Mike Karpa

Thanks again to Julia Halprin Jackson, Melinda Marks and Nicole Hughes for putting on another wonderful afternoon of readings at Play On Words’ second appearance at the San José Museum of Art in downtown San José. I guess I have been at this long enough that I am able to focus on the readings that come before mine (also a function of the fact that the readings are by actors, not authors?). Great crop of work, folks!

That includes the Museum’s Robin Treen and Frederick Liang, videographer Ryan Alpers and photographer Branden Frederick. Plus authors Anshu Johri (who was also a reader), Ann Hillesland (who has a new book out!), Marilyn Horn, Gerardo Pacheco Matus ( great to meet you!), Mairead Brodie, Jody Ulate, Tania Martin (of Flash Fiction Forum fame), Arcadia Conrad (another double winner–er, not in the 12-step sense), Leah Griesmann, and E.D.Southard. And nothing beats having your piece read by an actor. Many thanks also to Peter Ray Juarez, Muse Lee, Melinda Marks, Ronald Feichtmeir, and Erin Southard.

Finally, it was an honor to have my piece, read with brio by Keenan Flagg, close the show. The piece was a stripped down version of “Because of Course: An Award-winning Story” (yes, that’s the title), a meta-fiction that appeared last summer in Tahoma Literary Review. And the expanded version is entering final edits. Yes, it has turned into a novel: The Wealthy Whites of Williamsburg. Coming in 2021 or 2022 to this site, if I can get my act together on self-publishing?

The “arriving” started the day before, with an Aug 13 touchdown in Montreal, whose airport had been renamed since my last visit. “Dorval” was no more. I had a lot of psychological build-up for the conference, not just because, hey, it’s fun to travel, but because my key reason for applying was that Alexander Chee was teaching.

This was big, because I’d been to a number of writing conferences and never once has there been a queer man of any description on the teaching faculty. (Do conferences have “faculty?”) So, unlike the other places I applied for that summer, for Bread Loaf I sent a work featuring a straight white woman as protagonist. I mean, I wanted to get in! (To everywhere else, I sent pieces featuring gay men. I got in nowhere. This is a recurring theme in my life. And by recurring theme I mean ironclad rule.)

Now, I know this is in some sense irrational, because you can learn from everyone and there are not enough gay writers around for every conference to have one. That’s a feature of being a minority: there are not a lot of you. And esteemed Mr Chee wasn’t the only one. Christopher Castellani was teaching a workshop as well. I put them both on my list of four preferred workshop leaders, but got neither. I also didn’t get the lesbian author who was number 3. (She didn’t show.) I did get my final choice, Ana Menéndez, and lest anyone think this was a disappointment, know that it was not. Having done this before, I knew that for me, there’s a lot of chance involved in getting someone good for you and I normally don’t ask for anyone in particular. I’ve on occasion done a ton of prep, reading everyone who would be there, and been disappointed or thrilled at learning who I was assigned for a workshop leader only to have the completely opposite reaction to the actual person. (In this case, it would be in between: I got someone I wanted, and was so happy with my choice. More on this later.) But Bread Loaf asked, so I did not overthink my answer beyond what I have just said. I confess here that there was in fact not a single person at this esteemed conference whose work I had read.

I know, bad me (I guess). But if I felt like I was going somewhere I didn’t belong, it’s not totally surprising. On the trip down in my rental car (that was its own story of neurosis), I listened to the radio. All in French, then 50/50 French and English, then all English. And all NPR. Every little hamlet has its own radio station (it’s the mountains, I guess), and all of them were NPR. I let the radio seek stations on its own. It made it all the way round the frequency band and every last one was an NPR station. I mentioned this to the folks working the registration desk when I arrived at Bread Loaf, beautiful in its fields of grass tuck in a bowl of mountains. No one laughed.

Uh oh, I thought. This is going to be a long week…

Tahoma Literary Review has done me the honor of publishing a new piece, Because of Course: A Prize-wining Story (yes, that’s the title–it’s meta-fiction, I think), in which I rant against literary fiction–bridges are more exciting when they are burning—but then I succumb to niceness. You do have to pay to read this one, but for your $3.99 (ePub, PDF, Kindle) you get a whole magazine. (The print is $10.99 and lovely, in my opinion.) My bit is fairly deep into it. Woo hoo!

It’s more with trepidation than excitement that I say this, but I am going to Bread Loaf Writers Conference in August. It was exciting to be accepted in fiction, and then to also get accepted in non-fiction, but it came with a dose of my version of imposter syndrome: non-belongers syndrome. So what better reason to go than to get over that. Of course, I may be bringing it on myself, because I submitted a literary piece to get in, but sent a genre piece–gay SciFi romance–to actually be read and workshopped. We’ll see how that goes. Our workshop leader is Ana Menéndez, and the workshop fellow is Deepak Unnikrishnan, and hey, now I am getting excited.

I am delighted to announce that Play on Words has said yes to a shorter (considerably shorter) version of “Because of Course: A Prize-winning Story,” a meta-fiction piece that is forthcoming from Tahoma Literary Review this summer. That means I get to sit in the audience and enjoy someone else–an actor–read the piece. I will post the details when they are available, but I am thinking it will be at Cafe Stritch in San Jose.

And for those of you who did not make it, here is the video of Thomas Times reading Make a Muscle at the recent sell-out Play on Words show at the San José Museum of Art! On Estonian Independence Day, no less.

Play on Words–the series in San José that stages readings by professional actors of short pieces of fiction, memoir, essay and reportage–has accepted Make a Muscle, which appeared in Tin House last year, for their performance in New Terrains, an ongoing series at the San José Museum of Art. The reading is scheduled for February 24 at 2pm, and the venue is large and reportedly on the verge of selling out! (My reader is Thomas Times.) Here is PoW’s write-up of the event.

Join San Jose’s premiere literary performance arts series on Sunday, February 24 from 2-4 pm to watch professional actors perform original fiction, nonfiction, theater and poetry by 15 Bay Area writers. This unique show includes storytelling from Iran, Ireland, South Korea, India, Mexico, Serbia, China and the United States. Learn more at playonwordsanjose.com.

Featuring work by:

MAIREAD BRODIE
ARCADIA CONRAD
KEENAN FLAGG
MIKE KARPA
BECKY KLING
KSENIA LAKOVIC
ALLISON LANDA
MICHELLE SUZANN MYERS
TONY PRESS
MICHELLE QIAO
ANNIQUA RANA
CHRISTINA SHON
LAURA DOMINGO SHORT
ANJELA VILLARREALL RATLIFF

San José Museum of Art
110 South Market Street
San José CA

I am a late addition, and very excited to be one of the three readers in On The Cusp’s January 30 reading at the Bindery on Haight Street. I am reading an excerpt from my Japan novel–Criminals–and another piece of straight-up memoir. Here’s the write-up from Alison Landa, who makes it all happen:

The events that define us aren’t always immediately apparent. That’s the idea behind On the Cusp, a quarterly reading series that seeks to explore the meaning of life’s smaller moments … and their lasting significance.

Featuring Sarah Kobrinsky, Marian Palaia, and Mike Karpa!

Sarah Kobrinsky was the 2013-2015 Poet Laureate of Emeryville, CA. Her collection, Nighttime on the Other Side of Everything, is forthcoming by New Rivers Press (Autumn 2019). Her poems and stories have appeared in Magma Poetry, Eleven Eleven, Monkeybicycle, 100 Word Story, Fjords Review among many others. She was born in Canada, raised in North Dakota, seasoned in England, and tempered in California. Sarah and her husband have a handmade dinnerware company called Jered’s Pottery. She is also a perinatal yoga instructor.

Marian Palaia is the author of “The Given World,” named by Kirkus a best novel of 2015 and nominated for, among other awards, The PEN/Bingham Prize, the Saroyan International Prize for Fiction, and the VCU/Cabell Prize. She lives in San Francisco and in Missoula, Montana with her Mongolian Barking Shepherd, Tupelo. Her second book, “Wild Things,” is forthcoming.

Mike Karpa is a queer SF writer shifting from deeply felt literary writing to meaningless escapism. Briefly a DoJ staff translator, his biggest work victory is surviving as a freelancer for over thirty years, which may be why full-time employment sets his mind spinning murder-mystery plots. His memoir and/or short fiction has been published in Tin House, Sixfold, and elsewhere and been selected for Memoir Monday, a weekly newsletter co-curated by Narratively, Tin House and other literary magazines. A new story is apparently forthcoming in Tahoma Literary Review.

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Admission for this event is $5 in advance or $10 at the door. Advance tickets can be ordered at this link: https://thecusp.bpt.me/.

Please note: this is an all ages event. The bar opens at 7pm, and event begins at 7:30pm.

I actually don’t know which of two pieces I’ll be reading–“Chili Dog” or “Make A Muscle.” Suggestions encouraged. The reading starts at 1PM as part of NaNoWriMo festivities at the San Mateo Public Library in downtown San Mateo.

The Castro Coop is at it again, repurposing works of fiction in search of alternate facts. Join us on October 20, 2018.

https://www.facebook.com/events/534878030318291/