By Mike Gillis

Out in the suburb of River Forest—in an apartment complex housing the last remaining literary journal dedicated to light verse—is a living metaphor. Like the flickering form of light verse itself, the office of Light Quarterly is filled with both relics and curiosities: A cylinder of enchanted “Indian House Blessing.” Shelves of books torn in half by age. A cardboard box crammed with rubber-band-bound notecards on which founder John Mella wrote a novel during his thirty-two years working for the Postal Service.

Even more interesting are hundreds of letters to celebrities, stacked in plastic mail crates. Solicitation letters, to be exact, going out to the likes of the Dalai Lama and Conan O’Brien.

When asked if Light Quarterly has ever received a response, Mella, at sixty-nine years, smiles, his face suddenly illuminated. Read the rest of this entry »

By Mike Gillis

Ostensibly a Chicago bluesman steeped in the southern traditions of Jefferson County, Arkansas, William “Big Bill” Broonzy’s recordings stretch genres—from folk music to hokum, ragtime to country. His life and legacy are equally wide-reaching. He toured Europe, fell in love with a Dutch woman, and masterminded recordings that would inspire The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and the 2009 inauguration ceremony of Barack Obama. In the intervening years, Broonzy also became a master crowd pleaser, whose compassion and appeal to white and black audiences functioned as a heart to the Chicago music scene. In 1955, he compiled an autobiography that recounted his inspirations—an uncle named Jerry, a dubiously friendly white man—his childhood with twenty-one siblings, and his time serving in World War I. The only problem was, none of it was true.

In his recent biography “I Feel So Good: The Life and Times of Big Bill Broonzy,” Bob Riesman uncovers the reality behind the constructed life of the master showman. In an interview with Newcity, Riesman built a list of some of Broonzy’s most enduring works, and used them to talk about the bluesman’s legacy. Read the rest of this entry »

Since Stop Smiling transitioned from a periodical to a book publisher, the Second City has had a gaping hole in its journalistic output where long-form creative nonfiction is concerned. The Handshake, a new publication helmed by editor-in-chief Daniel Duffy, seeks to change this.

Taking admitted inspiration from Stop Smiling (the first issue of The Handshake features an interview with its founding editor, J.C. Gabel), Duffy continues its legacy of long-form interviews. Yet he aims to deviate from that publication through inclusion of five structured, recurring sections.

“I think offering these five very distinct things, with only one of each in each issue, gives us enough focus to really keep putting out a good product every time,” Duffy says.

Each issue will include one long-form interview and one “conversation, where two authors, artists, comedians, meet to talk to each other about their lives and work,” Duffy says.

In addition, the magazine includes a single experimental essay (“in tribute to David Foster Wallace,” reads the website). New Journalism influenced Duffy in constructing this section, causing him to realize the allure of subjectivity in reporting. Read the rest of this entry »

Finally, someone had the courage to write about the unsung privileged elite and the horrors they bear as they apply for the top universities in the world. Too long have they suffered in silence and born the agony of merely attending schools like Northwestern or the University of Chicago when they don’t get into the Ivy league.

John J. Binder, a Chicago author, writes of three high school students in a fictional western suburb, Oak Stream. Sarah, a middle child apparently incapable of making a decision, is the main character.  Her friends Rob and Carrie are her loyal, nerdy friends.  “There had been a few dates for Sarah and Carrie starting in the eighth grade, but the boys found them a bit overwhelming and largely stayed away. Rob’s off the wall sense of humor was the best girl repellent known to man and Sarah’s wit did nothing to help her with the boys either. Although the outside world did not always understand them, they understood each other and appreciated the bond they had forged.”

Sarah, crippled with indecision, applies to the 100 top schools in America, as well as her “safety,” the University of Illinois. Rob has a gimmick of his own and applies first as Rob Taylor and then legally changes his name to “Running Elk Taylor,” indicates his Native American heritage on his application, and applies to the same schools again. Carrie’s a legacy at MIT and her mother won’t hear of her going anywhere else. Read the rest of this entry »

By Jason Foumberg

If Hugh Hefner were a leather daddy, he would be Chuck Renslow. Both men were born in Chicago in the 1920s, lived in mansions, cultivated harems and, importantly, each trail-blazed a sexual revolution on a massive scale. “Leatherman: The Legend of Chuck Renslow” is a new comprehensive biography by Tracy Baim and Owen Keehnen that invites the Hefner-Renslow analogy but doesn’t stress it, for Renslow’s contributions and pet projects have been so varied and so unique. “Leatherman” explains in detail how Renslow hand-forged a safe place for his brotherhood of BDSM practitioners to play and, along the way, legitimized and improved the conditions of this subculture within a subculture.

In 1958, the police raided Renslow’s photography studio, which produced and distributed physique studies of male bodybuilders, or beefcakes, an early form of soft-core erotica. “The porno king,” as Renslow was dubbed in the press, triumphed in court, as he would many more times in the decades ahead, opening dialogue (often by force) about the right for his community to practice their dark, kinky arts. Renslow’s ability to work with local politicians, policemen and gangsters—most Chicago gay bars were mob-owned during the last century—made him a natural leader and protector of the leather community—their “daddy.” Read the rest of this entry »

On the surface, Kathleen Rooney might seem like a literary traditionalist. The DePaul English professor has forged a pretty straightforward path to success, releasing poetry and essay collections as well as nonfiction books on professional nude modeling and the mighty Oprah Book Club. Yet she’s always been fascinated by what she calls hybrid genres: chapbooks of short-short fiction, flash fiction and book-length prose poetry. So, while studying at Emerson College in Boston, she developed Rose Metal Press along with friend Abigail Beckel. “We wanted to give voice to undefinable, multi-genres,” says Rooney. “We saw a lot of really great work by a lot of others that were being pushed through the cracks.”

On June 19, Rose Metal Press is having a launch party for its latest publication, “They Could No Longer Contain Themselves,” an anthology of short shorts that Rooney says explore the Edgar Allan Poe idea of perversion. “Often you have characters who know what they should do, but they still do the opposite. That lack of impulse control.” (Alex Baumgardner)

June 19 at Beauty Bar, 1444 West Chicago, 7pm. Four of the collection’s five authors will read.

“They Could No Longer Contain Themselves: A Collection of Five Flash Chapbooks”
By Elizabeth J. Colen, John Jodzio, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Sean Lovelace and Mary Miller
Rose Metal Press,  248 pages, $15.95

RECOMMENDED

Erica Adams’ collection of short stories is a fantastical romp of contemporary fables that are at once completely fresh, and also seem to have sprung from a bygone era. The through-line in “The Mutation of Fortune” is a female character who slides easily between human and animal form. She stumbles through perpetual danger and yet always survives.

Adams’ first story, “The Girl Without,” sets the tone for this young woman’s various perilous adventures. Her father removes her hands and replaces them with metal, “of more value than before!” He removes her feet and replaces them with stone, and so on. Adams cleverly approaches and reappropriates a variety of mythologies and fairy tales, beautifully capturing the mystery and creepiness of beloved Grimm stories. At the same time, she subverts those ancient tales by casting a strong and almost willfully oblivious female protagonist, not just a friend of animals, like Snow White or Cinderella, but an animal herself, mutating into bird or rat or dog.

Family permeates the stories: fathers, mothers and the jealousies and fierceness of sibling devotion. In “The Well,” the young woman collects stamps which she organizes by animal and “degree of ferocity”; her brother obsessively reorganizes them alphabetically—“he will put a lemur next to a lion!” This very short story not only addresses the complexities of siblings, the mania of organizing, and Adams’ ever-present animal theme but blends the absurd with the familiar, the agony and acceptance of our sibling differences. Read the rest of this entry »

Although conceived by Victor David Giron in the early 1990s in Urbana, Curbside Splendor was finally realized in 2009 with the purpose of publishing Giron’s novel, “Sophomoric Philosophy.” Since then, Curbside Splendor has been consistently publishing short stories, poetry and photography online, recently released its first compilation of online and previously unpublished material, “Curbside Splendor Issue 1: Spring 2011”, as well as, been preparing for its newest release, “The Chapbook: Poems by Charles Bane, Jr.” due to come out in July. And then there are the events.

Beginning in February of this year, Curbside Splendor created a pop-up bookstore appearing at the Logan Square Farmers Market at least once a month, selling work from Chicago presses and authors next to stalls selling locally grown produce. The Curbside Splendor Bookstand is a satisfying idea of “locally grown with locally published” standing side-by-side. The Curbside Splendor Bookstall is currently on a hiatus along with the Logan Square Market, but it will return again when the summer season begins on June 5, preferring to stay local rather than finding a new place to pop up. “Logan Square is a very personal place,” Giron says.

In addition, each month Curbside Splendor hosts a “Two With Water” reading event at the Beauty Bar, where Giron is part-owner. The next installment takes place on July 10. See curbsidesplendor.com for details. (Elizabeth Kossnar)

“The bottom line is print is expensive,” says Mike Norton of the Chicago-based comics company Four Star Studios. The pressure of funding a printed comic book “can really affect the type of story you decide to tell,” adds co-founder Josh Emmons, “you’re going to tell a different, safer, more broad story” that will appeal to the masses. Through digital distribution, however, Four Star Studios has the financial ability to offer new comics to the public monthly for just ninety-nine cents.

Their iPad App, DoubleFeature, offers a new issue with two stories from a single genre each month. “We’ve started with two action stories,” says Emmons. “Next month will be horror, then sci-fi, then fantasy… eventually looping back around to action stories again.” Four Star Studios is also able to offer in-depth special features with DoubleFeature. The Four Star crew, made up of Norton, Emmons, Tim Seeley and Sean Dove, “really thought about what the iPad can offer and what are the things comic readers and art enthusiasts would like to see,” says Dove. “A lot of people don’t really understand all the stages that go in to making a comic and the DoubleFeature app really shows you layer by layer all the things that went in to drawing and creating the comic, from pencils, inks to final colored artwork.” (Tiana Olewnick)

Julius Shulman: The Last Decade

The photographer Julius Shulman probably had as much to do with the perpetuation of the LA style of home design as did any of the architects he deified with his images. Read the rest of this entry »