Charles Degelman has been an antiwar activist, political theater artist, musician, communard, carpenter, hard-rock miner, and itinerant gypsy trucker, and eventually grew up to be a writer, editor, and educator living in Los Angeles.
In 1971, the region then called “East Pakistan” fought a bloody liberation war with “West Pakistan” that led to creation of the independent nation of Bangladesh. Abu Zubair lived through that civil war, and he writes about it in his new novel, The Silent and the Lost. Zubair was recently awarded the US-Asia Business Forum’s Community Support Award for support of the community through historic writing.
Zubair read from his book at the 10th annual West Hollywood Book Fair.
It’s a first here on GR: a guerrilla reading about guerrillas.
Live from the West Hollywood Book Fair, it’s Steven Paul Leiva with a guerrilla reading from his first contact novel, Traveling in Space (Blüroof Press). Leiva is a writer and producer who knows more than just a little about Hollywood and Ray Bradbury.
Writing about writing in a recent blog post, Leiva said,
Good writers do not channel in from some higher plain, they are simply human creatures who have a talent for expression and a talent, as Noel Coward would have said, to amuse. Brilliant writers combine those talents with a talent to reveal truths—or, at least, very interesting questions—about the human condition.
Castellucci has written YA novels, graphic novels, short stories, an opera libretto and more. She once told Bookslut in an interview
I think that everybody can live creatively and I don’t see any difference between say, math and ballet. I think someone can even make something traditionally not “arty,” like being a business person, a kind of art form.
Guerrilla reader Melinda Palacio writes award-winning poetry and prose, and she’s done journalism too. She says that her poetry training actually helps her as a novelist. In a recent interview, she said,
I went from writing journalism, reporting type of work, to getting deeper and deeper into language… Poetry has influenced how I write longer pieces, and each word does matter.
I write about things that I care about, that matter to me. The immigrant experience is one of them. Right now I am working on a memoir in which I write about my childhood in Mexico, living in poverty, being raised by my grandmother because my parents were here in the U.S. working. I write about what it was like to come here as an illegal immigrant, and the difficulties of trying to close the gap created by eight years of separation between me and my father. So to answer the question, yes, I do plan to continue writing about immigration and families, among other things. I am always looking for new ideas and topics. One has to grow as a writer, and one way to do that is to take chances and try new things.
Got a sneak preview of the fabulous new Dinosaur Hall at the LA County Natural History Museum last night. While I was there, I did this guerrilla reading from James Michener’s Centennial, a book that (like so many of his novels) traces the history of a fictional city all the way back to the primordial goo.
Sound quality is a little iffy. I shot and edited the entire video on my iPad. Listen carefully for the sound of dinosaurs roaring in the background!
In her article at The Atlantic, Taking Literature to the Streets, Katharine Schwab profiles a number of terrific ventures around the world that take literature out of bookstores and libraries and, well, into the streets. GuerrillaReads was included
It's a literary thriller about one man’s struggle to solve his wife’s murder, set against a backdrop of geopolitical turmoil in the last days of Soviet Lithuania.
Creating your own guerrilla reading is easier than you think.
You just need a writer, a friend with a camera and a good setting. Check out our video tips for writers.
Want to shoot videos of writers at your next book event? You don't need us to make it happen. Here's how we did it at the West Hollywood Book Fair, and how you can do it too.
GuerrillaReads 