Literary Arts

The Literary Arts Bookstore is pleased to welcome Kimberly Blaeser to celebrate her latest book Red Ants. Blaeser will be joined in conversation by Christopher Diaz.

About the book:

This bold and genre-defying prose debut by the prizewinning poet incorporates social, historical, and supernatural elements to create a collection that is both contemporary and timeless, communal and deeply intimate Kimberly Blaeser’s singular stories center Anishinaabe characters who bring traditional tribal stories into contemporary experiences and break the stereotypes too often used to portray them. Here, we experience an Indigenous America inhabited by fancy dog contests, social protests, tree doctors, monsters, mosquitoes, and facial recognition software, all while blending, in the most exciting ways, the genre elements of magical realism, humor, horror, and speculative literary fiction. At the heart of the collection is the story “Red Ants,” which opens on the rez between a jump rope chant and a test proctor’s smile, where two girls learn how easily a life can be reduced to numbers, and how quickly those numbers can tilt ordinary days into something mythic, unsettling, and deeply human. Blaeser delves into the complexities of kinship and survival, exploring how the smallest moments of cruelty or tenderness can shape generations. For readers of Night of the Living Rez and Crooked Hallelujah speaking to larger issues of race, culture, and history, Red Ants explores alienation, displacement, and loneliness elevated through the precision of language, fierce emotional intelligence, and the haunting sense of place that permeates every page.

In Beautiful Is the World, David Biespiel spans three decades of lyric intensity, tracing the intimate cartography of memory, place, and inheritance. These poems move between the Pacific Northwest’s rain-soaked landscapes and the haunted reaches of Jewish ancestry, between the urgent present and history’s long shadows.

David will be joined in conversation with Director of Programs for Writers Susan Moore.

While Greek Mythology has never truly left the cultural zeitgeist, it’s clear that lately these old stories are at the forefront of the contemporary imagination. Over the past several years, no less than hundreds of retellings of Greek myths have been released in cinematic, best-selling novels, inventive scholarly works, and piles of poetry. What is compelling us to fervently consume these symbolically rich but often fraught tales of gods and goddesses, monsters and oracles, full of brutality, rebirth and transcendence?

In this seminar we’ll read three works that explore this question while updating the stories with poetic insight and contemporary flair: Madeline Miller’s Circe, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad. These books retell these myths through feminist and queer lenses while bringing the characters and their worlds to life in vivid technicolor. We’ll discuss the transformative and tragic quality of these stories, the recovery of the feminine voice out of patriarchal mores, and why these tales, which remain alluring after thousands of years, might still have something vital to say about what it means to be human.

Access Program
We want our writing classes and seminars to be accessible to everyone, regardless of income and background. We understand that our tuition structure can present obstacles for some people. Our Access Program offers writing class and seminar tuitions at a reduced rate. Most writing classes have at least one access spot available.

Please apply here for access rate tuition. Contact Susan Moore at [email protected] if you have questions.

Liaison position
Every in-person class and seminar at Literary Arts has one liaison position. Liaisons perform specific duties for each class meeting. If you are a liaison for a class or seminar, the full amount of your tuition is covered by Literary Arts.

Apply here for the liaison position.