Dana Rossi Added to InDigest 1207 in October

Dana Rossi, a freelance writer and stage manager, who has written for Time Out New York, Broken Pencil, and New York Press will be reading along with J.C. Hallman on Wednesday, October 7 in InDigest's monthly reading series, InDigest 1207.

Rossi recently won a New York Press Association Award for a feature article she did on actors understudying celebs on Broadway. Her blog is Party in the Back and it compares current events, trends, and news to 80s movies. On the theater side, she has most recently stage managed at Manhattan Theatre Source and at Soho Playhouse in the NYC Fringe Festival and Encore Series (where she also sound designed her first show). When she's not stage managing, writing articles, or comparing the state of the economy to Back to the Future Part II, she works as a story analyst for Sony Pictures Television.

For more info, go here.

InDigest Under Construction

As you can tell by the lack of content on the site the last month or so, we're taking a little break. This is not (only) because the summer has finally come to New York and we are out playing Frisbee in the parks. It's because InDigest is currently under the knife, getting a major face lift. We have brought on board a very talented designer and programmer and they are doing amazing things with the look and feel of the magazine, which we hope to unveil sometime in August.

Until then, take this time to catch up on some of the content you didn't get a chance to read and/or look at the first time around. How about these amazing poems by Ada Limón, "61 Trees" and "Rest Stop"? These poems will be included in a book coming out with cinematheque press later this summer. And Ada was recently in The New Yorker; her poem "Crush" found its way into the summer fiction issue.

Maybe fiction is more your thing. How about a story from the early days of InDigest by Sam Osterhout? Sam is currently the host of Radio Happy Hour, a live old-timey radio show that welcomes special guests, such as Norah Jones, Michael Showalter, and Andrew W.K., to perform as themselves in the script. The show is getting all kinds of attention. You can subscribe to the free podcast here.

If you've read everything there is to read on InDigest, then check out our blog, which is still being updated while the magazine is under construction. There are new features like "What's New This Week," which gives a concise list of the week's best releases in books, music, theater...really in everything, and "What We've Been Reading," which highlights some of the books the InDigest crew has been reading.

And of course there is always InDigest 1207 Reading Series, which keeps gaining momentum as the months go by. In August alone we'll welcome John Wray, Marlon James, and Ronaldo V. Wilson. And on the schedule for the fall already are the writers Neil Smith, J.C. Hallman, and James Hannaham, and the musician Franz Nicolay (of The Hold Steady). (Read a review of John Wray's Lowboy by James Wood in The New Yorker, here, and reviews of Marlon James' latest, The Book of the Night Women and J.C. Hallman's book of stories, Hospital for Bad Poets, here and here, respectively.)

As always, thanks for reading. Please be patient as we make InDigest better. We promise it will be worth the wait.

David and Dustin
Editors

Big Thanks to Deb Olin Unferth and Sam Osterhout

Thanks to Deb and Sam for making April's installment of InDigest 1207 an unforgettable night.

FYI: Sam read "Gold" from Donald Hall and an excerpt from the story "Gazebo" by Raymond Carver, while Deb read "Marriage and the Family" from Diane Williams' book Excitability.

Thanks to all who came out. If you couldn't make April, make sure to check out the schedule for the next few months. We have some great readers joining us, including Jennifer L. Knox, Dorothea Lasky, and Wayne Miller in May; Rodrigo Toscano’s Collapsible Poetics Theater, Angela Ball, and Giao V. Buu in June; and John Wray in August.

MN Year in Review at mnartists.org

The folks over at mnartists.org have collected quite a comprehensive list of artistic endeavors taken on and/or accomplished by artists, musicians, and writers from Minnesota in 2008. And they were nice enough to include a couple of my scribbles on the matter (including a shameless plug for InDigest). First is my review of my good friend Chris Koza's latest disc, which I was lucky enough to hear in its making in a small apartment in Brooklyn a couple of summers ago:

Chris Koza's Dark, Delirious Morning: This album holds some highlights in the impressive canon of Koza albums. "Straight to Video" shows a talented artist refusing to be boxed into what we might expect. This album makes me excited to see what Koza will do next, while leaving me something to work through while I'm waiting.

And then some great books by Dave Schwartz and Geoff Herbach...and a nice little magazine:

Dave Schwartz's Superpowers is an amazing novel by a local author in 2008 that is all the more so because, in less careful hands, the book could have been awful. His handling of the events of 9/11 is heartbreaking and understated and beautiful. Also released last year was Geoff Herbach's The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg (read a great review from Ashleigh Lambert at InDigest here), an unapologetically uplifting book and, as always with Herbach, hilarious. And, lastly, my shameless plug for InDigest Magazine. Although we technically launched in 2007, InDigest came into its own in 2008. From the beginning we've offered a unique home for Minnesota writers and artists to be showcased on a national and international stage, and in our anniversary issue we published many of our favorite Minnesota writers and artists again.

Check out all the lists here>>>

Lastly, if you are reading this today and you are in New York and you don't come to Chris Koza's show at Piano's tonight (see post below), then we are no longer friends.

Our Friends at Guernica Magazine Praised by Esquire

Guernica Magazine, where I am the Blog Editor, got a little praise from Esquire for our fiction section. The Fiction section editor, Meakin Armstrong, has been published twice in InDigest and will be reading at our second InDigest 1207 on Feb. 4, along with Guernica's Poetry Editor, Erica Wright, who we've also published a couple times in InDigest.

Well played, Meakin.

One-Year Anniversary Reading Update: Peter Bognanni Added to the All-Star Line-Up

Hey everyone,

We're very excited that our good friend Peter Bognanni has agreed to read at our anniversary reading on Friday, December 19. Peter will be joining Lech Harris and Meggie Elder, as well as Crack in the Damn, which is the musical incarnation of those fine young gentlemen Paul Engels, Ryan Thompson, and Dan Lehn.

Should be a good time had by all.

Here's a little more info on Peter:

Peter Bognanni is a native Iowan, and a former student of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His first novel, The House of Tomorrow is forthcoming from Amy Einhorn Books (Putnam/Penguin). His short fiction and humor pieces have appeared in Gulf Coast, The Bellingham Review, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Monkeybicycle, and Stop Smiling Magazine. His work was listed in the "100 Distinguished Stories of 2006" in The Best American Short Stories 2007, edited by Stephen King, and he is 2008 Pushcart Prize nominee. In addition to writing fiction and nonfiction, he is also a screenwriter. He was a quarter finalist for the Nicoll Fellowship in Screenwriting in 2007.

Impressive.

A New Look!

In the near future -- maybe a week or two; maybe sooner -- InDigest will be getting its first major makeover. It's a little nervous. It's still young, so big changes are kind of scary. But it's adventurous, too, and told us, after a long, pleasant Sunday-night dinner (Dustin, myself, InDigest, and a few of our very close friends...very pleasant) that it was up for the change. We're all very excited around the InDigest offices. Dustin high-fived the mailman today; the guy just couldn't keep it inside anymore, had to outwardly express himself. So, a high-five for the bewildered, but kind mailman it was. He's a sport, the mailman, and we give him a Christmas card with a wad of cash every year, so he puts up with our antics.

Anyway, InDigest is in the shop as we speak getting detailed. Unfortunately we haven't figured out how to put switches on it yet to make it hit that three-wheel motion, but we're working on it. Until then, we hope you enjoy the changes we are making. And feel free to let us know (comment on the blog or email us) what you do think when all these changes go down.

Random Thoughts

I've been thinking a lot lately about the role of art in this world and if it can really move anything towards change. Ed Abbey thought that in the long run art, and more specifically, a novel could have an impact on the world. But, Ed Abbey was much like Kurt Vonnegut in that he did not see us long for this place (or most of us anyway, and in that he differs from KV, who thought we were all doomed). He was a man of action and respected most those who were greater men--and women--of action. Change, change in the here and now, he thought, could not come from talking about it. You had to do it.

I read in some class or another about literary journalism a quote from a journalist writing in the Vietnam era. He asked something to the extent of if you weren't there, covering and writing about the war, then just what the hell was it you were doing? The unnecessary answer being, of course, nothing. Or what you were writing amounted to that.

This has been on my mind lately; there's just so much wrong with the world. Can poems and short stories and pictures really make anything better...in any real way. I haven't come to any conclusion yet. I tend to lean towards the opinion of Mr. Abbey, but do we have the time?

Anyway, I was pondering this over one night with a new friend--really I just met this girl--and she had these positive things to say about InDigest, which gave me hope. People still surprise me with their kindness, and so I guess I'll believe for a while longer.

"So our conversation at the bookstore the other day, and reading the writing on indigest got me thinking about how having public places to express art, writing, ideas, are central to having a healthy society...I was thinking about how dull and repressed our world would be if people were not allowed to create art and share it with others. I feel like art makes us slow down and pay attention to details. To notice. Sometimes it's the only way to truly express one's experiences. So I don't think you should feel like you are not contributing to the good of society-I think we need more people to connect on those levels."

-David