I’ve known Emilia Edwards for a while now, having spent long hours in the studio alongside her during our time at Carnegie Mellon University as art students. I’ve watched her work develop exponentially over the years and I’m always excited to see what she has been up to. She will so often have something new and nasty to show, whether it be the baby octopi she is using to print with or the latest issue of a muscle magazine she’s chopping up into a collage.

In addition to being a great artist, she’s also a fan of America’s Next Top Model, which only makes her more appealing (at least to me). I asked her a few questions about her work and how Pittsburgh has been treating her.

Here’s what she had to say:

OT Blog: You came to Pittsburgh in the summer of 2004 to begin an undergraduate degree in Fine Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Since graduating in May of last year, you decided to stick around. What about the city made you want to stay? What makes is an ideal place for young artists?

Emilia Edwards: I just like it here. It’s a nice place to live. There’s always something going on, and everybody is welcome everywhere.

I moved to Pittsburgh when I was 18 from Albuquerque, New Mexico. I knew next to nothing about the city, or even the state of Pennsylvania. I hated Pittsburgh when I first moved here. I was used to sunny weather and a grid. Pittsburgh was, at first, dreary and confusing but after living here for a while I began to learn more about the city and discover its charms.

Pittsburgh is an interesting place to be a young artist because there are opportunities available to everyone here that would be hard to come by in a larger city. After living here for five years I have far more experience showing my work than I would if I lived in a place where exhibition space is more exclusive. Also, it is entirely possible to make something creative happen from scratch here.

OT: Your work often deals with the grotesque, be it depictions of rotting meat, bulging bodybuilders, ugly babies, or serpentine cryptids. Where do you think the inspiration for much of this imagery comes from?

EE: I’ve always been fascinated by twisted and shocking images. My interest in horror movies and comic books began at a young age and continues to influence my art. Sea creatures are a recurring theme in my work. I like drawing ocean life because the result is usually part dinosaur, part alien, and part monster. Many of the images in my work are sourced from the pictures in medical journals, bodybuilding magazines, food magazines, Discovery Health shows about plastic surgery, the meat section in supermarkets, aquariums, and my own photography. I collage together ideas from photos and diagrams. I’m usually striving for a kind of ugly elegance in my work.

OT: Has anything in Pittsburgh particularly piqued your interest in the putrid and gross?

EE: I actually think Pittsburgh has contributed a certain beauty to my work that I wouldn’t find elsewhere. I have used drawings of Pittsburgh and several other industrial cities (Detroit, Bilbao and Frankfurt to name a few) as backdrops for my comics. The dramatic cityscape is an ideal setting for a fantastical narrative to take place.

OT: You were recently chosen by the arts organization Creative Time for their web project Creative Time Comics, where artists are invited to create a one-page web comic meant to address the issues facing our world. How did you get involved with them and what can we expect to see?

EE: I became involved with Creative Time through a former visiting professor at Carnegie Mellon. Christopher Sperandio was asked to contribute a page to the project and thought my work would fit well with the web format and content. From there CT contacted me and asked if I would contribute a page about something relating to “here and now”.

My page goes up June 1^st at http://creativetime.org/comics. I am currently drawing a segment of a narrative about a deformed frog that lives in black water. It’s about the environment but the tone is not moral-driven. It’s a story about a toxic place and its inhabitants.

OT: What else can we look forward to from Emilia Edwards?

EE: I’m moving to Providence in July to start a graduate degree at Rhode Island School of Design. Until then I have a few projects lined up. I currently have a drawing on view in A Beckoning Country: Art and Objects of the Champlain Valley at the University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum. The piece is a preparatory drawing for Champy, a wall painting featuring Lake Champlain’s resident monster. My contribution to the Creative Time Comics project will go up in June. I am also working on some new ideas for giant wall art.  

If you’re into inflammatory comments and scathing professional commentary, then an afternoon spent reading film reviews for the locally produced Gone the Way of Flesh will do your body good. Based on what I can tell, most critics think the film is poorly made, incoherent, and unwatchable schlock (though, in this writer’s eyes a little schlock never hurt anyone), but to get the whole picture of this little movie, we must first take a moment to learn about a band.

The band in question is a Pittsburgh based outfit going by the name of The Jason Martinko Revue (fronted, not surprisingly, by the multi-talented Jason Martinko), a band that takes classic ‘50s drive-in era rock and melds it with a swing/surf-punk sensibility to create a sound equally fresh and nostalgic. Formed in 1999, and performing (according to their website) “in countless seedy bars & roadhouses,” the band achieved a moderate level of success in 2003 when they released a self-titled album that had a modest number of sales. It was also around this time they came up with an extremely innovative way to promote their band: writing a movie.

That movie, of course, became Gone the Way of Flesh, a tale of a killer that was stalking women at rock concerts, kidnapping them, and visiting unspeakable tortures upon the groupies with a maniacal zest usually reserved for screen villains and Fox News correspondents. (Guess who portrayed the band in the film.)

Taken on its own, the film seemingly has plenty of faults, but when viewed as part of an inclusive multimedia experience, Gone the Way of Flesh takes on a truly engaging and fun perspective. (And it certainly has become such an experience: the band recently screened the movie at the Oaks Theatre in Oakmont, Pennsylvania—and immediately played a live set afterwards.)

With the torture-oriented subgenre of horror becoming increasingly popular in recent years (think Saw or Hostel), and its audience growing larger and larger, the fact that Martinko and Co. tapped into this filmic subculture was ingenious, helping to push their music past the bar scene that can trap so many local bands. Not only that, the film itself has become something of a minor cult favorite, going so far as getting a glowing endorsement from the godfather of gore himself, Herschell Gordon Lewis.

“I thought I’d seen gory, irreverent, don’t-give-a-damn movies as far out as they could get. Wrong! That label now belongs to GONE THE WAY OF FLESH” – it’s right there on the DVD box. As far as the horror industry goes, it’s the seal of bloody approval.

Following the film’s 2007 release, the Jason Martinko Revue showed little sign of slowing down, releasing a new album, “Damaged Goods” (which, coincidentally, features a song titled “Gone the Way of Flesh”) and recently announced that their production company, the aptly named Cut’N’Run Productions, is already at work on creating a sequel, tentatively titled Gone the Way of Flesh II: Fresh Bloody Flesh.

So critics can say what they like, but when considering the innovative route the Jason Martinko Revue has taken in getting their music to the world, I can’t help but applaud their efforts. Whether they are getting screams from fans at their concerts or screams of terror in the theaters, I maintain that they are a bloody good time. 

This spring, Open Thread is holding its first-ever Tri-State Chapbook Contest  in partnership with Encyclopedia Destructica! We’re taking manuscript submissions now until June 1^st, so check out our handy guidelines. 

Once the deadline rolls around, Open Thread will announce a set of finalists for each state – Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia – and send the manuscripts off to our final judges! So start submitting, and tell your regional cohorts! In the meantime, get to know our guest judges.

Ohio: Tyler Meier

Tyler Meier’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Cranky, Forklift, Ohio, Prism Review, and the Seattle Review. Poems are forthcoming from Bat City Review and Washington Square. He works as the managing editor of The Kenyon Review.

Pennsylvania: Claire Donato

Claire Donato grew up in and around Pittsburgh, PA. She is the former poetry editor of The New Yinzer and has studied poetry at The University of Pittsburgh and, most recently, Brown University. She is the author of a chapbook, Someone Else’s Body (Cannibal Books 2009). Her poetry and prose have been published or are forthcoming in journals such as Harp & Altar, Caketrain, Coconut, Fou, Gustaf, Dewclaw, The Open Face Sandwich, and Gray Tape. She currently lives in Providence, RI.

West Virginia: Isaac Pressnell

Isaac Pressnell received his MFA in poetry from West Virginia University. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Tar River Poetry, Ninth Letter, DIAGRAM, Opium, and Bravado. He lives in Keyser, WV where he teaches English at Potomac State College.

Tyler, Claire, Isaac, and all of us at Open Thread can’t wait to read your chapbook manuscripts, so upload yours now!

Pecha Kucha Night is a “high-energy showcase that started in Japan in 2003 and now occurs in over 110 locations globally.” Add Pittsburgh to the list and Open Thread to its proud participants!

In short (because that’s the style of Pecha Kucha, which means “chatter” in Japanese), each presenter uses 20 slides in 20 seconds to share her/his project, idea, or musings. Then the presenter must, in the website’s words, “sit the hell down.” The result is a fast-paced taste of what’s creative and exciting in Pittsburgh.

This Friday, April 3^rd, AIA and AIGA (No, righteous populace, not AIG.) of Pittsburgh will hold their Pecha Kucha Night at 8pm in the Third Floor Gallery downtown. Tickets are $10 at the door. 

Open Thread co-director Scott Andrew and I will share why we started Open Thread, what it’s done so far, and where we’re taking it in 2009 and 2010. 

Our fellow presenters include Steelerbaby, Teresa Foley, Open Thread featured artist Laura Miller, and representatives from the Pittsburgh Signs Project.

Reading Period for Open Thread’s Tri-State Chapbook Contest Starts Wednesday, April 1^st

Open Thread and Encyclopedia Destructica are collaborating on a new project, the first annual Tri-State Chapbook Contest, supported in part by a Seed Award from The Sprout Fund.

Three winning chapbook manuscripts – one from Ohio, one from Pennsylvania, and one from West Virginia – will be selected in June and produced by Encyclopedia Destructica for release in July. Guidelines for submissions can be found here.

The first round of reading begins on April 1^st and concludes at midnight on June 1^st, 2009 (the latest possible submission date). At that point, Open Thread will announce finalists and send them to guest judges (TBA). We can’t wait to start reading your poetry and prose!

The Open Thread Regional Review, Vol. 1, long previewed on our website, is finally hitting Pittsburgh this Thursday, April 2nd at INBOX/OUTBOX! It will sell for $15 at the event (way cheaper than online), and Encyclopedia Destructica’s Coatlicue 2 will sell for $10.

The event kicks off at 7pm at Encyclopedia Destructica Studios in Lawrenceville (address below) with readings by Coatlicue 2 contributors Mallory Monroe, Nick Rogers, and Wayne Wise – and Open Thread Regional Review contributor Lizzie Harris.

More Regional Review contributors read at 8pm: Alayna Frankenberry, Tom Laskow, Sally Wen Mao, Ben Pelhan, and Nicola Pioppi.

Throughout the night, selected artists from the Regional Review will display their work, including Danielle Brannigan, Elin Lennox, Michael McParlane, Jack Meade, Michael Pisano, and James Storch. Also, a silent auction featuring local businesses will raise money for the Tri-State Chapbook Contest, Open Thread’s new collaboration with Encyclopedia Destructica.

After the event, SPOILERS will host an after party at New Amsterdam in Lawrenceville, featuring DJs Lauren G and Nikkels, as well as video by Michael Mallis, Tom McConnell, Michael McParlane, and Michael Pisano. Thanks to SPOILERS, 10% of the bar benefits the Tri-State Chapbook Contest.

Pittsburgh poet and Prosody radio host, Jan Beatty, will be heading to Slippery Rock University on April 22 for the release of the fourth edition of the literary publication, SLAB. She’ll be making an appearance as the evening’s keynote reader, providing the public with a taste of her ever-reaching craft. The event will begin at 7:30 PM at the University’s Russell Wright Alumni House.

Beatty’s poetry has appeared in Quarterly West, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and Court Green, as well as anthologies published by Oxford University Press and University of Iowa Press. In 1994, her first book of poetry, Mad River, was honored with the Agnes Lynch Starret Poetry Prize of the University of Pittsburgh Press. 2008 marked the debut of her latest book, Red Sugar, which declared the ignored complications involving the interior and exterior thoughts of a woman’s body.

In addition to the book-launch, student sound/audio projects will also be showcased. The evening itself will contain a variety of odd and thought-provoking highlights, as well as the announcement of the recipients of the annual Elizabeth R. Curry Prize in Poetry.

Editor’s Note: The contributor is the Sound/Audio Editor, as well as a poetry and creative nonfiction reader, for SLAB.

In honor of March being Women’s History Month, SWAN Day has been created as a new international holiday that celebrates women artists. The No Name Players will be hosting Pittsburgh’s SWAN Day Event on March 27 & 28 at 7:30 PM at the Grey Box Theatre in Lawrenceville. SWAN Day is a grassroots effort that is being coordinated by The Fund for Women Artists.

The evening will consist of short plays, poetry, dance, music and film by local women artists. They will be showcasing paintings and photography by women artists as well. It promises to be a truly inspiring night! Open Thread can personally vouch for poets Molly Prosser and Michelle Stoner, who’ve both appeared in our Poetsburgh reading series with Weave Magazine.

Reservations are encouraged and can be placed via email: nonameplayers@gmail.com or call 412.207.7111.

Tickets are $15, payable by cash at the door.

Producing Artistic Director of the No Name Players, Tressa Glover, gave Open Thread a sneak peak into the SWAN Event.

OT Blog: What can we expect from this year’s SWAN event? Who is performing?

Tressa Glover: Well, the Celebration of Women Artists is a collection of short plays, music, poetry, dance, film and visual art by local women artists. There are over 35 artists involved in the event.

Plays:

“Accessories,” by Carol Mullen, Directed by Joanna Lowe, Featuring Jaime Slavinsky and Rachel Shaw

“Dry Cleaning the Soul,” by Tammy Ryan, Directed by Don DiGiulio, Featuring Tawnya Hall and Eric Anderson

“Stockholm,” by Jeanne Drennan, Directed by Tami Dixon, Featuring Laura Lee Brautigam, Don DiGiulio and April Kitchen

“Pieces,” by Vanessa German, Featuring Tressa Glover and Vanessa German

Poetry:

Vanessa German, Maggie Glover, Molly Prosser, Michelle Stoner, Arlene Weiner

Dance:

Kaitlin Dann and Gretchen LaBorwit, Nandini Mandal

Films:

Cecile Desandre-Navarre, Julie Mink

Visual Art and Photography:

Sally Bozzuto, Allison Hoge, Lauren Zurchin

Music:

Joy Ike (Saturday March 28th only), the young women from Act One Theatre School’s Professional Training Program

OT: How did you/Pittsburgh become involved with the SWAN events that happen all over the country?

TG: I first read about SWAN Day last year on www.womenarts.org and loved the idea. Don and I (We’re married, by the way!) were living in Chicago at the time and working as actors. In June of last year we moved back to Pittsburgh, and I knew once we began producing shows again that No Name Players would somehow take part in the SWAN celebration of 2009. From the beginning planning stages, we knew we wanted to take part in SWAN Day by celebrating local women artists. We wanted to make sure that the extremely talented female artists here in Pittsburgh received recognition and that Pittsburgh itself was rightfully included in this worldwide celebration—and not only artists in the theatre, which is our comfort zone and the field with which we’re most familiar, but also artists from other disciplines: visual art, poetry, dance, film and music. 

We wanted to create the most eclectic group of women artists possible, providing for them a safe venue in which they can foster their diverse creative sensibilities and exhibit their extraordinary talents.

This broad mix of artists and disciplines will, we think (and hope!), attract an equally broad demographic of audience members. We feel that the program we’ve assembled will appeal to women (and men) of all ages and backgrounds. We know that people within the thriving arts community here in Pittsburgh will be extremely interested in this type of event. We also hope to attract an audience that spans the multiple disciplines that we will have on display to encourage an environment of mutual appreciation of art in its many forms.

OT: Can you tell me more about the No Name Players?

TG: No Name Players’ tenure here in Pittsburgh began in August of 2004 with our critically acclaimed Pittsburgh premiere production of “Big Love,” by Charles Mee, which earned us a spot as one of the Top Ten Plays of 2004 in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Subsequent productions have included the American premiere of “This Hotel,” by Alex Poch-Goldin, and most recently our crowd-pleasing production of “Wonder of the World,” by David Lindsay-Abaire, in December of last year.

No Name Players is a 501(c)3 organization dedicated to presenting unique and challenging theatrical productions by both new and established playwrights with an emphasis on the collaborative nature of theatre through ensemble. We focus on works that appeal to our own uniquely eclectic creative sensibilities. We work together as a group, where no individual is greater than the whole. Actors, directors, playwrights, designers and stage personnel play equally important roles in achieving our artistic vision. There is no fear in exploring a vast array of styles and genres. There are no boundaries that will not be pushed. There is no limit to what we can achieve.

SWAN Day Poster

The discreet charm of wandering blindly into a pub or bar that you have previously had zero experience with is that upon entering, you have no expectations. True, you’ll form an opinion soon, but for a brief few moments, the clientele, the atmosphere…it’s all alien to you, and for that moment, you truly get to discover a new culture, some foreign location that was as easy to enter as just walking off the street.

With this in mind, the same can be said about the bands that play such establishments, as local bands often do. If you just so happen to be in a bar where a band is setting up, and you haven’t heard them on MySpace or had them recommended to you by a friend, then basically you have no idea what to expect, which I believe, sometimes is the best way to experience music.

I mention this sense of blind discovery and seeming alien experience, because that’s exactly how I encountered Big with Seed Big with Seed. It was March 13, the Friday before St. Patrick’s Day, and I had not really made any plans to review a band that night, as I had visiting friends to entertain, but it just so happens that a band found me, so to speak.

Wandering into the Spice Café in Oakland (a cozy little joint situated directly underneath India Garden, a delicious restaurant for those so inclined), the band had not yet begun, but were setting up as we ordered our first round of drinks. I had a sense they’d be cool, as the guy who I eventually learned was their lead vocalist (Adam Rossi) was wearing a Hunter S. Thompson t-shirt, and I believe someone who digs the good gonzo doctor can’t be all bad, but I still had no idea what to expect.

Shortly thereafter, the band kicked into their first number, which was a twangy, country inspired deal that I have to admit did little for me, and I was beginning to fear Hunter S. Thompson or not, that I was going to be disappointed. But, if any band should not be judged by their opening number, it is Big with Seed. Once the band got rolling, they kicked out an impressive set of cross-genre tunes, and I’d be amiss if I didn’t take a moment to point out that their guitarist, Scott Delledonne, plays some of the grooviest southern fried blues licks I have heard in an intimate setting in ages.

On their webpage, Big with Seed identifies itself as a “Rock & Soul” band, and I could not agree more. With solid instrumentation and vocals, the band manages to maneuver quite skillfully between blues, the aforementioned southern rock, light funk, and the occasional out and out jam. I thoroughly enjoyed their performance, and while their covers of some modern blues rockers such as the Black Crowes’ “Hard To Handle” (originally recorded by Ottis Redding) did not fall flat, the band was at their best when they were cutting loose doing their own music and their own thing. I particularly enjoy their honky-tonk inspired “Desire and Destiny”, which you can hear if you zip on over to their MySpace page, as well as a few other tracks.

Based on my research, this Pittsburgh based band is currently unsigned, but have a few feathers in their cap, including steady local airplay on stations like WDVE, among others, and their track “Need to be Freed” was included on a 2005 Emerging Artist collection that was produced by Hometown Records and Overthrown Records.

While their style may not suit everyone’s tastes, to be sure, if you can check yourself at the door and appreciate a night of good old-fashioned bar music and a groovy jam, then Big with Seed are worth checking out, especially if you just happened to wander in off the street. 

For purposes of full disclosure, S.E. (or Sarah, as we know her) is a dear friend of Scott and I. But don’t worry; favoritism this is not. After reading about good old S.E. it’ll be clear that we’re lucky just to know her! Enjoy!

About S.E. Smith

After growing up along a country road on her parents’ farm in Greene County, PA (along the West Virginia border), S.E. studied Creative Writing and English at Carnegie Mellon University, where she immediately got busy being semi-famous and multi-talented. In her four years there, she was the winner of many awards (1st place Adamson Awards in both poetry and fiction, an Academy of American Poets Prize, Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets Fellowship); a jazz aficionado (minor in Jazz Performance, first chair trombone player - and only woman - in the CMU Jazz Ensemble); and a published poet (Find some of Smith’s undergraduate poetry at the Beloit Poetry Journal or Issue 2 of Swink.)  Upon completion of her degree in 2005, she was named the first Artist in Residence for Creative Writing at Lincoln Park Performing Arts Center, a charter partnership between LPPAC and CMU. During this time, she was also nominated for a Pushcart Prize .

Now in her third and final year repping Western PA at the University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers, where she is focusing on poetry with a secondary focus in fiction, S.E.’s continuing her stunning run of success. After being named a finalist in Black Warrior Review’s 2006 poetry contest and taking over as Poetry Editor for the Bat City Review, S.E. has had a spectacular 2008, first being named a Runner-up in the Atlantic Monthly Student Writing Contest, then winning the Keene Prize for Literature, which rewarded a collection of her fiction with $18,000.

If you’re dying to read some of this much-honored work, fear not: her work is forthcoming in Caketrain, the Best New Poets 2008 anthology, and - yes, it’s true! - Vol. 1 of our Open Thread Regional Review. Isn’t that great? You can also find out more about Sarah and see her exciting new multimedia work here.

It’s really not fair to S.E. for us to list off these accomplishments under an “About S.E. Smith” heading, as though she’s some Tracy Flick type, out to build up a resume that makes all the rest of us wilt. What’s most striking about S.E. is her graciousness, humility, vulnerability and honesty when you, oh, ask her a standard interview question, or something like that. Oh, and she’s beautiful and a great dancer, too. Don’t believe us? Read on!

Pegradation

(Video Stills)

Straight from the Artist’s Mouth!

OT Blog: You grew up in Greene County, PA, which I’ve often heard (and experienced myself) to be just as West Virginia as it is Pennsylvania, culturally speaking. What kind of setting was it for your formative years? How has it informed your poetry? Your fiction?

S.E. Smith: Greene County is definitely Appalachian in a big way. In college, it did delight me to bring my urbane, sophisticated friends to Greene County for a weekend and watch you all freak out. I think it helped my city mouse friends understand me a lot better to see the kind of environment I grew up in and reacted to. It makes my own urbane sophistication all the more impressive! Seriously, though, I don’t want to trash Greene County because I love it there, and I love it more the more I grow up and shed my adolescent defense mechanisms, but I encountered a lot of anti-intellectual sentiment there. People were always telling me that I used big words and should cut that out if I wanted anybody to like me. Good thing that not being liked fit so well with my acerbic adolescent persona. When I was 14 half of my statements began with the rhetorical question, “Do you know what makes me really mad?” Anyway, like many parts of the south, the community is obsessed with local heritage going back generations upon generations; a lot of kids my age had their whole extended families nearby. I seemed like a transplant because my parents grew up in the midwest and moved to Greene County along with a pretty sizable influx of hippie-esque back-to-the-landers. So I grew up really feeling like an outsider, but also resenting that feeling, because I was born there like everybody else.

That outsider feeling is probably the biggest influence on my writing, but I don’t think it surfaces in any obvious way. It’s tempting to psychologize myself and say, “Well, probably feeling like an outsider made it easier for me to take the stance of an observer, and through observation end up at writing,” but I don’t think it’s ever that simple. More likely the outsider feeling left me with a gulf of sadness, a sense of the abyss, which I am forever trying to fill in with slapstick and dance moves. In a recent poetry workshop here at UT, Dean Young said that there’s a theory that humor is self-defense, and there’s some truth to that for me. I think I’ve only been able to write about Greene County since moving to Texas, which is so different, it allows me to sift through all of the stuff I remember, and to decide what’s actually interesting or usable in that material. And by “material” I mean “angst” obviously. And cornbread recipes.

OT: What has it been like to leave the region after 18 years in Greene County and five years in Pittsburgh? How do you feel about the prospect of returning?

SES: Let me say that people in Texas are extremely puzzled by the northeast. (I don’t necessarily consider Western PA a part of “the northeast,” but for Texans anything above the Mason Dixon line within reasonable proximity of the Atlantic counts.) They’re always surprised to find that Pennsylvania is actually a pretty big state. And they always mix up Philly and Pittsburgh, which angers me to no end. Lately, with the World Series, all of my sports-inclined friends assume that I’m rooting for the Phillies; they don’t understand how I can be all “Eh, good for them” and “STEELER NATION FOR LIFE” simultaneously. The upside, though, is that everybody here has a potent mental image of Pittsburghers as tough bitches, so yeah, that’s fine because I’m full of true grit.

It took me four or five months to adjust to the move, though. When I left Pittsburgh I felt like I was dying, which sounds kind of extreme, but what can I say? Western PA was the world that I understood. It was the world to which I had been calibrated. And I still feel this really overwhelming pride for the region, all angst aside. I’m always telling people that Sammy Nestico is from Pittsburgh, that the lady who played Agent 99 on “Get Smart” went to CMU. I dragged one of my friends out to see “Smart People” just for the ample Pittsburgh/CMU shots. I’m such a regional booster, I don’t know how my friends and acquaintances put up with me. Especially the ones who agree to watch Steelers games with me and then have to deal with the alarming spectacle of yours truly decked out in a Polamalu jersey, Terrible Towel in hand, making frequent/panicked phone calls to my father when the running game isn’t working out.

Texas has been good for me, especially climate-wise. I thought I was a depressed and inherently cranky person, but no, it was just the weather! Also, I love the Michener Center, my MFA program. And plenty of bands/plays/whatever are always passing through Austin. But I kind of think Austin has it too easy. Sometimes it feels like everybody here is sauntering around humming “Girl From Ipanema,” eating their organic foods, drinking their kombucha. It gets old. And I am thinking about moving back to Pittsburgh next year. In my extremely hazy life-plan, I end up back in Pittsburgh eventually. I think it’s the most beautiful city in the world. Every time I come back and drive through the Fort Pitt tunnel again, I cry, for serious.

OT: You recently won the Keene Prize for Literature, a pretty big-time award at UT-Austin. What were your winning stories about? How does it feel to win for your fiction in an MFA program where your focus is poetry? What is the most frivolous/fabulous/preposterous thing you plan to spend [even a little of] the prize money on?

SES: For the contest, I submitted a small collection of stories titled “The Wild Girl of Western Pennsylvania.” The title story is based on a news item from a few years ago about a feral teenage girl appearing in Java. She fascinated me because she was so weirdly socialized; she could use a spoon but not a fork, she could sing a few traditional songs but couldn’t speak. Translating that idea into small-town Appalachia came easily for me, and also engaged some of those outsider tropes noted above. The other two stories in my entry also take place in Western PA. “The Bigtime” is about the organizer of a baby pageant who wishes she had moved away from the small town where she was raised and still lives–she’s a mirror version of myself if I had never left Greene County, so it follows that she’s mad as all get-out. And “Night Shift at the Don Knotts Memorial Hospital” follows a group of badass night nurses at an imagined hospital in Pittsburgh. Well, the city isn’t identified in the story, but it’s clear for me that the no man’s land between three hospitals is in Bloomfield. When I brought these stories to workshop, usually somebody would point out a quintessential Western PA detail and say, “This, here, this just isn’t realistic. This belongs to some other time and place.” And I would think, nope, that’s just where I grew up.

As to your second question, well, it feels great! Only current students at UT-Austin can apply to the Keene Prize, but there are so many outrageously talented writers here and the competition is strong. At CMU we were encouraged to write in more than one genre, and I don’t think any of us students thought of ourselves merely as poets, fiction writers, or anything else exclusively. The Michener Center asks all of its students to take classes in two genres, which was one of its greatest selling points for me. I came here ready to devote a lot of time and energy to fiction as well as poetry. Ultimately my decision to submit a group of stories was pragmatic; contemporary poetry is, for better or worse, best understood by contemporary poets, and the Keene committee did not include any poets. My stories and poems share plenty of weirdness, but narrative makes weirdness more palatable.

It’s not glamorous, but plenty of the prize money will go directly to American Education Services to clear me of student loans. But I did use a little of it to finance my first tattoo, which is an image borrowed from a Margaret Kilgallen painting. I’m not going to explain the “symbolism” of the tattoo because it’s always kind of reductive to do so, but it definitely represents for me the fact that I’ll never be a banker, and maybe alludes to the possibility that I’ll be able to live my life on my own terms. Aside from that, I’m saving the rest, but who am I kidding? I have inexpensive tastes, and I usually spend my money on cigarettes, bar tabs, and tacky clothing.

OT: Do you find anything essential in the voice of writers from the tri-state area? Writers of your “generation”?

SES: I have a theory about working class writers, especially working class writers from the tri-state area, and it might be bullshit, but here it goes: for working class writers, the act of writing is always a decision, a sacrifice. It’s not something you just end up doing because hey whatever, it’s kind of fun. It’s a choice that you make in full awareness of the choices your parents had to make to send you to college (for “choice” read “sacrifice”), and that sense of proportion makes it kind of difficult to fuck around. At the end of the day, I don’t think poems deserve to be read just because they’re poems. I think poems have to work hard to snag and keep their readers. This doesn’t mean that we have to write what we think an audience (audience being a gauzy term) wants to hear, or to only deliver scrappy working class narratives or whatever, but it does mean that we can’t just spray some of our consciousness onto the page and expect everybody to care about it.

I don’t want to sound despotic and evil, so I should probably modify that statement slightly: I’m a fan of the fact that anybody writes poetry anywhere, and for whatever purpose. All poems deserve to sit down at the grown-ups table at the Poetry Feast. But there is a difference between poetry that only engages with the selfhood of the person writing it and poetry that engages with craft and the massive preceding tradition entire. I get the sense that working class writers are sensitive to this distinction and, as a result, try to engage with a broad range of influences. I don’t want to exclude other writers from that designation, of course, but it seems to be a prevalent ambition among writers of a certain regional/socio-economic disposition.

Fiction doesn’t play into this dynamic as much because our culture embraces narrative; short stories and novels don’t have to fight as hard to be read by somebody, and that’s great. But it doesn’t really lend itself to polemics. Sadly.

Writers of my generation seem less interested in maintaining genre boundaries; I don’t think anybody’s really waving the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E or narrative or formalist flag right now. We’d rather borrow generously from all of the traditions than swear our allegiance to one. This may change, of course, once we try to get tenure. But I think we’ve come to writing from so many points of entry, many of which are not explicitly literary, that the previous distinctions cease to hold our devotion. That is to say, I’m excited to see what we’ll do.

OT: What can OT Blog readers expect to hear from you in the coming months?

SES: Well, blog readers, you can find my poem “Bedroom Community” in the upcoming Best New Poets 2008 anthology (along with poems from Anne Marie Rooney and Karen Rigby, both of whom are recent CMU graduates), which is exciting because it was guest-edited by Mark Strand, whose work I adore, and is distributed nationally. Also, I have a poem forthcoming in Caketrain, which I’m particularly delighted about because it’s a Pittsburgh-based journal. Otherwise, you can expect to hear the sound of my over-worked printer churning out copies of my first manuscript for all of the first book contests I’m entering, the sound of my checkbook depleting as I draw up entry fees for said contests, and the sound of innumerable late night bedroom dance parties, because that’s just what I do.