Event: Los Angeles Review at Elliott Bay Book Company

A special Red Hen/The Los Angeles Review reading featuring Tom Janikowski, Elissa Washuta, Amaranth Borsuk, and Patrick Milian.

Date: Aug 31st, 2015
Time: 7:00 pm
Location: Elliot Bay Book Co.
1521 10th Ave.
Seattle, WA 98122
http://www.elliottbaybook.com/

Tom Janikowski is a Midwestern author specializing in surrealism and symbolism. His flashes and short stories have appeared online and in print on both sides of the Atlantic. Janikowski is greatly influenced by “Lost Generation” authors such as William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, but he also admits long-standing love affairs with the writing of Kurt Vonnegut and John Updike. He currently works, writes, and mixes cocktails in Davenport, Iowa, where he lives with Shelly, his wife of 15 years.

The Crawford County Sketchbook by Tom Janikowski

The Switchback family has inhabited Crawford County since before the War Between the States, and it has eked out an existence, and even prospered, by virtue of hard work and honesty. Peter Switchback, Jr., is the current inhabitant of the family estate and caretaker of the farm, and in many ways stands as a symbolic paragon of virtue. The Morgan family has been in Crawford County at least as long as the Switchback family, and has made its way in the world by means of greed, pride, and dishonesty. Sheriff Cecil Morgan is the third in his line to hold his office, and like his ancestors he is an avowed enemy of the Switchback family and all that they stand for.

The life of Crawford County plays out through the course of short tales told by several of its inhabitants, some tragic, some whimsical. The stories wind their way through the lives of Switchback and Morgan, framed by several ponderings of moral philosophy and existence. We are faced with Peter Switchback’s obituary on the opening page of the story, and the balance of the pages works its way to that eventual outcome.

Elissa Washuta, a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, was born in New Jersey and now lives in Seattle. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington in 2009 and has been the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Award, a Potlatch Fund Native Arts Grant, a 4Culture Grant, and a Made at Hugo House Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Salon, The Chronicle of Higher Education and Third Coast. She is an adviser and lecturer in American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. My Body Is a Book of Rules is her first book.

Amaranth Borsuk’s most recent book is As We Know (Subito, 2014), a collaboration with Andy Fitch. She is the author of Handiwork (Slope Editions, 2012), and, with Brad Bouse, Between Page and Screen (Siglio Press, 2012). Abra, a collaboration with Kate Durbin, is forthcoming from 1913 Press.

Patrick Milian received his MFA from the University of Washington. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry, Copper Nickel, The Baltimore Review, Meridian, and several other journals. He lives and writes in Seattle.