What's the best Luxury album? A panel discussion
May
27
6:00 PM18:00

What's the best Luxury album? A panel discussion

Join us for an online discussion debating the merits of my favorite punk band.

Luxury is a rock and roll band that is 60% ordained priests. That's interesting, but what's even more interesting is their five exquisite rock and roll records. This event features a discussion and debate among writers, critics, and academics to finally answer the age-old question: "What's the best Luxury record?" Join us on Zoom to find out, as each panelist champions one of Luxury's albums.

Moderator - Alex Stroschein, Regent College

Alan Parish, Turn the Radio Off music blog: Amazing and Thank You
Jon Couts, Ambrose University: The Latest & the Greatest
Mischa Willett, Seattle Pacific University: self-titled
Joel Heng Hartse, Simon Fraser Unviersity: Health & Sport
Michial Farmer, The Christian Humanist podcast: Trophies

Join the discussion here

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CANCELLED: The Elegy Beta Book Launch
Mar
10
7:00 PM19:00

CANCELLED: The Elegy Beta Book Launch

Join us as we welcome a new book into the world! The Elegy Beta—the long-sought, the hoped-for coming, a terrifying apparition in the sky—is officially landing. These new poems imagine the angelic in a different register, while crafting observations on daily life that are meant to offer what one reviewer calls “astonishing moments of consolation.”

There will be time to mingle, hear some music, raise a toast to the success of the enterprise, hear some poems, and have books signed.

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Romantic Elements | NASSR Chicago
Aug
8
to Aug 11

Romantic Elements | NASSR Chicago

I’ll be presenting a paper at the upcoming North American Society for the Study of Romanticism on the subject outlined below.

An Element of Egotism: Taking the Self out of the Sublime in Late Romanticism 

In DeQuincey’s Romanticism, Margaret Russell shows how “the historical permutation of [minor] authorship…is necessarily also a symptom…that profits from the reflexivity it achieves by encoding an account of its own production” (133). Wordsworth’s The Prelude and Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn,” are the most well-known exemplars of such reflexivity and such profit, but the minor poets who followed them, both in chronology and in style turned this element of reflexivity from “a symptom” to a feature: the whole show. Poets Ebenezer Jones and Alexander Smith particularly made careers out of the origin stories of their own careers turning useful background of successful cultural artifact, as in Coleridge’s “Man from Porlock” gloss, into background as cultural artifact, and successful ones too. 

But this essay, which reads Smith’s and Jones’ early poems as attempts by working class (minor) writers to break into Russell’s succession of historical permutation by performing encoded reflexivity, also challenges the received notions about such writers: that they were fame-hungry strivers. It argues, rather, that their poems show a route around the egotistical sublime made so distasteful by Wordsworth. The fame which Keats so sought and Byron so basked in is rejected by their immediate poetic successors as unhealthy. Such grand rejections of authorship as personality, while still performing authorial struggle as spectacle, of course, made them famous. 

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Vine & Verse
Nov
6
7:00 PM19:00

Vine & Verse

Vine & Verse is sponsored through a partnership between Queen Anne Lutheran Church, Queen Anne Presbyterian Church, and Queen Anne Book Company; sensible places all, who have teamed up to make an evening of readings and tastings; this time on the subject of hope. I'll be the featured reader on Nov 6th. Come out if you can!

This event is free and open to the public. 

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A Reading with Mischa Willett & Lauren Camp
Oct
23
7:00 PM19:00

A Reading with Mischa Willett & Lauren Camp

Richard Hugo House and Seattle Pacific University School of Theology present:

Mischa Willett, poet and host of the podcast Poems for the People, and New Mexico-based poet Lauren Camp will read from their recent collections—both of which explore family and migration—followed by an onstage Q&A.

In her Dorset Prize-winning new collection, One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press), Lauren Camp explores the lives of a first-generation Arab-American girl and her Jewish-Iraqi parent. Camp tells overlapping stories of food and ritual, immigration and adaptation, evoking her father’s boyhood in Baghdad in the 1940s at a time when tensions began to emerge along ethnic and religious lines. She also draws upon memories of Sabbath dinners in her grandparents’ new home in America to reveal how family culture persists.

Facebook Event Page here

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The Gates Reading
Apr
27
7:30 PM19:30

The Gates Reading

Mischa Willett, author of *Phases* (Cascade Books, 2017, Wipf and Stock Publishers) gives this year's Gates Reading, an annual series co-sponsored by the English Department at Seattle Pacific University and Image Journal, named in honor of longtime educator Fan Mayhall Gates.

SPU faculty and students established the Fan Gates reading series in 1999 to honor this well-loved professor and colleague after her retirement from the English dept. after 36 years. Funded by the Fan Mayhall Gates Literary Reading Series Endowment, the annual event spotlights prominent writers on the campus of Seattle Pacific.

The poems in *Phases* have been described by the poet Scott Cairns (Paraclete Press) as employing "a surprising linguistic brilliance to compose oratoria that brighten the hearts of readers," and by the poet Kevin J Craft (University of Washington Press) as "rub[bing] shoulders with classical figures and Biblical traditions, stoics and shepherds and sleep-deprived poets, the better to place the old stories in a contemporary light."

Copies of *Phases* can be ordered from Amazon.com or from Wipf and Stock Publishers.

The event is free and open to the public.

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