Welcome to the Creative Writing Blog for Seattle University!

Hi, Everybody! I'm Sharon Cumberland, the Director of Seattle U's Creative Writing Program. I'm starting this blog so that our English majors--both CW and Lit--will know what's going on in the program--our readings, our trips to the opera, our free "Writer's Chronicles"--as well as getting information about our successful grads and their publications. This will be the place for faculty, students, alums and friends of the program to talk to each other, find out what's up,and talk about craft. Come join us!

Friday, March 25, 2011

June Johnson's Brother to Read at Elliot Bay on Saturday April 16th at 5:00 PM

English faculty Professor June Johnson has a successful fiction writer for a brother--Kris Saknussemm is an experimental novelist and short story writer whose current novel, Enigmatic Pilot, is being published by Random House. He will be reading at Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 Tenth Avenue (between Pike and Pine) on April 16 at 5 PM.


Kris a graduate of the UW Creative Writing Program and the author of the cult novels Zanesville and Private Midnight.   Lazy Fascist Press, a new hipster imprint of the Bizarro network in Portland has just brought out a collection of his short stories called Sinister Miniatures, and he will be reading from Enigmatic Pilot.

Kris has won First Prize in the Boston Review and River Styx Short Story Contests, and the FC2 Award for Innovative Writing.   A documentary film based on his live performances called Let the Dark Times Roll is about to be released. His work has appeared in Playboy, Nerve.com, Opium Magazine, 3 AM, The New England Review, The Santa Monica Review, The Hudson Review, The Antioch Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Zyzzyva and the Green Mountains Review, amongst 300 others internationally.

He’s a regular contributor to key blog sites such as Bookslut, The Millions and The Nervous Breakdown. He has a great deal to say about the challenges and opportunities emerging writers face in the Digital Era.  Enigmatic Pilot has received glowing reviews and he is known worldwide for the impact of his readings. So come join the SU faculty and students who are gathering at Elliot Bay Bookstore to experience this terrific writer and reader.

Monday, March 7, 2011

CW Grad Jill Charles Published "Marlene's Piano"!

One of our first CW grads, Jill Charles, has made good by publishing her first novel, Marlene's Piano, as a POD--Print-on-Demand ebook. Jill is from Spokane and lives in Chicago now, and has worked as a journalist and a school administrator. Check out her book page at Amazon Authors or this link to the publisher: http://www.booklocker.com/books/4109.html.

I think it's great to use POD as a way to get your work out to the public and to develop a following. I'm sure that Jill will be glad to tell us about her experience, and the Booklocker website has a really interesting discussion about the relationship between traditional print books sold in bookstores and print-on-demand books sold online. A lot of you may be wondering about the process of getting your work out online and still making money (as opposed to just publishing your work for free on a website). Let's get Jill to talk to us about the process and her success using this method to attract readers to her work.

I'd also like to get a thread going about Jill's process of writing and completing her novel--whether she wrote short stories first, what her writing day is like, whether she studied CW after she left SU. Talk to us, Jill! And congrats on your fist novel-may it be the first of many!