When I first moved to Houston from northern California, the city surprised me in so many ways. It’s easier to be a vegetarian here than it was there, and y’all got great bourbon lists at your restaurants and bars! Especially at Poison Girl, host to one of the best reading series in town. This was my favorite surprise: Houston’s vital, thriving, and progressive literary scene.

But not everyone knows about the award-winning Poison Pen series, which runs the last Thursday of every month. This month’s reading takes place on Thursday, October 26^th, and will feature Roger Reeves, Onyinye Ihezukwu, and Zachary Caballero.

In an effort to introduce the larger Houston community to Poison Pen, I sent some questions to the series’ current organizers, all of whom are writers themselves, as well as past or present Inprint Fellows: Giuseppe Taurino, Analicia Sotelo, and Erika Jo Brown. These folks vet authors and schedule line-ups to bring new, exciting work to Houstonians.

CHARLOTTE WYATT: What makes Poison Pen unique from other readings in town?

ANALICIA SOTELO: What I like about Poison Pen is that even if people aren’t at Poison Girl that night for anything other than whiskey or a Tinder date, they can come upon literature read by contemporary authors in a setting with writers and non-writers alike.

CHARLOTTE: How do you decide which writers to feature in the series?

ERIKA JO BROWN: We decide through a secret algorithm, taking into account genre, book-having-ness, community leadership, and phases of the moon. 

CHARLOTTE: Fair enough. What made you decide to become involved with Poison Pen? What is your role in the series?

GIUSEPPE TAURINO: I was approached by Greg Oaks, one of the original founders, as he was contemplating “retirement.” I’ve known Greg since my graduate school days at UH, and saw the series come to life and grow under his and David MacLean’s, and Scott Repass’s, and Casey Fleming’s and Jameelah Lang’s and Mat Johnson’s (am I missing anyone?) guidance. As a regular attendee (I’ve also read three times), proud UH Creative Writing Program alum, and active Houston lit community member, I’ve also admired the series and its ability to bring diverse readers and community together.

ANALICIA: I think what drew me to Poison Pen initially was its founding team – they were down-to-earth, weren’t afraid to say whatever at the mic, and were crazy encouraging of the readers. There’s this misconception that literature is something left to the care of English classes, but it’s alive and well in this city. And it’s fun to hear read aloud.

ERIKA: I was tapped by Greg Oaks and Jameelah Lang. They mistook my natural effervescence for competence. I like to think I am the beauty of the operation. That’s certainly not Giuseppe. I’m always scouting for interesting performers from the local community, and also help hook up CWP-ers.

GIUSEPPE: Erika might be the beauty of the operation, [but] I consider myself the middle-aged eye candy. 

CHARLOTTE: You are all beautiful. … What do you like best about the venue at Poison Girl?

ANALICIA: It’s classic Montrose Poison Girl, with the naked ladies on the walls, pinball machines, and the Kool-aid man out back. I like that you have to read louder and try harder to be entertaining than you would in a quiet reading space. I like when people laugh at funny lines, because literature can be really funny. I like when people become still as soon as a once funny story becomes deep and real and tragic. The entire reason most of us got into this world is because we all laughed or cried or laugh-cried at something someone wrote once, right? Poison Girl is a great home for that reminder.

CHARLOTTE: Do you have a favorite reading or reader so far?

ERIKA: Hands-down, [it] has to be our most dysfunctional as well. We did a reading celebrating the original founders [and] Mat Johnson railed at the rain like King Lear in the storm. David MacLean flew down from Chicago and said he didn’t care if we all got electrocuted, he would read his fiction snippet. It was exhilarating. You kind of had to be there.

CHARLOTTE: What should folks know about the reading upcoming on the 26th?

GIUSEPPE: That the reading will be lit, as the kids say. We’re going to raise roofs, and wave hands, and try our best to keep our clothes on. 

In all seriousness, we’re featuring a renowned spoken word artist and educator, a 1st year PhD student at the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program — who comes to us, most recently, from the Stegner Program at Stanford — and, in my estimation, one of the best American poets writing today. I could go on and on about their individual accolades, but mostly, I’m excited to introduce our lit community to such an exciting range of voices. I think regulars of the series will leave this month’s reading feeling energized, nodding their heads, saying, “Damn, what a lineup,” while first timers will get a great sense of who we are as a series and what we work hard to bring to the table.

To learn more about the reading on October 26^th, and the featured readers, click here.

See you there!

The post Naked Ladies and the Kool-Aid Man: The Poison Pen Reading Series first appeared on An Open Book - The Inprint Blog.

Being a creative writing graduate student, however, isn’t always an easy thing. No high-paying summer internships or corporate recruiters come these students way! And in addition to pursuing their craft, many generously give back to the community, like the great pool of writers at the UH CWP who teach our Writers Workshops, Teachers-As-Writers Workshops, and Senior Memoir Workshops. Without them, Inprint workshops would not be ranked among the best in the city.

Jameelah Lang, a PhD candidate in fiction at the UH CWP, taught a fiction workshop for Inprint this summer. We asked Jameelah to share her experience as an instructor with us. We were blown away by what she said.

I had a bad go of it last year. I took comprehensive exams, moved into another apartment, and rescued a puppy; my puppy cried without end, the windows in my new apartment wouldn’t open, and Virginia Woolf stalked me in dreams. My students were all too young or too old or too tired to care who Marguerite Duras or the New Kids on the Block were; they wrote about murderers even when I explicitly told them to write about anything but murderers.

The year ended fittingly: I broke my foot leaving my last class of the semester in the least dramatic way possible. I stood up to write a final note on the board and tripped and fell. There was a loud crack. I screamed; they screamed. I limped to my next class. A student carried me out to a security golf cart while they all clapped out of relief or confusion or both. I admit, that part was a little dramatic. They came outside to watch me go, and I felt sorry for myself. I was carted away very slowly, almost comically slowly, on the golf cart, and their faces eventually grew smaller and smaller. And then it was over.

I recently watched a reality show in which men lift weights and take ice baths together in a beat-down gym. In one episode, Richard Sherman shows up practically out of nowhere and says something like, “Before-game butterflies never go away, and if they do, you’re doing something wrong, because you’ve stopped caring.” I was anxious when my summer class at Inprint started, which is nothing new for me. Because I care, I always lay awake the night before a new class starts, my dress pressed, syllabuses readied in neat stacks. I have taught for Inprint three summers in a row now, and each time, I lay awake in half-panic and half-eager-anticipation. But, this time—given the past semester, my foot, the New Kids on the Block, the memory of my students’ faces with their mouths in little o’s of shock and disbelief—I couldn’t sleep at all.

Morning found me, and without knowing it, I had brushed my hair, poured coffee, and walked out the door to face them. My puppy, now a dog, watched me go through a window. I felt totally depleted from the night, the semester, and the year. Suddenly, I was at Inprint, and there they were: my twelve students. They sat around a clean black table drinking coffee from mugs and not talking to or looking at one another. Among them were a surgeon, a psychologist, a teacher, a radiologist, a former Black Jack dealer, and a poet. I sat down and they all turned toward me.

Over the next eight weeks, we performed the usual tasks: we read stories. We wrote stories. We talked about stories. I played the Teacher and they played Students.

Over the next eight weeks, we performed the usual tasks: we read stories. We wrote stories. We talked about stories. I played the Teacher and they played Students. We ate a cake called Gentleman’s Cake. Once, at the end, we held class at a restaurant where many of us ordered avocado enchiladas and one of us ordered flautas. These are the facts. If you had watched us on camera or through a window, this is what you would have seen: us bent over books, us bent over papers, us writing, us talking, us drinking coffee and eating doughnuts, us arguing, us laughing. But something else happened: something deeper and more magical, which can’t easily be seen or observed. I am not a sentimental person. They lifted me up.

I almost didn’t write this. The memory of the summer, of my students, is one I hold dear. I came to them at a time when I felt I had nothing to offer. I wasn’t sure I could write or teach or give anyone anything of any worth at all. In the end, they gave me more than I could ever have possibly given them. I can’t find words to tell you exactly what happened—or how or why. No one will ever know except for them and me, and in this way, the experience was intimate and extraordinary. They have their own stories from the summer, but this one is mine. I wrote it so that you, too, could take a class at Inprint, a place full of such pure magic—and so that you could capture a piece of it for yourselves.

I hold the memory of those weeks like a final drop of water, something vital and fragile, worth savoring. I hold closely the memory of their faces as I left our final class. I left them at a long tiled table in a restaurant, and a song played in which someone sang loudly and with great emotion. I walked away on two feet, and I looked at them one last time. They looked back at me, not with confusion or shock or disbelief, but with kindness and openness and acceptance. And like that, I was a teacher again. And they were my students.

The post In Which I Break My Foot and Am Saved By Students (Twice) first appeared on An Open Book - The Inprint Blog.