It’s time for yet another scary-good installment of TNY Presents!

Join us for a little pre-Halloween hijinks on Wednesday, October 21st. Tricks (of the literary variety) will be provided by Nathan Graziano, Holly Coleman, and Kevin Finn. Elliott Sussman will be on hand with a banjo full of tasty musical treats.

Where: Modern Formations 4919 Penn Ave.
When: 8pm
Cover: $5 or a contribution to our potluck dinner

Nathan Graziano: (reader) Nathan Graziano lives in Manchester, New Hampshire with his wife and two children. He is the author of TeachingMetaphors (sunnyoutside, 2007), Not So Profound (Green Bean Press, 2004),Frostbite (GBP, 2002) and seven chapbooks of poetry and fiction. His workhas appeared in Rattle, Night Train, Freight Stories, The Coe Review, The Owen Wister Review, and others. His third book of poetry, After the Honeymoon, will be published in Fall 2009 by sunnyoutside press. For more information, visit his website: www.nathangraziano.com.


<--Holly Coleman: (reader) Famed 'Wild Woman of the North Side,' hasn’t had a literary piece published since 1999 due to her own laziness, Holly Colemanis getting up off her ass and hummin, comin atcha!

Kevin Finn: (reader) Kevin Finn is a native of Pittsburgh, PA. A poet, as well as a singer-songwriter, his work has gained critical praise world wide. His chapbook, Exit Wounds, was published by Amsterdam Press in 2009.

<-- Elliott Sussman: (music) In 1984, the front porch and the campfire becameconcerned that they weren't being used for their intended musicalpurposes. It was that year that Elliott Sussman was birthed by the two tomake sure that their glorious traditions would never be forgotten. Visit Elliott at http://www.myspace.com/elliottsussman

The weather might be cooling down but we’re heating things up at TNY Presents. Join us Wednesday, September 16th for the latest installment. We’ll be featuring the literary talents of Dave Carillo, Joel W. Coggins, Sherrie Flick, and Dana Killmeyer. Stick around for the beautiful sounds of Stephen Tribou & The Vacant Sea.

Sherrie Flick (reader) has an excellent debut novel, titled Reconsidering Happiness, just out from University of Nebraska Press. I Call This Flirting, her awarding-winning chapbook of flash fiction, was published in 2004 (Flume Press). Her work appears in the anthologies Flash Fiction Forward (Norton) and New Sudden Fiction (Norton) as well as You Have Time For This (Ooligan Press). A recipient of a PA Council on the Arts grant, she lives in Pittsburgh where she directs the Gist Street Reading Series. Learn more here: www.sherrieflick.com and read her City Paper interview here! (photo credit: John Altdorfer)--->


<---Dave Carillo (reader) Dave Carillo teaches English at the University of Connecticut at Waterbury and is the Writing Coordinator at Saint Joseph College. He lives in West Hartford, CT with his wife and dog.

Joel W. Coggins (reader) Joel W. Coggins, a native Ohioan, is a Senior at the University of Pittsburgh, where he majors in Writing. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Three Rivers Review and also serves as an Editorial Assistant for Weave Magazine. His writing has appeared in Collision, Hinge, and Cedarville Review. ---->

<---Dana Killmeyer (reader) Dana Killmeyer is a Pittsburgh native working in mixed forms of expression. As a writer, she has published the novel, Paradise, or The Part that Dies and the poetry collection, Pendulums of Euphoria with Six Gallery Press. She has been known to swallow her children whole after giving birth to them, so she is grateful the Para/Pen twins reached maturity.

Stephen Tribou & The Vacant Sea (music) Check out Stephen Tribou at www.myspace.com/thevacantsea -->

TNY Reader McClanahan's STORIES reviewed in City Paper!

Scott McClanahan's deceptively simply Stories hooks you.
BY BILL O'DRISCOLL

Stories by Scott McClanahan
Six Gallery Press, 140 pp.

If you can't get Scott McClanahan to come tell you stories at your neighborhood bar, try just taking his book Stories and reading it aloud to friends. McClanahan's short stories are just that informal, and just that engaging.

McClanahan writes about life in small-town West Virginia as a boy, teenager and young man. There are 17 stories, rendered in double-spaced text, and you can read each one in about five minutes.

Told with a guileless tone, they begin with phrases like "The last time I saw Randy Doogan ..." and "You can see all kinds of strange things in Rainelle though." The stories are full of rueful comedy, moral ambivalence and poetic melancholy. They involve things like a man's arm getting ripped off by a lumber-mill saw; a protagonist's pointless running battle with a homeless panhandler; and a father's stubborn insistence on going to jail over a routine speeding ticket.
But McClanahan, an educator and filmmaker who lives in Beckley, W.Va. -- this is apparently his first book -- has mastered the art of seemingly artless transparency. He's a born raconteur with the disarming knack of sucking you into the narrative, the more offbeat the better.
Here's the opening of "Possums":

My Dad was something else though. I know he had this run in with a possum one time when we were standing around talking to this neighbor guy who was showing off his new truck. And of course I was sweeping off our driveway. I mean I hated sweeping off the driveway -- it was a driveway. But I guess my Dad was teaching something about sweeping off a driveway or something.

"Possums" continues with a kind of laidback humor, and ends on a note of unexpected exaltation. In "The Firestarter" -- in which the narrator figures a hit-and-run victim is dead because she has "this dead look on her face" -- he wonders if his mere presence is causing people to get hit by cars.

"Randy Doogan" begins as a shaggy-dog story about lending money to a half-remembered former high school classmate, but becomes a painful rumination on trust. "Poop Deck Pappy" is a strangely moving story about a broken-down old man's genuine love for a dead woman he never met. "The Prettiest Girl in Texas" finds the teen-age protagonist dragged to a low-rent strip club where a disfigured dancer's performance leads to an epiphany.

All the stories seem drawn together by "My Mom," a sketch near book's end composed mostly of stories of family tragedies the narrator's mother tells him, each rendered with the intense simplicity of a folk ballad.

Stories, oddly, lacks page numbers. While that might be an intentional informality, it's harder to excuse the frequent disappearance of paragraph indentation, or the numerous typos.
But none of that matters too much. Nor do McClanahan's mild stylistic tics, like repeating nouns for folkily poetic emphasis ("grinning a shit-eating grin"; "a dark so dark"), or the story or two that comes to a fairly banal resolution.

Mostly, you just want to know what happens next. What's next for the fourth-grade boy whose buddies all agree to dress up as baby dolls for a school pageant -- but then leave him the only one to show up in a dress? What becomes of the guy who falls in love with the woman who prank-calls him one night -- then keeps calling back? Somehow, McClanahan manages to position himself just outside his narrator's adolescent dreams and little-boy misconceptions while remaining fully invested in them too.

Scott McClanahan reads at TNY Presents with Cathy Day, Paco Mahone and Laura Davis, plus live music by Justin Andrew. 8 p.m. Wed., Aug. 19. ModernFormations Gallery, 4919 Penn Ave., Garfield. $5 or potluck donation. tnypresents.blogspot.com

TNY Presents' Fall 2009 Schedule!

TNY Presents is back Wednesday, August 19th!

Join us as we kick off the Fall semester of TNY Presents with a night full of late-Summer treats. On the reading side of things, we’ll be joined by the immense talents of Scott McClanahan, Cathy Day, Paco Mahone, and Laura Davis. If that wasn’t enough for yinz we’ll have Justin Andrew on hand to provide some truly golden sounds.

Where: ModernFormations 4919 Penn Ave.
When: Wednesday, August 19th, 8pm
Cover: $5 or a contribution to our potluck dinner

Scott McClanahan: (reader) Scott McClanahan is the writer of Stories (published by Six Gallery Press). His other works include Stories II, Hillbilly and the Nightmares, Stories and Revelations, The Sarah Book (Vol. 3 of McClanahan’s Lives), and Crapalachia (all forthcoming). He is co-partner of the company Holler Presents (www.hollerpresents.com), which has produced such films as Preacher Man, Spring, 1386, The Education of Bertie Mae McClanahan, and Lil Audrey’s Last Day at School. He can be reached at scottmcclanahan@hotmail.com.

Cathy Day: (reader) Cathy Day was born and raised in Peru, Indiana, which is best known as a circus town, but is also the birthplace of Cole Porter and the Spanish hot dog. She is the author of two books. Her most recent work is Comeback Season: How I Learned to Play the Game of Love (Free Press, 2008), part memoir about life as a single woman and part sports story about the Indianapolis Colts Super Bowl season. Her first book was The Circus in Winter (Harcourt, 2004), a fictional history of her hometown. Visit her at
www.cathyday.com

Paco Mahone: (reader) Paco Mahone is a father, writer and musician from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He lived in New York City for several years, taking the public transportation with his 150 year old bass, many late nights with quarter notes. He spent most of his teen and adult life playing in bands, touring the country before returning to college to study music, spent his childhood reading comics, playing with action figures and loved hanging out in the record vaults of the radio stations his father owned. He never pursued his interest in fiction until he took an elective during his last semester at City College Of New York. He currently lives on the North Side with his two boys and supportive wife and is enjoying the role of Mr. Mom while his brilliant wife pursues a doctorate degree. In his spare time, he keeps his fingers in shape, devours books and writes. This is his first public reading.

Laura Davis: (reader) Laura E. Davis was born on a sunny day in Pittsburgh in June. She is a teacher for a local charter school and is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at Chatham University. She serves as co-founding editor of Weave Magazine and organizes various literary events around Pittsburgh.

Justin Andrew: (music) makes folk-pop music that at once sounds timeless and new; the arrangements classic, yet unique. With crisp vocals and adept acoustic guitar playing, Justin's tasteful music conjures up the early-Seventies scene, when people carefully crafted their melodies and song structure.

To tide you over until our next reading event, The New Yinzer will be participating Pittsburgh's Small Press Festival on Saturday, July 18th and Sunday, July 19th. Not only will we be sharing a table with good friends Speed & Briscoe, several Yinzers will be participants in panel dicsussions that will take place on both days. Check this line up:

Saturday, July 18 @ 1 p.m. - Small Press, Big Impact?* (followed by Karen Lillis' presentation on the smallpresspittsburgh wiki)
Panelists: Adam Atkinson (Open Thread), Hattie Fletcher (Creative Nonfiction), Savannah Guz (author & Yinzer), Karen Lillis (LDP Distro, smallpresspittsburgh, Words Like Kudzu, author), and Scott Silsbe (The New Yinzer)

Saturday, July 18 @ 2 p.m. - Starting a Small Press or Literary Organization
Panelists: Adam Atkinson (Open Thread), Kris Collins (The New Yinzer), Sue Rumbaugh (The Diner Divas), and Edward Simon (Thirty First Bird Review and Press)

Sunday, July 19 @ 4 p.m. - Women in Publishing
Panelists: Nikki Allen (poet & Yinzer), Margaret Bashaar and Laura Davis (Weave Magazine), and Mary Biddinger (Barn Owl Review)

And on JULY 31st!
The New Yinzer will be celebrating 1970s literature and music on July 31st. Join a nattily clad Gore Vidal impersonator at Brillobox at 8 p.m. on July 31st, and celebrate literature and music with the Yinzers!

Also, stay tuned for bios of the readers featured in the next TNY Presents event, which takes place on August 19th!! We'll coming back from summer hiatus with a vengence, kids.