SNS | 9-28-24
Join us online for an evening of literary performance and open mic reading
Featuring: Amanda Gunn & G. Macias Gusman
Theme: Smoking, Drinking & Screwing
(scroll down for writing prompt)
Hosted By: Hollie Hardy
Saturday, September 28, 2024
6:00pm Pacific Time
(8:00pm Central time)
Online Event
Free Admission
Sign Up in Advance to Get on the Open Mic List
The theme is optional | Time limit is not optional
Please plan ahead and keep your reading to 3 MINUTES MAX
Scroll down for monthly writing prompt
Join Event on Zoom
Meeting ID: 827 6585 3595
Passcode: 883132
Author Bios
Amanda Gunn is a poet, teacher, and PhD candidate in English at Harvard. Raised in Connecticut, she worked as a medical copyeditor for 13 years before earning an MFA in poetry from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She is a recipient of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize as well as a Pushcart Prize and has received fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Her debut collection, Things I Didn’t Do With This Body, was released in 2023 from Copper Canyon Press.
G. Macias Gusman is a Midwest/West Coast Poet published in such silky rags as the Borfski Press, the Crazy Child Scribbler, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Last Call Chinaski!, 16th & Mission, Naked Bulb Anthology, and Alien Buddha Press, as well as a ton of online things, and a napkin he once left for a bartender, who was way too hot for his own good. G. wants you to know that his favorite things in life are PBR, weed, cats, and staring out the window writing love poems at four in the morning, while drinking coffee. He sings Ramones songs in the shower and knows that: there’s never gonna be enough Dope-to-Toke for going to work to be a good idea. His first full-length collection of poetry Neversent was released last month from Naked Bulb Press. Order it here.
Write with Friends! Register for The Write-In!
LET’S WORK ON THE THEME TOGETHER!
Join me the week before SNS, on Saturday afternoon, September 21, for the monthly Write-In, a generative online workshop with Hollie Hardy.
Write-In Details/ Sign Up
September Writing Prompt: Smoking, Drinking, & Screwing
This month’s theme was inspired by the 1994 Chronicle Books anthology by the same title: Drinking, Smoking & Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times, edited by Sara Nickles, and containing poetry and fiction by famous writers ranging from Charles Bukowski to Erica Jong, Tom Robbins, Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, Mark Twain, Vladimir Nabokov, Sam Shepard and many more.
Your challenge this month is to write a poem (or 3-minute prose piece, scene, monologue, song, etc) inspired by the classic vices—sex, smokes, drinks, drugs, etc.
SOME IDEAS:
Write about enjoying, not enjoying, indulging or quitting a vice
Write about how your relationship to “the good times” has changed over time
Write a how-to poem about one of these topics
Write a sexy or unsexy poem, a love or desire poem
Write about the morning after
Write about being “drunk” on something other than alcohol
Write about the joys or consequences of drinking, smoking, or sex, ode or elegy
Write about the myths of writers and their vices
Write about how drinking, smoking, or screwing inform the heart, mind, or body
As ever, the theme is optional—an invitation, not a requirement; feel free to interpret loosely or ignore. Below are some poems on our theme to inspire you.
FOR INSPIRATION
Fear of Flying (Zipless Fuck excerpt) by Erica Jong
Sonnet XI by Pablo Neruda
Be Drunk! (on Poetry) by Charles Baudelaire
Are You Drinking by Charles Bukowski
Deer Hit by Jon Loomis
When Man Enters Woman by Anne Sexton
How to Smoke a Cigar by Hollie Hardy
The Best Cigarette by Billy Collins
No Smoking Please by Gary Soto
Smoking by Ronald Wallace
Smoking Notes by Sandra McPherson
You Were Perfectly Fine fiction by Dorothy Parker
NOTE: The SNS writing prompts will eventually be integrated into my subscription service, Praxis Poetry: Weekly Prompts for Poets. Learn more and sign up for weekly prompts!