknowingly in our daily rounds.”

If you’d like to give your Portuguese reading skills a try, you can find the February 26th issue here, then scroll to page 12.

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I’m returning to the road for a brief spring leg of my book tour for The Moon, Come to Earth, which will include readings, panel appearances and book signings. If you’re in the area of any of these events, please drop by!

Wednesday, March 17th
4:30 PM
Reading
Early Spring Literary Festival
Illini Union Bookstore
809 South Wright Street
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Friday, March 19th
2:00 PM
Panel and book signing
Virginia Festival for the Book
“The Writer Travels” (with Alan Cheuse & Lori Tharps)
Old Dominion Bookshop
404 East Main Street
Charlottesville, Virginia

Tuesday, March 23rd
8 PM
Reading
The Warehouse
706 West Gaines Street
Tallahassee, Florida
Sponsored by Florida State University English Department

Thursday, April 8th
4:30 PM
Reading and panel
“Baby on Board Abroad: Travel Writing and Family”
Room: 210, 212 CCC
Associated Writing Programs conference
Denver, Colorado

Friday, April 9th
9:00-10:15 AM
Book signing
Exhibit Hall A, E7
Vermont College of Fine Arts booth
Associated Writing Programs conference
Denver, Colorado

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This March 15-17, the Creative Writing Program of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, will host our first annual Early Spring Literary Festival: a rousing three days of panels, craft talks and readings.

The first event will be an National Book Critics Circle-sponsored panel titled “The Next Decade in Book Culture: The Rise of the E-Book.” I’ll be on the panel, along with the president of the NBCC, Jane Ciabattari; Martin Riker, Associate Editor of the Dalkey Archive Press; and Harriet Green, the English and Digital Humanities Librarian of the University of Illinois. You can read more about the panel at Critical Mass, the web blog of the NBCC, and more about the festival and view the entire schedule here.

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The third edition of Janet Burroway’s Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft (Penguin Academics) has been published, and it includes a section on the value for writers of keeping a journal. Burroway includes a couple pages from one of my writing journals, the one I kept while living in the small village of Asagbé in the Ivory Coast in the summer of 1993. The entries include bits and pieces of two novels I was working on; a mention of a malaria drug, Halfan; a sentence of a review I was writing for the Chicago Tribune of John Hawkes’ novel Sweet William; and this observation of a bit of activity passing by me in the village: “the choppy, swaying gait of goats.”

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Ninth Letter has a new issue out (volume 6, number 2), and as the fiction editor of the magazine I couldn’t be prouder of the six stories we’re featuring.

The story “Deciduousness: the Mechanism,” by Ander Monson, combines love and betrayal, an unobtrusive yet terrifying machine, and the approaching end of the world; we’ve published it as a stand-alone set of six combined booklets. “Stomp Tokyo,” by Viet Dinh, takes place on the super-secret island where all the giant monsters of Japanese movies are kept safely–one hopes–penned away from the rest of humanity. Marianne Jay’s story (and her first published fiction) “Cherry Ripe,” about adolescence and mysterious radio signals, is written beautifully in the difficult-to-master first person plural. The conflicted narrator of “Return to Sensibility Problems After Penetrating Captive Bolt Stunning of Cattle in Commercial Beef Slaughter Plant #5867: Confidential Report,” by John Warner, takes us step-by-step into the moral complexities of the slaughterhouse. “Your Book: A Novel in Stories,” by Cathy Day, tells the story of a novel as it is written, published and marketed, and then over the years makes its way into the minds of readers. Benjamin Percy, in “Terminal,” will remind you of every fear you’ve ever entertained while flying.

What a great line-up. And I’m not even mentioning our new issue’s first-rate nonfiction, poetry and art!

If anyone’s interested in some of the inner workings of the magazine, you can read this interview with me at the Sequoya Review.

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The Significant Objects Project pairs writers with objects that have been bought at a yard sale. Each writer is asked to write a story (500 word limit) that invents for the object a secret history and significance. The object plus its story is then auctioned on e-Bay, and all proceeds are donated to 826 National, the community of nonprofit organizations across the country that help students ages 6-18 with expository and creative writing. A good cause! Writers who have contributed in the past include Nicholson Baker, Jonathan Letham, Aimee Bender, Margot Livesey, Colson Whitehead, David Shields, William Gibson, and many others. And now a ringer like me. My object is a pepper shaker, and you can find a photo of the object and my story here.

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The literary magazine Hunger Mountain has begun its Exquisite Corpse Project, a collaborative story titled “The Malleable Morning Bruises,” which will be published in monthly installments. “No one knows exactly where this is leading,” the editors announce, and certainly not me, since I’ve written the first installment and am as curious about what will follow as anyone else. You can read all about it here.

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The Barnes & Noble Review recommends The Moon, Come to Earth, saying that these dispatches from Lisbon “explore the meeting of self and city with alert, subtle attention.”

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The Moon, Come to Earth is now available on the Kindle.

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The novelist Philip Womack, writing for The Guardian U.K.’s The Observer, has reviewed The Moon, Come to Earth, saying, “Graham’s writing is unobtrusive and gentle, and . . there is a pleasant luminosity that renders this little book of essays serene and enjoyable.”

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The anthology Now Write! Nonfiction: Memoir, Journalism, and Creative Nonfiction Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers, edited by Sherry Ellis, has just been published by Tarcher/Penguin; the collection includes my contribution, “Can You Hear Me Now?” Other contributors include Gay Talese, Lee Gutkind, Dinty W. Moore, Jenny Boully, Robert Atwam, Robin Hemley, Lee Zacharias, Sue Silverman, and Xu Xi. You can order the book here.

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The excellent website In Love with Lisbon (where you can lose yourself in its eloquent discoveries of the city) has posted a review of The Moon, Come to Earth, saying of the book, “This is not just an embellished travel journey, this is a story of one family and their fierce and delicate love for each other. Philip is not shy to admit his struggles as well as his victories. He is a writer with a keenly perceptive eye for detail and he is not afraid to turn that eye upon himself, to see himself in black and white and every shade of grey as we humans are. I’m not afraid to say the book moved me to tears as well as laughter.” You can find the entire review here.

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I recently gave a reading at the venerable Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, one of my favorite bookstores in the world. While I was in town the article “More Than a Travel Writer” appeared in The Daily Iowan, which you can read here. The archived broadcast of my Prairie Lights reading is now available. You can hear me read from three dispatches, field questions and, at the very beginning, sing a stanza of the new holiday classic “Walking in a Zombie Wonderland.”

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Julia Keller, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has written about The Moon, Come to Earth, saying in the Chicago Tribune that the book “is so enchanting: It dances and sighs. It twitches and hums and stumbles and then rights itself, with a winsome smile. It’s like a living thing, filled with desire and uncertainty and joy and regret . . . Graham is a nimble, witty writer with a penchant for teasing out the small, telling detail from the crowded scene around him. . . and this book is the perfect companion as one contemplates those mysteries, those ceaseless journeys outward and inward.” You can read the entire article here. Keller’s review was also reprinted in the Los Angeles Times, The Baltimore Sun, and the Orlando Sentinel.

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I recently gave a reading from The Moon, Come to Earth at the Meacham Writers’ Workshop in Chattanooga, Tennessee, a terrific three day conference, and I was so happy to meet George Singleton, a writer I’ve long admired, and to see a former student, poet and writer Rebecca Cook. My reading, from the dispatch “Go, Whatchamacallits!” can be heard here.

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While interviewing me for Inside Higher Ed about my latest book, The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon, Oronte Churm gets me to confess my fear of jellyfish.

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“The Pleasures of Saudade,” my article on the exciting energy of contemporary Portuguese music–complete with MP3s, photos and videos–is ready for your toe-tapping enjoyment at The Morning News.

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Write the Book has rebroadcast a radio interview about my Lisbon dispatches, which can be heard here.

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I’ll be on tour this fall for The Moon, Come to Earth, and here are the dates and times for my forthcoming readings. If anyone is in the area and interested in dropping by, please do!

Tuesday, October 13, 6:30 PM
Slonim Living Room
Sarah Lawrence College
Bronxville, New York

Friday, October 16, 6 PM
Rifkind Room, 6/316
The City College of New York
160 Convent Avenue
New York, NY

Thursday, October 22, 6pm
Richardson Library, room 300
DePaul University (Lincoln Park Campus)
2350 N. Kenmore
Chicago, Illinois

Friday, October 30, 7 PM
Meacham Writers’ Workshop
University Center, Raccoon Mountain Room
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
Chattanooga, Tennessee

Monday, November 9, 4:30 PM
Illini Union Bookstore
809 South Wright Street
University of Illinois
Champaign, Illinois

Wednesday, November 18, 7 PM
Prairie Lights Bookstore
15 South Dubuque Street
Iowa City, Iowa

In a future posting, I’ll list my book tour dates for Spring 2010.