Join us December 11th for a TNY Special Edition!

Our very good friends, poets John Grochalski and Ally Malinenko will be in town for an evening of poesy slinging. Also on tap for the evening are the local favorites Ed Steck, Renee Alberts, Margaret Bashaar, Joel W. Coggins, and Jessica Fenlon.
(Stay tuned for pictures of our guests...)

Where: ModernFormations 4919 Penn Ave.
When: December 11th, 8pm
Cover: $5 or a contribution to our potluck dinner

John Grochalski is a writer formerly from Pittsburgh. He lives in New York now with his wife and two cats. Grochalski's book of poems The Noose Doesn't Get Any Looser After You Punch Out was published by Six Gallery Press in 2009.

Ally Malinenko has been published by Alembic, Blind Man's Review, Small Brushes, Whisky Island Magazine, The Unknown Writer, HeART, Mad Poets Society, Posey, Jack Magazine and Words-Myth. She is also a contributing poet to Reading Ground blogazine, a division of Breeding Ground Productions (http://breedingground.com/reading/). Her first book of poems entitled The Wanting Bone was published in 2009 by Six Gallery Press. She is currently working on a novel for children. Ally lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two cats.

Ed Steck is awaiting World War III. "Hoojy boojy, wumbly tumbly, goody goody, grass grass."

Renée Alberts listens to rivers, talks to the radio, and translates the conversations into poetry, sound and collage. She learned all of this in Pittsburgh. She's been lucky to collaborate with some of the city's finest wordsmiths and musicians, and has participated in and curated many events. Her chapbook is forthcoming from Speed & Briscoe. Witness her in 1s and 0s at http://williamthesilent.blogspot.com/.

Margaret Bashaar is the co-editor of Weave Magazine and co-host of The Typewriter Girls. Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from numerous literary journals including Caketrain, The Pedestal Magazine, Boxcar Poetry Review, So to Speak, and Blue Earth Review. She also writes book reviews for The Multicultural Review and for Weave Magazine's blog.

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.

Jessica Fenlon lives and works in Pittsburgh PA. She makes art that touches on the currents of violence, everyday joys, and haunting losses that move in her peripheral vision. BFA UW-Madison, MFA School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Her first book of poetry, Spiritual Side Effects was published by Six Gallery Press in 2009. She spends too much time at crossroads with scarecrows. She enjoys playing with fire in her free time. She is probably taller than you.

Yinzers Kristofer Collins and Savannah Guz will be opening for Stephen Elliott, author of The Adderall Diaries, given a starred review by Kirkus and pronounced 'superb' by Time Out New York.

When? Monday, November 23, 2009 @ 8:30 p.m.
Where? Modern Formations (4919 Penn Avenue, Pittsburgh)
Cover? $4

Join us for the TNY Presents season finale on Wednesday, November 18 (psst....still, stay tuned for a special *Holiday Edition* of TNY in December). We’re turning the stage over to our good friends Chuck Kinder, Karl Hendricks, and Brendan Kerr. They’ll be swapping stories, telling jokes, and pretty much whatever else they’d like to do. TNY Presents belongs to them for the evening. In a similar vein our musical guests for the night – Scott Silsbe, Kurt Garrison, and Mark Mangini – will share the stage and trade some of their favorite songs.

Where?: ModernFormations 4919 Penn Ave. Pittsburgh
When?: 8pm
Cover?: $5 or a contribution to our potluck dinner

Chuck Kinder: (reader) Chuck Kinder is the Director of the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of the novels, Snakehunter (Alfred A. Knopf), The Silver Ghost (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) and Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a 2001 New York Times Notable Book. Honeymooners was reprinted as a Plume Paperback in 2002, and in June 2009 it was re-issued by the Carnegie Mellon University Press as a part of its Classic Contemporary Series.Kinder’s most recent book is a redneck noir, pulp romance meta-memoir titled Last Mountain Dancer: Hard Earned Lessons In Love, Loss, and Honky-Tonk Outlaw Life, which was published in 2004.

Karl Hendricks: (reader) Karl Hendricks lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his wife, Megan, and their two daughters, Maeve and Nell. He is the author ofthe chapbook, Stan Getz Isn’t Coming Back (Speed & Briscoe Books). He teaches writing at the University of Pittsburgh and also works at Paul’s CDs. His band, the Karl Hendricks Trio (sometimes Rock Band), has released eight albums, most recently The World Says.


Brendan Kerr: (reader) Brendan Kerr comes to Pittsburgh via Elkins, West Virginia and Brooklyn, New York. He recently completed his MFA at the University of Pittsburgh and his novel, The Uses of Talent, is currently looking for a home. Brendan plays bass with the rock band Workshop. He lives in Polish Hill and can often be found among the crowd in one local establishment or another.

Scott Silsbe: (music)Scott Silsbe was born in Detroit. He now lives in Pittsburgh, where he sells books, writes, and makes rock music.

Kurt Garrison: (music) Kurt Garrison is a member of The Shopkeepers, The Plat Maps and AAA.

Mark Mangini: (music) Mark Mangini is an editor at The New Yinzer.

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!