Please join Solid Objects at a benefit for the Nonhuman Rights Project and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Featuring Julie Carr, reading from Real Life and other works; Thalia Field, reading from Experimental Animals, along with a multimedia performance; Karen Joy Fowler, reading from We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves; Miranda Mellis reading from Demystifications and other works; Laura Mullen reading from Complicated Grief and other works; Jim Shepard reading from The Book of Aron!

And a screening of an excerpt from Unlocking the Cage, Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker‘s groundbreaking film about animal rights and the legal system!

Wednesday, January 18
At The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street, New York, NY
Doors open at 7 PM, Reading starts at 7:30 PM

All proceeds from book sales and admissions will go to the Nonhuman Rights Project and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Pay what you wish at the door.

A PUBLIC SPACE Issue 22 is out!

As always, it’s a terrific mix of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction: with poetry by Deborah Pease, Maria d’Arezzo, Rae Armantrout, Caroline Knox, Lisa Lubasch, Gëzim Hajdari, Sarah Crossland, Krzysztof Jaworski, William Brewer, Jessica Baran, Kimiko Hahn, Wong May, and Kevin Prufer.

And fiction by Kelly Link, Andrea Maturana, Anna Noyes, Jamel Brinkley, Garth Greenwell, and Prawin Adhikari!

The issue also includes John Haskell’s memory of New Yorker writer George Trow and a beautiful essay by Julia Cooke on Pablo Helguera’s epistolary conceptual works.

And on the cover, a gorgeous image by Lee Satkowski.

A great article about Mac Wellman recently appeared in The New York Times!

New York theater space JACK is devoting a season to graduates of the Play Writing Program at Brooklyn College, where Wellman has taught for decades.

Alexis Soloski’s wonderful article, as it spotlights the space, gives a lot of wonderful information about Wellman’s life and career, which includes over 80 plays and many awards, including three Obies, the third for Lifetime Achievement.

The piece focuses on Wellman’s integral relationship with his students, among them Erin Courtney (with whom he directs Brooklyn College’s Play Writing Program), Young Jean Lee, Tina Satter, and Sibyl Kempson. Above all, he encourages his students to be courageous; among his most famous exercises is writing a play in a language one barely knows.

It also describes Wellman’s start in playwriting: while he was hitching a ride with a Dutch playwright during a junior year abroad in the Netherlands, the playwright suggested that Wellman (primarily a poet at that time) try writing plays. Wellman’s first plays were for Dutch radio.

Solid Objects published Wellman’s Left Glove in 2011, and we are thrilled to announce that we will be publishing his book-length poem Sparrows Three in 2016!

Solid Objects is starting its own blog! We’ll post news about the press, author events, and other things here, so stay tuned!

For our first post, we wanted to draw your attention to a column Miranda Mellis published in The New York Times. In the piece, Mellis takes us through her job history, which has ranged from working in a zoo to working as a guide at San Francisco’s Exploratorium to working as a tree planter in Zambia, to show how this assortment of experiences has affected her writing:

“From the ages of 18 to 36 — when I began to teach creative writing — I worked variously as a house cleaner, house painter, landscaper, masseuse, editor and secretary. I worked as a tree planter in Zambia for a half-year when I was 19, then as a produce worker at a co-op grocery store in San Francisco, where I grew up. My first salaried job was going door to door, raising money for Salvadoran refugees fleeing civil conflict and death squads.”

Click here to read the rest of the article…